Real‐fiction versus historical reality: Rhetorical purification in “kent state”—the docudrama

Abstract

This essay analyzes the ways in which Kent State, the made‐for‐TV docudrama, purified the image of William Knox Schroeder‐one of the four students killed on May 4, 1970, by Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. The author was a boyhood friend of Schroeder, his roommate at Kent State University at the time of his death, and an observer of many of the major events of the Kent State affair. This essay views the making of a docudrama as a complex problem to be solved and characterizes a docudramatist as a less‐than‐perfect decision maker. Also, this essay views Kent State as a real‐fiction through which the act of rhetorical purification was accomplished. The paper discusses the docudrama's efforts in this regard by analyzing important scenes in which inaccuracies are presented in order to achieve the purification of Schroeder's image.