“When Truth Mattered,” former BJ managing editor Bob Giles’ account of the Beacon’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the 1970 carnage of Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard, should be required reading for every college journalism student in America.

United Press International got it wrong when it reported that two National Guardsmen had been shot.

Jeff Sallot, a BJ summer intern and campus stringer for the Beacon who was there, said and wrote otherwise. The BJ printed Sallot’s article that the only shooting victims were Kent State students: 4 killed and 9 wounded. Reporter Bob Page was sent to the hospital and verified that NO Guardsmen were among the wounded, only the students.

Governor Rhodes, in the midst of a tight battle with Robert Taft for a U.S. Senate seat that Jimmy lost after the Kent State debacle, and the National Guard officer in charge tried to claim that a sniper’s shot caused the Guard to react by firing back. The BJ disproved that, too.

Bob Giles accurately credits State Desk editor Pat Englehart’s whipcracking passion for the truth and accuracy displayed by the BJ.

I consider Pat the #1 reason that the BJ got the Pulitzer. Pat was my hero, my role model for what a great newspaper editor should be. Time after time he sent reporters back to their desk and their phones to dig deeper, to find collaborating sources, to shine a giant spotlight on truth.

Pat was no “enemy of the people,” only of politicians and authorities who tried to cover up, obfuscate or murky-up the truth.

Trump would hate Pat. I loved Pat. He was the best editor I worked with in my 43-year newspaper career and, even though I was 38 years old when I came to the BJ and had 16 years of newspaper experience, I learned more from Pat than I had from anyone else in my path at newspapers.

I found it an interesting juxtaposition that the fire-eating Pat, he with the deNobil cigar and the window-shattering demand for a story to be bear-hugging the truth, and mild-mannered Ray Redmond, the Casper Milquetoast of the newsroom, played the most pivotal roles in shattering the charade that the National Guard was the victim.

John Knight made the ultimate decision that the BJ, and not Knight-Ridder, would submit the nomination for the Pulitzer because it was the BJ that did the grunt work, the investigative work, that revealed the FBI report that nailed the National Guard as not being at risk when it fired, that time after time shot down claims promulgated by politicians and other journalists that tried to deflect the blame away from the National Guard.

JSK even told J. Edgar Hoover to piss off (Mr. Knight didn’t use those words but that was the message) when President Nixon got Hoover to demand that the BJ retract key parts of its article about the FBI report.

JSK stood up to Nixon over Vietnam; J. Edgar was no match for the best newspaper owner in American history either.

Bob Giles was at the BJ from 1958-75, and later editor of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and Times Union in New York, editor and publisher of the Detroit News and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

Jeff Sallot was with the Toronto Globe and Mail as bureau chief in Moscow, Ottawa and Edmonton before joining the Carleton University Journalism and Communication faculty in Ottawa. Jeff met his wife, Rosemary Boyle, at the Globe and Mail. They still live in Ottawa.

Bob Page, tired of hearing all the swearing in the newsroom and composing room, became a minister and is associate pastor at the Live Oaks Community Church in The Villages, Florida, which has a drive-in parking lot where you can hear and watch the services from your car.

I’ve been there and also played golf with Bob and late BJ printer Hugh Downing during my winter months in The Villages with Paula Stone Tucker, author of another book tied to Kent State, “Surviving: A Kent State Memoir,” available on Amazon.com.

Pat Engelhart and Ray Redmond passed away.

Bob Giles’ book will be published March 30 by Mission Point Press in Traverse City, Michigan, where Bob lives with wife Nancy Giles, a psychologist specializing in dealing with trauma. Bob is on the editorial board of the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

Like Paula's book, Bob's masterpiece is available on Amazon.com.

Bob is scheduled to be at an author event May 4 at the Kent State Book Store, 10-11 a.m. Unless it becomes another coronavirus cancellation.