The school of protests

I went to Paris in May 1968 to be part of the student uprising that startled the world.

- MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

It fizzled out within a few months but so shook the prestige of president Charles de Gaulle that the man generally regarded as the most firmly ensconced in office in all of Europe found himself out of the Elysee Palace within 18 months of his dismissing the demonstrators as “chiens-lit” (dog faeces).

So also do I belong to the Vietnam generation that saw massive protests in US campuses. On the face of it, these student protests, which even reached the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, only consolidated president Richard Nixon’s hold on power, giving him in 1972 the largest plurality in the history of presidential elections, but so badly had the students dented his reputation that within a few months of his election victory Watergate began undermining him and he was driven from office in 1974, his name in tatters.