AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

ABSTRACT
The Iranian student movement was partially a creation of the American government. The
organizational structure of the Iranian Students Association was conceived by the American
Friends of the Middle East in 1953. However, the United States had lost the battle for the hearts
and minds of Iranian students by 1960. Within the first two years of that decade, the Iranian
Students Association in the United States was joined by similar groups in Western Europe.
The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations grappled with the question of how to
react to these developments. The Kennedy administration questioned the shah’s ability to lead;
they also listened to the concerns of Iranian students in the United States. This changed when
Lyndon Johnson, determined to reassert American power through use of the military and the
forging of questionable alliances, adopted a policy of blind support for the Shah of Iran. What
began under the Johnson administration escalated when Richard Nixon was elected president.
Throughout these twelve pivotal years, the Iranian student movement became an integral
element of the global student unrest of the 1960s. In the early part of the decade, they were,
along with members of the Civil Rights Movement, in the vanguard of student protest. Iranian
students questioned American imperialism before many, and mounted a vocal campaign against
U.S. support for the shah’s regime in the mid-1960s. By then end of the decade, they were
joined in the age of global protest by members of SDS, the Black Panthers, and many others,
including German leftists. Despite this global call for a retreat from imperialism, Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger issued the shah a black check to purchase all non-nuclear military hardware
from the American arsenal on 30 May 1972.
The refusal of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to take the concerns of Iranian
students studying within its own borders seriously was a major flaw in American foreign policy.
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