John Gage was at Berkeley during the student protests in the sixties.
He later went on to be vice-president of Sun Microcomputers.
Interviewed in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (at 40 minutes), he talks about the effect of watching the response of the authorities:
I’d never realized that there were those who would lie to maintain their positions of power. Then I saw it. I’m not sure — I don’t think people were evil to lie, but they did it. They altered the way things were to maintain their positions of power and authority, and they did it in a way that was wrong. And then I saw that, and then I saw that everywhere. I saw that in the structures of political power in Oakland, I saw that in the structures of political power in the South, and I began to see that the mechanisms that the free-speech movement was attempting to change, were mechanisms that operated everywhere.