The Whites of their Eyes by Matt Braun Read Free Book Online

night are hard to come by. The night of the Boston Massacre, nearly one hundred people gave depositions; the Sons of Liberty were preparing a legal case, in order to charge Preston and his soldiers with murder. But the dumping the tea was, of course, a crime; the participants therefore pledged themselves to secrecy. Later—much later—people told stories about what happened and wrote memoirs. Somepeople kept souvenirs. When Thomas Melvill got home that night, he found some tea in his shoes and saved it. The next morning, an empty tea chest washed up on shore. Someone took it home. 25
    The Salada
Beaver
sailed from Denmark in May of 1973, just as the Watergate hearings got under way. In July, a witness revealed that Nixon had made tapes of conversations in the Oval Office. Archibald Cox, who headed the investigation, subpoenaed the tapes; Nixon refused to hand them over. The
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reached Massachusetts in October. 26 Nixon committed what the press called his “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20, ordering first his attorney general, and next the deputy attorney general, to fire Cox. Both men refused, and resigned. Nixon then ordered his solicitor general, Robert Bork, to do the firing. Bork complied. “I’m not a crook,” Nixon told reporters on November 17. On December 10, the
Boston Globe
covered its front page with an illustrated editorial titled “The Boston Tea Party . . . and this Generation”:
    Are we again today not made indignant by the abuse of power, violations of oaths of office, indifference to the public good, undermining of the people’s confidence? Mishandlingof problems, shortages, we all try to understand; none of us is perfect and great leaders are not always in abundant supply. But are we to tolerate longer publicly elected officeholders who do not belong exclusively to the entire public? It is not just the 18th century that tried men’s souls. Our generation, too, has to act on democratic—and constitutional—principles in the face of arrogant use of power. 27
    Meanwhile, the city braced for Boston’s “Tea Party Weekend,” intended to be the kickoff of the Bicentennial, not just for Boston but for the whole country. It included a brunch, tea parties, a ball, and a great deal of gimcrackery: “Tea Party plates, tea boxes, Boston 200 brooch and teaspoon, Tea Party posters, silver and pewter Tea Party medallions, and Tea Party stamp cachets.” 28 On the morning of December 16, twenty-five hundred people gathered at Faneuil Hall for a meeting held by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, where Thomas Boylston Adams, a descendant of John Adams and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, grieved for the state of the nation: “This should not be a day of commemoration but a day of mourning and prayer. We are faced today with the corruption, rot, arrogance and venality that our forefathers protested.” Then everyone in the hall marched to the waterfront. 29 By noon, as falling snow turned to rain, forty thousand people gathered on Boston’s bridges and wharves to watch the action on board the
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. “Dump Nixon, not tea” read one sign in the crowd. The National Organization for Women was there, picketing: “Taxation without Equal Rights Is Tyranny.” Another banner read “Gay American Revolution.” Rock music blared from loudspeakers. The ceremonies began at two o’clock when about thirty men wearing tricorns and knee breeches boarded the
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. They were from the Charlestown Militia, a reenactment group founded by an Irish American longshoreman named Jim O’Neil in 1967. 30 They dumped crates of tea into the harbor. Minutes later, six protesters from the Peoples Bicentennial Commission boarded the ship and unfurled a flag reading “ IMPEACH NIXON .” (This, too, had been preap-proved. “The bicentennial belongs to everyone,” the people at Boston 200 had always insisted.) 31 Then, as the Associated Press reported,
    A member of the group, wearing a huge mask