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Cheney Visits Harvard Club
Through Back Door
200 protestors waited to greet
vice-president near club entrance
Published On 9/9/2006 2:27:48
PM
By SAMUEL P. JACOBS
Crimson Staff Writer
Like that, he was gone.
Late yesterday afternoon, Vice
President Dick Cheney's motorcade drove over the
Massachusetts Turnpike and headed out of view, towards the
windowless rear of Boston's Harvard Club. A half hour
earlier, Governor W. Mitt Romney, in a black Ford Explorer,
had also slid passed the protestors outside the club using
the same back door.
Both Republican Party leaders
were at the Harvard Club to raise money for the GOP and to
honor Massachusetts' most generous and effective GOP
fundraiser, Richard J. Egan, founder of the data storage
company EMC.
According to the Center for
Responsive Politics, the Egan family gave almost $900,000 to
Republican organizations during the 2000 and 2004 election
cycles. In 2004, the Egans were the only family to field
three "Rangers"-the title given to those who raised over
$200,000 for George W. Bush. Egan served as US Ambassador to
Ireland from 2001 to 2003.
As Cheney spoke to GOP donors,
all of whom had shelled out $2,500 to hear him speak,
protestors stood a block away bemoaning the vice president's
presence in the city.
State and local police
departments, whose officers had arrived by motorcycle, bike,
horse, and car, closed down the blocks surrounding the club
for the entirety of the event.
"It's the equivalent of Hitler
coming back to life and coming to Boston," said Nick
Giannone of Quincy, Massachusetts. "This guy's a straight-up
fascist. I also find it pretty appalling that someone would
pay $2,500 to sit in a room with a war criminal."
Suren Moodliar of the Greater
Boston Stop the Wars Coalition expressed distaste for
Cheney's ability to raise money: "I am appalled that he can
go around raising money now that the party and he, in
particular, have demonstrated to be so morally bankrupt."
In 2003, Cheney attended an
event at the Egan home in Hopkinton, Mass. raising a
reported $1.2 million dollars.
Friday's event was not open to
the media; however, according to the Boston Globe, 300
people attended.
Betty Tufankjian, an elderly
resident of Scituate, Mass., was hustled across the street
by one officer. She was with an old friend from high school.
"Yeah, we're trouble," Tufankjian said. She was there to
protest Cheney because she thinks he is profiting from the
war, she said.
Hustling in the opposite
direction were Michael F. Cronin '75 and his son,
Christopher V. Cronin '08. They received an earful from
protestors as they made their way into the club.
"Just because I wear a suit,
they prejudge me," said the elder Cronin, the managing
partner of Weston Presidio, a private equity firm, and a
member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
The tension between attendees
and protestors increased as the group of approximately 200
hundred gathered a block down from the crimson and white
flowerbeds of the club's entrance. Protestors screamed,
"Shame on you!" and "Murderers!" to those making their way
to the fundraiser.
Most attendees ignored the
taunts, although one woman did return the favor, instructing
one particularly vocal protestor to "get a fucking job."
The crowd waved signs calling
Cheney a "demon" and chanted, "Cheney, Cheney's got to go!
Send him to Guantanamo!" Three men dressed in jailhouse
stripes and wearing Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld masks
mugged for passerby. A group of self-proclaimed
'Billionaires for Bush and Cheney,' dressed to the nines,
serenaded the crowd: "All we are saying is give greed a
chance!"
Cheney is not the first
political heavyweight to hold forth at the Harvard Club.
According to the club's website, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry
Kissinger, William Taft, and John Foster Dulles have all
been visitors.
-Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs
can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.
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