by Penn Rhodeen
O’Hara, who had been forced facedown over the front of the car, was the reason for the stop. “What are you doing with a terrorist scumbag like him?” one of the cops shouted at the Americans. As more questions came flying at Morrison, O’Hara assumed the role of his guest’s lawyer, yelling, “You don’t have to answer!” This, of course, made the cops even angrier.
The police searched the car, and when they found Prebensen’s stash of books on Irish history and republican heroes, they didn’t hold back their contempt. After they were done with the car, their activity and questions ebbed a bit, but their rifles remained high. It wasn’t clear that they had any specific objective beyond harassing O’Hara and whoever had the bad judgment to ride with him.
O’Hara—who at seventeen had been in the midst of the 1972 Bloody Sunday Massacre, in which British paratroopers shot and killed fourteen unarmed demonstrators in Derry, including O’Hara’s close friend Gerry Donaghy, also just seventeen—remained convinced that an actual shooting was unlikely. Morrison felt protected by his office, confident that the British government wasn’t about to shoot a member of the US Congress. If he’d realized that the police holding him had no idea what a congressman was, he might have worried a little more.
As time passed, Morrison had the feeling that the police “didn’t seem to have anywhere to go, and whether we had anywhere to go was of no interest to them.” In truth, O’Hara and the Americans weren’t on a tight schedule. Morrison and Prebensen had arrived in Derry a day or two earlier and were staying at O’Hara’s home. This outing was supposed to be a relaxed tour of Derry from a Sinn Féin point of view. Morrison had already taken other tours; in order to get a full picture of the situation, he had asked the American consulate to recommended an itinerary. He’d also taken a tour with John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), which was made up of moderate Catholics who opposed violence and focused on economic development as a key to progress.
The differences in viewpoints were revealing and sometimes amusing. Hume, for example, had proudly shown the Americans a housing estate he’d helped get built. When O’Hara took them to the same estate, his message was quite different.
“See how they designed the streets?” O’Hara asked. “That’s so the tanks can come in.” Indeed, O’Hara never let up. When Morrison said the situation was complicated, O’Hara snapped, “It’s not complicated: Brits out!”
Still at gunpoint, Morrison thought about how this situation would play out back home. He found it interesting that all three of them were being held so close together along the fence by the river. “It wasn’t like Gerry was separated as the Sinn Féin guy—the presumptive terrorist— and Dennis and I were told to sit in the car, which would have been the American version. This had a very different flavor—like we were all in the company of a terrorist and we were all gonna to be investigated.”
After ten or fifteen minutes passed, another officer, older and clearly of a higher rank, appeared on the scene. He spoke with the RUC men and examined the papers they’d collected. O’Hara watched him as he studied Morrison’s passport; it was clear to O’Hara that this officer knew exactly who he was dealing with and that he understood that “he had an international incident on his hands.” But the new arrival never spoke to the detainees.
There was still plenty of time for Morrison to take the strange situation in. That it wasn’t happening on some blasted out street late at night, as was so often shown on television, but instead near the handsome center of the city on a bright summer morning, made it all the more bizarre. He noticed pedestrians on the river side of Queen’s Quay crossing over to the other side as soon as they spotted the scene ahead and only crossing back when they were well clear of it. Three men were being held at gunpoint—maybe a new experience for them, maybe not—but everyday life was still going on, with a few minor adjustments.
There was nothing in Morrison’s background that should have involved him in this centuries-old Irish mess. He had been adopted at birth and had no way of knowing how Irish he might be. His adoptive parents—a Con Ed executive and a librarian—were Lutherans. They’d raised him in Northport, a pleasant town on the north shore of Long Island. He went to MIT, graduated in three years, and then got a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois. Along the way he realized that he was “more interested in working with people than molecules,” so he entered Yale Law School in the class of 1973; Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were classmates. After graduation, he worked as a staff lawyer for New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which provided lawyers to the poor, and within a couple of years became director of the program.
After the first year of the Reagan presidency, Morrison felt there were more urgent things to do than head legal aid, so he decided to run for Congress. Since he was a political nobody, it would be uphill all the way. First he had to beat the president of the New Haven Board of Aldermen, who was widely seen as the prohibitive favorite, for the Democratic nomination. Then he had to beat the popular Republican incumbent. In a general election campaign marked by terrific energy, a clear position on protecting Social Security, edgy and inspired advertising, and the failure of the incumbent to recognize the strengths of his upstart challenger, Morrison won by less than one percent of the votes cast.
Morrison had an abiding interest in human rights issues, but no special focus on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Soon after he was sworn in, however, he learned that all new members of Congress with significant Irish American constituencies had to decide whether to join Friends of Ireland, the established vehicle for expressing general support and affection for Ireland, or the less genteel Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, which wanted Irish unification—getting the six counties of Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into a 32-county Republic of Ireland.
Friends of Ireland avoided controversy; its major concerns seemed to revolve around St. Patrick’s Day. It was headed by Irishman Thomas Foley, the House Democratic whip. Foley was no friend of Sinn Féin; when it came to Northern Ireland, his sympathies lay with the British position. He abhorred the IRA and anyone who seemed to have the remotest sympathy for their cause. Even when the Irish Peace Process finally began to gather steam in the mid-1990s, Foley, by then Speaker of the House of Representatives, remained determined to keep Sinn Féin away from the negotiating table.
The Ad Hoc Committee was headed by Mario Biaggi of New York, who was decidedly not Irish but had a huge Irish American constituency in the Bronx and, as a former New York City police officer, strong support from the city’s legions of Irish American cops. The Ad Hoc Committee didn’t merely favor a united Ireland politically: Several of its members had close ties with supporters of Irish Northern Aid (Noraid), an American group that aggressively sought funds for the republican cause in Northern Ireland. While Noraid insisted the money was collected to help widows and orphans of fallen IRA heroes, the authorities claimed it was being used for IRA guns and bombs.
Morrison was advised by his staff to join Friends of Ireland, and he did so. But before long, he came to feel that it wasn’t the group for him. He had a general awareness of the situation in Ireland and, although he didn’t have fully formed views on it, he was more interested in substantive issues than Irish celebrations. He didn’t favor the more extreme pro-IRA views of some members of the Ad Hoc Committee, but the group’s willingness to engage with serious issues impressed him.
He hadn’t yet committed to switching over when a man named Richard Lawlor asked to meet with him. Morrison’s staff was alarmed: “You can’t meet with this guy. He’s a terrorist.” Morrison met with him anyway. Lawlor, a Hartford lawyer and a former Connecticut state representative, was the national vice chairman of Noraid. He was willing to press the case for a united Ireland anytime, anywhere, and he did it well. Lawlor argued to the new congressman that the Catholics in Northern Ireland were being subjected to terrible discrimination in employment, housing, and all other major spheres of public life,
as well as widespread deprivations of civil rights and unrelenting abuse by the RUC.
As they talked, Morrison didn’t think he was dealing with a terrorist. He felt that many of Lawlor’s points were worth exploring from a human rights perspective. Lawlor urged him to join the Ad Hoc Committee, and in time he did so. He was happier tackling serious questions instead of wondering which green tie to wear on St. Patrick’s Day.
It had been a good twenty minutes since the higher ranking officer arrived at the Derry standoff. The car from the Republic sat empty in the roadway. Things seemed stalled. Morrison, O’Hara, and Prebensen stayed still, backs to the river, guns still pointed at them. Morrison remembers one of the rifles aimed directly at his knee, a visual echo of the IRA practice of kneecapping: crippling lesser targets with a bullet to the knee.
And then, like a sudden summer shower, it was over. Keys and papers were handed back. There was no explanation and, of course, no apology. The police piled back into their vehicles; as suddenly as they’d appeared, they vanished.
Life carried on as if none of it had ever happened. The wide River Foyle, glistening in the August light, rolled on in its stately way to the Atlantic Ocean. Pedestrians walked freely alongside Queen’s Quay, the path ahead unimpeded by any unpleasantness. It was nearly lunchtime.
When Morrison got back to the United States a few days later, he called a press conference at the state capitol in Hartford. He told reporters: “Northern Ireland strikes you on first impression as a police state.” He described himself as a strong supporter of a united Ireland, adding that he would push for relaxing visa restrictions on Irish republican leaders so that Americans could hear different viewpoints. “What we hear in the United States comes to us from a British perspective,” he said. He denounced the discrimination and abuse and called for efforts to improve economic conditions in Northern Ireland.
Back in Congress, he got more involved in Irish issues and became co-chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee. He offered colleagues his impressions of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, whom he had met with in Belfast. Although many were certain that Adams was IRA to the core, Morrison’s impression was different: “This is a politician. This isn’t a general. This man—his skills, his focus, his way of thinking—is political. He’s a political organizer. I recognize this person.”
Morrison described his experience in Derry as “radicalizing,” which at first took the form of support for the cause of a united Ireland. In time, that radicalization developed into something broader and deeper: an unwavering determination to do everything he could to help make peace. He would go on to dedicate untold hours, travel endless miles, and seek out support from anyone—American, Irish or British, Catholic or Protestant—who could help advance the prospects for peace. He brought to bear every aspect of his political know-how and intellectual firepower, and he did it with remarkably little ego. In short, he became a radical seeker of peace in Northern Ireland.
Morrison would return to Northern Ireland many times in the coming years and would play a crucial role in the long chain of events that would eventually lead to peace. But as the 1980s drew to a close, his focus was on two enormous projects at home. In Connecticut, instead of running for re-election to Congress in 1990, he would run for governor. And in Washington, he would lead a major overhaul of the immigration laws. Both projects would, in very different and sometimes surprising ways, help him make good on his determination to seek peace in Northern Ireland.
CHAPTER TWO
Catastrophe: One Averted, One Total
Here it was, Friday evening, late October, 1990, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congressman Morrison’s immigration bill was, without warning, in terrible trouble, almost certainly at the end of a long road that had started so promisingly.
As chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, Morrison brought a point of view on immigration that went against the prevailing belief that the issue was nothing but an annoyance to deal with, a political loser. Whenever immigration issues came up, the typical response from most of his colleagues was a whiney, “Why do we have to do this?”
Morrison was sure that dealing with immigration didn’t have to be like swallowing cod liver oil. He believed many issues had wide appeal: family reunification, protection for Soviet Jews, help for Chinese after Tiananmen Square and Salvadorans fleeing a brutal civil war. He also felt that a bill allowing more skilled workers into the country, limiting unskilled workers, and regulating temporary workers would win the support of a broad range of constituencies.
In 1990, he rolled it all together into a comprehensive House bill. Business liked the increase in skilled workers, and labor liked the limits on unskilled workers and the regulation of temporary workers. Provisions helping particular ethnic groups brought their own constituencies on board. Fifty thousand new visas for the Irish had the additional virtue of appealing to a large segment of the Reagan Democrats, which Morrison’s party needed to win back if it hoped to take the White House in 1992. For each of these groups, Morrison’s bill became their bill, especially the Irish: Whenever it came before the House, members would ask him, “Is this the Irish bill?”
The Senate passed its own comprehensive immigration bill in 1989, and the House passed Morrison’s version in 1990. Then the joint conference committee hammered out a compromise bill from both versions. The Senate passed the compromise, and the House was voting on a House rule that had to pass before the bill itself could be taken up. Morrison had every reason to believe the votes were there.
Then it all went bad.
After all the horse-trading, adding in, taking out, adjusting, nipping and tucking necessary to line up an unprecedented coalition, this bill, the only immigration bill ever supported by both the AFL-CIO and the United States Chamber of Commerce, the bill a Republican president stood ready to sign, Morrison’s grand goodbye to Congress after four terms, was going down—and his friends were the ones doing the damage.
The trouble started when California congressman Ed Roybal, a founder of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, rose to argue that a pilot program buried in the bill that would add biometrics—a fingerprint, for example—to drivers’ licenses, would be a precursor to a national identity card. This program was an experiment dear to the heart of Senate sponsor Alan Simpson, but the Hispanic caucus hated it. Roybal’s argument persuaded enough representatives, mostly progressives who typically voted with Morrison, to vote no on the rule and effectively kill the bill.
The defeat was sudden and total. Because the joint conference committee had already issued its report in the form of the compromise bill and by House rules the committee was automatically dissolved upon issuing its report, it was no longer possible to go back and get rid of the fatal provision. Starting over in the Senate was no solution because so little time remained in the session. Besides, a filibuster by a single senator—and there were plenty waiting in line—would kill it there. And for Morrison there was no next year to try again, because he would be leaving Congress in January. It was now or never, and all of a sudden it looked like never.
Then a savior appeared: Joe Moakley, a veteran Massachusetts congressman and Chairman of the House Rules Committee, whose staff knew the House rules inside and out. There was a lot about the bill that Moakley liked, and one part he loved: protection for Salvadoran refugees. This was Moakley’s special passion. For years he had fought for temporary status to protect those who had fled the Central American nation’s civil war. Four years earlier, then-Chairman Roman Mazzoli had promised to include protections for Salvadorans in his 1986 bill. When Mazzoli failed to keep his promise, Moakley felt double-crossed. He never got over it, and he never stopped caring about the Salvadorans.
When Morrison defeated Mazzoli for the chairmanship in 1989 and began work on his bill, he approached Moakley with his own plan for the Salvadorans. Moakley was skeptical the new chairman could get it done, but Morrison said, “I’m going to deliver this for you.” Wat
ching him pull it off, Moakley had been impressed and grateful. So when disaster struck, he turned to Morrison right then and there on the House floor and said, “Let’s go figure this out.”
Morrison and Moakley, along with one of his aides, proceeded to put together a plan. It involved obscure legislative maneuvers and rules that Morrison, who was no slouch in this area, never even knew existed. Simply put, the plan was this: First, pass a House concurrent resolution—a housekeeping measure that isn’t actual legislation— striking out Simpson’s license project. Next, send the corrected resolution over to the Senate for passage. Finally, tell Ed Roybal that the committee bill was back before the House—this time with the license provision out—and bring it up for a new vote.
Getting the House to pass the concurrent resolution was no problem. After that was done, Moakley told Morrison what he had to do next, which Morrison wasn’t looking forward to: “You gotta call Simpson.”
Alan Simpson, a longtime senator from Wyoming—bright, coy, unpredictable, and often cranky—was a leading Republican who often went his own way, especially on immigration. Because it was Simpson’s pet project that had to be dropped, Morrison could see trouble ahead. He remembered how exasperating it had been to deal with Simpson on earlier stages: He’d delayed sending the Senate bill to the conference committee, and when he finally did so, it was accompanied by a long list of things he wanted added. He constantly threatened to filibuster the entire thing, probably to get what he wanted, but maybe just to keep everyone else off balance. This would not be a fun call.