Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  Morrison girded up, made the call, and got a pleasant surprise: Simpson readily agreed to deletion of the biometrics experiment provision, telling Morrison, “Aw, I didn’t give a shit about that anyway.” Simpson then quickly got the corrected version through the Senate. When it came back to the House, Ed Roybal’s nays were back on board, and it passed easily and went to the president for his signature. When Simpson noticed Morrison at the edge of the group watching George H. W. Bush sign the bill, he pulled him into the center, between himself and Ted Kennedy and right behind the president, telling him, “You belong here.”

  Catastrophe was averted, both for the advocates of immigration reform and for Morrison personally: one of his two grand projects for the year succeeded after all, and, looking ahead, it gave him enormous stature in Ireland that would prove invaluable when he got himself involved with the quest for peace there.

  But Morrison had no time to savor his victory, because the 1990 Connecticut gubernatorial election was just ten days away. He flew back to New Haven and embarked on a simple but brutal campaign schedule: He was going to campaign around the clock until it was over. It was a plan he took literally: A TV clip showed him pumping gas late at night for a startled customer. It was a valiant effort in what many at this stage were sure was a lost cause. But it hadn’t started out that way.

  When Morrison had decided to heed the chants of “Run, Bruce, run!” echoing through the ballroom of New Haven’s Park Plaza Hotel on election night 1988, after trouncing his opponent to win his fourth term in Congress, victory seemed entirely plausible, certainly much more so than when he first ran for Congress. The incumbent he would need to beat this time was Bill O’Neill, an old-style organization Democrat who had never been a favorite of liberals.

  O’Neill became governor in 1980 when the popular Ella Grasso died, and as lieutenant governor, he succeeded her. He was seen by many as too conservative, essentially a caretaker who never would have been a strong candidate on his own. To his political pals, basically the Irish American establishment of the party, he was a great guy. He was also a tough political infighter, ruthless when he had to be. Both times he ran for re-election he faced intense opposition but managed, with the support of the old pols, to avoid primary elections. It was generally thought that he would be vulnerable in a head-to-head primary.

  Morrison announced his challenge to O’Neill in early January of 1990. The venue was a New Haven nightclub called Toad’s Place, which had recently been in the national news when the Rolling Stones turned up to do a short set before kicking off their next American tour. On this January night, Toad’s was a place for politics. Morrison had spent the day touring the state on a bus filled with supporters, starting with the mill towns of the Naugatuck River Valley that John F. Kennedy had so memorably visited on the eve of the 1960 election that would make him president. During Morrison’s tour, the campaign sported an up-to-the-minute technological innovation on loan from a local construction company: cell phones, huge and heavy, lugged around in sturdy canvas cases with stout shoulder straps.

  When night came, Morrison’s supporters jammed Toad’s and cheered as their man promised victory and better days ahead. His likely opponent in the general election would be John Rowland, a politically astute conservative Republican congressman. Rowland’s effort to get Congress to open its sessions with the Pledge of Allegiance had been ridiculed by liberals but, as Morrison always pointed out, it polled astonishingly well. Rowland had also made a splash by smashing a piece of Japanese electronic gear on the steps of the Capitol to express his support for products made in America.

  For his part, Morrison looked forward to a clear-cut progressiveversus-conservative general election campaign. He was confident that he could take Rowland and smart enough not to underestimate him.

  But first he had to get the Democratic nomination. There were mixed signals about whether or not Governor O’Neill would run again. Not only was he politically vulnerable, but he had a history of significant health problems. But he saw Morrison’s challenge as a personal attack, once asking him why he was coming after him since, “I never went after you.”

  Finally in March, O’Neill decided to step aside. This was no graceful handing-off of the baton to a new generation while the old campaigner headed to a well-deserved retirement. It was clear that O’Neill was bitter and not about to do anything to make things easier for his upstart challenger. Although Morrison’s path to the nomination now seemed clear, there was trouble ahead.

  Even before O’Neill announced that he wasn’t running, former senator Lowell Weicker entered the race as an independent, despite having told Morrison to his face that he wouldn’t run and would support him. Weicker had been narrowly defeated just two years earlier by Joe Lieberman, who ran to the Republican’s right, lambasting him for being soft on Cuba and other un-Americanisms. Weicker lost that election by just 10,000 votes, taking 49 percent of the statewide vote. He continued to have a lot of support from Democrats who fondly remembered him as a member of the Senate Watergate Committee, where his doubts about Nixon set him apart from almost all the Republicans on the committee. In his three terms in the Senate, Weicker had positioned himself as one of a vanishing breed: a somewhat liberal Republican.

  Six and a half feet tall and burly, the wealthy Greenwich pharmaceutical heir was literally and figuratively a gigantic figure on the Connecticut political scene. By running for governor as an independent, he had set up the second major three-way race of his career. In his first, he had been elected to the Senate in a race against two Democrats; one a sitting senator who wasn’t renominated, and the other the nominee of a badly split party.

  This new three-way setup between Weicker, Rowland, and Morrison looked equally promising for Weicker—and dismal for Morrison. It seemed clear that Weicker would take a good many Democratic votes, the lion’s share of the independents, and what was left of the moderate wing of the Republican Party; Morrison could count on committed progressives, diehard Democrats, and maybe not a whole lot more. Additionally, the kind of strategic voting often found in races with three major candidates was likely to make matters worse for Morrison. The argument in 1990 for Democrats went like this: Don’t vote for the your party’s nominee (Morrison) because that will take votes away from the candidate leading in the polls whom you are okay with (Weicker) and might get the one you really dislike (Rowland) elected. When Morrison’s pollsters tested Weicker’s popularity among Democrats, the results were devastating, but by that point Morrison was already committed to the race. There was no going back.

  With O’Neill out, Morrison won the Democratic nomination at the state convention, but State Senator William Cibes, advocating a state income tax, got enough convention votes to mount a primary challenge in September. Morrison won the primary by a nearly two-to-one margin, but starting the fall campaign season mired in a battle with another Democrat over a state income tax, the most contentious issue in Connecticut politics, was no help to his already bleak general election prospects.

  It was increasingly clear that many in the Democratic establishment who resented Morrison’s challenge to O’Neill were sitting on their hands, if not actively supporting one of his opponents. Yet despite all that, he never let up, pushing relentlessly to the end. Recalls his campaign manager Ted Baldwin:

  Bruce had committed to the race and he never gave it less than his all. At the same time he did his work in Congress and served his constituents at an amazingly high level. His ability to do more than one major thing at a time was exceptional. He worked as hard as anybody could. There was never a moment when we needed him for the campaign that he wasn’t there.

  On election night, Morrison’s worst fears were realized in spectacular fashion: The three-way race was a total disaster.

  The New York Times told the sad tale in the morning:

  Mr. Morrison, who conceded defeat just after 9:30 P.M., 90 minutes after the polls closed, was rejected by about three-quarters of the members of his own
party.

  He avoided, however, the ignominy of taking his party down to complete disintegration. Had he drawn less than 20 percent of the vote—an outcome that seemed possible based on polls conducted last week—the Democrats would have lost their status as a “major party” under state law and would have been forced to submit petitions to get new candidates on the ballot.

  It was an unimaginable calamity for the party that had won eight of the last nine elections for governor. As silver linings go, receiving 20 percent of the vote was about as feeble as it gets. A three-way race with Weicker would have likely been impossible for any Democrat, but ultimately that didn’t matter: Morrison lost horribly to Weicker and became a pariah in his own party. And he couldn’t go back to Congress: His successor Rosa DeLauro had just won her first of thirteen terms (and counting).

  The writing on the wall was brutally clear: Morrison’s political days in Connecticut were over.

  Just how irredeemably over they were was driven home in mid-January when Morrison, now nothing more than an ex-congressman, went to the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey dinner, the traditional midwinter Democratic party fund-raiser, that year at a central Connecticut Radisson ballroom big enough to hold a thousand. The size of the room meant that, even with decent seating, the head table could be far, far away. But for Morrison and his fiancée, there was no decent seating: The organizers put them in a virtual Siberia, practically in the kitchen. It was an unmistakable message that the party’s most recent candidate for governor was now a very dead duck. That this was no greatly exaggerated death was made painfully clear when Morrison greeted O’Neill and his wife, Nikki. It was bad enough when O’Neill’s manner showed so clearly that he was still seething over Morrison’s challenge. But it really hit bottom when Nikki O’Neill said quietly through clenched teeth as Morrison shook her hand, “This is really hard for me.”

  Morrison went home that night in a complete funk. It couldn’t have been clearer that he was a political goner in Connecticut. The door wasn’t just shut—it was triple locked, bolted, chained, and welded over with steel plating. Only one question dominated his thoughts: What do I do now?

  It is no wonder, then, that at that moment Morrison had absolutely no inkling that a new door was opening on the horizon, one that would give him a chance to help make world history.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Longshot

  Morrison’s humiliation at the Democratic banquet perfectly captured his dreadful situation. Not only was he friendless in his own party, but he had no job, no income, and a massive campaign debt, including personal loans in six figures secured by his house. So he decided to start his own private legal practice in New Haven, with a special focus on immigration law.

  By late winter 1991, as Morrison was getting his practice underway, he started thinking about something beyond making a living. Although he understood that his days as a political candidate were over, his activist impulses hadn’t left him. So, like any good politician, he decided to look where he still had support: Ireland, now 50,000 new visas strong. Those visas had made him a revered figure throughout the island.

  Though the violence and despair of the Troubles were still going strong, there had been some recent promising developments in Northern Ireland. For one, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams had been publicly advocating for a political path as an alternative to the IRA’s efforts to unify Ireland by force of arms. Then in the late 1980’s, moderate nationalist leader John Hume had begun confidential discussions with Adams, despite Sinn Féin’s ties to the IRA, which offered Adams the prospect of wider political acceptability and contributed to the development of a real peace process.

  Morrison hoped that with his newfound stature in Ireland he could do something in support of these hopeful developments. “I thought I should spend my legacy on something,” he says. He wasn’t sure yet what that something should be, but he knew just the man to discuss it with.

  Niall O’Dowd, a New Yorker through and through, was an Irish immigrant, once illegal, who became a successful publisher. His Irish Voice newspaper and Irish America magazine had considerable influence in the Irish American community. He had a vast array of contacts in the Republic and Northern Ireland—everyone from mainstream politicians to shadowy paramilitary men—and an equally large number throughout Irish America. Morrison had worked with him on immigration issues, and O’Dowd had been a strong supporter of his campaign for governor. He was the perfect person for Morrison to visit.

  They met in the late winter in O’Dowd’s Manhattan office, an unremarkable workaday place where he ran his publishing business. Its most distinctive feature was a view of the Empire State Building. It didn’t take long for Morrison to realize that this wasn’t just a meeting for him: It was also a meeting that the publisher had been waiting for.

  O’Dowd’s path to New York and to American citizenship had been a long and colorful one. He left Ireland in 1978 after graduating from university, ultimately making his way to San Francisco, where he sustained himself, like so many young Irishmen, as a house painter. He was also in demand for his talent at Gaelic football. When his visa ran out, he stayed anyway—also like so many others. Years later, his experience with illegal status made him determined to advocate for immigration reform, which was the issue that first brought him together with Morrison. O’Dowd had been enormously impressed with Morrison’s determination and effectiveness in crafting the 1990 immigration bill and getting it passed. The Irish Voice mentioned him frequently during that time, although, Morrison says, “It wasn’t always sweetness and light. One of his columnists regularly questioned whether I was actually going to deliver. She was constantly saying that I couldn’t get it done—that no one had ever passed a bill in only one year and that because I was running for governor, I was going to be distracted and wasn’t going to pay attention.”

  As the two men spoke in what Morrison later called “an easy meeting of the minds,” it was clear that they shared many views and perceptions of the situation in Northern Ireland. They also had high regard for each other. O’Dowd respected Morrison’s intellect, his political astuteness, and his reputation throughout Ireland as an American who practically walked on water. Morrison was impressed with O’Dowd’s passion and vision, not to mention his amazing network of contacts. He had deeply appreciated O’Dowd’s support in the governor’s race, especially in marshaling financial backing from prominent Irish Americans.

  As the publisher and the politician tossed ideas back and forth, it was clear that not only was O’Dowd the right man for Morrison, but Morrison was the right man for O’Dowd, who had long wanted to find a way to get the United States involved in helping to end the Troubles. The idea was not a new one—throughout much of the twentieth century, Irish republicans had sought to “internationalize” their struggle by getting the United States involved as a counterbalance to Great Britain—but an important difference now was that O’Dowd could drum up support for that vision through his publications and his contacts on both sides of the Atlantic. He had already seen how effective that could be: When the Irish Voice started referring to the new Irish visas as “Morrison Visas,” Morrison’s reputation throughout Ireland rose even higher.

  Morrison knew that for O’Dowd’s vision to succeed, influential Irish Americans would have to get behind it. He also knew that O’Dowd, a pioneer in elevating the status of what it meant to be an Irish American, was the right man to galvanize them. O’Dowd publicized and celebrated Irish American successes in business, politics, science, and other areas at the highest levels of American life, even establishing a hall of fame for Irish Americans. Morrison has a deep respect for O’Dowd’s transformational accomplishments:

  When I was growing up, the traditional image of Irish America would be the Irish cop, the firefighter, the carpenter, the electrician, the priest. But of course the truth is that with maybe 40 million Irish Americans in the country, they ran the full range of achievement. Niall recognized that the self-image of Irish America was
kind of moored in a particular category of occupation and living style. He set out to inform Irish America of how much they have achieved in all aspects of American life. What he changed was that people who historically focused on their assimilation, not on their Irishness, now aspire to be recognized for their Irish connection in addition to their achievements at high levels of American society. So now people want to be on his “Irish 100” lists; they want to be in the Irish America Hall of Fame. That’s a total change: people treated their Irishness as a footnote and emphasized their achievement as an American—such as, “I’m a CEO”—but now the CEO says, “One of the reasons I’ve done so well is my Irish heritage and my Irish upbringing.” Niall did this.

  Morrison and O’Dowd both recognized the challenges and payoffs of getting America involved in a new way. The biggest challenge was that for nearly 200 years, it had been the policy of the United States to regard the ongoing conflict in Ireland as an internal British matter, not an appropriate subject for an independent American policy. That deference was solidly entrenched in the State Department, and getting it changed would be enormously difficult, particularly since the British insisted that any armed activity by the Irish Republican Army was terrorism, pure and simple. That meant that anyone advocating a wholesale change in American policy could be accused of being soft on terrorism by the State Department and the FBI.

  But if American policy could be changed, the potential that it could help bring about peace was enormous. The United States was ideally positioned to support and encourage positive developments in Northern Ireland. More and more American voices against the warfare were making themselves heard, both publicly and behind the scenes. Furthermore, given Britain’s positive regard for America, if there was any nation that could influence its policies, it was the United States.