Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  In addition to showing Irish Americans that Clinton’s commitment was genuine, Morrison also intended the letter to serve notice to the British that Clinton’s concern was real and that he was willing to take risks to make peace happen. Morrison knew Clinton well enough to know that British pushback would make it all the more likely that he would keep his promises. “Resistance made the letter all the more important,” Morrison said later. “In effect, the letter said, ‘And I mean it!’”

  Morrison’s third strategic target of the letter was Clinton himself. “Politicians always say, ‘Now is not the time.’ But our message was, ‘The time is now—and next week, and next month, until we get it done.” The soon-to-be-president was on notice that his old classmate and his cohort weren’t going away.

  For Soderberg herself, soon to be appointed deputy national security advisor in the Clinton White House, Morrison saw the letter as representing nothing less than the commencement of planning the administration’s policy on Northern Ireland.

  On Election Day, Clinton won an impressive victory. Although he didn’t win a plurality of the vote—in a bizarre twist, Perot had jumped back in—he decisively routed Bush, carrying thirty-two states plus the District of Columbia and winning the popular vote by 6 million.

  Morrison and the Irish Americans who had bet on Clinton were ecstatic. But Morrison’s delight was tempered by his awareness that just because a presidential candidate promises something, wins, and sincerely wants to keep his promise, that doesn’t guarantee that the issue will get to the top of the agenda or that unforeseen events won’t relegate it to the back burner. In other words, after the long haul that began when Niall O’Dowd asked Morrison, “What about your classmate Bill Clinton?” the job of turning Clinton’s promises into American foreign policy was now just beginning. This was no surprise to Morrison: A core element of his overall strategy from the outset was the recognition that the real work would begin after Election Day.

  Those who thought that throwing out long-established American policy was a terrible idea were already sharpening their knives. The British and their American allies in the State Department and the FBI had the terrorist brush ready to go. Opposition to the new policy would be intense and relentless. In marshaling supporters, Morrison knew that the road wouldn’t rise to meet them and the wind wouldn’t be at their backs.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When Clinton Wins, the Real Work Begins

  In most circumstances, getting stuck in Nashville would have its advantages. It’s Music City USA, with the Grand Ole Opry and countless honky-tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It’s also the Athens of the South, with its very own full-scale Parthenon. But this was January 13, 1993, and Bill Clinton would be inaugurated in a week. Almost 350 miles away in Little Rock, Clinton and his team were in the thick of final preparations for the move to Washington. So there was nothing good about Bruce Morrison, chairman of Americans for a New Irish Agenda (ANIA), freshly rebranded from Irish Americans for Clinton-Gore, being stuck in the Nashville airport.

  He was supposed to be leading a delegation of Irish Americans to Clinton’s headquarters in Little Rock to collect on the presidentelect’s promises on Ireland. But instead of being in the midst of the post-election, pre-inauguration turmoil, here he was in an American Airlines lounge he’d managed to talk himself into, trying his best to participate in meetings via speakerphone. The visit to Little Rock could be crucial in determining how high on the new president’s agenda his pledges on Ireland would get, and making the case over the speaker-phone just wasn’t anything like being there.

  It had been snowing in Hartford when he got to the airport that morning, but he’d gambled that the plane would take off in time for him to catch his connecting flight to Little Rock. He lost that bet: The plane sat on the tarmac for two hours. When they were finally cleared for takeoff, Morrison knew he had no hope of getting to Little Rock in time. The events yet to come in the remains of the day—a frustrating conference call followed by a long interval of airport nothingness, followed by another long flight right back to where he’d started, without ever having set foot in Arkansas—beckoned grimly. He didn’t feel like much of a chairman.

  Morrison was sure that there was plenty of action happening in Little Rock, and he was right. The energy and chaos that greeted Niall O’Dowd and other members of the Irish American delegation was a sight to behold. Boxes and file cabinets were everywhere. In the turmoil of aides darting this way and that, staffers trying to pack for Washington, and many interest groups jockeying to get their voices heard, little meetings were carved out among the chaos. Big shots and savvy operators were desperate to find that crucial ear or key exchange that could make all the difference in something important, and the Irish Americans were having their audience with whoever was available. They had been scheduled to meet with Nancy Soderberg, soon to be deputy national security advisor, but she got called away to meet with the president-elect about a sudden crisis in Libya.

  The one real meeting the Irish Americans did get was with Christopher Hyland, who headed up ethnic outreach for Clinton and had been in touch with O’Dowd since early in the campaign. Hyland had been an unrelenting inside-the-campaign voice on Northern Ireland, doing everything he could to get Clinton’s staff to understand the importance of getting Clinton involved and enduring unending eye-rolling and worse in the process. (Nancy Soderberg would later praise his ethnic outreach efforts as, “tireless and incredibly effective in a thankless job.”) Undaunted, he carefully planned his meeting with the Irish Americans—he called it the Irish American Round Table— and did everything necessary to have Morrison participate by phone. Morrison did his best over the speakerphone, and when it was over, those who’d made it to Little Rock flew back to Nashville to connect for their flights home. They found Morrison still there, waiting to leave for Hartford, the second leg of his wintertime journey to nowhere. Morrison remembers their return: “They arrived from Little Rock on their way back to New York with big smiles on their faces. The good news was that they were very upbeat about their meeting with Chris Hyland. The bad news was that I’d spent the day at the Nashville airport.”

  Smiles notwithstanding, the Americans for a New Irish Agenda couldn’t point to much in the way of concrete payoff from their visit to Little Rock. The president was never in reach, and Soderberg got called away. In truth, this was a perfect preview of the difficulties involved in turning Clinton’s promises into real change. The competition for his attention was unimaginably intense. There was every reason to fear that the new Irish policy might get lost in the welter of equally worthy issues. There was also the possibility that Clinton would begin to think that his promises had been a mistake to begin with and that the risks—potential harm to the relationship between the United States and Britain and too much chance of failure—were simply too high. Certainly Soderberg might still welcome the chance to walk her boss’s promises back. And there was always the possibility that Northern Ireland would get swamped by one or another—or maybe several—acute crises threatening national security or some other vital national interests.

  The Irish Americans, however, did accomplish something important at their pre-inaugural visit: They showed up and they made it clear that they would keep showing up. They also knew that they had to attend to their base: Although their formidable Irish American constituency put real muscle behind their efforts, it was a constituency that would require ongoing attention and would always demand evidence that their leaders were on the right track. The key promises everyone was waiting to see fulfilled were the appointment of a peace envoy to Northern Ireland and an American visa for Gerry Adams. If those things never happened, the prospects for a real break with past American policy were bleak. And even if they just took too long, there was a danger that Irish activists, thoroughly accustomed to being let down or forgotten about by politicians, would start fighting amongst themselves and turn on their leaders.

  So Morrison had plenty to worry about. B
ut his overall strategy contained a plan to deal with that:

  Many groups like this go out of existence soon after Election Day, but our organization was about some very specific policy positions and some very specific commitments that Clinton had made. To me it was critically important not to fall back on existing Irish American organizations to carry forward that agenda, but to try to hold those groups together in some kind of alliance that would, in a coordinated, consistent way, follow up on the good work that was done during the campaign. So I suggested that we move forward with an advocacy organization, not a campaign organization. We christened it Americans for a New Irish Agenda, very consciously saying that it was a new agenda and was being pushed by Americans, not Irish. It would be an organization for all the various groups in Irish America to come together and support each other in focusing on Clinton’s five promises from the forum in April.

  We were able to be a focused and effective presence on behalf of the things we’d gained during the campaign. One of the mistakes groups make in elections is that they extract commitments from candidates, but lack the follow-through after the person is in office, not just to advocate for what they want and what was promised, but also to facilitate the political situation that makes it easier rather than harder for their candidate to deliver. And that’s what ANIA was. It wasn’t a large organization, but it brought together a large number of organizations and people committed to the same goals.

  Shortly before his would-be Little Rock sojourn, Morrison decided he had to do something that pretty much everybody working with him on Northern Ireland hated. He believed strongly that the British should be told what ANIA was planning to do. For him, this was fundamental: “Northern Ireland is British territory, even if some people don’t like to acknowledge it, so we should pay them the respect of going and saying, ‘Here is what we’re doing and here’s why and here’s what you might think about it.’”

  He got himself an appointment at the British embassy, not so hard for a former congressman with considerable standing in Ireland. Whether he would receive more than a polite hearing with no meaningful engagement was the real question. The embassy gave the job to two young diplomats, one of whom was Jonathan Powell, who a few years later would become deeply involved in Northern Ireland as Tony Blair’s chief of staff. Powell and the other diplomat listened politely as Morrison told them that he knew Clinton personally and that the new president was serious about his commitment to make America part of the peace process in Northern Ireland. He did his best to persuade them that it was in Britain’s interests to consider that the new American approach might hold real value for them. His message was that ANIA was going to Little Rock to claim what the president had promised—that Clinton meant what he said and that ANIA existed to make sure it happened. The essence of his message was, “The new president of the United States, your best friend in the world, has substantive and political reasons to want to play a role. Instead of getting upset and asking him not to meddle, you might welcome his involvement. Tell him, ‘Anything you can do to help sort out this historic problem we have in our midst would be appreciated.’”

  Morrison emphasized that if the British made it a matter of pride and principle—essentially, “How dare you meddle in the affairs of the United Kingdom?”—that would only make it more likely that Clinton would push to get himself involved. Morrison wanted to see them “co-opt his interest rather than reject it.”

  The conversation was one-sided. Politeness reigned. Morrison’s hope that the British would see Clinton’s promises as an opportunity instead of an intrusion seemed to get no traction at all. There was no way these young men were going to tell their superiors that a fresh look at Clinton’s plans might make sense. Morrison later summed the meeting up as “message delivered, message received,” and nothing more. But as the years passed, he became enormously proud that he had insisted on it. It demonstrated that as the Americans injected themselves into the peace process, they would deal straight up with all sides, and they wouldn’t go behind Britain’s back. That principle would prove invaluable in establishing the Americans as honest brokers who would be open-minded and available to everyone. And that reputation, established so powerfully by Morrison and carried forward by Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, was the cornerstone of the American role that would turn out to be so crucial to the ultimate success of the peace process.

  A few months after Clinton took office, it was still an open question whether he would keep his promises—and things weren’t looking good. His pledge to appoint a peace envoy was opposed by Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds. Morrison got a sense of Reynolds’s position early in 1993 when the Taoiseach was in Washington for St. Patrick’s Day. Reynolds invited Morrison to ride with him in his limousine from the Irish embassy to the Ireland Fund dinner, and during the ride Reynolds took the opportunity to tell Morrison about what types of American involvement he thought would—and would not—be helpful. His determination not to lose control of peacemaking efforts to the Americans was clear, and he was worried that a Clinton peace envoy might jeopardize his own relationship with British prime minister John Major. Reynolds knew how badly his British counterpart had started out with Clinton, and he seized the opportunity to do Major a favor by urging Clinton to shelve the peace envoy plan. Reynolds the businessman was always on the lookout for the chance to do Major a favor that might pay rich dividends in the future.

  It was also evident that Reynolds had doubts about Clinton himself, as Morrison recalls: “He was probably not at all sure what Clinton was like. He had already watched him make a hash of gays in the military, so whether he had the subtleties down sufficiently to be a player in Ireland or whether he would put a big foot in it and make a mess was probably an open question in Albert’s mind.”

  Reynolds’s comments gave Morrison a good sense of what was troubling him. He’d had reason to believe that Reynolds would welcome a strong American presence in the peace process, but now it was clear that he had real concerns about whether or not Clinton was up to it. Could the young president carry a new policy forward effectively? Would he stick with it? Would the involvement contemplated by his lavish promises do more harm than good? Obviously there was a lot more to Reynolds’s urging of Clinton to shelve the peace envoy than just doing a favor for John Major.

  Reynolds would go on to become one of the most important and courageous players in the search for peace. Morrison greatly valued his early contact with him:

  I came to know in retrospect how different he was from the average Irish politician: He was blunt, he really spoke his mind, and he said things that you don’t expect to hear from the prime minister. He was not a typical politician; his self-image was not as a politician. He thought of himself as a successful businessman, knowledgeable about budgets; as somebody who’d been a finance minister, he thought that he was good at it. He had the sort of hard-nosed business leader view of jobs to be done. It served him wonderfully well with respect to the peace process, because there had been so much BS out of the Irish government over the years about Northern Ireland and so little constructive action. He was having none of that and was cutting to the chase at every turn.

  At every occasion when there was something to be done and we were trying to work constructively with the Irish government, he would meet privately with us, and he said what was on his mind—there wasn’t a lot of equivocation, there wasn’t a lot of papering over with fancy phrases. It was, “This is where I am, this is what I want, this is what I say.” Obviously you could push back if you thought something different, and he would listen, but he was direct and blunt and constructive. Although that got him in a lot of trouble over other things that ended his political career, it sure was what was needed at the moment.

  Ultimately, Clinton followed Reynolds’s advice and held off on the peace envoy. Like Reynolds, Clinton was an astute politician; he certainly understood that agreeing to Reynolds’s request could help him get his own relationship with Major on a better footi
ng.

  Clinton’s other key promise to the Irish Americans—a US visa for Gerry Adams—was also not looking good. Early in 1993, Adams’s book publisher had applied for a visa for him to do an American tour. Morrison was unhappy that the request had been made at all—it was ill-coordinated, ill-prepared, ill-considered, and ill-timed—and he wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when Clinton turned it down cold. Morrison knew there were three crucial elements that a focused effort to redeem the Adams visa promise required: The proper groundwork had to be laid, the timing had to be right, and the purpose of Adams’s visit had to be lofty and broad, not self-serving or confrontational. Morrison understood that a history of visa turndowns could establish a precedent that would make it very difficult for Clinton to change course. Would he really be willing to reverse himself and take on the unrelenting opposition of the British government and his own State Department, Justice Department, and FBI?

  The other serious problem was that Clinton’s Irish American supporters were beginning to get skeptical and restive—the pessimistic activists were sure they were headed down the same old road of broken promises—and it took all of Morrison’s powers of persuasion to get them to be patient enough to let the right visa request be presented in the right way at the right time. This was a tough job; the various Irish American groups were constantly splitting up, regrouping, forming other groups, and fighting with one another. (There’s an old joke that if you get twelve Irish activists together to do something, you wind up with thirteen separate organizations.) Morrison knew that if the Irish Americans couldn’t keep their own groups on track, their case wouldn’t be persuasive with the new administration. And any sense that the Irish Americans who had been so excited about Clinton were starting to jump ship could seriously dampen the new president’s enthusiasm for radically changing the old policy that suited the British and their American supporters so well.