by Penn Rhodeen
These setbacks gave plenty of reason for discouragement, but Morrison never lost sight of the urgency of continuing to press the case with the White House and of giving credit when credit was due. He understood this dance exceptionally well:
We had to play carrot and stick in the public arena. Nobody in the government wanted Clinton to do any of this stuff, so we set up an accountability structure, a mechanism by which we intended to criticize and praise in proportion to what did and didn’t get done. The president would see both the political upside and the political necessity of getting engaged.
The praise, what I call reinforcement, is often overlooked. A lot of people in politics only whine about what they don’t get and what doesn’t happen and are very spare in acknowledging accomplishment unless utopia arrives. People like to be appreciated, to have their progress noted. That was a big part of what we tried to remember, because “What have you done for me lately?” constituencies can really frustrate you when you beat your brains out to get something done and it never seems to be enough. I think Bill Clinton and his team did feel like their efforts were appreciated, and I think that was very helpful.
As disheartening as the beginning months of the Clinton administration were to the Irish Americans, the signals from the republicans in Northern Ireland were encouraging. Most communication came through Niall O’Dowd from his network of contacts in Sinn Féin and the IRA. Things might be stalled in the United States, but Sinn Féin was pressing O’Dowd to get an American delegation to Northern Ireland in the spring in order for the IRA to see that there was reason to hope American policy would change profoundly. The message to America was clear: It’s time for you to come over here and show us something new.
Morrison was unavailable to go to Northern Ireland at that time, so O’Dowd asked former Boston mayor Ray Flynn to be the group’s political leader. When Flynn agreed to go—and to keep the plan confidential, as Sinn Féin had requested—the trip was set. O’Dowd sent a message back to Sinn Féin that an IRA ceasefire for the duration of their visit would be a big help to the Americans in pressing their case with the White House when they returned. This was an audacious request: apart from occasional brief holiday ceasefires, this was not something the IRA did. There had been a short ceasefire years earlier that the IRA regarded as a disaster never to be repeated. It took everything Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin had, but they were able to persuade the IRA of the immense value of showing the White House that real progress toward peace could be made if Clinton carried through on his promises.
At last there was reason to be hopeful. The Americans knew how extraordinary the ceasefire promise was, and they were confident that it would make a strong impression on the White House. But as the time to leave for Ireland drew closer, O’Dowd found that Ray Flynn had suddenly become very hard to reach. O’Dowd suspected that he had broken his promise to keep the trip secret, and he was right. After Flynn finally begged off altogether (through a spokesman), O’Dowd learned that he had widely shopped the question of whether leading the trip would help or hinder his prospects for a high-level job in the Clinton administration, ultimately deciding it was too risky to go.
This was a disaster. Political leadership was essential for the success of the mission, because the key players in the peace process were politicians, and the process itself was fundamentally political: It was essentially an effort to negotiate a deal that would replace war with politics. With no experienced and skillful politician at the helm, O’Dowd had no choice but to scrap the spring trip altogether.
The credibility of the Irish American peace process venture was now severely, perhaps fatally, damaged. O’Dowd’s plans were up in smoke, with major collateral damage—not to mention huge embarrassment—on both sides of the Atlantic.
The sowing of doubts among those in the administration who knew about trip was troubling enough, but the problems in Belfast were far more serious. Sinn Féin had gone far out on a limb by pushing the IRA to declare a ceasefire for the American visit. In the eyes of the IRA, the ceasefire had accomplished nothing and had placed them at a military disadvantage. Their only question was whether the Americans were playing them for fools or were just incompetent. O’Dowd’s Sinn Féin contacts soon told him to get over to Belfast right away and explain the mess.
O’Dowd’s journey involved the usual intrigue of getting to a secret location for a secret meeting. The driver from Sinn Féin—or perhaps the IRA itself—was constantly watching the mirror, doubling back, changing direction, and crisscrossing through the dark streets of West Belfast. As they zeroed in on the destination that would put O’Dowd in a room with men who had killed for the cause and would not like being played, the would-be peace impresario struggled to fend off worries about his personal safety.
The meeting went as well as such a thing could. Adams presided, calm but relentless. The hard men in the group were unsettlingly quiet. O’Dowd told the whole embarrassing story with complete candor. To his immense relief, his account was accepted, and Adams asked if a new trip could be organized. O’Dowd said he thought he could get one together for late summer. This time he knew that Bruce Morrison had to be the political leader.
Morrison agreed, and plans were quickly under way for a delegation of four Americans with no official government status to go to Belfast in early September. They would carry a message of Clinton’s interest in helping resolve the bloody conflict, and they hoped to return with encouraging news of what the United States could do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Unofficial Peacemakers in Northern Ireland
In the late summer of 1993, the British border control station where Ireland’s N-1 highway meets Northern Ireland’s A-1 on the way to Belfast was an unmistakable reminder that to enter the north was to enter a land at war.
After passing through the main gate, all travelers were subject to being stopped for interrogation and search by the British soldiers and the RUC. Behind those who decided who got stopped were more soldiers in full combat gear, some of whom watched from observation towers equipped with “general purpose” machine guns.
If reinforcements were needed, soldiers at a British army encampment housed in an old linen mill a short way up the road in the village of Bessbrook were at the ready, along with pilots at the improvised heliport outside the village that had become the busiest in all of Europe, with its constant bellowing and batting of engines and rotors. The military helicopters blanketed the border area, patrolling for terrorists and smugglers, who ducked border control by taking narrow back roads. The British regularly blasted holes in those roads in an effort to force everyone—travelers, smugglers, and paramilitaries alike—to keep to the main route.
Plenty of cars were stopped for questioning and maybe a search, but the car carrying a small party of unofficial American peacemakers was allowed to continue on to Belfast, now less than forty miles ahead, without incident. Riding with Bruce Morrison and Niall O’Dowd, impresario of this audacious journey, were Chuck Feeney and William J. Flynn, two Irish American businessmen of radically different styles.
Feeney was a brilliant, hard-nosed entrepreneur who cofounded a chain of duty-free shops in 1960 that became a multibillion-dollar venture. He became one of the richest men in the world, but he was no stereotypical big-time billionaire. His personal style was one of complete self-effacement—he had a plan to give away nearly all of his fortune, including hundreds of millions to his alma mater Cornell, though he never wanted anything named after him. He was obsessively private and hated being photographed. Feeney dressed modestly— there was even a story that he was once spotted with his pants held up by a safety pin. As Morrison describes him, “Chuck is very low-key, respectful, and inquisitive, the opposite of the table-pounding and demanding Donald Trump type. He’s always human scale, as opposed to grand and pontificating.”
By the time the Americans met up in Dublin, Feeney was no longer the multibillionaire that Forbes had reported him to be; he had already given almost all of h
is assets to Atlantic Philanthropies, a mysterious foundation that made grants anonymously to people and organizations that hadn’t asked for them. Feeney was now in the business of charity, driven to use his resources to make a difference in the world, undeterred by what others might think.
Feeney’s commitment to peace in Northern Ireland reached its peak when he saw the horrific images of the 1987 IRA bombing in Enniskillen, home to some of his forbearers, on television. He was moved to tears as he listened to the transcendent response of a father who held the hand of his grown daughter, a nurse, as she died in the rubble: “I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She’s dead. She’s in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men tonight and every night.” Feeney was determined to do anything he could to help end the violence.
The other businessman in the delegation, William J. Flynn, was entirely the corporate man. Chief executive officer of the insurance giant Mutual of America, he was tall and elegant, with beautifully tailored clothes. An ex-marine and a very devout Roman Catholic, he was the very model of the fully arrived, establishment-certified Irish American business success and was entirely at home at the University Club on Fifth Avenue near St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. As a prominent CEO, Flynn was always willing to call upon his contacts—moneyed, social, corporate, political, and academic—to support and advance the struggle for peace in Northern Ireland. He was also a serious student of foreign policy, and his involvement in that arena would prove invaluable as the process moved forward. He did business and made connections in a direct and personal way, belonging not only to the high ranks of corporate America, but also to Ireland, where his parents had been born and raised and where he visited frequently. Flynn was eager to get other CEOs behind the developing peace process, but he never hesitated to tell the Irish republicans that the violence had to stop or they’d lose corporate America.
The members of the little American team landed in Dublin in the early morning hours of Monday, September 6, 1993. They met in the Westbury Hotel coffee shop off Grafton Street. Niall O’Dowd pulled out the letter from Sinn Féin that had been delivered to him by courier in New York, confirming that there’d be an IRA ceasefire for the duration of their visit. Sinn Féin demanded that it be kept secret; if word of the ceasefire got out, the IRA would cancel it and get right back to the bombs and guns. Because one of the goals of the trip was to show that Sinn Féin had the ability to deliver a ceasefire in response to American involvement—what Morrison called a “demonstration ceasefire”—its cancellation would deal a serious blow to their prospects for success before they even got out of the Republic.
One by one, Morrison, Feeney, and Flynn read the letter. It drove home, in a way nothing else had, that their journey was about war and peace, life and death. When everyone had finished reading it, O’Dowd, as he’d been instructed, destroyed it right there at the table, tearing it into the tiniest of bits.
The Americans spent the rest of their day in Dublin meeting with top officials. Although Morrison was fond of describing the American group as “nobodies,” he was well aware that they were nobodies who could get meetings at the highest levels. “I remember being impressed that we got such good access,” he said later, recalling the day in Dublin when they met with a prime minister, a president, and an ambassador. Money may be the mother’s milk of politics, but access to the powerful is the coin of the realm.
Taoiseach Albert Reynolds had held the office for a little more than a year, and he was already deeply involved in the situation in Northern Ireland. Reynolds, who saw himself as more of a businessman than a politician, was certain there was a way to negotiate a resolution to pretty much any problem.
When the Americans arrived, Reynolds cleared everyone else out of his office for a full two hours. He brought his guests up to date on his secret exchanges with British prime minister John Major and laid out his vision for getting to peace. It was a productive meeting, and the Americans found Reynolds open to new approaches. He treated them as teammates, but it was clear to Morrison that this wily character’s mind was whirring fast with thoughts of how he could make them the instruments of his strategic vision. For their part, the Americans remained true to their promise to Sinn Féin and didn’t tell the Taoiseach about the ceasefire.
Irish president Mary Robinson received the Americans at her official residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, as warmly and as sympathetically as the constraints of her post allowed. She was the head of state but had no substantive governmental role, and the meeting was largely ceremonial. But because Morrison had met with her the year before and they’d had a long off-the-record discussion about human rights issues, he was confident that peace in Northern Ireland was profoundly important to her and that she would do whatever she could on the issue.
The last stop on that long Monday was a visit to the American embassy at Ballsbridge. When the Clinton administration had started the search for a new American ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith decided that she wanted the job. Her brother was Ted Kennedy, chieftain of everything Irish in the US Senate, so when a simple message—“Jean wants it”—went out, the search was basically over. When Smith was officially chosen in March, Ted Kennedy wrote that she was “returning in the spring,” thereby redeeming the promise their brother President John F. Kennedy had made at the end of his last visit to Ireland but didn’t live to keep.
It was immediately clear to her visitors that the ambassador was still new to the job. Because her brother Ted was so influenced by moderate nationalist leader John Hume, Smith seemed to have zero enthusiasm for her visitors’ plan to engage with Sinn Féin and support a visa for Gerry Adams. In fairness to Smith and Ted Kennedy, the terrible legacy of the assassinations of their brothers John and Robert made the prospect of seeking a way to peace through contact with those close to the IRA deeply unappealing.
“She was clearly uneasy with being drawn into a conversation on this,” Morrison recalled. “She was guarded and holding back, unsure of her role and unsure of her facts because she hadn’t spent a lot of time on this issue. She’d only been there a few months, and here we were with a grandiose plan—we were going to meet with everybody and talk about the peace envoy. On some level it was, ‘What are you doing here in Dublin? You should be in London talking to that ambassador.’”
The Americans left the meeting with Smith with a shared sense of disappointment. “We expected more engagement,” Morrison says. “She was a bit detached. I would say that at that moment, she was more than anything Ted Kennedy’s sister. She was in the position because Teddy wanted her to be, and Teddy’s view of Northern Ireland was whatever John Hume said, so it was unclear where we sat in the picture.” But it wouldn’t be long before this Kennedy sister became entirely her own person and a major player in the peace process— “jumping in,” as Morrison said later, “with both feet.”
By the time the Americans were preparing to head north to Belfast the next morning, two important decisions about how they’d operate in the north had been settled: The first was who would do the talking; the second was what they would talk about. Although it was clear that each member of the American group—not a shrinking violet among them—would speak his mind without hesitation throughout the visit, the group needed a spokesman. Because O’Dowd had organized the trip, it was his call who that person would be. Without hesitation, he chose Morrison.
O’Dowd had previously determined two crucial attributes the American spokesman would need to have: He should speak with an American accent and he shouldn’t be a Catholic. Morrison, a Lutheran who grew up on Long Island, fit the bill. His adoptive father had some Irish blood and reportedly his biological father did as well, but Morrison had once been described as resembling—of all things—a benevolent British army colonel. It had to be the pale skin, sandy hair, thick mustache, and merry laugh.
O’Dowd also knew how important it was
that the spokesman be skilled and knowledgeable in the art of politics, and having worked closely with Morrison on the passage of the 1990 Immigration Act, he had the highest opinion of Morrison’s political understanding and skill. He also knew that Morrison had a masterly command of the complex and subtle issues involved in Ireland, both historically and in modern times. Lastly, O’Dowd knew that Morrison was so revered throughout Ireland that he was literally a household name. And, of course, his friendship with Bill Clinton couldn’t hurt.
When O’Dowd told Morrison that he wanted him to be the spokesman, Morrison’s immediate thought was the age-old response of someone eager to get into the thick of the action: “Put me in, coach!” Worries and concerns wouldn’t creep in until later.
The other important decision—later described by Morrison as, “What are we gonna say about why we’re here?” —had been resolved before they left the United States. Morrison had convincingly argued that they needed a substantive focus—and, to a considerable extent, a cover story. They all agreed that the story should be that they came to Northern Ireland to discuss and gauge support for the appointment of an American peace envoy to Northern Ireland.
Although enthusiasm for the peace envoy plan ranged from muted to nonexistent in Dublin, in London, and—with the exception of Sinn Féin—in Belfast, it was the kind of idea that could win wider support if efforts to get all-party peace talks under way remained stalled. As a basis for conversations that were aimed at exploring common ground, the topic of an American peace envoy was a reasonable focus. The other major Clinton promise—a US visa for Gerry Adams—would be a polarizing nonstarter; bringing it up would guarantee that their discussions in Northern Ireland would go nowhere good.