by Penn Rhodeen
The Telegraph article reflected the considerable unionist opposition to the American visit. It was also seriously misleading. The letter in question had actually been written and widely publicized nearly a year earlier: It was the letter Clinton wrote at Morrison’s insistence just before the presidential election. So it was definitely old news, but the Telegraph obviously felt it could get a maximum jolt from the inflammatory headline by withholding basic facts. The paper saw nothing good for the unionist community in the American visit. The next day, an account of the team’s plan to meet with Sinn Féin breathlessly claimed that the party’s deputy leader Martin McGuinness had recently been labeled as “Britain’s No. 1 Terrorist.”
The story in the nationalist-leaning Irish News had a quieter headline: “Fact-finders Strengthen Case for US Peace Drive.” Obviously the News had a much warmer feeling about the American visit than its unionist rival. It did, however, predict accurately that “the decision to meet with Sinn Féin and support for the envoy proposal is likely to irritate the unionist parties.”
Combat via newspaper headline was obviously preferable to the more violent alternatives so familiar in Belfast, but it still didn’t bode well for the ability of the American team to engage constructively with all sides of the conflict. It further revealed the challenges Morrison would face as American spokesman as he tried to communicate openly and honestly across the partisan chasm.
When the American team set out from Dukes Hotel for the first day’s meetings, they found themselves leaving the starting gate not with a confidence-inducing, powerful stride forward but with an embarrassing stumble. They were supposed to meet Joe Herndon, the MP who had defeated Gerry Adams, at his office in a complex known as Twin Spires, but they were taken to the wrong Twin Spires. They hustled to the right one, arriving late, appearing not a bit like a well-connected American political/corporate/media powerhouse. Morrison feared they “looked like rubes” and that Herndon might feel disrespected. But he was gracious, and the brief event went well, although Morrison did have some jitters about facing the Northern Ireland media for the first time. Even though it was a low-key event, he remembers it as his “baptism under fire” and recalls “the body tension of being thrust to the fore.” He would soon discover just how gentle a baptism it had been.
The Americans managed to leave for Stormont more or less on schedule.
Stormont Estate, purchased in 1921 to be the seat of the Northern Ireland government, is dominated by the gargantuan white parliament building that was opened in 1932 for what unionist leader James Craig called “a Protestant Parliament.” When the Americans arrived it was a parliament building without a parliament, since the British had imposed direct rule from London years earlier. The building’s design mission, not uncommon in Europe between the World Wars, was to convey in no uncertain terms who’s who and what’s what. No one approaching the parliament building by way of the enormously long and wide rising mall that leads up to it could fail to be impressed by how powerful the state can be and how small and insignificant an individual human being can be made to feel.
The Americans’ meeting with the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, was to be held at Stormont Castle, also unique but more benign. Since Mayhew was Britain’s top official in the province, Morrison expected increased media coverage at Stormont. He was picturing the kind of stodgy press events so common in Washington when a member of Congress—at least one not embroiled in a scandal—faces the media. How wrong he was.
As the Americans approached the castle, they found themselves in the midst of what ex-Gaelic footballer O’Dowd called “a media scrum:” a tumultuous crowd of reporters, broadcasters, and camera crews covering their arrival like sensational breaking news. About two dozen microphones were thrust toward Morrison. Television cameramen were jockeying for position. Niall O’Dowd might have been the prince of Irish American journalism, but this frenzied coverage took him completely by surprise.
For Morrison, “Put me in, coach!” immediately gave way to “Oh shit, I’d better do a good job.” Suddenly the high wire was far higher than he’d imagined, and all of Northern Ireland (not to mention London, Dublin, and Washington) was watching. There was no longer time for him to worry about how rusty he might be or how badly things had gone just three years earlier. He took in the great weight of his responsibility, with stakes far beyond those involved when he ran for governor. Back then it had merely been about an election he would either win or lose. This time it was about war—a war that so many were sure would grind on for many more generations—and peace. If he did well, new opportunities for peace could materialize. But if he slipped, even a little, the chance for a constructive American role in the process might not be fully realized, or, worse still, it might be lost altogether. And even worse than that, the future prospects for peace in Northern Ireland might be set back terribly. This time his success or failure would be measured not in votes but in human lives.
Morrison faced the media’s questions, delivered in tones from skeptical to aggressive, with aplomb. It was obvious to O’Dowd that the journalists were trying hard to trip the American spokesman up, but they weren’t succeeding. Morrison was pressed hard about the group’s intention to meet with Sinn Féin and was grilled on the controversy over the willingness of the unionist parties to meet with them. This was yet another vivid reminder of how potent the idea of Americans meeting with Sinn Féin was. The unionists and the British couldn’t understand why any group claiming to be, as Morrison had said earlier, “coming with no preconditions or preconceptions but with open minds,” would want to meet with them at all.
Morrison robustly defended the plan. “I believe there isn’t anyone here that I would not meet with if they were willing to meet with me. I do not think that one adopts the views or sanctions the particular actions of one or another group by talking to them. I think that one of the barriers to progress in this community is too many preconditions rather than more communication.”
In the closed-door meeting that followed, Morrison found May-hew to be “an aristocrat through and through” and “the epitome of the British diplomat.” Mayhew was a large, full-faced, somewhat overbearing man with wild and impressive eyebrows. He had been attorney general of the United Kingdom from 1987 to 1992, when he’d been appointed to his current post. He was confident in his abilities and sure of the correctness of his nation’s cause.
Mayhew was cordial but thoroughly dismissive of the notion of the United States sending a peace envoy to Northern Ireland. He told the Americans that while he received the idea as “an act of friendship,” he regarded it as irrelevant in the face of his conviction that the stalled peace talks would go forward “in one form or another.” Morrison had already gone on the record with his view of how likely it was that there would be talks anytime soon: “A combination of circumstances makes it clear that the prospects for the talks going forward are zero.” Still, they’d heard each other out, and that was why the Americans had come.
On the way out, Morrison faced the same media throng. He candidly told them that Mayhew had “expressed skepticism about the usefulness of techniques like the envoy.” He also previewed the defense of the envoy plan that the UUP would doubtless hear: “The most important thing is that no one should use it as an excuse to not do something they otherwise would do to promote peace and reconciliation. Everyone should see it for what it is: an attempt to be helpful and not an attempt at meddling or to interfere or deprive people of their legitimate point of view.”
Then the unofficial peacemakers headed to the on-again meeting with the UUP. The obvious damage from the recent bombing of the party’s headquarters on Glengall Street in the center of Belfast set just the right tone. The press was still covering the American visit like breaking news.
The UUP leaders meeting with the Americans included party general secretary Jim Wilson—who the day before had told the Belfast Telegraph that the visitors “would be left ‘in absolutely no
doubt’ about unionist opposition to ‘outside interference’”—as well as Chris McGimpsey, who had played the crucial role in keeping the UUP meeting on track, and two UUP members of Parliament at Westminster. One of the MPs was David Trimble, who would later become the party’s leader and win a Nobel Prize for his role in the peace process—though at that point there was no hint of his future. “David was pretty awkward and out there,” Morrison recalls. “No one would’ve predicted that he was going to play such a central role.” Morrison also found Trimble to be somewhat dandified in his dress and downright bizarre in his manner of greeting the Americans: Upon being introduced, he clicked his heels like a proper German officer. Morrison couldn’t fathom why a member of the British Parliament would do such a thing, apparently oblivious to its Nazi associations. For his part, O’Dowd had no idea how to interpret the gesture; he wondered if it had been meant as a sign of disrespect.
The UUP leaders and their American visitors wasted little time in getting down to the matters at hand. Morrison described the business part of the encounter as “a real meeting, not scripted, not like a stiff bureaucratic or diplomatic meeting.” As the UUP members spoke, Morrison became aware that yet another dimension of the journey was starting to reveal itself: The people living through these harsh times desperately needed to be heard. That need, pervasive throughout the Protestant community, would become more powerfully evident in the days to follow.
The discussion between the UUP and the Americans was reported by the Irish News as covering such contentious issues as “political talks, the lack of democratic structures, British-Irish relations, paramilitary activity, and American financial support for the IRA.” For their part, the UUP leaders fully delivered on their promise to tell the Americans “exactly what we think about the peace envoy plan,” insisting that the majority in Northern Ireland opposed it. They added that because Clinton had, as they saw it, backed the peace envoy plan during the election campaign as a result of Irish American pressure, the sincerity of anyone he would subsequently appoint “would always be suspect.”
In Morrison’s equally direct response, he stressed that his team had come to Northern Ireland not as official representatives of the president, but as his friends who were supporting his program, especially the appointment of the peace envoy. He recognized that with this group, the peace envoy was a hard sell, but despite that challenge, he made considerable headway presenting the United States as “an honest broker: ready, willing, and able to listen to all the sides,” and sincerely interested in doing whatever it could to advance the prospects for peace. This really was the man McGimpsey had told his party about, and Morrison clearly did well: After the meeting the UUP issued a statement that described the discussions as “harmonious and constructive.”
The main event of the team’s second day was a trip to Derry, seventy-five miles away, to visit moderate nationalist leader John Hume at his summer home outside the city. He was cordial and generous with his time, but, as expected, he countered their call for a peace envoy, who would have a broad mandate from the president, with his preference for an economic envoy, whose focus would be much narrower. His stance was that the Americans could best contribute in the economic sphere while leaving the politics to the political leaders in Northern Ireland. Morrison felt that Hume’s confidence in the ability of economic change to drive political change gave short shrift to the necessity for a fundamentally new approach in the political sphere: “I was consciously pushing against the Hume analysis because you won’t get investment and economic change in a war zone. These things have to go hand in hand; the idea of the peace envoy is to work on changing the political environment to make this a place where people would want to invest.” In Morrison’s view, this involved getting a clearer picture than Hume had about where the republicans fit into the political landscape, as well as greater emphasis on the development of grassroots political participation throughout the nationalist community.
Morrison recognized that for him John Hume was a complicated proposition, just as Morrison and his ideas surely were for Hume. In an Irish American political world long divided between IRA supporters and those who condemned the violence, Hume’s moderate nationalist stance gave him an absolute lock on the opinions of the mainstream Irish American political establishment, which included Edward Kennedy, House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, and New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Along with New York governor Hugh Carey, they came to be called “The Four Horsemen.”) Indeed, Hume had set Kennedy straight years earlier by rebuking him for a brief flirtation with hard-line republicanism. But as Morrison saw it, the Hume approach was, in terms of American policy, leading nowhere new.
It was Hume’s confidence that the Catholic community could not be held down if you gave them economic opportunity, which is an important thing—it’s not to be dismissed, but it just doesn’t ever turn the corner. It doesn’t require people to create common cause in any particular way. If you are asking people to share the community, you cannot ask them to give up what they have. Asking unionists to give up their jobs or houses so the Catholics can be equal is a fool’s errand. You have to grow more jobs and houses, if you want that to happen. But there’s more to it than economics. There had been a lot of change in the economic circumstances of Catholics in recent decades, but that didn’t root out the IRA, because the problem wasn’t just things, wasn’t just material problems. It went to the heart of identity: recognition of identity, proper respect for identity, and all of that. So you couldn’t just do economics.
It’s fair to say that it was easier for Morrison to think beyond Hume’s influence because he was not himself part of the Irish American establishment—not a Kennedy, not a Catholic, and without much Irish blood—and therefore regarded by Hume as an outsider, not someone of great importance on matters of war and peace in Northern Ireland. But then along came Bill Clinton, another outsider, and he was listening to Morrison and others like him instead of the establishment over which Hume held such sway. This other flank of political Irish America was a new world for Hume, and by the time of his meeting with the Americans, he had not entirely adjusted to it.
In the meeting, the Americans, as Morrison put it, “went to the mountain” to pay their respects to an important leader he considered “a great man, with all the limitations and attributes of a great man.” Morrison summarized the visit with a bit of an edge: “The gospel according to John had been preached over and over, so there was no new news there.” The Belfast newspapers saw it the same way: The fact that the Americans went to Derry to meet with Hume was reported as news; what they talked about wasn’t mentioned.
Although Hume wouldn’t be an important part of the story of the groundbreaking 1993 visit, a day would soon come when he, like so many other leaders involved in the peace process, would be summoned by history, and he would answer courageously and unselfishly. As Morrison later said, “At every critical stage, John did what was right about inclusion, not what was in his personal interest. But sometimes he had to be roughed up a little bit to get him to see.”
Throughout the week-long Americans’ visit, the great news story, as far as the media was concerned, was that the Americans would be meeting with Sinn Féin and its president, Gerry Adams. These were the politicians closest to the IRA. It was widely believed (often accurately) that many of those who were in leadership positions in Sinn Féin had been or still were active in the IRA. Some, like Sinn Féin vice president Martin McGuinness, have since acknowledged that they were IRA fighters. Others, like Gerry Adams, have said they weren’t, despite the belief of many that he was commander of an IRA brigade in Belfast; whether he was active IRA remains unproven.
Because Adams was on terrorist watch lists in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and because his image and voice had been banned from British and Irish broadcasting, any sign of respect toward him from conventionally respectable quarters had enormous impact. When Irish president Mary Robinson shook his hand before the ca
meras in June of 1993, the effect was seismic and a huge step forward on his path to political acceptance. When an influential group of Americans close to the new American president, among them a former member of the United States House of Representatives, announced that they would be meeting with Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams in Belfast, the earth shook again.
Precisely how newsworthy these meetings really were depends on what the big story of the American journey was. If the story was that a group of private citizens friendly with Bill Clinton had come to Northern Ireland to meet with a wide range of political parties and leaders, then, of course, the meeting with Sinn Féin—especially since they had mastered arts of public relations in ways that their rivals had not—was the biggest part of the story. But if the story was that the Americans’ visit was making historic connections in the process of helping bring peace to Northern Ireland and that it was cementing the American role as honest brokers without an agenda other than peace and a better future for all who lived in Northern Ireland, then the most important story was completely missed by the media. In fairness, they missed it because everyone involved kept it secret—some because they feared it could be dangerous for them if the wrong people learned about it.