Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  Beyond the politics of it, the people of the republican community were telling their stories and being listened to with warmth and respect. Niall O’Dowd remembers an older woman with a heartbreaking account of her son’s death. After finishing her tale, she held his hand firmly, looked straight at him with tear-filled eyes, and said with heartfelt gratitude, “Thank you for not treating us like animals.” It was all O’Dowd could do to maintain his composure, and he didn’t fully succeed.

  In political and diplomatic terms, Gerry Adams and the leadership of Sinn Féin were being treated like legitimate leaders, not terrorists who should be isolated and silenced. This was something far beyond Adams shaking hands with Irish president Mary Robinson earlier in the summer. It was the arrival of a Sinn Féin and its leaders at an entirely new level—a long way from the days the British home secretary mocked Adams as “Mr. Ten Percent” after his party had turned in a dismal showing at the polls. Although Great Britain would continue to fend off Sinn Féin’s efforts to be included in peace talks for years—often at ruinous human cost—the gathering at Conway Mill marked the beginning of the end of the marginalization of the party.

  When the enormously successful and deeply moving presentation was done, it was time for the second stage, in which the Americans would meet privately with the top Sinn Féin leadership. That part was held in a harsh, plain space utterly devoid of creature comforts; there weren’t even any of the minimally comfortable chairs one would expect to find in the waiting room of a public agency, just backless stools.

  Despite the hard seats in the hard room and the tense feeling the discomfort engendered, the glow of the public event could still be felt. It was an easy transition to the initial business of the private meeting, in which the Americans laid out what the republicans could expect from the United States in response to movement away from violence. Morrison and the others stressed that the involvement of the new Clinton administration offered an unprecedented opportunity for peace and the establishment of an effective political process that Sinn Féin and the IRA should seize quickly and without hesitation. They made it clear that they themselves—friends of the president, influential people in the worlds of politics, journalism, and business— were willing and able to ensure that any moves toward peace would be met with corresponding political and economic benefits from the United States. These benefits ranged from getting Clinton to authorize a visa for Adams, to aggressively encouraging the American business community to invest in a Northern Ireland that was making its way toward peace.

  As the discussion progressed in this positive vein, Morrison saw how easy it would be to let everyone continue to bask in the afterglow of the public event. But a powerful realization overtook him, brought on in part by the hard atmosphere of the room itself: He knew that keeping things comfortable was not his duty. Though it brought him little pleasure, he knew that the moment demanded he take a serious risk and tell the Sinn Féin leadership the truth about the need for the violence to stop.

  This wasn’t the first time Morrison had been in the presence of people who’d been involved with violence and killing in support of causes they believed were so compelling that terrible acts were justified. As a member of Congress committed to advancing human rights, he had gone to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinistas and to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro. On each occasion, the welcome was warm and the people charismatic. How bluntly to speak was a matter of judgment: Would directness be constructive, or would it create greater problems? Should the focus be on making a connection, with the tougher words left for another occasion? Apart from knowing that nobody likes to be the skunk at the garden party, Morrison was aware that keeping things pleasant is often the smartest way to behave: “In many circumstances, it’s called diplomacy.”

  But in that hard, spare room in Belfast, it was inescapably clear that the moment demanded straight talk of the sort Irish republicans almost never heard from visiting American politicians. He also knew that Sinn Féin and the IRA never responded to such words and entreaties directed at them; they just took them in and discussed amongst themselves later. But he knew that “we weren’t there to get Sinn Féin on British television; we were there to make peace.” And he believed that the integrity of the American mission was on the line. So he did his duty and laid it out.

  Morrison told them that while he and the others understood why the IRA violence seemed necessary to so many in the republican cause, it was time for it to stop. He explained that the violence gave the British their most effective weapon: the ability to label the IRA and Sinn Féin as terrorists. It was that word that enabled the British to marginalize Sinn Féin and keep its members out of the peace talks that were necessary to end the conflict. The IRA had it within its power to take that word away from the British and force them to find a new way of dealing with the republicans. If they stopped the violence, the peace process could move forward and Clinton would feel free to engage Sinn Féin as a valued and essential partner in ending the war. But if the IRA wasn’t willing to meet these demands and stop the violence—if they lacked the understanding or perhaps even the courage—then this extraordinary moment of opportunity could be lost and the conflict could grind on indefinitely.

  As he spoke, Morrison felt the discomfort that comes when the hard message clashes with the warm tone of the moment: “The whole atmosphere was that they had put on this performance very successfully. But now we were not going to tell them that they’re right and they should go blow up Big Ben—we were going to tell them that they’re right, there is suffering and discrimination and wrongdoing here, but the way to stop it is to find a political process through which their grievances can be heard.”

  In that moment, Morrison was acutely aware of how much he didn’t know about Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin, and the IRA. He knew the history of the 1986 split within Sinn Féin that had the Adams faction advocating the establishment of a political agenda in addition to the IRA’s armed struggle. He felt confident that his assessment of Adams as primarily a politician was correct, but he couldn’t be certain. The challenge Morrison and the Americans faced was to get the republicans to lay down the gun so the ballot box could be fully engaged. Recalls Morrison:

  It’s not that Adams disdained the violence of the IRA—I don’t know that he ever did. Like most revolutionary leaders who have been part of the struggle, he accepted that violence comes with the territory. But I knew Adams was a politician and a gifted political leader, and that a gifted political leader would gravitate to politics if it was on offer, if you could convince him that it would work. That was his strength. That doesn’t mean that I knew in 1993 exactly how committed he or the IRA was to stopping. That was a question mark. It wasn’t a question mark that politics was a viable way forward—but what would it take for that way forward to happen?

  True to their way, the Sinn Féin leaders listened intently and betrayed no reaction. But Morrison was relieved at what their body language didn’t show: Adams and the others remained completely still on the hard stools—there was no stiffening or bristling. The Americans were hopeful.

  At a news conference following the Sinn Féin meetings, Morrison offered a comprehensive summary of both the Americans’ visit and what he saw as the way forward. He said that despite the unionists’ continued opposition to Clinton’s appointing a US peace envoy, he remained convinced that the idea still had value. He told the press:

  We have heard a variety of viewpoints, but most of what we have heard is constructive contributions on how a US role can be helpful, and I think an envoy is part of that role. All people of goodwill should be looking to end violence. Ending violence is more than making ritualistic denunciations of violence; it is looking for ways that alternatives can grow. The best alternative I know comes from compromise and particularly negotiation, and that is what I think the envoy idea is all about.

  This was a politician speaking, a politician with an abiding faith in the capacity of a democratic political process to achieve great
ends. He was speaking from the absolute heart of his credo. And it was precisely this—a political process in the highest and best sense of the word— that would in time lead to the end of the war and the establishment of a society in Northern Ireland that accommodated its entire population.

  Morrison also, of course, stressed the importance of ending the violence: “I want to see peace given a chance and all guns put away. I want to see the people of Northern Ireland have their disagreements through a political process that works for everyone, not through a violent process that at the end of the day works for no one.”

  After the press conference, the Americans left Northern Ireland for Dublin. O’Dowd, Feeney, and Flynn would fly home, but before Morrison left Europe, he had a date at Cambridge University in England with the elite of the British and Irish establishments, as they gathered to discuss Northern Ireland.

  When the car bearing the American team crossed the border into the Republic of Ireland, the IRA ceasefire was still in effect. It would be another day or two before the world became aware of it. Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds learned about it only by reading the Irish Times, although the White House knew about it much earlier. Gerry Adams later revealed that the ceasefire itself had been a very close call—really it was an “informal” ceasefire (which was not the way it had been described in Sinn Féin’s letter to O’Dowd) that hadn’t been fully communicated throughout the IRA, and in fact allowed for the possibility, of which the Americans were blissfully unaware, that local commanders might carry out actions that had already been planned. So while the Americans believed they were under a confirmed ceasefire, there was actually the constant danger that someone who hadn’t gotten the message would blow something up or shoot somebody. But luck was with them, and the White House saw that Sinn Féin could deliver a ceasefire if there were solid signs of progress toward letting the republicans into the political and diplomatic process. Of such close calls, history is made.

  In reflecting on that crucial visit, Morrison recalls the extent to which the busy Americans were isolated from the world around them and not cognizant of the historical import of their achievement. “I couldn’t have told you whether there was or wasn’t a ceasefire. I was living in the moment. It wasn’t like, ‘This is the first step in how the world changes.’ That’s all retrospect.”

  Morrison did feel uncomfortable about one thing. Although the administration had been told that Americans were going to Northern Ireland, he had carefully avoided in any way seeking White House permission for the trip, because he knew it wouldn’t have been given. But when the trip was over, one aspect of what he’d done didn’t sit well with him: “I was trading heavily on my friendship with the president without his permission.”

  Apart from that concern, Morrison was happy with what the Americans had achieved and how he had played his crucial part in the mission. He attributed it to something very basic:

  Nobody ever talked straight to the media in Northern Ireland before. People spun everything through their own rose-colored glasses. It was a propaganda world. It was all such a game; you know, “You can’t talk about it—there are these two communities that don’t talk to each other.” We are the Americans dropped right in the middle of it to talk to all the people in this place where people don’t talk to each other. In a democracy, that’s how people solve problems: They talk to each other.

  Although it would be some time before the two communities actually began talking directly to each other, in those late-summer days of 1993, nearly everybody with a stake in the future of Northern Ireland talked to the Americans. A vital new chapter in the process that would ultimately lead to the end of the centuries-old conflict had begun.

  It was also clear to Morrison that the absence of expectations and a well-worked-out strategy hadn’t been an impediment but a boon. The constant need to improvise had definitely contributed to the success of the journey: “Because we didn’t know what to expect, we didn’t know what the right way was. So we were making it up. If I went back to try and do it now, I would probably be much more circumspect—and it wouldn’t be as good.” But as it was, the Americans presented themselves well: “The media had come out to watch the silly Americans get it wrong, and we weren’t getting it wrong. We knew exactly what we were talking about.”

  From a political perspective, Morrison said later, the trip was everything it needed to be: “One of the great advantages of our group was that we were nobodies. We were accountable to nobody; we were completely deniable. If things went badly, so what? But if we brought back any goodies, they belonged to the president. That is a perfect thing in politics.”

  Morrison’s notion that any credit goes to the president reflects a fundamental—and for a politician rare and admirable—credo that Morrison adhered to throughout his involvement in Northern Ireland: “It’s remarkable what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

  Morrison got high marks for his performance as the mission’s public face and its explainer-in-chief. Veteran Belfast reporter David McKittrick of the London paper The Independent says that Morrison presented to the unionist community an entirely new view of American involvement, adding, “This is when everything changed.”

  Niall O’Dowd summarized his man’s performance in two words: “Just right.” To Bill Flynn, Morrison’s performance had been “letter perfect.”

  Flynn’s assessment evokes memories of Yankee pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, an unmatched feat from which Larsen—like Morrison, no stranger to the agony of defeat—draws a modest and generous principle: “I think everybody is entitled to a good day.” No one who was there denies that in Northern Ireland in September of 1993, Bruce Morrison had one good day after another.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An American Nobody Meets the Elite in Cambridge

  Cambridge, embraced by the deep curve of the River Cam as it flows gently through the flat landscape of England’s East Midlands, has been a university town since 1209, when a group of Oxford scholars fleeing hostile townspeople set up shop there. Across the sea to the west, the Irish had already been fighting the British for more than two generations.

  In September of 1993, Cambridge University was the venue of an important conference on Northern Ireland, and Bruce Morrison was an invited guest. The occasion was the annual proceedings of an ever-so-British organization known as the British Irish Association. This rarefied gathering of elite policy and opinion makers, along with selected guests, met each year to talk off the record about what should be done in Northern Ireland. The meeting location alternated between Cambridge and Oxford Universities—never in Ireland or Northern Ireland.

  In Morrison’s eyes, this was basically a collection of wise men (and a few wise women) who “know all there is to know” about whatever topic they turn their attention to. Sinn Féin would be conspicuous by its absence; only representatives of those groups the organizers considered to be legitimate political parties were invited. As Morrison saw it, it was the kind of gathering that would engage in “the kind of endless conversation about structures that would somehow fix this, but without a whole lot of confronting the fundamentals. It was a proper British gathering.” For him, this approach of devising the solution first, followed by an earnest effort to explain to everybody else why this was what they should do, was the antithesis of the brick-by-brick politics on the ground that he knew it would take to make real and lasting change in Northern Ireland.

  A lot of people believe that change works like this: You say the way the world should be and you wait for the world to do it. Which of course is a joke. Nothing ever happened this way. Change takes action at a granular level, really down and messy. Grunt work. Every important thing that’s ever been done was done one brick at a time.

  But Morrison had been invited to the conference, and he was determined to do his best to convey the reality and the promise of Clinton’s new policy.

  The guest list also included Inez McCormack,
a labor activist from Belfast who had managed to rise to the top level of the man’s world of organized labor in Ireland. McCormack radiated energy and intense commitment. Her fearlessness and relentlessness were legendary. One of the maxims she lived and worked by was, “We don’t wait for the change, we make it,” which, as she was well aware, was “anathema to the elites.” She made no effort to conceal her frustration with the difficulty of improving the lives of those in Belfast who held no power: “This is a very small place. Change here is very doable. In a sense, you have to work very hard to keep conditions as bad as they are.” McCormack was under no illusions about how she was regarded by the overwhelmingly male power structure she was constantly up against. “In the corridors of power, I was seen as an uppity woman. I didn’t know my place.”

  Additionally, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith was at the conference, as was an American foreign service officer who, without a doubt, would be more in tune with the traditional State Department line on Northern Ireland than that of his new president. John Bruton, an Irish politician who would later become Taoiseach, was also present, along with many other influential opinion makers.

  The first day there was a reception, to be followed by a dinner. Toward the end of the reception, Smith approached Morrison and asked him to take a walk with her. It was a perfect late summer day in Cambridge—a brilliant blue sky, with the late summer heat cut by the crisp air of the coming fall. They walked through the university grounds and out on to the rugby fields at the brisk pace to which both were accustomed. As they began to speak, Morrison noticed right away that Smith was spontaneous, direct, and confident—all the things she hadn’t been back in Dublin. This time, outdoors instead of inside her embassy office, less hemmed in by her position and its formalities, with no embassy staff watching over her, she was Jean Kennedy Smith, not Madam Ambassador.