Peacerunner

by Penn Rhodeen

  When it was done, the body count stood roughly even: ten in the fish shop, counting Begley, and twelve by UDA/UFF guns, although two of those were Protestants.

  The Shankill bombing was a tragic fiasco, unforgivably dangerous to the civilians the IRA had promised to safeguard after the Enniskillen disaster of the previous decade, but from the IRA point of view, it had been an official operation in which a volunteer was killed. There would be a funeral with full military honors. As president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams had to help carry the coffin. Pictures of him doing so rocketed around the world. Adams understood and accepted the responsibilities of his position, but to the rest of world, he didn’t look like a man of peace.

  The Shankill atrocity and its aftermath gave the unofficial peacemakers what Morrison, in a model of understatement, called “a bigger mountain to climb.” In truth, it would be difficult to imagine a more devastating blow to the plan of action they had carefully devised and begun to carry out upon their return from Northern Ireland in September. The combination of such wanton disregard for the lives of innocents, the added insult of sheer incompetence, the endless possibilities of how plans for violent action can go so very bad, and the sadistic glee and cruel randomness of the reprisals added up to a deeply repellent and disturbing episode. That it threatened Gerry Adams’s growing reputation in the United States as the man to move the IRA from war to politics deepened the gloom considerably. Adams was their best hope, but here he was helping to carry the coffin of a killer. It was true he had to do it to maintain his credibility with the IRA and also that he’d denounced the bombing, calling it a stupid operation. But nobody was in any mood to think about that.

  What a mess, when the task at hand was to persuade an American president, over the vehement objections of his State Department, his Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA, not to mention the British, America’s closest ally in the world, to give Adams a visa that would allow him to come to the United States and make his case. The only hint of a silver lining was that the bombing and its aftermath didn’t become a major media event in the United States. The challenges it created for Morrison and the group were immense, but it did leave them with a little more room to maneuver than they would have had in full media glare.

  It might have seemed to Morrison and the others that this was as bad as it could get, but obstacles kept coming. While the reprisals were still under way, in a thoughtless, spectacularly ill-timed move, New York mayor David Dinkins, desperate to give his flagging re-election campaign a boost with the Irish, asked Clinton in a widely publicized letter to give Adams a visa. The administration’s response was swift and devastating: Giving a visa to the man so entangled with the terrorists behind the Shankill Road slaughter was beyond unthinkable. Absolutely not.

  It was no surprise to Morrison and the others that the visa request was rejected and no surprise that the Shankill Road attack was cited so forcefully as the underlying reason. But still it was a huge setback— yet another occasion where Clinton had to take a stance against what he had promised during his campaign. Morrison knew that a pattern of precedents would make it more difficult for Clinton to ever start taking steps in support of the new approach he had promised. It was impossible to know where the point of no return was or when it would be reached, but once it was, it would be very difficult to get Clinton back on track. It wouldn’t necessarily be a case of repudiating his promises or changing his outlook on Northern Ireland; more likely just a busy president with an abundance of worthy endeavors in front of him making a hard-nosed judgment that other issues were more likely to give him a better return on his time and effort, not to mention fewer headaches.

  It was precisely because Morrison completely understood how Clinton could reasonably move his focus away from Northern Ireland that alarm bells were going off in his head. He was already worried that the earlier request for a visa for Adams’s book tour had been strike one. Now Dinkins’s botched request looked like strike two.

  Still, it was clear that the president had to make good on the Adams visa soon in order for the new strategy to succeed. Only that fundamental breakthrough would demonstrate to the IRA and their American supporters that the United States was really going to support the shift to the political path Adams was urging and show the British that the break with past policy on Northern Ireland was thoroughgoing and genuine. In short, it was the only way to demonstrate that Morrison and the others could actually deliver the goods.

  For the visa drive to succeed, three major things had to happen: There had to be a compelling event in the United States for which Adams’s presence was necessary, there had to be overwhelming political support among Irish Americans for Clinton to grant the visa that would allow Adams to attend that event, and events in Ireland and Britain had to unfold in a way that would support, not undercut, the visa push.

  When Morrison met with O’Dowd, Flynn, and Feeney in New York after returning from Cambridge, they all agreed that they needed to find a worthy event in the United States that required Adams’s attendance right away. Flynn and O’Dowd were charged with finding—or, perhaps, creating—such an occasion. Meanwhile Feeney would continue his essential analysis, oversight, and blunt truth-telling—what Morrison sometimes referred to as Feeney’s adult supervision—along with his generous financial support for their endeavor. (Morrison was prepared to pay his own way, but it was a welcome thing when Feeney, as he often did, picked up a check.) The other great, enormously complex task, would be primarily Morrison’s responsibility: Keep Irish America behind Clinton by pushing him to keep his Northern Ireland promises and creating political conditions to help him do so.

  Morrison’s responsibility for maintaining the support of Irish America required him to persuade the activists not to lose heart, not to see this as just another political letdown, even though Clinton hadn’t yet taken a single public step to carry out his promises. Or, put differently, every public step Clinton had taken on Northern Ireland since his inauguration seemed to be moving away from what he had promised. It would take every shred of political acumen Morrison possessed to keep the now-restive activists behind the president. There was a real danger that Irish Americans would decide Clinton wasn’t going to keep his promises and would lose faith in him entirely or, worse still, begin to actively oppose and undermine his policy. If the activists jumped ship, there was little reason to believe that Clinton would ever make good on his promises. And, as Morrison always remembered, while Clinton had promised the visa, he never said when he would deliver it. Morrison knew it was up to his group to determine the timetable by the impact of their own actions. A deadline was needed, and his group would have to bring it about.

  Morrison would also, of course, continue to press the White House directly to take long-overdue positive steps in support of the promised new policy. That meant dealing effectively with Clinton’s deputy national security advisor Nancy Soderberg, who now held the NSC portfolio on Northern Ireland. Although Morrison had managed to work well with her after she joined Clinton’s campaign, she had her doubts about the plans he was pushing, so it was a challenge keeping her on his side.

  Dealing with Nancy Soderberg I always considered a challenge because she is always at the top of her game. There’s an intensity to her personality—because she really does her homework and she really cares about what she works on. She’s a fun person, but it’s not always fun to have to negotiate with her, to have to satisfy her, to convince her. She can be quite intense and demanding. I always felt under enormous pressure to rise to her standard of what we needed to persuade her.

  After the White House rejected Dinkins’s request for an Adams visa, Morrison went out of his way to affirm to Soderberg that he understood why the administration had done so. That was important for his credibility, and it made a good connection between them. Beyond that, he worked hard to understand the administration’s concerns in order to provide them with whatever was needed to make it easier for Clinton to grant the visa and to move fo
rward on his other promises. He strove to give Soderberg the information and analyses she needed to advance the case.

  Years later, Soderberg described the give-and-take of their working relationship and the strengths Morrison brought to it:

  I’m sure I got mad at him and I’m sure we argued. I remember arguing with him about that week-long ceasefire in 1993. He tells me what a big breakthrough it was, and I say, “Bruce, a week’s nothing.” He goes, “No, no—it really is something.” I said, “Well, it may be something for you but not for me. I mean, it’s progress, but there’s no way that a week ceasefire is going to be enough to get the president of the United States to move.”

  But he was so persistent and so responsible in how he presented issues. He would listen and he understood the politics of it for the president. He’s a smart guy: he’s been in government, he knows how decisions are made. He understood the need to build up a base of facts, and he also understood the role of Congress. He was masterful in laying the groundwork and not rushing it. He was a genius about orchestrating a yes out of Clinton. Bruce and Clinton were on the same page. Clinton really wanted to do it, and Bruce knew that because he’d had enough conversations with Clinton directly. I never got tired of his persistence because I respected it. That’s the White House—you’re there to get pushed to do things.

  Without a doubt, the quality of their working relationship was a key factor in Soderberg’s growing receptivity to Morrison’s overall view that engaging and supporting Adams was fundamental to progress toward peace. For Morrison, this was an encouraging evolution from her long-held view that the approach of moderates like John Hume was the right way forward and that Adams and Sinn Féin were best avoided.

  In pursuit of his responsibility to maintain and increase Irish American support for the new course on Northern Ireland that Clinton had pledged, Morrison worked relentlessly to convey the unprecedented opportunity presented by the developing peace process and the active role for the United States Clinton had promised. To the segment of Irish America that had largely avoided involvement in issues relating to the conflict because of the violence, he continued to stress his belief that Adams’s commitment to a peaceful path was genuine and that it was in the interests of those who wanted the violence to stop to engage Adams and his supporters in their peaceful aspirations, rather than to regard them as permanently tainted by IRA actions. He consistently made the case that supporting Adams and condemning IRA violence, even when Adams himself did not do so, were not incompatible.

  Morrison knew that to keep Irish American activists—a diverse array of people who were often at odds with each other—on track with the strategy, he had to show them that his group’s efforts with the White House were getting somewhere. “Meetings of ANIA (Americans for a New Irish Agenda), which were held more or less weekly in New York, reverberated with complaints of betrayal and beliefs that the visa promise had already been breached,” he recalls. “So what was to be done? My idea was to arrange for a meeting at the White House to achieve some communication, some expressions of concern from the outside, and to elicit words of support from people on the president’s staff.” To do that he would need Soderberg’s help, and he would have to persuade her that the invitees needed to include the full array of activists, not just the politically safe moderates. “You don’t get to the White House unless the White House says okay. To get in, even in 1993, you needed to be vetted fairly seriously.” What it came down to was that Morrison would have to persuade the deputy national security advisor to the president of the United States to invite Martin Galvin to the White House.

  Galvin was a longtime official of Noraid, which was widely seen as the major American base of support for the IRA, channeling extensive financial support for weapons purchases, and often weapons themselves, into Northern Ireland. The development of the peace process complicated life for Noraid. Warnings of British perfidy fell easily from Galvin’s lips in the face of encouraging developments in the direction of peace. Morrison was under no illusions about the challenge he had set for himself: “Martin had been denied access to the White House by other administrations on the basis of his role as a leader in Noraid. This time it had to be different.”

  Morrison knew it was essential that Galvin not be excluded from direct participation in the White House meeting, because exclusion would give him and other hard-liners a powerful weapon to undercut support for Clinton’s initiatives. Better to let him into the room—just another guy with a strong point of view—than to have him make a ruckus at the gate, shouting about censorship. Galvin was controversial and polarizing, but he was part of ANIA. Morrison told him, “We’re going to the White House and you’re going to come.” Galvin, no stranger to exclusion from the White House and other bastions of polite society, scoffed, “It’ll never happen.” Morrison said it again: “We’re going to the White House and you’re going to come.”

  Selling it to Soderberg was another matter. When she spotted Galvin’s name on the list, she was incredulous: “You want me to vet this guy?” So Morrison explained why it was better to include Galvin than to make him the martyr he had been in the past. Recalls Morrison, “I said to Nancy, ‘You don’t have to listen to what Martin has to say. But if you keep him out, you empower him. If you let him in, he’s just a Joe Blow at a meeting.’ Nancy got it.”

  Soderberg’s acceptance was a harbinger of an important shift she would undergo as the new American policy gathered steam. Morrison’s abiding perspective, which he was not at all shy about urging on Soderberg, was, “Do the deed, take the risk, reap the reward. What do we use power for? What’s the downside? You’ve got a possibility of doing something important.” He adds, “Nancy bought into that perspective. She evolved from ‘Why?’ as she came on board in the campaign to ‘Why not?’ as the visa was being considered.”

  The meeting was constructive and enjoyable for those on both sides of the table. But its overriding significance was that it happened, that the full range of Irish American activists were present, and that they all got to speak their piece and experience a White House that listened with respect and engagement. This helped reinforce to all that Clinton’s promises still mattered and that he was still worth supporting.

  Meanwhile, Niall O’Dowd and Bill Flynn were still looking for an event that would provide Clinton with a solid justification for granting Adams a US visa so he could participate. Flynn had recently become chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a respected and well-established activist organization focused on resolution of conflicts that threatened American interests. He asked O’Dowd if he thought a peace conference in New York sponsored by his organization might be the event they were looking for. O’Dowd agreed enthusiastically and soon began to promote the conference heavily in the Irish Voice. Over the next several weeks, the group worked hard to build support for it among top Irish American politicians like Ted Kennedy and leaders from Northern Ireland like John Hume.

  As the push for the Adams visa gained momentum, its supporters were assisted considerably by something over which they had no control: developments overseas. In November of 1993, it became known that the British government, which had steadfastly denied Adams any legitimacy—even to the point of banning his image and voice from television and radio—had in fact been conducting secret talks directly with the IRA itself. That revelation severely undercut Britain’s claim to the moral high ground when it came to talking to what they themselves called terrorists and made their claim that allowing Americans to hear from Adams amounted to yielding to terrorists seem hypocritical.

  Then in mid-December, another significant step forward came when British prime minister John Major and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds announced the Downing Street Declaration. The essence of the agreement was that the people of Northern Ireland would determine its future status, whether it would remain a part of the UK or rejoin Ireland. This signaled a willingness on the part of both governments to hear and honor the wishes of the
people who actually lived there.

  The declaration also addressed the question of participation in peace negotiations by political parties like Sinn Féin that were linked to paramilitary organizations, demanding a renunciation of paramilitary violence as a condition of participation. Morrison saw the declaration as a definite step forward:

  The Downing Street Declaration had many faults and many limitations, but it was an important step in the right direction. In many ways it was the formal start of the peace process as far as the Irish and British governments were concerned. Its very existence was promising and more helpful than anything that had happened between the two governments up to that point.

  For the British government to say quite explicitly in an international communiqué that the people of Northern Ireland could leave the United Kingdom on a majority vote was remarkable. It would have surprised most prime ministers of the United Kingdom going back hundreds of years.

  The agreement communicated to the republicans that the outline of a final agreement would require taking on board not a formula for a United Ireland but a formula for self-determination of the people of Northern Ireland. This would be a concession for them, and it was ultimately at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement.

  One aspect of the agreement that Morrison saw as singularly unhelpful was its lecturing tone: “Downing Street was the ‘good guys’ lecturing the ‘bad guys’ on how to do the right thing. It’s words versus deeds. Lecturing versus doing.” It was a valid critique. But soon enough, Bill Clinton would offer a compelling and historic example of doing versus lecturing.