by Penn Rhodeen
The New York peace conference was scheduled for February 1, 1994. Flynn’s organization took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in early January to promote it and to put pressure on political leaders like Kennedy and Hume to support it—and, by implication, to support the Adams visa, since his presence would be necessary for the conference to be seen as meaningful. Flynn also delighted Morrison with his willingness to augment more genteel methods of advocacy with old-fashioned political pressure: he reminded Hume that he had generously supported an earlier conference that Hume wanted in Northern Ireland and let him know clearly and firmly that now he needed Hume to back the Adams visa. This “I did this for you, now I need you to do this for me” is essential to the effective political give and take by which agreements are forged, and Morrison enjoyed the spectacle of the distinguished executive getting down with it.
By late December, the visa proponents had gained support from important political corners. Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds had felt for some time that granting the visa was the right thing to do and that it would give the peace process a boost; the Downing Street Declaration only strengthened his conviction. US ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith became convinced as well, despite her belief that the men of the IRA—and perhaps Sinn Féin—were, as she told journalist Conor O’Clery, just like the men who had murdered her brothers. But Smith had well-developed political instincts, and it was clear to her that the support of both her brother Ted and John Hume were essential to getting Clinton to issue the visa. Smith had already clashed with members of her own staff at the Dublin embassy over her support for a strong new American policy, and she brought that same zeal to bear in her relentless effort to persuade Hume and her brother that the visa would help bring about peace and that they should join her in urging Clinton to issue it.
For Ted Kennedy, backing the visa would bring him politically closer to the IRA, something that had gotten him into trouble years earlier, when his strong pro-republican and anti-British stance had brought him a torrent of criticism. At that time Hume counseled him that the solution to peace in the region needed to come via economic progress and politics, not violence. Kennedy gratefully accepted Hume’s advice and followed it for twenty years, often uncritically. But now Hume came to Kennedy encouraging him to support the visa for Adams. Kennedy worried that he could be seen as reverting to his 1972 stance, but Hume presented it as a matter of supporting a peace process, not rewarding the IRA. In 1972 the focus had been on injustice and human rights violations. Now the focus had shifted to advancing the peace process by helping Adams establish a political path. The exchange squared the circle between the two men, redeeming Kennedy and exalting Hume.
Hume’s own political situation around the visa was more complicated and perilous than Kennedy’s. For years he had been the preeminent nationalist leader, both in Northern Ireland and in Washington. His SDLP was by far the strongest among Catholics, and his grip on the opinions of figures like Kennedy, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and House Speaker Thomas Foley was nearly absolute. As a nationalist leader untainted by violence, he also had wide support from Irish Americans upset by the violence. But the charismatic Adams was now a real threat to his political position, both at home and among the Americans. There was no doubt that any political rising of Adams and Sinn Féin would diminish the power and influence of Hume and his party. Hume knew that giving Adams a visa was the right thing to do, but in raising his rival’s stock and conferring legitimacy on a man both the Irish and the British had banned from the airwaves, he put himself in real political peril. Ultimately, his support for the visa would be tremendously influential, but in the years to come, he would pay a big political price as Sinn Féin eclipsed his SDLP as the majority nationalist party.
Hume’s great moment, as recounted by Irish journalist Conor O’Clery, came in early January as he spoke with Ted Kennedy at the funeral for former House Speaker and Irish American icon Tip O’Neill. Kennedy asked Hume point blank whether or not he would support the visa for Adams. Hume had everything to lose, but his answer was unequivocal: yes. Kennedy immediately said he would do the same. In one brief exchange, these two heavyweights were onboard, and the push for the Adams visa now had major momentum.
For Morrison, the man from Derry had truly answered the call of history:
John Hume owned America, but once Gerry Adams came, Hume’s role was different. It was not marginalized, but Gerry is a much more charismatic human being than John is. Gerry’s a little professorial, but John is very cerebral. He is not charismatic, in an American political sense, so it was never going to be the same again. For John to be a sponsor of Gerry’s role was huge. John is a real patriot, and he wanted the right outcome. He never let the cost to him get in the way of the goal. So I think he is pretty special.
Morrison himself worked hard to get the support of another heavyweight: the editorial board of the New York Times. He had extensive conversations with board member Susannah Rodell, who wrote their editorials on Northern Ireland. Her strong support for the visa helped turn the tide of the public debate.
The gathering momentum did not go unnoticed by the British and their American supporters, among them House Speaker Thomas Foley, Irish by blood but Anglophile by heart, as well as the State Department and the Department of Justice, especially the FBI, which had all long opposed anyone having anything to do with the IRA. The British, however, were surprisingly slow to grasp the serious possibility that Clinton would actually give Adams the visa. When they finally realized that it really could happen, they were all over Washington, grabbing whatever ear they could to fend off the dreaded possibility.
State Department spokesman and future Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry remembers the British onslaught vividly:
I was getting creamed by all of my friends over in the British embassy. I remember Jonathan Powell, who, as young, very talented foreign services officer in the British embassy, had traveled with me in 1992 when I was with the Bob Kerry campaign, calling and just howling and screaming about what a disastrous idea the whole visa was and how this was going to besmirch the special relationship between the United States and the UK. They were just frosted about this, and particularly upset that they had been outflanked by what they then later came to understand was a pretty determined behind the scenes effort that was certainly guided by Morrison but I think had a lot of very deft and capable help from Nancy Soderberg.
It wasn’t just diplomats who were getting upset. The actor Hugh Grant went to a reception at the British embassy and then to a dinner at which Clinton official George Stephanopoulos was giving a talk unrelated to Ireland. Grant loudly interrupted him to denounce White House encouragement of terrorists.
As the conference drew closer, efforts to influence Clinton’s decision intensified. The big labor unions, many with Irish Americans in top leadership posts, strongly favored the visa. The British and the State Department argued that the visa would imperil US/UK relations. The FBI was certain it would send the wrong message to terrorists.
Clinton felt the full weight of the moment and the opposition to an Adams visa:
First Bruce’s trip happened and then the Downing Street Declaration and then we got word that he wanted to come to America and speak and wouldn’t fund-raise. And that if he got a visa, we might be able to get a ceasefire. So by then, the major players who had been talking to Bruce and to Nancy Soderberg and Tony Lake had come around to the prospect that it was better for me to give him a visa than to appoint an envoy, because then the play would still be between Ireland and Britain but we would have injected ourselves into it.
The State Department was, to a person, crazy against it. Warren Christopher thought I had lost my mind. Admiral Crowe, our ambassador to England, who had been a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan and who had endorsed me for president, which was hugely important to me at the time—it made a major contribution to my credibility as a candidate—was wildly against it. Of course he would be;
I mean, he was there in the UK, he was hearing one side of the deal. And Foley, who was Speaker, whom I needed desperately to pass my program, thought it was crazy. Dodd thought I should do it, and Kennedy also wound up thinking I should do it.
Clinton’s decision-making process went as far down to the wire as it could. On Saturday afternoon, January 29—a mere three days before the conference—he met with top White House advisors George Stephanopoulos, Tony Lake, and Nancy Soderberg to talk it through. All three favored giving Adams the visa, but Clinton was still concerned about the likely impact it would have on America’s relationship with the British. His advisors told him that they were sure the relationship was strong enough to withstand this disagreement. Clinton finally told them he saw it the same way, even though he was eager to get British support for his plans in a different region of the world:
Keep in mind, the world was focused on Bosnia and I had tried to get the allies early in ‘93 to agree to have NATO take action there. Warren Christopher got stiffed everywhere, including in the UK, but we still knew that the UK was the most likely country to come on quickly along with the Dutch. I’d wanted to go into Bosnia earlier, but I knew I couldn’t do it without the Europeans because of just the geography—they had to live with the aftermath, not me. So I was in no great hurry to destroy our relationship with Britain, but I just thought, if this works . . .
Nancy said they’ll get used to it, and even though they’ll never admit it, they’ll think it was the right thing to do—and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll be back with them.
Soderberg confirms her analysis: “I never bought the argument the State Department made that they wouldn’t continue to cooperate with us on Bosnia. They weren’t doing it as a favor—it was in their interest to do it.”
At that moment things couldn’t have looked better for the Adams visa. But the drama never seemed to let up. At the last minute, a potentially fatal obstacle emerged: a strange and highly suspect story from San Diego. The report was that fake bombs had been placed in British businesses, and that the real thing would be next if Adams didn’t get the visa. The “South California IRA,” which no one had ever heard of, took credit. Investigators later found blue training grenades at a pub, a British curio shop, and the federal courthouse, but the name, the place, and the exquisite timing of the threat gave plenty of reason to be skeptical about it. Many suspected that the whole thing was a trick—by the British?—to block the Adams visa. But there was no time to get to the bottom of it. If Clinton was going to grant the visa, he would have to authorize it on Sunday morning in order for Adams to have time to collect it at the embassy in Dublin on Monday and get to the United States in time to attend the conference Tuesday morning.
All of this meant that the fake California bombs had to be treated like a real threat. The White House needed Gerry Adams to denounce the whole thing, publicly and in writing. The task of getting that statement, still with no guarantee that the visa would be granted, fell to Soderberg, who decided it was time to talk to Niall O’Dowd directly. Before this, all of their contact had been through intermediaries, principally Kennedy staffers, in order to keep the man who seemed to have so many friends close to the IRA at a safe remove from the White House. But now Soderberg needed to reach Adams immediately, and O’Dowd was the one who could get her to him.
O’Dowd’s heart sank when he learned of this new obstacle and what he had to do. He called Adams right away, fully prepared for the Sinn Féin man to take out his frustration on the messenger. But Adams surprised O’Dowd by taking it in stride: He was ready to oblige with whatever would help Clinton feel comfortable granting the visa. His only expression of annoyance was ruefully asking whether he’d have to prepare a statement every time an Irishman and an Englishman got into a fight in a bar.
Adams’s statement on San Diego was faxed to the White House and then hand-delivered to Clinton at a dinner at Washington’s Alfalfa Club. The dinner had nothing to do with Ireland, but the seating arrangements gave those who favored the visa a last-minute fright: Clinton had been placed between Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the most vehement visa opponent in the administration, and House Speaker Thomas Foley, the most vehement visa opponent in Congress. (Foley later told Conor O’Clery that he briefly raised the issue with Clinton but concluded that the president had already made his decision.)
On Sunday morning, Clinton told his staff that he would give Adams a forty-eight-hour visa with numerous restrictions to keep him on a short leash. He called his unhappy secretary of state, who tried hard for half an hour to talk him out of it. Then he called Janet Reno, his unhappy attorney general, who didn’t mount a major argument but was thought by some to have been the source of a leak that made it impossible for staffers to tell the British about it before they heard it on the news, a breach of protocol that made the British feel all the more wounded and outraged.
But the overriding reality was that despite terrorist watch lists, Gerry Adams was coming to America.
Years later, Clinton described his analysis:
I just decided to do it. I figured it was our best chance ever to try to settle this thing, and I did not personally believe that the politics in the UK would permit it to happen unless we could trigger some sort of jolting event. They couldn’t do that—there was nothing they could do for Gerry Adams that would change the internal calculus of his politics. But I could. It was very simple to me. In the end we did it and NSC [National Security Council] was for it, and everybody else was against it. Thank God it worked.
For Morrison, the magnitude of what Clinton had done cannot be overstated:
This was the history-changing moment: the powerful one, the president, goes first and takes the risk for peace. Now there’s a huge moral claim that the less powerful one should take the same risk. It’s easy to tell someone to do the right thing, but with the president going first. . . . He doesn’t lecture, he takes action, and now the ball’s in Adams’s court—there’s a clear expectation of a ceasefire.
Nancy Soderberg was a bit rueful, as she had been during the campaign when she learned Morrison had already gotten to her candidate before she could put the brakes on. But she offered a gracious tip of the hat to her worthy opponents:
None of us were happy about the peace conference. I was very annoyed by it. But it was brilliant. I was like, “Why are you jamming this down our throat? We’re not ready!” But they just forced the decision on us, which was great. It was really brilliant the way they did it. How do you oppose a peace conference? But I hated it at the time.
The British, of course, were unhappy in the extreme. As Soderberg recalls, “I don’t think they thought we would do it, and when we did they were just dumbfounded. Major didn’t take Clinton’s calls for a week.”
It was well past midnight in Ireland by the time everything was in place for Adams to pick up his visa at the American embassy in Dublin the next morning, and he barely managed to catch the last flight out that could get him to New York in time for the conference. For Morrison, the last-minute hurry-up was all too typical of how things had worked throughout the peace process:
It so often came down to the last minute, being held in doubt as to whether things would move forward or they wouldn’t—the visa, the ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement. It really does test one’s faith and energy, waiting for the shoe to fall and hoping it falls on the right side.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon on January 31, already getting dark in New York, when Aer Lingus flight EI 105 landed at Kennedy airport and the clock started running on Adams’s forty-eight-hour visa. Inside the terminal he was welcomed in true rock-star style, with a media mob, old friends, fans and nonfans, and curious people of all stripes. Morrison and Republican Congressman Peter King, a longtime supporter, greeted the Sinn Féin leader at customs. Adams gave a brief press conference, and then he was off to Manhattan. Morrison recalls the momentous culmination of so much of his work:
Gerry’s arrival was very exciting. There w
as the media, but most of all the reality of meeting Gerry on his first time coming to the States. It was another huge leap forward in the project that started years before. It was rewarding and overwhelming— feeling like you had a very big role in why it happened.
Bill Flynn’s security man Bill Barry rode in the front seat of the limousine carrying Adams to Manhattan, but it was the man riding in the back with Adams who was interesting in a wonderfully ironic way. He was George Schwab, a CUNY history professor and president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. Decades earlier Schwab had been a member of the Stern Gang, Jewish guerillas fighting the British in Palestine. He had helped with the running of guns and ammunition from New York to Jerusalem and had been trained at an estate in New Jersey for surveillance and assassinations of British officials in the United States. Everything the British said about Adams had also been said about former Stern Gang members, including future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. So Adams and his host had plenty to talk about on the way to the hotel.
Adams was familiar with the Stern Gang and the controversy surrounding its members who later became politicians. As the two conversed, Schwab says, “We became, so to speak, friends.” As the magnificent sight of Manhattan, sparkling brilliantly on that winter’s night, came into view, Bill Barry spoke up from the front seat. “We were in deep conversation,” Schwab says, “so he interrupted, saying, ‘George, maybe we should let Mr. Adams look at the skyline of New York.’” Schwab remembers taking the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan—Jay Gatsby’s route to the “city rising up across the river.”
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge . . . Anything at all . . .” Nick Carraway had mused in The Great Gatsby, and in every sense, this crossing too was filled with possibility for Adams, for Clinton, for all who had worked so hard to make it happen, and for all who longed for an end to the warfare. The miraculous possibility was that America could help Northern Ireland break free of the current that had for so long borne it ceaselessly into the violent past.