by Penn Rhodeen
But soon enough Clinton was off to his next stop and the great moment evaporated. Gerry Adams reverted in an instant from international player to local politician on the street. For Morrison the transformation was captured perfectly when an angry woman approached Adams in the wake of Clinton’s departure and demanded that he do something about some injustice related to her job. There was clearly nothing Adams could say to assuage her distress, but she was not about to let go. She followed him down the street, as Morrison recalls, “like a barking dog.” He was a local politician, she was a constituent who needed help, and that’s all there was to it.
Clinton’s departure from Falls Road left Morrison and O’Dowd with a feeling of wonder that their meeting nearly five years earlier in O’Dowd’s Manhattan office had led to all this. The success of their plan was astonishing, and they were naturally thrilled by it. Morrison recalls:
The handshake with Adams and Clinton was quite surreal. Of course it had to happen, we had insisted that it had to happen, yet until the moment it did happen, we weren’t sure it would. It was the best thing Clinton could do. It was completely without risk to him in any political sense, and it made clear that he understood the path that he had chosen when he approved a visa for Gerry Adams. This is the most obvious of points on that path, but when it was happening, it was much more like a dream come true than it was a real event. It was a moment to say, “Well, look at that: The leader of the free world has come to the Falls Road and met Gerry Adams. We never thought we would get this far but, man, how much further do we have to go?”
It’s fair to say that Morrison and his contingent were never in it for the glory, but this moment was truly glorious and they took it in with intense pleasure—until reality intruded. First, it was when Gerry Adams was hectored and tracked by his constituent, which brought everything down to earth. Then Adams gestured to Morrison and O’Dowd and said solemnly, “Come with me.” He pulled them away from the presidential party and all the joyous goings-on for a secret meeting in the living room of a terrace house on nearby Kashmir Road, one of many streets in West Belfast commemorating past triumphs of the British Empire. Morrison remembers Adams’s somber presentation:
In his report on the state of the peace process, he said that the ceasefire was very much at risk and that while the president’s visit would be a confidence builder and would certainly illustrate a long journey traveled, the British intransigence on moving the process forward was really dangerous. The message to us was, “This has been a great day and it’s a great thing that Clinton is here, but don’t be misled: We’re at the very end of the ceasefire if this new process with Mitchell doesn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat. The IRA is at the end of its patience.”
Gerry is unexpressive in his demeanor most of the time. He speaks like a professor, in a measured way; he very rarely shows agitation, even when his words are about things that agitate him. So his delivery of this news was matter-of-fact; someone who knew him less well could have misread this as just words. But it was quite clear that he was warning us there was imminent danger in terms of the whole edifice that we had helped construct, of which the ceasefire was a central plank—that it was about to come undone.
Yet even while the bad news was being delivered in that living room in West Belfast, Morrison and O’Dowd knew that crowds were continuing to greet Clinton with joy and hope. It was a jarring juxtaposition of simultaneous realities.
Clinton’s triumphant procession through Belfast maintained the careful business of honoring both populations of Northern Ireland throughout the day. After speaking with Adams, he went to East Belfast for a visit and a handshake with Peter Robinson, deputy leader of Ian Paisley’s DUP. After that he was off to Derry by helicopter to meet with John Hume, longtime nationalist advocate of nonviolence.
When the distressing meeting on Kashmir Road was done, Morrison and O’Dowd were supposed to be taken back to the presidential party by a driver who maybe had been IRA. The grim reality that had just been conveyed to them was briefly relieved by the low comedy of a nervous driver who seemed to make one wrong turn after another, finding himself increasingly ensnared in the enormous web of security surrounding Clinton. When they finally got within sight of the airport, which was still bristling with security even though the presidential party was far away, the frightened driver dumped them off at the far back, leaving them to fend for themselves, and sped off, desperate to get out of there as fast as he could. Morrison and O’Dowd trudged along the airport fence until they encountered a guard in uniform, RUC or the British army. The guard, highly skeptical of their claim of being part of the presidential party, had to be talked into walking them across the tarmac to the terminal, during which they were in a sort of custody, not to be released until their story checked out. When they finally made their way to the White House press bus, Clinton’s communications director Mark Gearan vouched for them and the cop released them to his custody. After the guard left, Gearan couldn’t resist cracking, “Lucky for you I didn’t give you up.”
The crowning event of the day was to be the tree lighting in the plaza in front of city hall. Both the location and the event were the product of meticulous advance planning as well as plain old good luck. Anne Edwards and her team had spotted the location during a visit to the Belfast city council on a dark night to find the right place for Clinton’s speech. When they rounded a corner and came upon it, “our eyes lit up,” she says. It was ideal: an open public space with the grand Victorian city hall as a backdrop. During the planning meeting, the British Foreign Office people were against it and a local person said the space was already committed for the lighting of the community Christmas tree by the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Edwards instantly envisioned Bill Clinton, not the Power Rangers, lighting the tree:
My heart stopped and I remember saying slowly and just loud enough so the others heard it, “When do they light it?” Our heads snapped and turned at the answer: “Well, they light it about the first of December, about that weekend.” We didn’t say anything—we knew we had it. We went in, we asked the council about the plaza, but they were just, “No.” When we got home, it took a while. But we knew the Secret Service could figure it out. So we planned this event in front of the city hall that would be part of turning on the lights. The whole day would build to that.
Now the day was here. As night approached, the Americans had high hopes for the event but also had their worries. Recalls Anne Edwards:
We were confident that people would come, that there would be a respectable base. Here’s what we didn’t know: throng. I’d gone to my table, which was at the front windows of the Europa Hotel, and I’m looking out and it’s dark but I’m seeing motion, and I look and I realize that it’s a steady stream of people walking up to the checkpoint to go into the speech site about a block away. They’re young, they’re bringing strollers, they’ve got kids on their shoulders—they’re coming, real people are coming. And it kept up.
I left and went over to the speech site. The stage had been set so it looked straight down the canyon of the shopping street straight in front of the city hall. The lights were bright. We were very close to event time. There were people everywhere, as far as the eye could see. And when you look at a crowd in Northern Ireland, you can’t tell a Catholic from a Protestant.
The great Van Morrison, born and raised in Belfast, serenaded the crowd with his song “Days Like This,” which had become an unofficial anthem of the hope and enthusiasm sweeping the city:
When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch, Well my mama told me, there’ll be days like this.
Then it was time for Clinton’s address. In very personal terms, he spoke of what peace meant to Northern Ireland and what the reception he received meant to him:
As I look down these beautiful streets, I think how wonderful it will be for people to do their holiday shopping without worry of searches or bombs, to visit loved ones on the other side of the border without the burden of checkpoin
ts or roadblocks, to enjoy these magnificent Christmas lights without any fear of violence. Peace has brought real change to your lives.
Across the ocean, the American people are rejoicing with you. We are joined to you by strong ties of community and commerce and culture. Over the years, men and women of both traditions have flourished in our country and helped America to flourish.
Ladies and gentlemen, this day that Hillary and I have had here in Belfast and Derry and Londonderry County will long be with us as one of the most remarkable days of our lives.
After the tree lighting, Clinton spent the rest of the evening meeting one-on-one in carefully balanced twenty-minute segments with the full range of Northern Ireland’s political leaders. That included Ian Paisley, no fan of the peace process, an encounter Clinton later recounted with a nice edge in his book: “Though he wouldn’t shake hands with the Catholic leaders, he was only too happy to lecture me on the error of my ways. After a few minutes of this hectoring, I decided the Catholic leaders had gotten the better end of the deal.”
Special attention was given to UUP leader David Trimble since Clinton had gone to visit his nationalist counterpart John Hume in Derry earlier in the day. Trimble got his twenty minutes with Clinton in the presidential limousine en route to the Europa Hotel. The Europa had been targeted so often in the years before the ceasefire that it became known as “Europe’s most bombed hotel.” Clinton’s party made a special point of staying there in order to show the world how much Belfast had changed since the ceasefire.
Clinton spent the next day in Dublin amid huge ecstatic crowds, and then it was off to Germany to review troops headed to Bosnia, where Clinton told the soldiers, “The power of the United States goes far beyond military might. What you saw in Ireland, for example, had not a whit to do with military might. It was all about values.”
Grumpy Paisley people aside, the response to Clinton’s visit was uniformly positive. The overriding sense was one of accelerating celebration and hope. In his dispatch, veteran New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple quoted a Protestant woman: “I didn’t think his presence would do much good, but he was absolutely first-class, and after listening to him, I think he will help people come together.”
Morrison saw the day as a watershed moment for Clinton as president:
That was an example of timing that was really critical, because it was a period of testing and transition for Clinton coming out of the ’94 elections. I certainly noticed a kind of growth in stature that seemed to happen at the time, and the Ireland piece of it was key. It was a great psychological boost. There was a spring in his step. All of a sudden he was on the world stage and he was making this difference.
A particularly gracious note was struck by veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, an implacable opponent of Clinton’s Northern Ireland policy, particularly his visa for Gerry Adams. Social encounters with Adams only increased her vehemence. Despite her depth of feeling—contempt is probably not too strong a word— McGrory elegantly ate crow in her column when she got back to Washington after witnessing the presidential visit to Belfast:
If President Clinton had listened to the likes of me, he would never have had his Irish triumph. I was one of those who thought he was mad to let in Gerry Adams, the IRA propagandist. But he paid no attention to us. Adams was the key, and last week Clinton brought genuine joy to Belfast, one of the planet’s most cheerless sites.
With an about-face like that, is it any wonder that Clinton thought—and still thinks—that these were the best two days of his presidency?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
George Mitchell Offers a Way
After his two magical days in Northern Ireland, Clinton departed, and it was back to reality—not the full force of the Troubles, to be sure, but worrisome nevertheless—for those who called it home, especially those hard at work to put the violence firmly in the past. The ceasefire was shaky, with an IRA that felt it had done its part for a year and a half and gotten nothing in return.
There was simply no reason to believe anything new would be coming from John Major. His words, in fact, started to become even more inflammatory. In late December he approvingly described unionist refusal to meet with Sinn Féin by saying “You cannot negotiate for peace with an Armalite in your hand held at the negotiators’ heads.”
Any possibility of saving the ceasefire hinged on the report from the International Body on Decommissioning headed by George Mitchell, which was due in January. It would not only have to thread the needle brilliantly, but it would have to be so compelling that it would make even John Major see things differently.
The commission consisted of Mitchell, Canadian general John de Chastelain, and former Finnish prime minister Harri Holkeri. In preparing their report, they talked exhaustively with a wide array of experts, as well as virtually everyone in Northern Ireland who knew anything or had any stake in the outcome.
The report was released to the parties on January 23, 1996, and to the public the next day. Its core conclusion was that decommissioning should not be a precondition for all-party talks because there was no realistic prospect that any of the paramilitary forces—republican and loyalist alike—would ever agree to it. “In the real world of Northern Ireland, prior decommissioning simply was not a practical solution,” Mitchell wrote later. “That was so clear that I wondered whether someone as astute as John Major ever really believed that we would simply endorse it.” The report concluded that the way to move forward was for “some decommissioning to take place during the process of all-party negotiations, rather than before or after.” The commission cushioned its solution in gentle diplomatic language, offering that “the parties should consider” such parallel decommissioning and adding, “Such an approach represents a compromise. If the peace process is to move forward, the current impasse must be overcome. While both sides have been adamant in their positions, both have repeatedly expressed the desire to move forward. This approach provides them that opportunity.”
At the request of the British, made directly to Mitchell “by letter, by fax, by telephone, in person,” the report, in its discussion of possible confidence-building measures, observed that “an elective process could contribute to the building of confidence.” Because Major had told Mitchell that he would have to reject the report if it outright recommended parallel decommissioning, Mitchell’s commission ultimately acceded to a British request, a late evening question “asked softly” by the British minister in Northern Ireland, that it be presented as a suggestion rather than a recommendation in order to “soften the impact of parallel decommissioning.” As a skilled negotiator, Mitchell wanted to ease the way for Major to receive the report as positively as possible. And as an experienced politician, he had more than one reason for cutting Major some slack: “I was keenly aware that he had created the International Body on Decommissioning, with an American chairman, overriding critics in his own party. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to embarrass him.”
Any hope that the Mitchell report would save the ceasefire depended entirely on Major’s response. He addressed Parliament on January 24, two days after receiving the report. His words were, as ever, plentiful—a deft yet maddening combination of distortion, avoidance, and obfuscation. He basically ignored the commission’s central point that parallel decommissioning was the only realistic way forward, stressing the fact that the report’s conclusion wasn’t a “formal recommendation”—just as his minister had asked. “Although the body makes no formal recommendation on this point, it suggests an approach under which some decommissioning would take place during the process of all-party negotiations.” As David McKittrick and David McVea succinctly put it in their superb book Making Sense of the Troubles, “Major rose in the Commons, thanked Mitchell for his report, and then in effect overturned it.”
Then Major pivoted to the elections idea, which the British had also pressed the commission to mention, as if that had been its primary recommendation. “An elective process
offers a viable alternative direct route to the confidence necessary to bring about all-party negotiations,” the report said. “In that context, it is possible to imagine decommissioning and such negotiations being taken forward in parallel.” In other words, new elections first, and then possibly—only possibly—all-party talks could follow without prior decommissioning.
Major’s elections concept was a new version of the proposal offered months earlier by UUP leader David Trimble. But from Major, in late January 1996, it was too little, too late. Elections would take yet more time, and to an IRA already seventeen months out on a limb about which many of its members had deep reservations, Major’s proposal was just another burst of words that communicated exactly one thing: There would be yet more delay before any possibility of all-party talks. Even John Hume, moderate though he was, was furious: “The government praises the report, then ignores it.” He lambasted the elections proposal as a “delaying tactic,” “utterly irresponsible,” and “play[ing] politics with the lives of people.”
To Gerry Adams, Major’s response was nothing less than bad faith: “Mr. Major rejected the core of the Mitchell report, scuppered the twin-track approach and the February date for all-party talks, and in their place has produced a new precondition based on a unionist proposal.”
There was no possibility that the prospect of future elections, about which both republicans and nationalists were deeply skeptical, could rescue the tottering ceasefire. Only a clear acceptance of the Mitchell report’s primary recommendation for starting all-party talks and promptly taking up decommissioning could do that. And Major made it unmistakably clear that he would not take that step, a reality that rendered the closing flourish of his address to Parliament strange, insincere, or both: “I pledge that I will leave no stone unturned to deliver to the people of Northern Ireland, on a permanent basis, the precious privilege of peace that they have enjoyed for the past seventeen months.” No stone, that is, except the one presented by an independent international commission as the only realistic and effective way forward. But as detached from reality as Major’s comment was, he managed to top it in his autobiography: “The Mitchell report was a balanced and reasonable attempt to find a way through, and I accepted its recommendations in the statement to the House of Commons.”