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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Family
Head of Falls
Baby Joe and Mintaha Become George and Mary
The Two Penny Bridge
Front Street
Sports
Everyone Worked
Elvira Whitten
Robbie
The Trip to Bristol
Maine
Maine
Waterville
The Lebanese
Seeing Maine
Bowdoin
A Brief Interlude
The Army
A Light for Ingrid Bergman
Georgetown Law
Muskie
Back to Maine
U.S. Attorney and Federal Judge
The Senate Years
Appointment to the Senate
Elizabeth Taylor’s Husband
Election to the Senate
A Christmas Decision
Iran-Contra
Divorce and Remarriage
Frank Sinatra’s Throat
Reelection in 1988
My Friend Bill Cohen
Majority Leader
Talmadge
Clean Air
The State of Altoona
“An Investment in Our Nation’s Future”
Read My Lips
Two Minor Bills That Had a Major Impact
One Road Not Taken, Another Opens
Northern Ireland
Omagh
Andrew’s Peace
Henry Kissinger’s Poster
No Time for Retirement
9/11
Disney
The Olympic Games
Baseball
The Middle East
The Scholars
The Art of Negotiation
The Art of Negotiation
The Sound of Your Own Voice
Learn to Listen
Patience Is a Muscle
Risk
Chance
Mount Desert Island
Photographs
Statement by the President
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
About the Author
Notes
Index
For my parents
Mary and George Mitchell
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the summer of 2011, with relief and a renewed sense of appreciation, I returned with my family to our home on Mount Desert Island, just off the coast of Maine. I had just completed my service as the U.S. envoy for Middle East peace after two and a half difficult and disappointing years. Although I had for years summered on the island, it now seemed new and fresh and comforting.
Going through familiar routines and attending events as I had in the past was also comforting. One such event was a meeting with Maine students at which I was asked to talk about my life. “You don’t have to prepare anything, just get up and talk from your heart,” I was told. That’s what I did. Without any notes or preparation of any kind, I told stories and answered questions about my life, mostly about growing up in Maine. The next morning I woke up early, sat at my desk, and wrote down some of those stories. Over the next few months I wrote some more. The result is this book.
This is not a complete biography. It is rather a telling of some favorite stories about my very fortunate life. It’s also about the lessons I’ve learned along the way about negotiation, lessons that have been central to my ability to get things done in law, in business, in the Senate, and in Northern Ireland.
After I retired from the U.S. Senate in 1995, I spent five years working on the peace process in Northern Ireland and did two tours of duty in the Middle East. These assignments, and others earlier in my life, took me to war-torn countries and exposed me to death and destruction on a scale that I had difficulty comprehending. The more I experienced of life outside the United States and away from Maine, the more I appreciated and longed for both.
In this book I mention only briefly two events that were an important part of my public life, the Iran-Contra investigation and the Northern Ireland peace process, because I have already written books about them. I also mention my work in the Middle East, but that deserves a full accounting in a separate book, which I hope to write in the near future. And although I describe some of the legislative efforts in which I engaged while in the Senate, they represent only a small part of my fifteen years of service there.
I am fortunate to be an American, a citizen of what I believe to be, despite its many serious imperfections, the most open, the most free, the most just society in all of human history. In America no one should be guaranteed success, but everyone should have a fair chance to succeed. This is the story of how I came to have that chance.
Mount Desert Island
2014
Family
HEAD OF FALLS
Right over there, just across the tracks, in what used to be Head of Falls, the senator was born.”
As he said those words, Tom Nale, the mayor of Waterville, pointed to his left. The few people in the crowd, standing in the November cold, instinctively turned to look. From the square in front of City Hall, where the Veterans Day ceremony was taking place, they could see little: a railroad track, across it a parking lot, and then a short, grassy slope down to the Kennebec River. As I too looked toward the river, I thought about living “right over there” many years ago.
Head of Falls, usually pronounced “hedda falls,” was the informal name given to a small triangle of land along the banks of the Kennebec River in Waterville, Maine. Bounded roughly by a railroad track, the river, and a textile mill, it consisted of about two acres of land onto which were crammed dozens of buildings, most of them apartment houses. Inside were jammed scores of families, almost all of them immigrants. It was the lowest rung on the American ladder of success.
Prior to 1900 most of them were French Canadian from Quebec. As families established themselves, they moved up and out of Head of Falls and were replaced by more recent immigrants. After the turn of the century, as the number of immigrants from what is now known as Lebanon grew, they gradually displaced the French Canadians, who in turn moved to a section of Waterville called The Plains. By 1933, when I was born, almost all of the families living there were Lebanese immigrants; a few French Canadian families remained, in homes adjacent to the textile mill.
The Head of Falls has since been cleared and turned into a parking lot. If it still existed, it would be described as a slum. But to me and the many children who lived there it was just home. On one side was the Kennebec River, rising in northern Maine and flowing southerly to the coast. The river is now clean, used by rafters, boaters, fishermen, and even some swimmers. Seventy years ago it was a stinking, open sewer; the towns located on the river dumped their sewage into it, and many industries added their wastes. Directly across and just up the river from Head of Falls, in the neighboring town of Winslow, the Hollingsworth and Whitney paper mill daily discharged huge volumes of wastes, as did the textile mill on the Waterville side. As a result the river usually was covered with scum and foam. It looked terrible and smelled worse.
The name Head of Falls comes from a nearby point in the river where it drops sharply. A dam now marks the spot. Just above the dam, a railroad bridge spans the river. It carries a main track of what was then the Maine Central Railroad. As it crossed into Waterville, that track formed one long boundary of Head of Falls, separat
ing it from the town center. In the 1930s Waterville was a rail center, with a large repair shop located less than a mile to the north of the bridge. Large trains regularly rumbled past, shaking every building and covering the area with soot.
The third, short side of the triangle, across Temple Street, was a large textile mill, the Wyandotte Worsted Factory. Since its discharges occurred on the Waterville side, just a few feet up river, the water directly adjacent to Head of Falls was particularly foul. The Wyandotte mill, also since torn down to make way for a parking lot, was noisy, the clatter of its looms filling the air around the clock. Combined with the whine of the paper mill’s huge saws cutting trees into wood chips and the rumble of the trains, it made Head of Falls a very noisy place.
It sounds bad now, but it didn’t seem so then. That was just the way it was. Not until I left home to go to college, at the age of seventeen, did I realize what it’s like to sleep through the night without the sound and feel of a passing train.
BABY JOE AND MINTAHA BECOME GEORGE AND MARY
My mother was born in 1902 in Bkassine, a small village in the mountains of south central Lebanon. Her father, Ameen Saad, and his wife, Hilda, already had three children—Marium, Rose, and Tamem—when Hilda again became pregnant. Ameen desperately wanted a boy. Disappointed at the birth of his fourth daughter, he called it quits, so he named his fourth daughter Mintaha, “the end” in Arabic. Hilda died soon thereafter, and Ameen took a second wife. The oldest daughter, Marium, married a man named Thomas Boles and had a daughter, Eugenie. Tom and Marium decided to emigrate to the United States, and, as was common at the time, they left their daughter behind until they could establish themselves. In 1920, by now settled in Waterville, they sent for her. Eugenie was nine years old and could not make the trip alone, so Mintaha was chosen to accompany her. She was eighteen and had never before left Lebanon. She could not read, speak, or understand a word of English.
Mintaha and Eugenie traveled first to Marseilles, then made their way to Paris. According to Eugenie, who later described the trip to my sister and brother Paul, one purpose of the trip was for my mother to meet a prospective husband for an arranged marriage; the man was a Lebanese immigrant living in Paris where he was a practicing dentist. After the meeting, Mintaha and Eugenie traveled to Le Havre, where on June 5, 1920, they boarded the SS Leopoldina, arriving in New York eleven days later, two of 1,169 immigrants on board, part of the human tide that passed through Ellis Island. But Mintaha did not return to Paris as planned, and she never again lived in Lebanon. She did not tell Eugenie what happened at that meeting in Paris, but based on her later life and words, it’s clear that all along what she wanted was to get to America, where she would join her sisters and be free to make her own decisions. Soon after she got to Maine she became Mary, and she stayed.
After arriving in Waterville and moving in with her sister and brother-in-law, Mary found work as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. But she soon learned the trade she would ply for the rest of her working life. Throughout central Maine textile mills were running around the clock, spinning out thousands of yards of cotton and woolen goods. In the previous half century they had become, in the aggregate, the largest employer in the state, hiring thousands of immigrants. By all accounts Mary became a skilled weaver. For several decades she worked the night shift, from eleven o’clock in the evening until seven in the morning. The textiles mills of the time were noisy, the clatter of the looms so deafening that conversation was impossible. The air inside the mill was hot and heavy, dense with suffocating lint that filled the workers’ lungs, hair, nostrils, and ears and covered their clothing. The floors were slick with many years’ accumulation of lubricating oil, so the workers shuffled around, their feet always in contact with the floor so as not to slip. It was (and still is, although conditions in modern mills are much improved, particularly the reduction of lint) hot, hard, demanding work. Mary did it for most of her adult life so her children would never have to.
My father was born in 1900 in Boston. Known as “Baby Joe,” he was the youngest son of Irish immigrants. He never knew his parents and was raised in an orphanage in Boston. It was common practice at the time for the nuns who operated the orphanage to take the children on weekends to Catholic churches throughout northern New England. After Mass the children were lined up in the front of the church. Any person attending Mass who wanted to adopt a child could do so simply by taking one by the hand and walking out. In that way, when he was four years old, my father was adopted by an elderly, childless couple from Bangor, John and Mary Mitchell.
The Mitchells had emigrated from their native Lebanon to Egypt, where they lived for several years before coming to the United States. Once here they assumed their new surname. So when they walked out of a Bangor church after Mass on a Sunday in 1904, Baby Joe became George Mitchell. Soon after, the family moved to Waterville, fifty-five miles southwest of Bangor, where they operated a small store in the Head of Falls. George attended a parochial elementary school where many of the students were of French ancestry, and he soon learned their language. But his childhood was short; he left school after the fourth grade to begin a long life of hard work and low wages.
In his early teens he went to the Portland area, where he worked as a laborer on the railroad. From there he traveled to northern Maine to find work as a logger. Despite his lack of formal education he was an avid reader. A friend of his told my sister about one of their early trips into the woods. It was a cold winter. They took the train to Farmington, about thirty miles to the northwest of Waterville. From the station they walked several miles through the snow into the woods to a logging camp. Throughout the trip young George struggled with two large suitcases. One of them was especially heavy because, as his friend learned when they unpacked, it was full of books. The loggers slept in a big one-room building that held about sixty men. Near the center of the building was a large opening in the ceiling for ventilation. Because my father was one of the youngest men, he got the least desirable bunk: an upper, right under what his friend called “the big hole in the ceiling.” There he spent a miserable winter, working all day, cold and coughing all night. No wonder he so much enjoyed being a janitor in his later years. At least then he was inside, keeping warm.
Sometime between 1920 and 1924 George Mitchell and Mary Saad met, fell in love, and married. I was born on August 20, 1933, the fourth of their five children.
My mother worked at several mills in central Maine. Despite the strenuous demands of working all night in a textile mill, she was home in time to get us off to school and be ready with supper when we returned home. After putting us to bed in the evening, she left for work. She slept briefly during the day, but to her children she seemed tireless and energetic, full of life and love. My father worked too, of course, but in the manner of the time, his working day ended when he got home. For my mother home was another workplace; she cooked, cleaned, and did the wash, the daily shopping, and many other chores. She often must have been exhausted, and surely she complained in private. But none of that was apparent to her children. To us she was always there, always ready, always supportive, always loving. She was a strong and very determined woman and she knew how to enforce discipline in her children, but it was always within a context of such total love, and often good humor, that it was impossible to feel put upon or to doubt her good intentions. She was the most impressive and influential person in my life.
My mother could not read or write English and spoke with a thick accent, mispronouncing words and fracturing sentences. She especially had trouble with the “th” sound, so smooth came out as “smool” and thirty as “sirty.” When any of us kidded her about it, she would laughingly mispronounce the words even worse, for comic effect. She loved to cook and did so constantly. I can still recall the warm smell of freshly baked bread; it filled the house, sweeter than the most expensive perfume.
My mother was raised in a society in which hospitality to guests is mandatory and she carried that pract
ice to an extreme. Every person who entered our home was required to sit and have a meal, no matter the time of day. She simply would not take no for an answer. The most modest offering—the last resort for those not able to eat a full meal—was freshly baked bread and coffee. So the plumber, the electrician, the family doctor—all sat at our kitchen table and ate and ate, until they could eat no more. I remember the plumber saying that he made a mistake on his first visit to our house because he came just after lunch; he was full, so he couldn’t eat much. He never made that mistake again, always arriving in the late morning or late afternoon.
She also welcomed complete strangers into her kitchen. One year, two young men rented an apartment in the rear of a neighbor’s house. They were Mormons, performing their service to their faith. Unluckily for them, the poor immigrant families in our neighborhood, most of them French or Lebanese, were deeply dedicated Catholics, so there were no converts. When the two young missionaries first visited our home, my mother understood their purpose, but couldn’t comprehend their arguments. That made no difference to her. She sat them at the kitchen table and fed them a full, warm meal. As they left, she invited them to return, which they did. Their visits became regular and more frequent and a ritual developed—they talked about religion, which she ignored, and she talked about food, which they ate. Consistent with her belief that everyone is a good person, she liked and admired them. Once, when my father criticized our town’s newly elected Republican mayor, my mother reproached him, saying, “He’s a good person.”
“How do you know that?” my father asked.
“Because I see him at Mass on Sunday,” she answered. To her, that was proof enough.
She was totally devoted to her husband, but her dependence on him did not become evident until after his death, when it became clear that life had been taken from her too. She began to shrink, physically and mentally. She became irritable and unpredictable. Worst of all, my mother, who had been so open, warm, and trusting, became mistrustful. Within a few years she had to enter a nursing home. There, despite good and warm care, she declined rapidly. Seeing her near the end—pale, eyes shut tight, murmuring incoherently—was the most painful experience of my life, far more painful than her death. Gradually that image has faded and I recall the strong woman of my youth, looking across the table at me and saying, laughing as she spoke, “You want to grow up strong and smart? Drink this goat’s milk and do your homework!” She was worried about my lack of size and strength and believed that goat’s milk would help me grow faster. It became a standing joke in our family: if I succeeded in anything—a good test score in school; getting a law degree; becoming a federal judge; entering the Senate—it was the goat’s milk!
The Negotiator Page 1