With Help from Their Friends
By Christopher Ogden
(TIME, April 20) -- At 3:15 A.M. in Washington last Friday, Bill Clinton began a 30-minute phone conversation with George Mitchell in Belfast. The parties were eight hours past the negotiating deadline, but a breakthrough was close. Mitchell asked the President to make another round of calls to save the pact the former Maine Senator had drafted. No sooner did Mitchell hang up than British Prime Minister Tony Blair phoned the White House, asking Clinton to call and reassure wavering unionist leader David Trimble. Everyone was up most of the night, but nine hours later an exhausted and exhilarated Mitchell announced the deal that few had given him much chance of brokering.
Clinton, one of 40 million Americans who claim some Irish heritage, was strongly pro-Irish during his 1992 presidential campaign. He called for a special U.S. envoy then, but after winning he backed down under pressure from London. During his first year in office Clinton twice turned down visa requests by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams to visit the U.S., because he refused to renounce violence as a means of ending British rule in the North. In January 1994, Adams applied again. He still refused to rule out violence, but, hoping that he would, and over the protests of the State Department, Clinton granted the visa, siding with his National Security Council advisers, among them Anglo-Irish specialist Nancy Soderberg, a longtime staff member of Senator Edward Kennedy's. Clinton had appointed Kennedy's sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, ambassador to Ireland.
An infuriated British government, led then by John Major, protested the visa, calling it a naive reward for an unrepentant terrorist. Last month, though, as Adams ate a St. Patrick's Day lunch at the British embassy in Washington with Trimble, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam was saying that "the Americans and President Clinton have been of incalculable help all along the way." What prompted the turnaround?
The visa began it. Adams' U.S. visit strengthened his stance for politics over terrorism within the I.R.A. and broadened his narrow views. The U.S. decision to take Adams seriously also made it harder for him to backtrack from diplomacy. After an I.R.A. cease-fire in 1994, Clinton and senior aides stepped up the frequency of meetings with Protestant Unionist leaders who had long considered Washington biased toward a united Ireland. When the President visited London, Dublin and Belfast in late 1995, he was hailed as a peacemaker.
Mitchell's role as head of the settlement talks was played without formal authority, only the respect he earned from all the parties. Working without pay, he juggled peacemaking with his regular job as a Washington lawyer, while navigating family crises, including his brother's death, his wife's miscarriage and the birth of their first child in October. After the pact was finalized, there was another area of agreement--for what Blair called the "infinite patience and kindness" of Mitchell. Clinton said Mitchell was "brilliant," while maintaining modestly that he himself just "did what I was asked to do." Ironically, it was Clinton's doing precisely what he was asked not to do that helped get the whole ball rolling.
--With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand/Belfast
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