Perhaps the most important contribution President Clinton made to the peace process was sending a peace envoy to Ireland in the form of George Mitchell. It was an election promise on which he delivered, big time.
The story of how this came about, in the teeth of initial British opposition, is one of Irish cunning, American subtlety and of Irish-American opportunism.
The promise was made on a chilly April evening in 1992 in New York, when Democratic candidate Bill Clinton addressed a pre-election forum on Irish issues in the Sheraton hotel. That forum, held before he had secured the Democratic nomination and at a time when his campaign was plagued by controversies, was the key to all that came after. In a small function room packed with 100 assorted Irish-Americans, a hoarse and tired Arkansas governor listed what became known as his "Irish promises". The key pledge was given in response to a planted question from Mayor Raymond Flynn of Boston, who asked if Clinton, as president, would appoint a peace envoy to Northern Ireland. An envoy had long been a dream of Irish-Americans, including Democratic Party activist John Dearie who had organised the Sheraton forum. They had got the 1984 and 1988 Democratic candidates, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, to promise to send an envoy to Northern Ireland, but both had lost the elections. Clinton that April evening looked like a loser too, and there were doubts about whether he would carry out pre-election promises made to an ethnic New York group. But what he had to say electrified the room. He would appoint a peace envoy, he said. He would not be like previous US presidents who had been reluctant to engage with the problem in a positive way "because of our long-standing special relationship with Great Britain". The governing rationale for US engagement would change in the aftermath of the Cold War, he explained. This was heady stuff. Because of the "special relationship", the White House had always followed a practice of going along with an initiative on Northern Ireland only if the British were on board. Veteran New York columnist Jimmy Breslin met Clinton for breakfast next morning to assess if he was serious. His verdict was: "If these goddamn Irish don't vote for him, they don't deserve anything." Breslin had recognised that for Clinton, Northern Ireland was personal. No one had really associated the Arkansas politician with Irish issues before. Yet when researching my book, The Greening of the White House, I discovered several intriguing clues to explain why getting involved in the Troubles was "personal" for Clinton. He was always aware of his parents' Irish blood. "I've always been conscious of being Irish," Clinton told Boston Globe reporter Jack Farrell.
"I mean, I'm sort of - I look Irish, I am Irish." He idolised the first Irish-American President, Jack Kennedy. In the late 1960s his first room-mate at Georgetown University, and his first girlfriend there, were Irish-Americans. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he followed Bernadette Devlin around when she came to speak. He watched the Troubles unfold, "fascinated and heartbroken" by what was happening. As governor he had made March 17th, 1978, "Human Rights for Ireland Day" in Arkansas. The Conservative British government had also been doing its homework and began to get worried about the envoy business. On the day of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, lobby journalists in London were told that Downing Street's first priority was to get the new President to drop the promise. London had a staunch ally in Washington who intervened on its behalf. US House Speaker Tom Foley, a rare Irish-American Anglophile, warned Clinton that an envoy would create new tensions and that British MPs would reply with an offer of a peace envoy for Los Angeles. But Clinton ignored Foley's advice that "not keeping your campaign promises is the venial sin, keeping them sometimes is the mortal sin". Two months into office, he put a peace envoy at the top of the agenda when the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, visited him in the White House on St Patrick's Day. Clinton was taken aback when Reynolds asked him to scupper the plan. The Taoiseach told him the time was not right, and that he wanted to be able to tell John Major he had killed the idea. With a metaphorical wink and a nudge, he told Clinton that the British Prime Minister, with whom Reynolds was secretly negotiating a Joint Declaration, would thereby owe him one. Clinton agreed, not without some reluctance, and the envoy idea was put on ice. It wasn't resurrected for another 21 months. By then Clinton had delivered on another promise, to give a visa to Gerry Adams.
Niall O'Dowd's Irish-American lobby had transformed the image of Irish-Americans from gunrunners to peacemakers. The IRA had declared a ceasefire.
Clinton had engaged with the unionists. The White House was encouraging American investment on both sides of the Border. The climate had changed. On December 1st, 1994, taking the long-standing advice of SDLP leader John Hume, Clinton appointed retiring Senate Majority leader, George Mitchell, as "Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State for Economic Initiatives in Ireland". No one in London could object at that point to an economic envoy. The British ambassador, Sir Robin Renwick, enthused about Mitchell as "a very good choice" as he left the White House after a ceremony in the Oval Office to mark the importance of the occasion. But the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom had been scuppered with George Mitchell's appointment. It was a short step from this to political involvement. It came with the appointment of Mitchell by both British and Irish governments to chair an arms commission at which the Mitchell principles of non-violence were formulated. It was a rush job but it achieved its purpose, a diplomatic breakthrough before the first visit by President Clinton to Northern Ireland in December 1995. And from there, it was a logical step for all sides and both governments to agree that Mitchell, a powerful and influential American envoy, should act as mediator at all-party talks. It was more than the promoters of the peace envoy dared hope for, as they listened to candidate Bill Clinton make his Irish promises that evening in New York, back in 1992.
Conor O'Clery is author of The Greening of the White House, published by Gill & Macmillan