The Negotiator

by George Mitchell

  Another risk that, in the context in which it occurred, was significant for me took place much earlier. Although to most people it will seem trivial, not risky at all, my decision to attend Bowdoin College seemed to me at the time to be very risky. By the time I accepted appointment to the Senate I was a mature man who already had been reasonably successful in life; that was even more true when I declined President Clinton’s offer to appoint me to the Supreme Court. But in the spring of my senior year in high school, I was a confused, insecure, sixteen-year-old boy who had not accomplished anything. Most of my school classmates were older and bigger and seemed more mature and wise. My lack of athletic ability, in comparison to my brothers, had generated in me a massive inferiority complex, and the trauma of my father’s unemployment had a devastating effect on him and on me. Although it was only a year it seemed like a lifetime. My emotions swung back and forth from love and sympathy to shame and hostility; he wallowed in despair and I reacted badly. I loved him, but I was ashamed of him; that made me ashamed of myself. In that situation I should have seen Bowdoin as a chance to escape, especially since there was no obvious alternative. But in my confusion I saw it as just the opposite: as a challenge I was unprepared to meet. I was overwhelmed by fear that I would fail.

  When I met with Bill Shaw, the director of admissions at Bowdoin, I told him that my family didn’t have any money for my education, but I was too ashamed to tell him that my father was unemployed. On my return to Waterville I told my guidance counselor at Waterville High School about my trip to Bowdoin. She encouraged me to talk with the principal and took me to his office. To my surprise, he urged me to forget about Bowdoin. You won’t fit in, he told me, the boys there are from different backgrounds. He wasn’t more explicit. He didn’t have to be. I knew little about Bowdoin, but I understood his message: given my background I wasn’t good enough for the place. I was nervous when I entered his office; when I left I was shaking with anxiety, inadequacy, and anger.

  That weekend at home was long and painful, the peak of my inner turmoil and the nadir of my relationship with my father. I was angry at him, at the principal, at myself. I also was consumed with self-pity: I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t be anything. I had no one to talk to. My brothers were away at college. I felt that neither my sister nor my mother would understand what I was going through. So I spent the weekend alone with my thoughts. I cried often on the inside, occasionally on the outside. Gradually the anger dissipated, the self-pity lifted, the tears dried up, and I began to see that I had a chance to change my life. I would show them! “Them” included the principal, the high school basketball coach, my brothers, and my father. He wanted me to go to Bowdoin, so it is a measure of my confusion that somehow I felt that by going I would be showing him—what? When I received the formal letter of acceptance from Bill Shaw I didn’t tell anyone. I simply sent back a short thank-you letter. I’ve made a lot of consequential decisions since, involving people’s liberties and lives. Although many were far more difficult and consequential, none seemed it at the time. That I made it through Bowdoin was, to me, at that stage in my life, a huge accomplishment. It gave me the confidence to take the next important steps in my life.

  I also took a risk when I accepted the invitation of the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom to serve as chairman of the Northern Ireland Peace Negotiations. The conflict was ancient, fueled by religious and other differences, and marked by extraordinary brutality. Previous negotiations had failed; there was no reason to believe that these would be any different. But I felt that I could somehow help them find a way through their many differences. I knew there was a substantial risk to my life and personal safety, but I managed to submerge my doubts and fears by concentrating on my work. By far the greatest risk I took in the negotiations themselves was when I established the firm and final deadline of midnight on April 10, 1998. That was regarded by some as a desperate and dangerous move. Some British civil servants opposed the deadline; they had been engaged in trying to manage the Troubles for many years, and they feared that an abrupt end to the process would trigger an immediate return to violence more savage than ever. I shared their concern. But, I argued, without a final deadline the process was ultimately more likely to fail, producing the very result they feared. Just a few months earlier, on December 27, Billy Wright, a prominent Unionist paramilitary leader, had been murdered while in prison by a group of Republican prisoners. That touched off a brutal round of tit-for-tat reprisals. In the early months of 1998 violence rose, threatening the negotiations. Two parties were expelled from the talks because of their relationships with paramilitaries, although they later returned. Two other parties had earlier walked out, never to return. The process was now in danger of a final collapse. To avoid that, I believed a dramatic change was necessary, so I proposed an early, unbreakable deadline, just prior to which there would be an intense, final two-week push for an agreement.

  The British and Irish governments accepted my assessment and my recommendation. But I was deeply worried, all the more so because I respected the civil servants who urged rejection of my proposal. The prospect of renewed conflict, which virtually everyone assumed would be more violent and brutal than what had occurred before, hung heavy on me for the last few months. Although I tried to project an air of calm confidence, inside I was anxious and fearful. It was close, but it ended well, to my enormous relief. I had taken a huge risk and it paid off.

  As a young man I wanted to teach history at Bowdoin, but ended up in military intelligence in Berlin. I wanted to practice law in Maine and did for a while, but ended up in politics in Washington. I wanted to be a federal judge and was for a short time, but ended up in the U.S. Senate. When I left the Senate I wanted a private life, but ended up in public positions in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Not in my wildest early dreams did I imagine that I would ever write a book, but at the age of fifty-four I wrote one; this is my fifth.

  A central lesson of my experience (and that of many others) is that life is not lived in a straight and predictable line. It zigs and zags, goes sideways and backward, and lurches forward suddenly and in ways that cannot be foreseen. Around every corner there is risk. A willingness to confront it, at times to go against the odds, is an important part of success in life.

  CHANCE

  On November 4, 1979, fifty-two Americans were taken hostage in Teheran by Iranian revolutionaries. The televised images of mobs swarming the U.S. Embassy and of blindfolded American diplomats being led through hostile crowds aroused public opinion in our country. Each night, as the newscasts reminded Americans of the length of their captivity, the pressure mounted on President Carter to do something. Overriding objections from his secretary of state, Carter authorized a military rescue mission. It proved to be a disastrous failure. When Secretary Vance resigned in protest, Carter turned to Ed Muskie for his replacement. Less than a year earlier, at the age of forty-six, I had been sworn in as a federal judge. I did not, indeed could not then have imagined that by the time I turned forty-seven I would be a U.S. senator.

  Viewed objectively, filling Muskie’s seat was a huge risk not worth taking. I loved being a federal judge and I was assured (if I maintained good conduct) of lifetime security. Most of those whose advice I sought urged me to stay where I was. One very good friend, a Portland lawyer, pointed out, “If you stay on the bench you’ll almost certainly get the chance to move up to the First Circuit,I and then you’ll have a good shot at the Supreme Court.” The possibility that I would someday be offered appointment to the Supreme Court seemed very remote and unrealistic to me. I later joked that so many of the friends I called for advice urged me to decline that I stopped calling. Instead I made the decision on my own. I was able to do so because my vision was no longer clouded by inadequacy, insecurity, or fear. I had been a partner in a small, good law firm, working with men I liked and admired. I was confident that even if I accepted appointment to the Senate and was defeated at the next election I could return t
o a successful law practice in Maine. Twenty years earlier that had been my principal goal in life. A few years earlier I had lost an election and discovered that the world didn’t end, for me or anyone else. I felt I had acquitted myself well as U.S. attorney and was confident that I also would have done so had I remained a federal judge; I had developed the habit of working hard to prepare myself for every task I undertook. While I knew accepting the Senate seat was a risk, I decided it was worth taking. I was influenced in part by the reality that while judges play a crucial role in our society, they are involved only in disputes that others choose to bring to them; they have virtually no independent authority to act on their own initiative. Elected officials, by contrast, and U.S. senators in particular, can initiate action on any issue they deem important enough to address.

  Cy Vance was a man of integrity. I had gotten to know him well. When I saw him for the first time after entering the Senate, I thanked him for making it possible for me to become a U.S. senator. He laughed and replied, “Well, I’m glad some good came out of it.”

  Entering the Senate was a major turning point in my life, and it was due largely to chance. In many other instances—some large, some small—chance has intervened to alter the course of my life, usually for the better. I believe that to be true of all other human lives as well. Life is unpredictable and random; we are unable to fully control it against the vagaries of chance. So we should anticipate chance, even without knowing when and how it will occur, and view it as offering an opportunity that might otherwise not be available. Chance can offer an escape from tedium, from a dead end, from failure; it can offer redemption from error; in some dramatic cases it can offer a new life, as it did for me.

  * * *

  I. One seat on the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Boston, is traditionally held by a judge from Maine.

  MOUNT DESERT ISLAND

  There is, of course, no one most beautiful place on earth. The judgment is entirely subjective. But for me, Mount Desert Island is that place.

  I write these words on a late August day. What I call the summer symphony is in full swing as the incoming tide pounds steadily against the rocky coast, the bell buoy in the harbor clangs, and the ocean breeze swishes softly through the trees.

  The sky is a light, cloudless blue. The temperature will reach the seventies this afternoon and dip to fifty tonight. The trees and plants, nourished by a wet spring and summer, are deep green. The cold ocean changes from gray to green to foaming white as it nears then crashes against the granite blocks on the shore. The air is clean and pungent with the odor of Maine: salty ocean mixed with spruce and fir trees. The forests, the mountains, and the ocean meet in a rugged beauty that pleases the senses and refreshes the spirit.

  Long before the white man, the Indians of the Penobscot tribe summered on the island they called Pemetic, or “Sloping Land.” In 1524 the explorer Verrazano called the region Acadia, apparently after a place in ancient Greece. The name Mount Desert came from the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who landed there in 1604. Viewed from the sea the granite outcroppings on the tops of several of the island’s mountains could be confused for patches of desert sand. Thus the name “the Island of the Mountain Deserts.” As I look out my window I try to imagine a French sailing vessel captained by Champlain, gliding slowly toward the island, just as it did almost 410 years ago.

  Champlain could not have missed the island, as it is by far the largest along the Maine coast. Indeed it is the third largest off the coast of the continental United States, being exceeded in land area only by Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard.

  Like other places in Maine and eastern Canada, Mount Desert Island was the scene of conflict between the French and British. Although many of its landmarks bear French names, reflecting their early presence, it, like most of the rest of Maine, was eventually controlled and settled by the British. As one historian noted, the French brought Jesuits to the New World, while the British brought guns, so the outcome was inevitable. The island’s early growth centered on shipbuilding and fishing. Around the middle of the nineteenth century its cool, clear weather and beautiful scenery began to attract summer visitors.

  Soon the island was “discovered,” and the rich and famous of their day came and built large mansions, which, no matter how pretentious, were always described as “cottages.” They created a lively (if class-conscious) social scene. One commentator described the period between 1880 and World War I as “the golden days,” which were ended by “the servant problem and the income tax.” Although perhaps not golden, the island continued as a preserve for the wealthy. Two things changed that: the great fire of 1947 and the creation of Acadia National Park. From May to October 1947 there was no rain. Forests across the state were the driest in centuries, and many areas suffered from extensive fires. One of them was Mount Desert Island. About a third of the structures in Bar Harbor, the island’s largest town, were destroyed, as were large portions of the island’s forests. Many of the most elegant mansions were never rebuilt. To be sure, there remain many large, attractive, and expensive homes on the island, but the gaudy, golden age was over, never to return.

  Charles W. Eliot set in motion the events that led to the creation of a national park on Mount Desert Island. Then president of Harvard, Eliot, a summer resident of the island, took two steps in 1901 that were to prove decisive. He and a group of like-minded people obtained a state charter for a “public reservation” society to acquire land in the area for public use, and he recruited George Dorr to run the society. A lifelong bachelor whose consuming passion was conservation, Dorr inherited a fortune and spent it and his life acquiring land on Mount Desert Island for public use. Tireless, persistent, considered by many egocentric, Dorr gave of his own land and bought more with his funds and those donated by others.

  In 1913 he had to confront and defeat a bill introduced in the state legislature to annul the Public Reservation charter. The experience unsettled him and convinced him that the only way to preserve the area that had been acquired was to create a national park: the state might undo what he did, but it could not undo an act of the federal government. After three years of effort by Dorr and others, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation on July 8, 1916, creating the Sieur de Monts National Monument area. Soon thereafter it was converted into a national park, eventually to be known as Acadia. It was the first national park to be created east of the Mississippi River, and the only one created entirely by private donations of land to the government.

  Dorr was helped immeasurably by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had come to the island at the turn of the century. He liked it and built a hundred-room “cottage” here. He also built fifty-seven miles of roads (now called carriage paths because when built they were intended to be used only by horse-drawn carriages, not motorized vehicles), which traverse large portions of the island, providing scenic hiking, biking, and horseback-riding opportunities. Rockefeller also provided much needed funding for further acquisition by Dorr. Today his son David and several members of his family maintain summer homes on the island and continue their family’s impressive legacy of philanthropy and conservation.

  Acadia is one of the most-visited national parks in the country, even though it is one of the smallest. Millions of people come each year, rich and poor alike, to enjoy the island’s beauty. I became involved with the park when, as a U.S. senator, I wrote and obtained enactment of legislation establishing for the first time a permanent boundary for the park, resolving other contentious issues, and ending nearly a quarter century of conflict between the park and the surrounding towns. It took me six years and required many trips to the island, where I had dozens of meetings with local and national park officials. I negotiated many land swaps between the park and the towns and encouraged some private landowners to donate, then or at a future date, some of their property to the park. That experience instilled in me a love for the island and its people that has grown over the years.

  That
feeling has been enhanced by many humorous events. One of my favorite stories is about a visit to the Jordan Pond House. It is a restaurant that has existed for decades within the park. It is a lovely setting, the restaurant on a ridge above a long lawn that slopes down to the heavily forested shores of the small, picturesque body of water known as Jordan Pond. The original structure burned down in the late 1970s. When I entered the Senate I helped obtain funding to complete the rebuilding, and it has since been one of my favorite stops on the island.

  One warm August day early in my Senate tenure, I agreed to meet two close friends there. One of them, Don Peters, a builder and contractor from Portland, arrived just as I did. We waited for a long time for our mutual friend, Marshall Stern. Frustrated, we decided to call Marshall to see if he was in fact coming. We walked to a spot near the restaurant’s men’s room where we knew a pay telephone was located. A man was standing at the phone, on which he had propped up a card with several phone numbers written on it. He was having trouble getting the pay phone to work. As he pumped in quarters without response he started banging the side of the phone box with his open hand and cursing. To his wife standing next to him he unleashed a torrent of criticism in which he made clear that he, from Boston, didn’t care much for the “yokels” in Maine who didn’t even know how to properly maintain a pay telephone. Gradually the line grew, and the small crowd watched and listened in embarrassed silence. Suddenly the man standing behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, aren’t you Senator Mitchell?” I acknowledged that I was, and he extended his hand toward me, saying, “I’m Bob. I’d like to shake your hand.” We did, then he asked, “Are you working or are you on vacation?” I told him I was there on vacation and had just stopped to have lunch with a couple of friends. Then, since it seemed like the polite thing to do, I asked him the same question.