Ted Kennedy and the Troubles, part 2

On May 16th, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate hosted a symposium on Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland at the Library of Congress, highlighting the Miller Center’s Edward M. Kennedy Oral Histories on the Northern Ireland peace process. Part one of this series covered Kennedy's work with President Carter.

During President Bill Clinton’s first year in office, Senator Kennedy urged the new president to put Northern Ireland at the top of his agenda. The situation on the ground in Northern Ireland was rapidly changing. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams had recently expressed interest in pursuing a peaceful resolution to the conflict during secret talks with moderate Northern Irish leader John Hume. Kennedy’s Senate office provided an important back channel through which former Kennedy staffer and then-NSC official Nancy Soderberg, and the Clinton administration could unofficially communicate with political leaders in Northern Ireland. After a strong lobbying campaign from Kennedy and his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Clinton agreed in January 1994 to grant a visa for Adams to visit the United States, paving the way for an IRA ceasefire and the commencement of peaceful negotiations.

Kennedy: President Clinton is elected and we are in a situation in ’92 with a new administration and someone that we feel that we can work with on many different issues. There is certainly the hope that we’re going to be able to work with President Clinton on the Irish issue. He is surrounded by people that we know and who are empathetic, sympathetic to what we’d been trying to do in Northern Ireland. So we’re trying to figure out the best ways that we can move the whole process forward in terms of getting a cease-fire and governmental institutions up and functioning and working…

[Adams] and John Hume had issued a joint statement designed to inaugurate a peace process in April of 1993. While the December 15 [Downing Street] joint declaration by Major and Reynolds had offered all-party talks if all agreed to a cease-fire, Adams hadn’t renounced violence and there was no IRA cease-fire, and neither Sinn Féin nor the IRA had accepted the joint declaration…

Vicki [Reggie Kennedy] and I decided to go over to Dublin and spend New Year’s Eve [1993] with my sister… A series of meetings were set up that changed certainly my thinking and my view and approach to the whole issue of both Adams and Sinn Féin…

In the conversations that I had with [Irish Taoiseach Albert] Reynolds, who was really the most powerful, convincing, insightful, historic and persuasive, he talked about a new day that was possible and that would happen if he had the chance to get Adams a visa. He thought it would have an impact on the IRA and would have an impact on moving the whole process forward…

John [Hume] told us there was a split in the IRA of whether to accept the [Downing Street] joint declaration and that a visa for Adams would help carry the internal debate. He made a very powerful case about the importance of moving the peace process forward, and said this was a great opportunity to do that…

Former Kennedy staffer Trina Vargo: [Niall O’Dowd] is a publisher of an Irish American newspaper… He came to me because he knew that it would take Kennedy to make this [the Adams visa] happen because Kennedy had always been opposed to the IRA and he would first have to be convinced if there was to be any hope with the President. That’s one of those things that many people don’t know or understand. In the tabloids in Britain they’d often suggest Kennedy was an IRA supporter, when in fact he was opposed to the IRA. People who cared about this knew that you had to get Kennedy onboard; it was an absolute must to make it happen…

They were coming to me because—I don’t know if by statute or just by practice—they couldn’t speak to the White House. Nancy Soderberg wouldn’t talk to O’Dowd at that stage. But they also knew that they needed a go-between, and that was me, on a daily basis… It suited everybody if I was in the middle and Kennedy was in the middle, him in the big picture, me in the day-to-day, because if anybody tried to be cute, and not live up to the commitment, then I could say, “No, that’s not what was agreed.” I would also be able to mediate between both sides by making it clear to each party what the other side could or could not accept.

Gerry Adams: Some of the main people in the Clinton administration were people who had worked with Teddy Kennedy, Nancy Soderberg, for example. So I just presumed that there were all sorts of back channels going on. If somebody got a formalization from source A, then the Nancys of this world would go on to Teddy and Teddy could go on to John Hume, or Teddy could go on to Jean Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith could go on to Father Reid, and so on…

Jean Kennedy Smith wrote a letter of endorsement, endorsing the visa, but senior officials in her department, in her office wrote objecting to the visa.

Kennedy: [House Majority Leader Tom Foley] was against it in principle. He didn’t think that Adams had done enough to renounce violence and he thought we could be embarrassed by it. If we all signed on and then he did something we’d feel very bad about, and the President would be embarrassed by it. He was not satisfied that Adams was in a position to deserve it…

So you had the British Government and the State Department strongly against it, a prominent Irish Catholic Leader in the House strongly against it. This was going to be difficult to turn around. The British Embassy was using all its influence to keep Adams out. They resented Congressional interference, when American policy had long deferred to their views. They still had that traditional position and they feared that Adams would be able to rouse his own constituencies here…

By January 25 our office was being advised by Nancy Soderberg, who was at the NSC, that the White House was leaning against the visa and we’d have to weigh in politically and not just substantively on this, and that’s what we did.

Robert Strong: Clinton says there was a bigger fight over that in the Cabinet than anything else early in the administration. Is that fair?

Clinton NSC official Nancy Soderberg: It was huge. Yes, Louis Freeh was apoplectic. Janet Reno was apoplectic. Warren Christopher… Opposed to it, both—Louis Freeh was anti-terrorism, and Janet Reno the same thing. “You can’t do this; it will send a message to our anti-terrorist allies.” Warren Christopher was saying that it would ruin our relationship with Britain; they’d stop cooperating with us on Bosnia and Iraq. I said, “No, they’re not. They’re not doing that as a favor to us. It’s in their interest to cooperate on those two issues.” As far as the terrorism message goes, I wasn’t worried about Adams coming here and blowing up anything. I thought, actually, in the long run, if he came here and the President of the United States stuck his neck out for him, and he didn’t deliver a ceasefire, it would enable us to go to the Irish-Americans and say, “See? This guy’s a fraud. Quit sending him money,” and undermine him further. It was that kind of win-win logic that convinced Clinton to do it…

Without Clinton, it [peaceful negotiations] probably would have happened, but probably only about now. I think he sped it up by a decade—he provided the confidence. He enabled both sides to talk with each other with a modicum of trust that just was not there without the United States. They trusted what they told us, but not each other. So that enabled them to have a conversation and move things forward in a way that was not possible before. Clinton instinctively wanted to get it done from day one. He wanted to get involved, see where we could use it. But I wouldn’t underestimate electoral politics. He wouldn’t have done it had it been wrong from a foreign policy perspective. I literally never saw Clinton make a foreign policy decision for anything but policy reasons. But in this case, you get the added benefit of all the electoral votes. It’s not just Massachusetts; it’s all the Catholics around the world. There are 40 million in America, and a lot of them are in the swing states of the Midwest. There are a lot of Irish in this country.

James Young: What was your sense of what resonated with him [Clinton] particularly?

Kennedy: One, the chance for peace, and two, the politics. He could understand both. Those were the two things, the chance for peace—you’d make a difference in terms of getting the chance for peace and be unique in that sense—the first President who reached this. And the politics of it—the fact that all Irish-Americans would appreciate that he had tried for peace. If he didn’t, they’d all know he didn’t. He could understand that.