“The Negotiator,” a memoir by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, is less a full autobiography than a collection of vignettes from the life of a man with a tower of accomplishments.
‘The Negotiator: Reflections on an American Life’
by George Mitchell
Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $27
George Mitchell had a remarkable career: lawyer, U.S. Attorney, federal judge, U.S. Senator, Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate and ultimately a special envoy who successfully brokered peace in Ireland after 800 years of conflict. There are few public figures who could even come close to matching that record.
In “The Negotiator,” Mitchell tells stories from his long career. It’s not really a comprehensive autobiography but more of a series of short, mostly self-congratulatory, vignettes. That’s interesting, to be sure, but disappointing at the same time. With a career like this, Mitchell could have provided a far more substantive history of his public service. This is more amuse-bouche than main course.
Mitchell was the fourth of five children. His mother was a Lebanese immigrant; his father an orphaned son of Irish immigrants. He was raised in small-town Maine, and his love of the state and its people shines through these pages.
Mitchell worked for U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie, where he learned politics from a master of the craft. He briefly served as the U.S. Attorney for Maine in the Carter administration before being named to the federal bench by President Carter, at Senator Muskie’s recommendation.
He didn’t serve long in that position. Senator Muskie resigned from the Senate to serve as President Carter’s Secretary of State, opening up a seat in the Senate. Joe Brennan, then the Governor of Maine, appointed Mitchell to the seat in 1980. He served for 15 years, the last six as Majority Leader.
Mitchell’s Senate actually worked to get things done. Senators from opposite parties felt obligated to work together, to compromise even strongly held positions, in order to accomplish things. It’s a far cry from today’s U.S. Senate, largely shut down from accomplishing much of anything significant by partisan bickering.
His inside stories are at times compelling. He fought a bitter dispute with Senator Robert Byrd over amendments to the Clean Air Act, ultimately winning an amendment to strengthen its provisions. The next day, Byrd, then the Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, obtained the tally sheet of votes, “had it framed, and hung it next to the door leading into his Appropriations Committee office. For years thereafter anyone who entered his office was reminded of that vote.”
Mitchell left the Senate in 1995 but he was hardly finished. Joining the board of directors of the Walt Disney Corporation, he rose to become Chairman of the Board. He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a special envoy to Ireland and, over the course of five long years, helped to negotiate the “Good Friday Accords” that achieved a lasting peace in Ireland. He served, as well, as a special envoy to the Middle East during the Obama administration, where he tried but failed to negotiate peace between Israel, the Palestinians and others in the region.
One of the most hotly debated issues in the Senate today is immigration reform. George Mitchell’s story, a son of immigrants on both sides, provides eloquent testimony to the power of the American dream and the strength — not weakness — that immigration has always provided the United States. His story is worth reading for that reason alone.
Month: May 2015
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George Mitchell’s ‘The Negotiator’: a peacemaker’s life
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‘Days of Rage:’ the long-ago war between the left and the FBI
Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage” chronicles an era when leftist American students used bombs and other forms of violence in an attempt to convert the working class to their cause.
‘Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence’
by Bryan Burrough
Penguin Press, 585 pp., $29.95
Terrorism today conjures images of Islamic militants horrifically crashing planes into buildings, detonating bombs on crowded subway trains or exploding devices specifically designed to kill or maim large numbers of people. But not so long ago, as the 1960s wound to a close, the idea of “revolutionary violence” was embraced not by religious zealots, but by left-wing radicals, certain they were on the vanguard of the coming revolution.
In “Days of Rage,” Bryan Burrough, author of “Public Enemies,” provides a fascinating look at an almost forgotten era of homegrown terrorism. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) routinely bombed post offices, military installations, and corporate facilities in a wildly naive and self-indulgent effort to lead the “oppressed” American working class to revolt. “Days of Rage” relies not only on historical research, but on interviews with some of the principal activists, living in obscurity but still defiant about their underground activity. The book is utterly captivating, coupling careful historical research with breathless accounts of the bombings and the perpetrators’ narrow escapes.
The sheer numbers are astounding. During one 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings, nearly five a day. Yet, as Burrough’s notes, “less than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings lead to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people.” Most of the bombs were placed in restrooms and were followed by ornate “communiqués,” filled with Marxist jargon.
This was not an anti-war protest movement. The underground radicals were, instead, committed to righting what they perceived as wrongs in American society and fighting back against racism and police brutality.
Bernadine Dohrn, the stunningly beautiful and promiscuous leader of the Weather Underground, who J. Edgar Hoover called “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” famously celebrated Charles Manson’s horrific murder of Sharon Tate in 1969. The SLA grabbed attention by kidnapping 19-year old Patty Hearst in 1974. Neither action led to a tide of sympathy or support. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the country had moved on, embracing much of the hippie culture, music and style — but emphatically rejecting its violent rhetoric.
The FBI, pushed hard by the Nixon administration, formed “Squad 47” to investigate. The squad conducted widespread “black bag jobs,” opening mail, breaking into homes, and installing thousands of wiretaps — with full knowledge that what they were doing was patently illegal.
When the FBI’s abuses came to light, only three individuals were indicted: Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, Acting Associate Director Mark Felt and Assistant Director Ed Miller. Felt and Miller were both convicted. Felt was fined $5,000, Miller was fined $2,500 and both were quickly pardoned by incoming President Reagan. (Felt, it was revealed years later, was the “Deep Throat” source for The Washington Post reporters breaking the Watergate scandal).
Within weeks, Dohrn turned herself in. At one time the most wanted fugitive in the underground, she was fined a mere $1,500. The Weather Underground had conducted hundreds of bombings but the only individuals convicted were the FBI agents — not the leadership of the organization.
When Ray Levasseur, one of the last violent bombers, was finally arrested in 1984, the world had so completely changed that, as Burrough’s notes, he was the “radical equivalent of the aging Japanese infantrymen found in Pacific caves well into the 1970s, men still fighting a war everyone else knew only from history books.”