cover image Daring Diplomacy: Clinton's Secret Search for Peace in Ireland

Daring Diplomacy: Clinton's Secret Search for Peace in Ireland

Conor O'Clery. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $22.95 (271pp) ISBN 978-1-57098-130-2

Since before 1900, according to O'Clery, there has existed a ""special relationship"" between Britain and the U.S. This relationship has precluded the U.S. from interfering in the ""internal affairs"" of Britain in the conflict in Northern Ireland. O'Clery, presently the Irish Times correspondent in Beijing, previously stationed in Washington, here presents a riveting account of how Irish America wooed Clinton the candidate, and of how Clinton the president changed long-standing U.S. policy toward Britain and Ireland. During the 1992 election, Clinton vowed to appoint a special U.S. envoy to Ireland to help seek a peace in the North. Many saw it as nothing more than another empty campaign promise meant to assuage 44 million Americans of Irish ancestry. But when British Prime Minister John Major sought to help President George Bush and to embarrass Clinton during the 1992 campaign by having Clinton's passport records from his student days at Oxford searched, that act paved the way for a revamping of U.S. foreign policy. First Clinton appointed Jean Smith Kennedy, sister of JFK, as ambassador to Ireland. She immediately cleaned house of pro-British sympathizers in the U.S. Embassy in Dublin. He then appointed former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn as ambassador to the Vatican. Britain was horrified at this two-point diplomatic missile aimed at it and its policy in Northern Ireland. With the blessings of the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister), Albert Reynolds, Ambassador Kennedy, SDLP leader and M.P. John Hume and Senator Ted Kennedy, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was granted a visa to visit America, and the road to peace and an IRA cease-fire was temporarily opened. This is an exciting book with fascinating revelations about the internecine workings of the State Department and American foreign policy. It will make Americans wonder why so much of their foreign policy seems carved in stone, never to be changed as the times change, when change, as this marvelous book shows, is there for the doing. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)