For Mitchell, 64, the birth was an unmistakable sign of hope. "It gave me a renewed determination" he says. "I had my staff find out how many children were born in Northern Ireland on the same day. There were 61. I began to think, 'Will those 61 children have the same chance for success that I hope for my son?' "
The answer may finally be at hand. On Good Friday, April 10—after 32 hours of almost nonstop last-minute wrangling and repeated phone calls from President Clinton—representatives of eight Northern Irish political parties signed a historic agreement that could, after three decades of violence that has claimed 3,200 lives, bring lasting peace to their bitterly divided land. According to the agreement (which must first be ratified by voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 22), Northern Ireland's 1.6 million citizens will no longer be governed directly by Britain, but will manage their own affairs through a new elected assembly of Catholics and Protestants—with limited input from the Republic of Ireland in areas such as tourism.
Perhaps most important, the accord puts unprecedented pressure on terrorists on both sides of the religious divide to surrender their weapons. Mitchell, who moved the peace talks along briskly at the end, partly because of his awareness that assassination—his own or someone else's—might be attempted to derail their progress, told the people of Northern Ireland in a televised speech after the signing, "If you support this agreement, and if you also reject the merchants of death and the purveyors of hate—if you make it clear to your political leaders that you want them to make it work, then it will."
But that will take patience and understanding—qualities that Mitchell, who once listened quietly while a Protestant participant in the talks spoke for 7 hours without interruption, says he inherited from his working-class parents. Raised in the mill town of Waterville, Maine, Mitchell is the son of an immigrant Lebanese textile worker and her husband, a Colby College janitor who quizzed his kids on the contents of the newspapers he brought home from work. "We'd have school during the day and night classes with my father," says Barbara Atkins, one of Mitchell's three surviving siblings.
Mitchell served as an altar boy at a Maronite Catholic church and, between classes and jobs delivering papers and shoveling snow, played basketball with his older brothers. (Still a sports buff, he attends Boston Celtics games whenever he can.) He studied law at Georgetown and married Sally Heath, with whom he had one daughter, Portland social worker Andrea Mitchell, now 31. The couple divorced amicably in 1987.
Mitchell practiced law in Portland, made a run for the governorship and lost, before Maine's Edmund Muskie left the Senate to become Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State in 1980. Mitchell, then a federal judge, was named to succeed him. On Capitol Hill, the senator, though a vigorously partisan Democrat, impressed even Republicans with his integrity. "You can have confidence when you talk [privately] with Mitchell that it's not going any further," says former Sen. Bob Dole, now a colleague of his in a Washington law firm. Mitchell retired from the Senate in 1994, the same year he married fellow sports fanatic MacLachlan, now 39, whom he sees on frequent trips to New York. Reportedly, it was his desire to become major league baseball commissioner that prompted him to turn down an offer from Clinton to nominate him for a Supreme Court seat.
The baseball job never materialized, but helping to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, where Mitchell had already chaired a commission on disarmament, brought its own rewards. Mitchell will almost certainly be a contender for a Nobel Peace Prize, and British papers report that Prime Minister Tony Blair will offer him an honorary knighthood.
Sir George? "I don't think so," says Mitchell, who plans to return to his work for law firms in Portland and Washington—and to catch up with his wife and son during a vacation in Maine. "George is good enough."
Patrick Rogers
Linda Kramer in Washington, Eric Francis in Vermont and Nina Biddle in London
- Contributors:
- Linda Kramer,
- Eric Francis,
- Nina Biddle.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
