Advice From A Gambler

What a deceased British politician can teach George Mitchell about diplomacy.

By John Barry | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Feb 2, 2009

As George Mitchell embarks on his thankless odyssey as President Obama's special envoy to seek peace between Israel and the Palestinians, I offer him advice from someone who has traveled a similar road: "Go where the power lies. You may not like them. You may abhor them. But they are who you must deal with. Any other course is a waste of time."

That piece of advice I learned from the late Iain Macleod, a brilliant British politician of the post-World War II years. His boast was that, as secretary of state for the colonies, 1959-1961, he "brought freedom to more people than anyone since the Duke of Wellington," the victor against Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.

At first glance, Macleod couldn't be more different than Mitchell—or Macleod's task of unwinding the aftermath of Empire more different than Mitchell's. But shorn of rhetoric, their missions are essentially the same. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is, at root, the colonial problem Macleod confronted. How to reconcile the interests of settlers with those of the indigenous population whom they displaced, and who now demand what they see as their rights.

In personal terms, too, the pair have much in common. Mitchell's career—lawyer, U.S, attorney, judge, senator for Maine, majority leader until his retirement in 1995—is a classic American success story. But Mitchell's strength—what everyone who's dealt with him recalls as his gift of understanding both sides in any dispute—comes from his background. The son of a janitor father and a Lebanese mother, Mitchell has always called himself an Arab-American. That's more than familial piety. Mitchell's childhood as a poor kid in a struggling family in Waterville, Maine, remains with him. The core of Mitchell's judicial approach to any issue he works on is that part of him remains an outsider in the society whose ranks he has climbed—someone still open to the appeals of the have-nots.

Macleod too was an outsider. He was a Scot—a mark against him in Britain of those years—and he climbed a distrustful Conservative Party on brains and a gift for devastating rhetoric. He was brave: despite a congenitally weak spine, he talked his way into the Army during World War II; a shell-burst in Normandy shortly after D-Day more or less destroyed one of his thighs. For the rest of his life, he was a cripple: he limped, with his right shoulder crooked up under his chin. Like JFK—whom he admired for, characteristically, "breathtaking nerve"—Macleod lived in constant pain.

Macleod had the task as colonial secretary of organizing independence for Britain's imperial possessions. Harold Macmillan, prime minister at the time, was at heart a liberal. In a brave and historic speech to the apartheid-dominated South African Parliament in 1960, he declared: "The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of nationalist consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it." Having signaled this resolve, Macmillan chose Macleod to implement it. Macmillan admired warriors—he'd been badly wounded on the Somme in 1916—and he saw in Macleod someone not short of courage. "You knew Iain would always charge the guns," he recalled to me in the late '60s.

In two years, Macleod brought independence to Nigeria, British Somaliland, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, the British Cameroons and Kuwait. (Who now even recalls Kuwait was once under British suzerainty?) He cajoled the white settlers of Kenya into the first steps toward African majority rule—freeing from detention Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Mau Mau insurgency. "The whites regard Kenyatta as a monster," Macleod remarked on one of the long train journeys in the mid '60s where we got to know each other over chess games he always won. I had met Macleod when I was a student at Oxford, and we later became friends when I began my career as a journalist. "They may be right. But he's an able monster, and the best hope for Kenya. And that's what matters."

Macleod had an acrid disdain for those who counseled unimpeachable generalities from positions of lofty ignorance. "I told the Archbishop of Canterbury that I would refrain from commenting on canon law if he would do the same about my efforts," he once said.a

Only in Rhodesia did Macleod fail. He persuaded the white-settler government to write a new Constitution giving black Africans seats in the legislature. But he couldn't push them further. Macleod's prescient judgment embodies more good advice for Mitchell: "I told them [the white Rhodesians] that their choice is between change now, or bloodshed and change later. They have chosen bloodshed."

What Macleod grasped, above all, was how much courage it took for local politicians of either side to commit publicly to the notion of peaceful change. Of one African leader he admired, he said: "The question is who will kill him first: the whites, or his own people." Mitchell grasped that in his mediation marathon in Northern Ireland from 1995. The Brits, understandably, never quite shed their view of the Provisional IRA as a gang of murderous thugs. Mitchell saw what risks IRA leaders like Gerry Adams were taking in even talking about peace. So, however hard Mitchell fought in private to align Adams's demands with what the Protestant community in Northern Ireland might be brought to accept, in public he went out of his way to give Adams whatever marks of respect might help to save his life.

In one crucial regard, Macleod differs from Mitchell. Macleod was a gambler. He was an international-class bridge player; and, through his political career, he supported his family with winnings at the card table. (He so ruthlessly fleeced rich but slower adversaries that he was finally banned from playing at White's, then as now one of the poshest London clubs.) During one of our train trips, Macleod explained his card-playing strategy to me: "It's all about the stakes. You have to know what stakes matter to your opponent. Find that, and you can control the game." That, too, is counsel Mitchell might find useful.

© 2009

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