This was the heritage which, in British eyes, lent Trimble such significance in America. For a long time, the US Administration had been influenced by the notion that the Unionists were mere puppets of the British and of the Tories in particular. This idea had been assiduously fostered by Sinn Fein via Irish Americans. Patrick Mayhew, with his patrician manner, was not the best man to correct this impression with American audiences and his visits became more infrequent. Trimble’s manner was obviously not patrician. His accent alone was proof that there were intelligent and reasonable residents of the geographic entity of the island of Ireland who wished for no part in an all-Ireland state. Moreover, the British Government understood that the Unionist population were fed up with the ceaseless reminders of Adams’ film-star status in America. If it continued unchecked, they could easily conclude that the ‘peace process’ was irremediably stacked against them. They would then become even less willing to cut some deal with Irish nationalism. The British also understood very well that many Unionists have always had a craving for respectability, perhaps more than some of their critics and admirers have supposed. This included the UUP leader. ‘Trimble went to America a huge amount,’ recalls Sir John Wheeler. ‘It played to his ego. He loved his Washington jaunts and was made much of. Suddenly, here was the man from Vanguard who walked with kings and princes.’39
William Crowe, the American ambassador in London, and Blair Hall, the Political Counsellor at the embassy, also recognised that a one-sided process would be inherently unstable. But initially, it looked as if these overtures might go disastrously wrong. Anthony Lake, the National Security Adviser, came to London in October 1995 and met Trimble in the sunlit corner room of the US ambassador’s residence in Winfield House, overlooking Regent’s Park. There was an exchange of pleasantries which well matched the Gainsborough pictures and the flowered armchairs. It all passed smoothly until Lake urged Trimble to ‘exert leadership’ over prior decommissioning and ventured that his community would understand. ‘Don’t tell me what my community thinks!’ exploded Trimble. Lake appeared shocked, and it confirmed the Americans’ fears of Trimble’s volatility (Lake and Soderberg also expressed scepticism about Trimble’s elective assembly).40 It is possible that Trimble wanted to show that he was no pushover, and that he chose deliberately to foster what Richard Nixon called the ‘madman theory’: that he needed to be handled with great care lest he go off the rails. Trimble denies this to be the case, though he is calculating enough in other ways.41 It may be that he behaved thus out of genuine annoyance at a foolish suggestion which showed no comprehension of the balance of forces within Unionism.
The British were determined to persist with the UUP’s ‘outreach’: Trimble recalls that John Major had told him that if he pressed for a meeting with the President, the request would be favourably received. It was accordingly arranged that the President would make a ‘drop-by’, ‘spontaneous’ meeting whilst Trimble was in Vice President Al Gore’s suite. This was the form employed when the President did not yet want to bestow a full Oval Office tête-à-tête, but from a Unionist perspective it was a significant step to parity of treatment with John Hume.42 Sir John Kerr says that there was huge interest in Trimble when he came to town. Attention particularly focused upon internal relations within the UUP, notably between Trimble and Taylor. Nobody, says Kerr, had studied Trimble in advance and they did not know what to make of him (such uncertainty did not affect the hardline republican Irish American Unity Conference, which took out an advert in the New York Times on 30 October 1995 entitled ‘A WELCOME TO DAVID TRIMBLE, THE “DAVID DUKE” OF IRELAND’ and likening the Orange Order to the KKK. The next day, David Duke expressed anger that his name had been blackened by such unfavourable comparisons!). Following a breakfast meeting with Edward Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts singled Trimble out as the most important political leader in the Province and said that ‘all of us here in Congress know that Mr Trimble is going to play a vital role in settling the future of Northern Ireland. Whatever is worked out will be worked out for the future of Northern Ireland by the people of Northern Ireland.’43 This belied the rancorous nature of Trimble’s meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs, including Congressman Peter King, a Long Island Republican and an energetic supporter of Sinn Fein. All relentlessly peppered him with hostile questions, and Trimble responded in kind. At the White House, Trimble met with Gore for half an hour and they were joined by Clinton for ten minutes.44 Trimble again pressed his idea of an elected assembly, but little of substance was achieved. One thing would impress him above all others: he presented Clinton with copies of two Ulster Society publications: Ronnie Hanna’s book on American servicemen in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, Pardon Me Boy and Gordon Lucy’s lively study of the Ulster Covenant – which he brought into the White House in a grotty plastic bag. When the President made his first visit to Belfast some weeks later, he had read both from cover to cover, and was able to put the British Prime Minister right on points of fact. The White House noticed one other thing about Trimble during these early visits: according to Anthony Lake, the UUP leader would glance across to John Taylor to see his deputy’s reactions.45
In truth, Trimble made a mixed impression on those he met. He seemed to many of his interlocutors to be very prickly, and very much on the look-out for insults and slights. Partly, it was inexperience: he handled the US media in a confrontational manner more appropriate to a rowdy Unionist gathering back at home. But, says Anne Smith, it was also because many of his interlocutors were either hostile – as was the case with the Ad Hoc Committee – or else uninformed. As she observes, the most common question which Trimble had for years to endure on his visits to America was ‘why won’t you shake hands with Gerry Adams?’ They always, says Smith, wanted Trimble to make the first move, because that is the way that reasonable men settle their disputes in the United States. It would take some years for Americans to understand the reasons for Trimble’s reluctance – namely, the reaction of ordinary Unionists to the idea of such a meeting.46 That was because such understanding of the Unionist case as was achieved was entirely functional: no Unionists, no process. But there was no year-round constituency created with a positive understanding of the merits of Unionism. There was, eight years later, no pro-Unionist bloc to counteract the influence of the Irish-American lobby.
In some ways this was understandable. After all, when it came to the affairs of Ireland, the Scotch-Irish Protestant immigrants of the 17th and 18th centuries were more thoroughly assimilated than the Gaelic Catholic Irish of the 19th and 20th centuries. That said, many small peripheral peoples without limitless resources such as the Chechens had set up Washington offices on a shoestring basis and had successfully mobilised far more support for their cause. Indeed, in the 1980s, even a figure such as the military dictator of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt (who was pushing a rather worse case than the Unionists of Ulster) had managed to garner some support amongst his fellow evangelicals in the United States for his regime. Why then did the UUP not succeed in making in-roads? Anne Smith states there was simply no time to cultivate the ‘Bible Belt’, partly because of what she claims to be the size and fragmentation of the community.47 But Unionists did little better with secular conservatives ‘inside the