Since listening and patience are cautious pursuits, it may seem paradoxical that another important lesson of my life is a willingness to take risks. At several turning points in my life I took chances that seemed imprudent at the time. These included leaving the security of a federal judgeship for a temporary appointment to the Senate and declining an appointment to the Supreme Court as I was leaving the Senate for an uncertain future. Those were large and obvious risks. To leave the security of being a federal judge, a job I truly loved, for the insecurity of a Senate seat, especially for just a short time, was difficult. So was the decision to turn down an appointment to the Supreme Court. But I was confident of my ability to properly evaluate the risks and rewards, to rationally prepare a personal cost-benefit analysis. Most of all, whatever my decision, I was reasonably well-assured of being able to continue to successfully engage in important and productive work. In neither case was money a factor. My experience prior to each decision had bred in me confidence that I could earn enough to take care of my family’s needs.
Another risk that, in the context in which it occurred, was significant for me took place much earlier. Although to most people it will seem trivial, not risky at all, my decision to attend Bowdoin College seemed to me at the time to be very risky. By the time I accepted appointment to the Senate I was a mature man who already had been reasonably successful in life; that was even more true when I declined President Clinton’s offer to appoint me to the Supreme Court. But in the spring of my senior year in high school, I was a confused, insecure, sixteen-year-old boy who had not accomplished anything. Most of my school classmates were older and bigger and seemed more mature and wise. My lack of athletic ability, in comparison to my brothers, had generated in me a massive inferiority complex, and the trauma of my father’s unemployment had a devastating effect on him and on me. Although it was only a year it seemed like a lifetime. My emotions swung back and forth from love and sympathy to shame and hostility; he wallowed in despair and I reacted badly. I loved him, but I was ashamed of him; that made me ashamed of myself. In that situation I should have seen Bowdoin as a chance to escape, especially since there was no obvious alternative. But in my confusion I saw it as just the opposite: as a challenge I was unprepared to meet. I was overwhelmed by fear that I would fail.
When I met with Bill Shaw, the director of admissions at Bowdoin, I told him that my family didn’t have any money for my education, but I was too ashamed to tell him that my father was unemployed. On my return to Waterville I told my guidance counselor at Waterville High School about my trip to Bowdoin. She encouraged me to talk with the principal and took me to his office. To my surprise, he urged me to forget about Bowdoin. You won’t fit in, he told me, the boys there are from different backgrounds. He wasn’t more explicit. He didn’t have to be. I knew little about Bowdoin, but I understood his message: given my background I wasn’t good enough for the place. I was nervous when I entered his office; when I left I was shaking with anxiety, inadequacy, and anger.
That weekend at home was long and painful, the peak of my inner turmoil and the nadir of my relationship with my father. I was angry at him, at the principal, at myself. I also was consumed with self-pity: I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t be anything. I had no one to talk to. My brothers were away at college. I felt that neither my sister nor my mother would understand what I was going through. So I spent the weekend alone with my thoughts. I cried often on the inside, occasionally on the outside. Gradually the anger dissipated, the self-pity lifted, the tears dried up, and I began to see that I had a chance to change my life. I would show them! “Them” included the principal, the high school basketball coach, my brothers, and my father. He wanted me to go to Bowdoin, so it is a measure of my confusion that somehow I felt that by going I would be showing him—what? When I received the formal letter of acceptance from Bill Shaw I didn’t tell anyone. I simply sent back a short thank-you letter. I’ve made a lot of consequential decisions since, involving people’s liberties and lives. Although many were far more difficult and consequential, none seemed it at the time. That I made it through Bowdoin was, to me, at that stage in my life, a huge accomplishment. It gave me the confidence to take the next important steps in my life.
I also took a risk when I accepted the invitation of the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom to serve as chairman of the Northern Ireland Peace Negotiations. The conflict was ancient, fueled by religious and other differences, and marked by extraordinary brutality. Previous negotiations had failed; there was no reason to believe that these would be any different. But I felt that I could somehow help them find a way through their many differences. I knew there was a substantial risk to my life and personal safety, but I managed to submerge my doubts and fears by concentrating on my work. By far the greatest risk I took in the negotiations themselves was when I established the firm and final deadline of midnight on April 10, 1998. That was regarded by some as a desperate and dangerous move. Some British civil servants opposed the deadline; they had been engaged in trying to manage the Troubles for many years, and they feared that an abrupt end to the process would trigger an immediate return to violence more savage than ever. I shared their concern. But, I argued, without a final deadline the process was ultimately more likely to fail, producing the very result they feared. Just a few months earlier, on December 27, Billy Wright, a prominent Unionist paramilitary leader, had been murdered while in prison by a group of Republican prisoners. That touched off a brutal round of tit-for-tat reprisals. In the early months of 1998 violence rose, threatening the negotiations. Two parties were expelled from the talks because of their relationships with paramilitaries, although they later returned. Two other parties had earlier walked out, never to return. The process was now in danger of a final collapse. To avoid that, I believed a dramatic change was necessary, so I proposed an early, unbreakable deadline, just prior to which there would be an intense, final two-week push for an agreement.
The British and Irish governments accepted my assessment and my recommendation. But I was deeply worried, all the more so because I respected the civil servants who urged rejection of my proposal. The prospect of renewed conflict, which virtually everyone assumed would be more violent and brutal than what had occurred before, hung heavy on me for the last few months. Although I tried to project an air of calm confidence, inside I was anxious and fearful. It was close, but it ended well, to my enormous relief. I had taken a huge risk and it paid off.
As a young man I wanted to teach history at Bowdoin, but ended up in military intelligence in Berlin. I wanted to practice law in Maine and did for a while, but ended up in politics in Washington. I wanted to be a federal judge and was for a short time, but ended up in the U.S. Senate. When I left the Senate I wanted a private life, but ended up in public positions in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Not in my wildest early dreams did I imagine that I would ever write a book, but at the age of fifty-four I wrote one; this is my fifth.
A central lesson of my experience (and that of many others) is that life is not lived in a straight and predictable line. It zigs and zags, goes sideways and backward, and lurches forward suddenly and in ways that cannot be foreseen. Around every corner there is risk. A willingness to confront it, at times to go against the odds, is an important part of success in life.