Among the many kinds of political animals found in Washington, few are as widely admired as the Gray Man. Quietly competent, somewhat bland, respected by Republicans and Democrats alike, and most comfortable working tactfully behind the scenes, the Gray Man is a dying breed in today's American politics. He is often spotted in a beige trench coat or gold-buttoned navy blazer in his native environment, the Senate committee hearing or the long seminar at Brookings. Unlike his flashier cousins, such as the Red-Blooded Partisan or the Silver-Tongued Orator, the Gray Man eschews the media spotlight -- in fact, he speaks in public as little as possible. In a Fox News era, he is unapologetically a C-SPAN kind of guy, to the eternal gratitude of those in politics who are counting on him to get the real work done while others blather endlessly.
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Modern-day specimens of the breed include Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Sen. Richard Lugar, but the unquestioned Alpha is George Mitchell. Since retiring as the Democratic Senate majority leader in 1995, Mitchell, 76, has patiently worked to resolve numerous seemingly intractable conflicts, including Northern Ireland and the steroids scandal in baseball, winning plaudits for his tenacity and evenhandedness while remaining curiously anonymous to most of the American public. Now, as President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, Mitchell finds himself back in the spotlight -- or as close as he ever gets to it, anyway -- ahead of this week's United Nations General Assembly session, which could serve as a venue for relaunching the troubled peace process. Obama's plan to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York is a start. The looming question, given the particularly difficult circumstances that prevail in the Middle East, is whether even this most distinguished of Gray Men is capable of brokering a broader breakthrough.
A former Army intelligence officer and federal judge of Lebanese descent, Mitchell is fond of telling people, "There's no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended." Indeed, he seems to take genuine pleasure in addressing the planet's most arcane, contentious debates. Prior to being drafted by Obama in January, he was participating in a bipartisan panel of elder statesmen including his old Republican Senate colleague, Bob Dole. When the panel presented its recommendations on U.S. health-care reform this summer, Dole joked, "George left early because he thought solving Mideast peace would be easier." The audience laughed, but those who knew Mitchell wondered if he had, in fact, departed in search of a bigger challenge -- the holy grail of negotiators.
During his numerous trips to the Middle East this year, Mitchell has largely employed the same techniques as he did early on in Northern Ireland. There, he began by meeting individual parties in the conflict and, essentially, letting them vent for as long as they liked. In his memoir Making Peace, Mitchell recalled his first encounter with the Rev. Ian Paisley, in which the unionist minister, evidently displeased by the appointment of an envoy with some Irish roots, refused to even sit down. Paisley limited his responses to Mitchell's polite queries to a loud, grating: "No. No. No. No."
"I was accustomed to rough-and-tumble political debate," Mitchell later wrote, "but I'd never experienced anything like this." By most accounts, his initial closed-door meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and others have been much more polite, but only incrementally more productive.
Mitchell listened attentively while in Belfast, betraying no sign of fatigue or frustration, allowing his patrons to exhaust themselves with invective until they were finally ready to be led -- by the nose, if necessary -- toward compromise. Among Protestants and Catholics alike, Mitchell slowly built personal relationships with the same attention to detail that made him such an effective majority leader in the Senate, where getting bills passed means not only understanding the political stakes for all the major players, but also the seemingly tiny details that can impact the timing of a vote, such as who has to be back in their home district for their kid's soccer game.
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