Lee Hamilton: Washington's bipartisan power broker

Need to get bitter political rivals talking? Need the ear of an ayatollah? He's the go-to guy in crises.

By Jina Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 12, 2007 edition

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Washington - Political crises are supposed to be a thing of the past for Lee Hamilton. Lately – most notably as vice-chair of the 9/11 commission or co-chair of the Iraq Study Group – he has advocated diplomacy. He never expected, after retiring from 34 years in Congress, to make history practicing diplomacy himself.

But last summer, Iran arrested Haleh Esfandiari, who directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which Mr. Hamilton heads. Accused of spying, Ms. Esfandiari was kept under house arrest in her mother's Tehran home, and then taken to prison. A plea for her freedom had to be made, but Hamilton, who has had the cooperation of presidents and all the power of Congress behind him in the past, didn't know whom to call.

"It's a black hole," he says of Iran. "There's just no conversation between the United States and Iran." So he sent letters to the Iranian president, vice-president, and speaker of parliament. When no one answered, he sent one more – to Iran's most powerful man, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Drafted in consultation with religious leaders and translated into Farsi, the letter included a quote from the Koran. "I didn't come up with the quote," he says, "but I told those who did they damn well better be right, because I did not want to screw up the Koran talking to the supreme leader."

And then, he waited. He'd struck out with Iran's three biggest political figures, and the ayatollah, he'd been told, had never responded to an American before.

But after two months, Iran's UN representative called Hamilton to New York to read a letter from the ayatollah. A veteran of mincing language for legislation, Hamilton zeroed in on the most important sentence: "The issue" would be "addressed." The ayatollah was telling him that Esfandiari would be freed. She came home three weeks later.

He wasn't trying to make a name as a back-channel negotiator. But at a time when the US is weighing an attack on Tehran, who but the man known on both sides of the political divide in Washington as a fair-minded listener would think to pick up the phone and give Iran a call?

Hamilton is Washington's middleman, the mild-mannered moderate more interested in solutions than sound bites. People who know him well compare him as a man of character to Washington and Lincoln, or, as a man of pragmatism, to "that other Hamilton" – Alexander, the Founding Father famous for his worry about the dangers of faction.

Lee Hamilton sees it differently. He explains his old job as if he'd been a teacher, or a mayor, or served in any of hundreds of public service roles performed by thousands of people every day. But Hamilton had a job not many covet and even fewer win: He cast the votes – 16,000 of them – that passed the laws that make America run. Which puts him, he concedes, "at the center of things," but not as the benevolent power broker. It was simpler, he says: "As a member of Congress, you're a bit player in a much "larger drama."

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