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PREFACE

This book is a companion to a film I made on the same subject, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, which was funded by the Irish Film Board, the BAI, RTÉ and the DFAT and has already been released. Where quotations have not been cited, the reader may assume that they derive from interviews conducted in the course of making the film.

A common assumption when a book and film on the same subject co-exist is that the book brought the film forth. My experience has been rather the opposite. In an earlier book/film, The Boys of St. Columb’s, I discovered very late in the day that I was writing a book as well making a film. It was during that production that I interviewed John Hume and discovered the breadth of his connections with US politicians. I heard about the Four Horsemen straight from the Fifth Horseman’s mouth and, in time, I grew determined to tell the story of Hume in America both in book and film form.

While elected and re-elected to the parliaments of Northern Ireland, Britain and Europe over a timespan of thirty-five years, this book asserts that John Hume’s role as a political strategist and touchstone of credibility in the eyes of politicians in the United States Congress and in the White House from 1972 to 1998 was the most decisive and far-reaching dimension of his political life. Hume has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Martin Luther King Peace Award, and the International Gandhi Peace Prize – the only person ever to win all three. His distinction is widely, though not uncritically, accepted yet the full significance of what he achieved is not so often fully understood or documented. For instance, Hume’s work in the US has not even received book-length treatment. This study attempts to do that.

Maurice Fitzpatrick, 2017