If twice begins a trend, put down embattled Maine political icon George J. Mitchell under the definition.
Long respected not only in Maine but on the international stage, Mitchell lost a second successive major notch of prestige Monday.
Queen’s University Belfast cut ties with Mitchell over his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the second such institution to do so in just days.
The university has stripped Mitchell’s name from the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and, in the ultimate humiliation, removed the bust commemorating him from its campus.
The college said it was no longer appropriate to remain associated with the key figure in the Northern Ireland peace deal.
School officials said their decision followed new information on Mitchell released in the latest trove of millions of files linked to late convicted sex offender Epstein by the U.S. Justice Department last Friday.
“While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, the university has concluded that, in light of this material, and mindful of the experiences of victims and survivors, it is no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name,” the university said.
BBC News cited a representative for 92-year-old Mitchell as saying he had never met, spoken to or had any contact with Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre or any underage women.
The British broadcaster said the statement was issued before the university’s move.
Mitchell chaired the 1998 talks between Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland and pro-British unionists, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement that largely ended 30 years of sectarian conflict in which 3,600 died.
Separately, the non-profit U.S.-Ireland Alliance board decided Friday its George J. Mitchell Scholarship should no longer bear his name, also citing the newly released Epstein files.
The program sends American students to Ireland and Northern Ireland for a year of graduate study.
Born in Waterville, Maine, Mitchell for 50 years has enjoyed the highest of respect across the state’s political variants.
For a guy who came from virtual poverty and illiteracy he excelled in spite of himself.
His father was an orphaned Irish immigrant who worked as a janitor and his mother a textile worker who had immigrated from Lebanon.
Mitchell was an altar boy who throughout junior high school and high school worked as a janitor.
He got into Bowdoin College, a top-notch school considered as elite as the Harvards and Browns in academic circles.
The broad, dimple-cheeked smile and ever-ready sense of humor played well on a campus of otherwise serious, sober academicians.
Amid boisterous frat-boy hijinks came a humorous nickname that wouldn’t wear well in today’s politically-correct environment.
Mitchell’s extracurricular sideshow was a cover for his focus on the books – he went on to get a law degree from another of the nation’s highest-ranking schools, Georgetown University.
Though he was later shaken to the core by an unexpected 1974 shocking gubernatorial loss he overcame defeat, eventually becoming a federal judge.
But he wasn’t made to sit in a staid courtroom the rest of his life.
Mitchell resigned the guarantee of a lifetime job on the bench to except a temporary appointment to a U.S. Senate seat vacated by Edmund Muskie, who had left the Senate to become secretary of state.
He ran for election in his own right two years later, upsetting David Emery, a multi-term Republican congressman who had been expected to walk away with a win.
So from 1974, when Mitchell lost a race he was supposed to win, he emerged from 1982 with a win that was expected to be a defeat.
The victory high looked awkwardly muted when, the morning after his greatest political triumph to date, he sidestepped a reporter’s seemingly easy-to-answer question – would his family be moving with him from Maine to Washington.
An unknown Mitchell family crisis was apparently brewing behind the scenes of the famous public smile.
The highlight of his political life arguably became the nadir of his personal life five years later, in 1987, when he announced that he was leaving his wife and their daughter.
Mitchell learned his lessons well in the upper chamber, becoming a powerful United States senator who then rose to the rank of majority leader.
He remarried a much-younger sports consultant in 1994, going on to have two more children.
Mitchell was the most charming and savviest of politicians anywhere, perhaps most notably as Senate leader convincing President George H.W. Bush to approve a national spending plan that some argue later prevented Bush from winning a second term as president.
The negotiator par excellence, Democrat Mitchell persuaded Republican Bush to abandon his famous “no new taxes” pledge, a move that alienated Bush from the conservative flank of his party angry that he had abandoned his campaign pledge.
Bush agreed to a tax increase as part of the 1990 budget deficit reduction package that flew in the face of his 1988 “read my lips” promise.
Mitchell has had few political peers as polished and persuasive.
