A Nobel Cause

UTNEY, Vt. — It was a long, exhilarating weekend: turning 47 years old, riding her horse Frank, keeping track of the beaver’s construction on the pond and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Exhaustion was taking its toll.

“I’m Jody,” she announced, “and I’m not getting up.”

But moments later, the first American to win the peace prize since Elie Wiesel in 1986 did arise from the cozy love seat where she had all but

collapsed beneath a rose-colored blanket. Her two young nieces were about to leave after a weekend-long birthday celebration. Emma and Libby, their aunt declared with the insistence that makes her relatives refer to her as Attila the Hun, were going nowhere without a hug.

“They’re my anchor,” Jody Williams said of her large, loving family, so close they all live in the same area code.

On Saturday, the day after the peace prize was awarded to Williams and the group she coordinates, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, most of her kin converged on her sunny, wooden home beside the beaver pond. Since the occasion coincided with Williams’ birthday, they came bearing gifts. Along with the decorated Halloween pumpkin that said “Happy Nobel Prize,” Williams’ favorite was a scrapbook her mother made in honor of her daughter’s unconventional career.

It has pictures of Canada geese on the outside, just like the flocks that fly over Williams’ Putney retreat at the end of a winding dirt road. Inside are newspaper clippings that date from Williams’ early involvement as an antiwar protester at the University of Vermont in the late 1960s.

Williams nearly split a side laughing when she came across one headline from the 1970s, when she was working for a Central American rescue project. It described her as an “Angel of Mercy.”

“Angel of Mercy, ha!” Williams exclaimed, crumpling back on the love seat. “My family calls me the Angel of Mercy from Hell.”

Along with her family members, who have grown tolerant of her dictatorial ways, Williams was besieged this week by members of the media, like a Vermont congressional candidate in a hot campaign year.

Stella, Williams’ white German shepherd, assumed that the news people had all come to play fetch with her.

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Williams loved it. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize was a buzz, an astonishing achievement for the head of an organization that has existed only since 1991 and that has made the Nobel committee’s short list four times since then.

But how could she let her head swell when there were network TV crews outside in her field, throwing rubber rings for her dog?

Williams displayed her own brand of youthful restlessness. In the Brattleboro of the 1950s, her family lived a version of “Leave It to Beaver.” Her father was a county judge. Her mother wore dresses while she vacuumed. She ironed the sheets.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was a kid, but I knew what I didn’t want to be,” Williams said. “I didn’t want to grow up, have 2.2 kids, be married. I knew that girls grew up to be teachers or nurses or secretaries. I didn’t want that either.”

On the other hand, “I certainly didn’t want to be an activist. I didn’t know what one was. I had never heard the word.”

But Williams did grow up to trace an activist trajectory that began with Vietnam, “the pivotal issue of our generation.”

Vermont was hardly a hotbed of political activity, “sort of small and cold,” she remembered. Still, with students from all over the country, she did go to Washington for protests. Days and nights of sit-ins at the White House may have marked the beginning of her sometimes fractious responses to occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Because of his failure to support a United Nations ban on land mines, Williams has been known to refer to the current president as “a weeny.” On Sunday, she was still fuming about the lack of a congratulatory phone call from Bill Clinton.

“I guess it’s a lot easier to call the winners of the Super Bowl and say rah-rah, all that testosterone stuff,” Williams said.

(At a news conference last Friday, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said that President Clinton “has not had the opportunity to personally congratulate Ms. Williams, but he certainly does congratulate her and the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines for the receipt today of the Nobel Prize.”)

*

After college, Williams picked up a master’s degree in Spanish, then headed to Mexico.

“I went from Vermont, this beautiful green state with white church steeples everywhere, and where everyone lives in white houses--or at least that’s the illusion--to a place where, for the first time, I saw extremes of wealth and poverty,” she said.

She was 25, tall, blond and sturdy, with turquoise-blue eyes that still flash equally with anger and amusement. The scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families fell in love with her. Riding his Arabian horses across the countryside, “we would spend hours arguing about the inequities. I would tell him, ‘Excuse me, you sound like something out of the old American South.’ ”

When he proposed, Williams said no and headed to Washington. By now she had gotten the bug to think of the world as a lot bigger than Vermont.

Coming out of the subway in the capital one day, someone handed her a pamphlet comparing U.S. actions in Central America to the war in Vietnam.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my god! The U.S. is doing it again,’ ” Williams said.

While supporting herself as an English teacher at a Washington law school, she began volunteering to work with an El Salvadoran rescue group. “I never looked back,” Williams said.

Soon it became clear that with “this rather radical political work,” it wouldn’t hurt her credibility to “go to an elitist school and get an elitist degree.”

At Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Williams became the resident political troublemaker. After graduation, while her classmates marched off to jobs with the CIA and the World Bank, Williams took a $13,000-a-year job with the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project. Meanwhile, graduate school had left her $18,000 in debt.

“My mother kept saying, ‘You have all these degrees. Why don’t you get a job where you make some money?’ ” Williams recalled. “And I said, ‘Because I don’t care about money, Mother.’ ”

By 1986, Williams was commuting between Washington, Los Angeles and El Salvador, running the Children’s Project of Medical Aid for El Salvador, an effort launched by actor Ed Asner.

In the early 1990s, as peace began to take hold in Central America, she began casting her sights wider.

“I wanted to do something with other issues, more global issues,” she said. Specifically, she decided, “war in general, raising public awareness about war issues was what was important to me.”

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Through her work in El Salvador, Williams was known to many international groups, said Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation President Bobby Muller. He approached Williams in 1991 about heading the fledgling International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.

Williams said she took the job because “I pretty quickly saw that land mines could be a vehicle for discussion of broader issues about war.”

While they have been used since the Civil War, land mines gained notoriety in the aftermath of the Cold War as international relief groups moved into battle zones, says Philip Winslow, author of the recently published book “Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War” (Beacon Press).

More than 100 million mines are believed to be still planted in 70 countries. At least 26,000 people are killed or maimed each year by land mines.

Ninety percent of the casualties occur as the victims go about normal activities, gathering water, working the fields or traveling on rural roads. Children often uncover and play with mines, and workers are often killed or injured while attempting to remove mines.

“Aid agencies found to their absolute horror that their work was impeded by the presence of land mines,” Winslow says. “Aid agencies started to see these terrible civilian casualties, long after the soldiers had taken away their other weapons.”

As a consequence, “the world started to look at this as a very peculiar weapon, the weapon that stayed behind.”

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With so many organizations and individuals involved in the global effort to ban land mines, Muller, for one, said he wishes the Nobel Prize committee had not singled out Williams, or even the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines that he founded.

“In 1991, when we started this group, everybody was talking about land mines,” Muller said. “What we did was such a tiny step. I think it’s, frankly, almost embarrassing that this broad international effort gets reduced down like this.”

The movement to ban land mines “represents an extraordinary amount of work by an extraordinary number of people,” agreed Susannah Sirkin of Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, which in 1990 issued a report documenting land mine devastation in Cambodia.

Still, Sirkin says, “with so many disparate groups, there has to be a linchpin--and Jody has been the linchpin among linchpins, the nerve center. She’s an extraordinarily determined individual.”

Indeed she is. Williams continues to pound away at President Clinton for backing off on U.S. support of the international treaty banning land mines, scheduled to be signed in Ottawa in December.

Among major nations, only the United States and China have not agreed to sign the document.

The White House and presidential defense advisors remain unmoved, Williams conceded.

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“This weapon has been used since the U.S. Civil War and the Crimean War. And so, all of a sudden, the tree-huggers from Vermont are going to tell the White House and the Pentagon what to do? I think that’s the issue,” she says.

Where does Williams’ resoluteness come from? Once again, she turns to her family.

“Where does it come from?” she repeats. “I have a deaf, schizophrenic brother. I couldn’t save him, so I decided to save the world instead.” She pauses, momentarily taken aback by what she has just said about her brother Steven, 50. “I’ve never quite put it like that,” she says.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded Dec. 10 at a ceremony in Oslo. After that, Williams says, again showing the giddy effects of exhaustion, “I’m going to sell doughnuts.”

No, wait. That’s not really what she meant. What she meant is that she’s going to keep on pushing for grass-roots world diplomacy, for real cooperation between government and civilian organizations.

“I’m going to continue this work,” Williams said. “We have to bring this treaty into force. If those of us who have been most involved declared victory, I’d worry about our commitment.”