A Farewellto Arms? : His smile is charming, his message welcome: If South Africa can work for peace, so can Northern Ireland. But is Gerry Adams the right messenger?

Britons know Gerry Adams and his cease fire.

They say he’s a fascist, an Irish executioner with a peace initiative that’s just another cheap ploy. Because they have seen his shoulder beneath the caskets of dead terrorists and for 25 years have mourned hundreds bombed by Gerry’s kids in Northern Ireland’s pubs and chip shops, England’s hotels and offices. Even Harrod’s, one bloody Christmas.

This month, Americans celebrated their Gerry Adams.

Editorials and cheering audiences called him the great, courageous hope for peace in Ireland.

They back-slapped this tall, bearded, rough-cut nationalist whose past is only alleged and thus may be ignored. In glittering hotels and an Irish pub they raised champagne and beer glasses to Adams as a shrewd, dogged freedom fighter no different from Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat, therefore just as deserving of Washington’s clout in restoring freedom and democracy to his homeland.

Friday, in an empty banquet room at the Century Plaza Hotel, over scrambled eggs (“Ah!”) and hash browns (“What are these?”) Gerry Adams, controversial president of Sinn Fein, political megaphone for the Irish Republican Army, spoke of Gerry Adams.

His portrayal as a thug, he says, is a caricature drawn by Britain’s “right wing and the reactionary press . . . not (by) the very democratic, progressive, liberal element in British politics which recognizes the need to end British rule in Ireland.”

But there have been published reports of Adams the teen-age soldier who in 1979 became head of the IRA’s Army Council. That was the year Lord Mountbatten died when a terrorist bomb exploded his yacht in Sligo.

As was his father, so Adams has been shot by Protestant guerrillas and imprisoned for suspected terrorist involvement. Grenades have been thrown at his West Belfast home--all of which seems to go beyond reasonable dissent within the career of an ordinary politician.

Adams does not bristle at the suggestions.

“I have consistently, and on the record, denied and disputed that (terrorist allegations),” he says. “And I was, in the High Court in Belfast, acquitted of such a charge.”

Adams says he’s just a political activist, his protests rooted years ago against apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War. That, he says, makes a man do what a chosen servant of a struggle has to do “through a sense of duty . . . probably, if I think hard enough, I have to confess that I never envisaged myself performing this type of role.”

No matter trans-Atlantic polarization and colorization--and British officials advised Washington to refuse Adams a visa to visit the U.S., citing its own terrorist concerns that still bar Adams from entering Britain--the richness of Adams’ current role is undeniable.

On Aug. 31, he stunned all sides and splinter groups of the Northern Ireland conflict--known traditionally and coyly as “the troubles”--by announcing the IRA’s “complete cessation of military operations.”

Adams was a co-engineer of the cease fire. It followed months of hidden negotiations with Britain, with Protestant leaders in the six counties comprising Northern Ireland, and with Albert Reynolds, prime minister of the 26 counties forming the Republic of Ireland to the south.

The IRA olive branch was extended 10 months after Reynolds and British Prime Minister John Major agreed that talks on the future of Ireland, north and south, to maintain separate countries or reunite a nation, could be held with the Sinn Fein.

But talks only would commence after 90 days of unbroken IRA cease fire.

“The current situation has been described, I think very graphically, as space in which hope can grow,” Adams says. He is exhausted by jet lag, breakfast-to-midnight appearances, a permanent preoccupation with personal security, and now only coffee and passion for the cause is keeping him vertical. “I think my role is to widen that space, and deepen that space, and allow that very delicate seed to flourish.”

And for five weeks--despite the provocation of recent bomb and bullet attacks and killings by Loyalist guerrillas--the cease fire has held and the peace seed is sprouting.

Yet there remain general concerns about IRA sincerity. Does “complete cessation” mean “permanent cease fire?” If Loyalist paramilitary groups launch major offensives, how long can Republican weapons remain silent?

And after 25 years of fighting, after 3,160 killed and 36,000 wounded on both sides, with IRA guerrillas undefeated and 15,000 British troops holding their ground, why should anybody quit now?

“I think that everyone wants peace and I don’t think I have any monopoly on that,” Adams says. “Peace is in fact, a political thing. Peace comes when you have certain conditions which nurture, which sustain . . . and (when there is) absence of the cause of the conflict, the process of justice and equality.”

Peace has also been known to break out when terrorists grow weary of no-win civil wars. Or when new generations look back in frustration at the sins of their fathers, and when financial and political support wane.

And there are rumors that the IRA is underfinanced and divided, that this paramilitary minority within a civilian minority no longer represents the majority wants of even Catholics in Northern Ireland. So rather than ending British control of Northern Ireland, the popular sentiment could be for evicting the IRA.

“To even suggest that any of that is part of the situation would be to make a grave mistake,” Adams cautions. “I think you have an undefeated IRA, 25 years old, competent, undivided and undefeated.

“The stalemate that you describe is not a valid description of the situation. I said over 15 years ago there could be no military victory, by either side. And a British minister echoed that some eight or nine years later when he said the IRA could not be militarily defeated.

“So if there’s no military victory, no military solution, then we need a political fix.”

That fix, Adams emphasized at every school, every cocktail party on his diagonal whistle-stop from Boston and New York, to San Francisco and Los Angeles, is the Sinn Fein (Gaelic for “By Ourselves”) platform--British troops out of Ireland, unification of North and South, and a new constitution with a bill of rights.

“It must be a new Ireland, an agreed Ireland, and the people have to decide this Irish Republic,” is Adams’ way. “And based on the 1916 proclamation (by a Marxist-Socialist group opposing British rule) which upholds the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, the right of our children to education, to the right of people to economic freedom.”

Adams denies that Sinn Fein’s new Ireland would be organized along Leninist-Marxist lines but insists “we need a transformation and I think the Dublin government acknowledges that.”

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Not to be aware of the shadows of Adams’ past is to be charmed by the man. He is articulate, shrewd, and as polished as another famed Irish politician, John F. Kennedy.

Although his one-liners are apt to repeat, although the same quotations and word-plays appear in most presentations, Adams massages his speeches to the interests of each group.

To Harvard students he noted the contribution of business to the economic stability of all government and nations. At Berkeley it was the value of youthful, virile protest. To Show Coalition, an organization of entertainment industry activists, he appealed for an end to movie portrayals of Irish men who “never get quite sober” and Irish women as “always very beautiful.”

And as have politicians before in their crusades for glamorous support, as has President Clinton, Adams held Hollywood’s hand.

Shortly after Thursday’s arrival at LAX--there was California champagne and Guinness in the back of a limousine to celebrate Adams’ 46th birthday--the Sinn Fein group drove to a home off Mulholland Drive for drinks among and with the stars.

Oliver Stone--bearing no offers to make a movie on the life and times of Gerry Adams--Sean Penn and Martin Sheen were there.

Adams has a sly sense of humor. When a page for “Gerry Adams” echoed through LAX, he said: “It’s nice to be traveling under an alias.”

Adams had great patience for a television reporter who asked: “What is Sinn Fein? Is that the name of someone?”

He expresses little patience for the British and that has created a major mischief in his life. He is married, a father, but draws no salary from Sinn Fein. Technically Adams is unemployed, last known job tending bar at the Duke of York pub in Belfast.

So, except when traveling on expenses, he receives $110 a week in unemployment benefits from the British government.

Yet Adams is diplomatic enough to include “my Protestant brothers and sisters” in the proposed new Ireland.

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He shows great cultural polish by starting and ending each speech with Gaelic greetings and farewell.

American audiences rose to his canny reminders that Irish-America has given this country a dozen presidents, that the IRA struggle in Northern Ireland is a counterpart of the American Revolution with the identical enemy, and that the first person to be processed at Ellis Island was Irish.

And in asking for America’s support and mediation--which, Adams noted, makes every American a contributor to the freedom of Ireland--he is expecting no less than what was earned by Mandela and Arafat. For if Jews and Arabs can find agreement in the Middle East, if there is a new coexistence among black and whites in South Africa, why not a union of Protestants and Catholics, Loyalists and Republicans, in a new and united Ireland?

Of course it is going to succeed.

“We have built a very solid foundation with well over 25 years involved in the struggle and I don’t envisage failure,” he insists. “The foundation . . . has been done in a step-by-step way, sometimes too slowly, sometimes intolerably slow.

“But nonetheless . . . had I come here five years ago and told you that Mandela, who was then in prison, a convicted political prisoner, that he would be president of a new, democratic South Africa, you could have been excused for being skeptical.”

Now, he says, the British government needs to find a counterpart to former President F.W. de Klerk, whose administration and understanding produced that new South Africa.

“I think that wherever he or she is, this is their moment, this is that time in our history where someone can grasp it and move it forward, and then we can all build upon the momentum and the foundation,” Adams says. “Where there’s a political will, and especially where there’s a goodwill, no conflict is intractable.”

Then when, this settlement? Adams leaves plenty of space.

“Certainly . . . as we approach the millennium,” he says.

Adams believes the best visions go forward and never look back. He is confident that the world has seen the last tears of Northern Ireland’s crying game. And inherent to Republican dreams, he says, are the words of Bobby Sands, an IRA gunman who starved to death in 1981 after a prison hunger strike.

“I stand on the threshold of a new, trembling world,” wrote Sands. “Let our triumph be the freedom of all, let our revenge be the laughter of our children.”