Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (59 page)

The review produced several positive suggestions, the most important of which was that we hire a full time New York-based foundation president, which we are currently in the process of doing. . . .

I am so proud of the work we have been able to do around the world; and the staff that has worked alongside me for these past ten years has played a key role in that success—Doug Band among them.

I couldn’t have accomplished half of what I have in my post presidency without Doug Band. Doug is my counselor and a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, which was created at his suggestion. He tirelessly works to support the expansion of CGI’s activities and my other foundation work around the world. In our first 10 years, Doug’s strategic vision and fundraising made it possible for the foundation to survive and thrive. I hope and believe he will continue to advise me and build CGI for another decade.

Finally, I did not sever my financial relationship with Teneo. I changed it. Because of the invaluable help I continue to receive with my business relationships and speaking engagements, as well as with CGI and other philanthropic activities. . . . I felt that I should be paying them, not the other way around.

Despite Clinton’s kind words, their once close and almost paternal relationship never fully recovered from the MF Global incident. The
distance between them would grow, in fact, as Band was turned into a media scapegoat for the real and, more often, perceived or even imagined shortcomings of the Clinton Foundation. But they still spoke from time to time, at events and on the telephone, especially when the former president felt he needed his former counselor’s advice.

With the conclusion of a year of meaningful anniversaries, there was still one more to consider. As a legal entity, collecting donations and planning the library, the Clinton Foundation had existed well before 2001. But Clinton had needed many months after leaving the White House to recover himself and find a mission worthy of his skills, passion, and intellect—and on the calendar, 2012 would mark ten years since he had promised to bring HIV/AIDS treatment to all who needed it, regardless of their ability to pay.

Since that day at the Barcelona AIDS Conference in 2002, when Denzil Douglas and Nelson Mandela had asked Clinton to take on what seemed an impossible objective, he had achieved great progress toward fulfilling that commitment. When he and Ira Magaziner had launched CHAI, only seventy thousand people in the less developed countries, outside Brazil, were getting the antiretroviral medication that would keep them alive; at the beginning of 2012, more than six million patients in nearly seventy countries were receiving those vital treatments, more than half through agreements negotiated by CHAI.

Clinton would never claim to have accomplished any of that by himself, nor would Magaziner, for that matter. They had continued to work together, sometimes when they were barely on speaking terms, and they had each contributed their own passion and talents—along with hundreds of dedicated doctors, nurses, CHAI and Clinton Foundation staff, volunteers, individual and institutional donors, American politicians, World Health Organization and United Nations officials, government leaders, and bureaucrats in the aid agencies and health ministries of many countries.

Behind their success had been a powerful element of fortune, as well, in the emergence of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, in George W. Bush’s decision to create PEPFAR, and in Bill and Melinda Gates’s determination to apply their wealth to world health—
all of which enabled treatment of millions more people, thanks to the CHAI formula for reducing generic drug costs.

Nor would Clinton ever suggest that their progress had been adequate, in its urgency or breadth. He knew too well that millions had died, and would still die, because the world response to the pandemic had been too slow, too narrow, and too parsimonious. It was still a constant struggle, every year, to obtain adequate funding from the developed world’s governments.

That was why, on so many occasions during the “decade of difference,” he had chastised those who applauded when he talked about CHAI’s work. And yet, they had accomplished something great, and were still working toward something greater. In a five-country study by CHAI analysts that would be released in 2012, the decline of AIDS treatment cost per patient showed that providing care to all 15 million of those infected was indeed affordable. “We now have compelling evidence that universal access to high-quality HIV treatment is achievable, sustainable, and within our means,” said Clinton. “Together, the costing study and price reductions open the door to scaling up and sustaining services for the 7 million people who currently lack access to HIV treatment. Providing treatment will save lives and help prevent the spread of HIV.” Ten years on, he still hoped to fulfill his promise.

Along with the leaders of the other Clinton Foundation initiatives, Magaziner was asked to brief the foundation’s “trustees”—really a group of major donors—on CHAI’s latest endeavors when they arrived for an annual conference in Harlem on February 10, 2012. The series of briefings began at breakfast, after welcoming remarks by Dennis Cheng, a veteran political fundraiser for Hillary’s campaigns.

Bob Harrison, the Clinton Global Initiative’s longtime chief executive, explained how CGI had expanded internally rather than abroad, by sponsoring its first “CGI America” the previous summer in Chicago, which had attracted such luminaries as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, as well as top corporate executives, city mayors, and nonprofit leaders.

Among the one hundred commitments that Harrison said would create 150,000 new jobs was a pledge by the AFL-CIO to allocate $1.4 billion in pension fund financing to retrofit buildings for green energy. He
also reported on CGI University, whose fourth annual conference in San Diego had attracted more than one thousand students from 368 universities and colleges; one out of five had received “scholarship” aid to attend.

Each of the initiative leaders offered a similarly uplifting report. Among those who went deeper was Walker Morris, a former broadcasting executive who headed the Clinton Development Initiative, working with smallholder farmers and other agriculture projects in Rwanda and Malawi for several years.

“These are the people with an income of $1 a day that we hear so much about,” Morris said. The Rwandan project had grown to 9,000 farmers, mostly growing soybeans and cassava; the 21,000 farmers in Malawi had set up two hundred community nurseries to begin a project that would eventually plant millions of trees, with carbon credits as well as wood and fruit to raise their incomes.

When the briefings concluded, Chelsea rose to engage the initiative leaders in a “dialogue” about their programs. “It’s impossible, even for my father, to wrap his mind around all of it,” she said. “How do you learn from and work with each other?” Later she invited the trustees to raise questions of their own. And at the end of the morning, just before lunch, her father took the floor, speaking with great familiarity about all the projects, with numbers and anecdotes from the fields of Africa to the streets of Haiti, as if he were working on every project personally.

That evening, the trustees sat at big round tables with Clinton and Chelsea at Del Posto downtown, where chef Mario Batali would greet them all like family. Dennis Cheng would be at dinner, too, working away at his daunting goal: to raise an endowment for the foundation of $250 million.

The conflict between Magaziner and the Clinton foundation management had not disappeared, but remained in abeyance as Band gradually withdrew. Placing CHAI under a separate board had submerged those disagreements, for the time being, but they would emerge and intensify with Chelsea’s increasing influence.

When Obama’s
campaign aides approached him, Clinton had agreed to a series of 2012 events supporting the president’s reelection, with an emphasis on raising money in the spring and, after the late-summer convention, rallies and speeches to inspire the Democratic base before Election Day.

On a Sunday afternoon in late April, he and Obama appeared together in the spacious yard of Terry McAuliffe’s home in leafy McLean, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. The cocktail reception attracted five hundred guests, each paying $1,000 to hear Obama and Clinton, with a dinner afterward for eighty high rollers who had each paid $20,000, all proceeds split between the president’s reelection committee, the Democratic National Committee (which McAuliffe had once chaired), and Democratic Party committees in the battleground states.

‘’You guys get two presidents for one out of this event, which is a pretty good deal,’’ Obama told the guests. Although at least one news report later portrayed the president as uncomfortable on what was clearly Clinton turf, he eventually loosened up, perhaps while listening to Clinton’s introduction.

Even that early in the campaign season, political observers had noticed that two favorite Republican themes revolved around Bill Clinton, who by then had been out of office for more than a decade. The first was a claim, emphasized by writers in right-wing media and on talk radio, that the Clintons and the Obamas continued to despise each other, even though Hillary served in Obama’s cabinet without rancor, and both she and her husband had worked hard to elect him in 2008. The conservative publisher Regnery had just published a book on Obama by tabloid writer Ed Klein, titled
The Amateur
, which was replete with alleged quotes from Clinton—uniformly nasty and almost certainly fabricated—disparaging the president.

The second theme was less gossipy and more substantial, voiced by Romney himself and other Republican officials. They complained that Obama had betrayed the steady, centrist, fiscally responsible Clinton style of governance—which somehow they had never appreciated when Clinton was president—and embarked on a reckless left-wing spending spree.

Understandably reluctant to associate themselves with the unpopu
lar George W. Bush, the Republicans instead were trying to claim Clinton—and turn his achievements against Obama. Romney attempted this rhetorical maneuver repeatedly, usually quoting the famous 1996 State of the Union address when Clinton had declared “the era of big government is over.” According to the Republican, “President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship.”

To say that Clinton disliked hearing this line, especially from Romney, was a grave understatement. Such right-wing boilerplate irritated him and didn’t reflect his views at all, no matter what trope he had once uttered. He had spoken out strongly against austerity policies both at home and in Europe, and written a book that demanded more and smarter public investment while sharply criticizing the antigovernment ideologues of the Tea Party. At McAuliffe’s house party, he left no doubt of his opinions concerning Obama and the Republicans.

“When you become president, your job is to explain where we are, say where you think we should go, have a strategy to get there, and execute it,” he began. “By that standard, Barack Obama deserves to be re-elected president of the United States. And I’m going to tell you the only reason we’re even meeting here. I mean, this is crazy—he’s got an opponent who basically wants to do what they did before, on steroids”—his audience laughed—“which will get you the same consequences you got before, on steroids.” They kept laughing.

Clinton went on to endorse Obama’s “forward-looking” plans for economic renewal, first outlined in the 2008 campaign, which were derailed by the financial crash “only seven weeks before the election.” Such fundamental collapses, noted Clinton, historically render nations unable to achieve full recovery and job growth for as long as a decade, “so he’s beating the clock, not behind it.”

Obama responded with fervent praise for Clinton’s “remarkable record” in the White House—and in particular, his capacity as “a master communicator” to persuade his fellow Democrats, “at a time when, let’s face it, the Democratic Party was a little bit lost, to refocus not on ideology, not on abstractions . . . but on where people live, what they’re going through day to day.” He couldn’t help ribbing Clinton a little, too, noting that the former president must miss Air Force One. “I’ll miss it too,”
he mused. One of the guests shouted, “But not yet!” Obama smiled. “No, not yet,” he replied, as Clinton clapped.

Late in August, Clinton took his summer trip to Africa, with Chelsea and the usual cohort of donors and associates, including Magaziner, hitting the usual stops in South Africa and Rwanda, with detours to Uganda and Mozambique, all in six days aboard a chartered Boeing 737. Owing to his scheduled speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention on the evening of September 5, when he would nominate Barack Obama for a second presidential term, the
New York Times
had sent political reporter Amy Chozick along with him.

Her story, datelined Rwanda, appeared the day before Clinton’s address. It lightly tweaked his idiosyncrasies while respecting his philanthropic work, and noted Chelsea’s gradual “evolution into a more public and less press-averse figure.” It also mentioned Hillary’s determination to step down from the State Department after Obama’s reelection, when she would join the foundation and “go back to being a professional advocate for women and girls” in her daughter’s words.

At Entebbe Airport in Uganda, Clinton had met and embraced “the other Bill Clinton”—a boy named after him, Bill Clinton Kaligani, whom he had held in his arms as a tiny baby during his first visit to Africa in 1998. A photograph of that scene hung on the wall in Chappaqua. Clinton had promised young Bill Clinton’s mother that he would pay for the child’s education, and the fourteen-year-old boy said he hoped to become a doctor, which delighted his namesake. “I feel good,” Bill Clinton Kaligani told reporters. “He told me he also wanted me to be a doctor, that I should work hard and pass in my studies.”