Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (10 page)

“One of the things I am interested in,” he later told reporters, “is coming up with a model which will be helpful in developing other villages in India or Africa or Latin America, that may not have had natural disasters, but would like to build a different future.”

During the afternoon he toured Akshardham, a ten-story, hand-built, pink sandstone edifice in Gandhinagar that is one of Gujarat’s largest Hindu temples. He was received with a big garland of crimson and white flowers hung around his neck, as women devotees chanted a peace prayer. Standing before the great temple he looked up, marveling that such an enormous building still stood perfectly intact, without any support from steel or concrete. “The earthquake has not damaged Akshardham?” he asked Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the guru of the modern Swaminarayan sect, which emphasizes service and tolerance. It had not. The swami walked him through the complex, trailed by monks swathed in orange robes, and Secret Service agents, perspiring heavily in polo shirts.

Despite the torrid air, again over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Clinton noticed that he felt surprisingly calm and comfortable. Scheduled for fifteen minutes, the tour stretched into an hour as the swami and the former president ventured beyond the temple into a garden, filled with statues and carved stones, including a life-sized likeness of Gandhi. Then Clinton’s glance fell upon an extraordinary artwork—the figure of
a man, sculpting himself with a hammer and chisel from a giant block of yellow stone. “What an amazing, incredible idea,” he blurted. “So powerful!” The swami smiled.

The sculptor’s metaphor of self-realization intrigued Clinton, who stood and gazed at it for minutes. At last, someone reminded him that they had fallen behind schedule—and that some of his companions were almost fainting in the heat. Before he left, Pramukh Swami introduced him to temple volunteers working in the earthquake relief effort—and to a Muslim man who told Clinton that although there was not a single Hindu family in his village, Akshardham had sent workers, construction materials, and food to aid the people there every day since the quake.

In the visitor’s book, he wrote:

April 5, 2001

Thank you—

for welcoming me.

for making me feel at home.

for reaching out to all God’s children.

for helping the people hurt by the earthquake.

for working for peace and reconciliation.

—Bill Clinton

The seven days in India were sometimes exhilarating, sometimes sad, and often grueling for Clinton, who felt like he was spending more days on the road than at home—and was booked on excursions to every continent on earth before the year’s end. In mid-April, he and Hillary took six days off for spring vacation in Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic resort owned by a group that included their friend, fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. Within days of returning to New York, however, he was leaving again on a seventeen-hour flight to South Africa.

No matter how tired Clinton felt, Nelson Mandela’s request that he deliver a talk at a “civil society forum” in Johannesburg—free of any honorarium—was an undertaking he would have been most reluctant to refuse. The eighty-two-year-old Mandela had stepped down from his country’s presidency just a year before Clinton. Both were now
members of the fraternity of former heads of state. But their connection went much deeper.

Over the years, the friendship between the two leaders had grown increasingly intimate, like that between a loving father and son; it was the kind of relationship that both men had struggled with in their own families, years earlier. Having lost his biological father three months before he was born, Clinton had fought repeatedly with the abusive, alcoholic stepfather whose surname he carried. Some friends thought he had looked for a caring dad ever since. The stoical Mandela, imprisoned for decades after two wives had given him six children, knew all too well that he had missed the chance to serve as a proper father to them. And some of Mandela’s children later voiced their resentment over his absence.

None of those troubles shadowed the affinity that they felt toward each other, cemented forever after Mandela spoke out publicly for Clinton when impeachment loomed. On September 21, 1998, the same day that American television broadcast Clinton’s four painful hours of grand jury testimony on the Lewinsky matter, he addressed the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. At the end, the gathered heads of state rose as one, clapping for a memorable six minutes. All agreed they were applauding the man more than his speech about fighting terrorism.

The following day, Mandela flew down to Washington for a White House reception in his honor hosted by the Clintons, with African American ministers, civil rights activists, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus present. When his turn came to speak, Mandela was blunt.

“We are aware of the national debate that is taking place in this country about the President, and it is not our business to interfere in this matter,” he began, then proceeded to do precisely that.

“But we do wish to say that President Clinton is a friend of South Africa and Africa, and I believe the friend of the great mass of black people, and the minorities, and the disabled of the United States. . . .

“We have often said that our morality does not allow us to desert our friends. And we have got to say tonight, we are thinking of you in this difficult and uncertain time in your life. . . .

“I repeat that I will not interfere in the domestic affairs of this country.”
His face broke into that incomparable smile as his audience laughed. “But you should have seen the way he was received by the General Assembly of the United Nations,” as if they had missed it. “The applause was spontaneous and overwhelming. All of us rose to our feet when he came in. It was the same after he delivered his speech. That sent a strong message as to what the world thinks on this matter. . . . If you judge from the reaction of the General Assembly, the United States is completely isolated on this question.” News outlets across the world quickly reported Mandela’s provocative remarks, with several stories noting that Clinton appeared to wipe away a tear as he listened.

In Johannesburg three years later, again standing beside Mandela, Clinton’s mission involved more than delivering a speech on civil society. Among those joining him on the trip was Eli Segal, the longtime Democratic activist and successful corporate entrepreneur who had served as chief of staff of Clinton’s 1992 campaign—and who had later organized and directed AmeriCorps, Clinton’s signature domestic Peace Corps program. The former president still considered its creation to be among his proudest achievements.

At Mandela’s urging, Clinton had brought over Segal and a group of twenty enthusiastic alumni from AmeriCorps and its largest affiliate, City Year, which pays young men and women a small stipend to live and work in urban and rural communities on every variety of local problem, from disaster relief, housing for the homeless, and improving schools to delivering food and services for poor HIV/AIDS patients. They had all come to encourage South African political and community leaders to consider the possibility of starting a South African affiliate of City Year, with promises of American assistance and funding.

“Just before I left to come to South Africa,” Clinton explained to the hundreds of civic leaders and students at the conference, “I saw television coverage of the terrible flooding along the Mississippi River in the United States, and there were pictures of people in a small community in Iowa packing sandbags against the rising waters, and in the midst of them were young people with AmeriCorps emblems on their shirts, working with people who formerly would have been strangers to them, to build the bonds of community.

“These young people embody the vision that drove me to run for president and serve. I wanted to build a country where there was op
portunity for every responsible citizen, a national community that celebrates our incredible diversity while reaffirming our common humanity.” Gesturing toward the AmeriCorps and City Year veterans, he said, “That’s what they do every day.”

The second leg of his Africa trip took Clinton to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, where he was invited to address a major three-day conference on HIV/AIDS called by the Organization of African Unity (soon to be reorganized and renamed the African Union)—the largest event of its kind in the continent’s history. At the “Extraordinary OAU Summit,” as it was billed, he would share the spotlight with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as a high-ranking audience of African heads of state, health ministers, officials from donor countries and medical NGOs, including the American mega-philanthropist Bill Gates, grappled with the worsening health crisis.

Only eight months earlier, in August 2001, Clinton had visited Nigeria as president, shaking up the country with a televised appearance during which he physically embraced several AIDS patients—an act that violated taboos and elicited “a very powerful response in Nigeria and the rest of Africa,” according to a local AIDS activist. Among the country’s 110 million people, an estimated 15 million were infected, driven into hiding by the pervasive stigma. Discrimination and fear were so strong that a judge suspended the trial of a woman with HIV/AIDS because he viewed her presence in his courtroom as a threat to public health.

“In every country, in any culture, it is difficult, painful, at the very least embarrassing to talk about the issues involved with AIDS,” he had told the Nigerians. “But is it harder to talk about these things than to watch a child die of AIDS who could have lived if the rest of us had done our part?” Based on his own administration’s decision to support exclusive patents on AIDS medications and to oppose production of cheaper generic alternatives, he might well have been talking about himself.

Now he was in Nigeria again where, despite his attempt to break down prejudice against people suffering with HIV/AIDS, the virus continued to spread. For both the OAU and the U.N., the chief purpose of the Abuja conference was to formulate a consensus plan for fighting an epidemic that, as Clinton noted in his speech, might kill as many as
100 million Africans in the coming decade. By putting together a credible plan with U.N. backing, including major contributions from their own governments, the African leaders hoped that they could attract more support from the West. Specifically, Annan and the OAU leaders wanted to mobilize vast new resources from the developed nations to begin providing antiretroviral drugs to sick Africans.

Until then the Western consensus had been clear and chilling, if usually left unsaid. Antiretroviral medications or ARVs, the only known treatment for HIV/AIDS, were simply far too costly for most citizens of the developing world to afford. Long struggles over patent protection for the European and American pharmaceutical companies that produced the drugs—with the Clinton administration mostly advocating the narrow interest of those U.S. corporations—had left millions of people to die, even though generic versions might have saved at least some of them. Western governments preferred to promote prevention rather than treatment, as the more feasible and cheaper alternative. It was easier not to talk about the real consequences of that choice.

But on April 19, just days before the conference opened, a consortium of thirty-nine international pharmaceutical companies abruptly dropped a lawsuit against the government of South Africa over its attempts to purchase and produce generic medications. Under growing international pressure, the drug manufacturers had abandoned their effort to overturn a law signed by Mandela, which empowered the South African health minister to import generic drugs without regard to patent protection. Announcing their decision, the firms claimed that South Africa had promised to recognize their rights and consult them in implementing the law.

This sudden legal victory shot a powerful tremor of hope through the Abuja conference. Branded medications that cost $10,000 to $15,000 a year per patient in the developed world might soon cost as little as $700 a year in generic form—still too expensive for most patients or governments, but far closer to affordable. With legal obstacles removed, the possibility of effective action and the moral imperative to act were at the top of the conference agenda.

Annan’s keynote address to the conference urged the creation of a global war chest of up to $10 billion annually, raised from governments, corporations, foundations, and individual donors, to provide
AIDS medications in the developing world “at the lowest possible price,” in cooperation with manufacturers. He pledged that if money was forthcoming, as he expected, the U.N. would take the lead in coordinating financial assistance with strategic planning in this proposed “Marshall Plan.”

Following Annan, Clinton endorsed the secretary-general’s call for funding and action, warning that although Africa was currently the “epicenter” of the disease, other major nations such as “India, China, or even Russia” could take its place in the future if the world failed to act. He had a warning for the three dozen African heads of state who were present, too: Unless they began to establish national systems in their countries to ensure effective use of the global funding, the additional money would accomplish little. “You still need to get enough medicine distributed,” he emphasized, “and educate your people on how to take the medicine.”

The obvious question for Clinton himself was what he could do, besides delivering speeches, to advance the cause. It was good to hug an AIDS patient on TV, so that the stigma surrounding the disease might diminish. But however warm and sincere his embrace might be, he knew that this gesture alone would save no lives. Without treatment, every person—every little child—that Clinton hugged would die, as would millions more.

He could not expect to sway U.S. government policy, which was at best equivocal toward the U.N. effort. Annan wanted the United States to pay up to $3 billion annually toward his global war chest, but word from Washington indicated skepticism in the White House toward any program overseen by the United Nations. “There are still a lot of questions to be answered,” said a Bush administration official on the eve of the conference.