Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (34 page)

Waiting to greet them at the airport, where the temperature hovered near 100 degrees under a merciless sun, was an official party led by Khunying Potjaman Shinawatra, Thailand’s first lady. From there, the Americans traveled by motorcade to a tiny fishing village where most of the boats had been wrecked by the waves. As in many places
that they visited, people seemed more familiar with the younger of the ex-presidents.

To greet them the villagers had put up a big banner: “Welcome President Clinton.” Such evidence of Clinton’s international popularity popped up repeatedly, but if being in the younger man’s shadow irritated Bush, he never showed it.

Under a scorching tropical sun, the heat grew steadily as the day wore on. Clinton and Bush dressed casually, wearing khaki pants and short-sleeves—the Democrat in a blue polo shirt and the Republican in a red one. Traveling by motorcade they toured the island resort, a legendary beach destination for many Westerners that had suffered severe damage from the surging wave, with residential and commercial buildings toppled, fishing boats overturned and reduced to splinters, cars and trucks rammed through narrow streets and storefronts, killing hundreds. In the Thai coastal resorts, half of the dead had been foreign tourists from more than thirty countries.

By late February, six weeks after the tsunami, the relief effort had removed many bodies and much of the debris. But more than 1,500 corpses, still unidentified, lay in a refrigerated facility there called the International Repatriation Center, next to a Wall of Remembrance where Bush and Clinton participated in a brief ceremony to honor the dozen Americans known to have died there.

From the Marine helicopters that took the presidential party on a sweeping aerial tour, they could see acre upon acre of flattened buildings. A few still stood, their lower floors gutted, amid the concrete rubble. Later in the day the choppers took them about ninety miles north to Ban Nam Khem, another coastal fishing village where nearly a third of the residents, including many children, had died when the towering wave smashed their homes. It was a wasteland of ruined buildings, dried mud, and toppled trees, surrounded by cement and stone fragments. But however awful, the physical destruction was far less affecting than the human distress.

Intense emotion visibly gripped both Clinton and Bush—along with their companions—as they encountered the existential reality of loss, again and again, in the eyes and voices of the village’s survivors. Amid the noise of bulldozers and work crews engaged in rebuilding the little town, the former presidents met local residents and officials who
told how they had watched their homes and families pulled away by the surging water. One little girl gave Bush a crayon drawing of a head out in the sea, depicting her own lost mother.

On that first afternoon they met with Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and members of his cabinet back in Phuket to discuss how the donor nations and organizations could best assist the Thai government. When they emerged to talk with the press, Clinton tried to sound encouraging: “From what I saw today, the most urgent thing is to have people back in their homes and their businesses as quickly as possible. It seems to me that you are well on your way here.”

Then newly reelected (and not yet ousted by the Thai military), Shinawatra expressed his nation’s gratitude for the effort of the former presidents, men of differing parties and political views, and for the generous assistance of the United States, particularly including the Marines and the USAID personnel, at a time of grave need. That night, the prime minister hosted an informal dinner for the two presidents at the resort hotel where they were staying.

Early the next morning, they boarded the 727 and jumped across the Malacca Strait to Medan, the teeming, multiethnic capital of North Sumatra, where they landed amid pouring rain to meet with Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Their ultimate destination was to the north in the province of Aceh along the shore of the Andaman Sea, where the tsunami had struck with devastating force. Yudhoyono, a former general educated in the United States, had ventured north from the presidential palace in Jakarta to offer his personal guarantee that American money and goods sent to help the Indonesian victims would reach them without skimming or corruption of any kind—a concern increasingly voiced in U.S. media as the aid dollars, both government and private, mounted into the hundreds of millions.

Hours later the presidential party landed at the airport in Banda Aceh, the island’s northwestern tip, where Indonesian security forces maintained a heavily armed presence due to a decades-old separatist insurgency that mostly kept Westerners away from the region. Then they quickly boarded a Marine helicopter that provided a vista of devastation along the entire coast, where nearly 130,000 people were estimated to have been killed.

They touched down again in one of hundreds of coastal villages,
where nothing now remained of the little shacks where the fishermen and their families had once lived except scraps of wood, sheet metal, and cement along the beaches. Much of the debris had been cleared away, along with recovered corpses—yet even two months later, bodies of the victims continued to wash up onshore nearly every day. Many of the villagers refused to eat any fish, translators told the former presidents, fearing that the fish had consumed the flesh of family members lost to the sea.

As Clinton and Bush stepped away from their helicopter, they passed through long lines of people who had emerged from tents in the midday sun to see them. Tens of thousands of survivors were living in temporary shelter along the coastline hit hardest by the tidal wave. Few of the Acehnese spoke a word of English, but the former presidents listened as translators recounted their wrenching personal stories. A father stood staring, his arm around one surviving son, as he described losing his wife and four other children. Boys and girls, wearing the soiled T-shirts that were their only clothing, spoke softly, haltingly, of watching their parents swept away. Others stood by mutely, only their faces revealing a state of shock, sorrow, and hopelessness.

Moving through the hot and humid landscapes, confronted by dramatic vistas of ruin and throngs of destitute people, the rapid pace drained Clinton and Bush. Even in the middle of the day they slumped in their car seats, physically and emotionally exhausted. Clinton’s words would catch in his throat as he tried to speak. As governor and president he had visited so many scenes of tragedy, from tornado-razed towns in Arkansas to the terrorist wreckage in Oklahoma City. But this was horror on a scale bigger than anything he had ever seen.

Whenever Clinton got cell phone service he called Hillary to tell her what he was seeing and feeling. It was so much worse, he said, than anything television could show. Publicly, he and Bush mustered the strength to express hope, empathy, and the determination to provide as much help as the tsunami victims needed to rebuild. The wire photographs showed them smiling, thumbs up, standing with heads of state and local officials. But away from the cameras, both men had wept.

In the late afternoon, the former presidents flew across the Bay of Bengal from Aceh to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, where they dined at the home of President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.
Like many of the politicians they encountered in Asia, where ideological and communal enmities too often erupted in violence, she expressed wonder at the alliance of two men of opposite parties, who had once fought a bitter election.

“It means so much to me that the two of you who were political rivals in the U.S. . . . can rise above that to come and help us in this our hour of greatest need,” she said, standing to toast them. In tribute to their example, the Sri Lankan president noted, she had invited the country’s opposition leader and former prime minister to join her and her distinguished visitors at dinner.

For Clinton, the Sri Lankan leader’s gesture to her own rivals meant more than a nice formality. In the months that followed, he would engage in quiet backstage diplomacy, covered by his role as the U.N. special envoy for the tsunami, in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil rebellion and its suppression had claimed many lives, as well as in Aceh. The memory of his successful intervention in Northern Ireland encouraged hope that he could achieve at least a cease-fire in these religious and ethnic conflicts on the other side of the world.

From Colombo they flew to the southern coastal city of Matara. There they stopped outside a temporary school, where they sat down on the bare ground with some of the island’s orphaned children, looking over an exhibit of their artwork, and talking with them about the future. Hurt and frightened as these children were, they showed signs of beginning to recover from their trauma. They were more animated, and less withdrawn; they sang and danced for the former presidents. And although many of their pictures displayed tragic moments from the tsunami, some had more recently drawn sunnier scenes of rebuilt homes and gardens. Thomas Ward, a USAID official who accompanied Bush and Clinton on the trip, later told author Carol Felsenthal they could see “that we were making progress with these kids.”

On the trip’s final day they flew hours over the Indian Ocean to the remote Maldives, a cluster of coral atolls, whose population of 350,000 depended entirely on tourism and tuna fishing. While the islands hadn’t suffered any damage comparable to the havoc wreaked in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, nearly one hundred people had died there. The point of the presidential visit was to show that the Maldives resort industry was up and running and ready to receive visitors.

Following a presidential greeting at the airport and a hotel lunch that Bush later described as “without a doubt the best tuna I have ever eaten,” the former presidents sat for live interviews on the morning shows of the three major television networks, framed against the blue sky and sunlit sea.

On ABC News,
Good Morning America
anchor Charles Gibson asked what they had seen that “really surprised you or brought you up short.” As usual Clinton deferred to his elder, who replied first.

“Well, I think it is far greater, far worse than what I had thought, particularly over in Aceh, in Indonesia,” Bush said. “You can’t tell from this background, this placid, beautiful background here, but there’s a lot of suffering here. And every place we’ve gone, we have seen it. And what’s affected me the most is the children, the heartbroken children whose families were literally ripped away by this tsunami. And so what we are trying to do is encourage more private giving in the United States. The people in our country have been generous, [are] continuing to be generous. But this work is far from over. The reconstruction is just beginning in many of these countries.”

“We saw orphans in Thailand,” Clinton confirmed. “We saw orphans in all these countries. We visited a village in Aceh where there had been 6,500 people living, all of the homes were destroyed, and only 1,000 people survived. You know, you can report on that, you can show it. But unless you physically see it and you look into these people’s eyes, it is very difficult to communicate. . . . I was surprised by how much work has already been done, by how much people are working together. . . . I think people’s money has been well spent so far. They are working hard and they are incredibly brave.”

Then Clinton displayed the drawing that the little girl in Thailand had given to Bush, which showed her mother drowning. He held up another drawing that a child had given him, with helicopters dropping food and medicine.

“Every place we went,” he said, “there’s heartbreak and courage, and hope.” These countries needed more aid, and a plan, and a coordinated effort to avoid waste and corruption. “But so far I have been impressed by what we have seen.” Nodding toward his companion, Clinton added, “And I think he has, too.”

Parting company in the Maldives—with Bush headed home to
Houston and Clinton scheduled for book tour and foundation events in Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, and Brunei—both felt that they had established a lasting bond. As he relaxed on the 727 that evening, Bush composed a three-thousand-word letter about the trip to his old friend Hugh Sidey, a retired
Time
correspondent. Pouring out his impressions, he described the personality of his old competitor as well as their compelling experiences together.

“I thought I knew him, but until this trip I did not really know him,” Bush mused. “First of all, he has been very considerate of me. I think my old age had something to do with it.” He explained how Clinton had surrendered the Air Force Two bedroom, and always waited courteously whenever they made an entrance together. But he also noted, in some detail, how often he had been required to wait patiently on “Clinton Standard Time,” a perpetual and notorious tardiness that dated back to White House days.

Indeed, Bush catalogued his new pal’s foibles with tart candor: “In grade school they had a place on our report cards, ‘Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention in the class room.’ Bill would have gotten a bad mark there.” Everywhere they went, Clinton kept Bush waiting while he talked with waiters, cooks, shopkeepers, everyone he encountered.

And when Clinton finally showed up, he would usually ramble on at great length about his own experiences and opinions, of which there was an inexhaustible supply. “Does this purification system use reverse osmosis? This is diesel driven isn’t it? I remember the hurricane damage I saw in X-land, or this reminds me of my trip to the Sudan, or I used to love to watch the kids singing in Ulan Bator. Boy, you haven’t seen a wedding ’til you’ve seen one in Swaziland,” Bush wrote, inventing a stream of Clintonesque patter. “I do think people were fascinated,” he allowed. “Once or twice I got a clandestine high sign from the people we were talking to that we had to move on, that I had to get him going.”

Yet as Bush generously acknowledged, neither lateness nor loquaciousness diminished the man’s radiant charm. Moreover, Clinton actually knew a lot about many things, contemporary and historical; he could be relied upon to fill any awkward silence with engaging observa
tions, usually relevant, and his confiding manner drew people to him in a way that Bush admired.