Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (37 page)

Later that afternoon, following a meeting in the State House with Zanzibar’s president Amani Abeid Karume, Clinton walked across Stone Town to a tiny stone building near the city’s center. Inside were several Zanzibari women, dressed modestly but colorfully, with young children and an American expatriate named Kathryn Sutton—the core of a local advocacy organization, the Zanzibar Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, known ZAPHA+. Fewer than a hundred of the thousands of men and women affected by the pandemic on Zanzibar had joined the group, whose leaders had worked with CHAI ever since its Tanzanian staff visited the island several months earlier.

Following introductions by a local interpreter named Faroque, Clinton shook hands with everyone and sat down in the small room. Taking a little girl and a young boy on his lap, he listened as each of the women, and one man, told their stories. With the interpreter, this took some time. They told him that before CHAI arrived on Zanzibar the previous spring, they had been waiting for medicines to arrive while watching their friends and relatives die. They thanked him for making the medicine available.

But they went on to say how worried they were that the medicine might suddenly disappear—or that the government would start demanding payments that they could not afford. Many of them were so poor already that they were always hungry. To stop taking the medicine would mean certain death. They had seen development agencies come and go over the years, many times, and that made them afraid.

Clinton waited to speak until everyone who wished to address him had finished. He praised their courage and urged them to spread the word that everyone could now emerge from the shadows for testing and treatment. He explained that he had just met with President Karume, and told him that the drugs must remain free. The president, he said, had assured him that was understood. And then Clinton made his own promise: He would work as hard as he could to ensure treatment for all the members of ZAPHA+ and every other HIV patient on Zanzibar, for as long as they needed it. He was not going to abandon them.

In every place he visited on that trip—and on similar trips that he would take nearly every summer thereafter, from Johannesburg to Nairobi to Kigali to Abuja to Addis Ababa—Clinton dropped in on clinics, hospitals, and community centers where hundreds and eventually thousands and hundreds of thousands of patients received treatment, thanks to his foundation’s work, in concert with a global array of governments, organizations, and individuals he had helped to bring together. It was an achievement that the world’s public health authorities had deemed impossible only a few years earlier. Millions of lives had been lost needlessly, as he continued to remind himself and everyone else. But millions of lives would be saved.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Whenever Bill Clinton considered the shape of his sprawling post-presidential life, with all its thematic and geographical complexity, he tended to sort what he did into two broad categories. “There are things that I plan to do,” he would say. “And then there are things that just . . . come up.”

Not long after he returned to New York from Africa, something very big came up. During the early morning hours of August 29, the most destructive hurricane in American history landed on the Gulf Coast, destroying entire towns in Mississippi and Louisiana as well as much of the historic city of New Orleans. The storm and subsequent flooding killed almost 1,250 people, left many thousands injured and homeless, and cost well over $100 billion in property damage. In its awful aftermath, the callous and incompetent federal response inflicted political damage from which the Bush administration never fully recovered.

Watching the catastrophe unfold on television in Chappaqua, Clinton felt deep distress over the botched maneuvers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its director, Michael Brown—a Bush patronage appointee with no known qualifications who soon became notorious as “Brownie,” his presidential nickname. Clinton hated to see the relief agency in the hands of such a dim nonentity.

With him in charge, the Bush approach to emergency relief, smacking of antigovernment ideology, had thoroughly undone the rebuilding and improvement of FEMA by Clinton’s appointee and childhood friend, James Lee Witt, widely esteemed as the best chief executive ever to serve there. Combining the federal fiasco with the human suffering in the Superdome and the destruction of a city he loved, the former president found the entire spectacle nearly unbearable.

Within hours after the hurricane’s landfall, the White House called Chappaqua to ask whether Clinton would rejoin George H. W. Bush to raise charitable donations for Katrina reconstruction, in a reprise of their “odd couple”
routine, only nine months after the Asian tsunami. Although his fall schedule was already jammed with events—headlined by the debut of the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan in just over two weeks—there was no way he would or could refuse.

On September 1 President Bush announced the reunion, operating under the banner of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. That same day, the two former presidents taped a series of three public service commercials in the White House library, urging Americans to give generously to help the hurricane’s victims. But Clinton also wanted to see the victims up close—despite the fact that he was leaving a few days later for a grueling trip across Asia to deliver speeches, raise foundation money, and promote CHAI projects. So his advance team slotted a very brief trip to Houston into his packed calendar and hastily arranged air transport with assistance from John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire, supermarket magnate, and political donor who owned a small fleet of jets.

Hours before dawn on September 5, Bill and Hillary Clinton left the gated compound on Old House Lane with Band, Cooper, and several Secret Service agents, heading to Westchester County Airport. There they boarded a Gulfstream IV, which delivered them to Hobby Airport before 8 a.m. In Houston, they joined the elder Bush and wife, Barbara, Oprah Winfrey, Rev. Jesse Jackson, several members of Congress, and a group of local ministers to visit the Gulf Coast evacuees at the Reliant Center, a smaller arena next to the Astrodome filled with cots and ice-chests, temporary home to nearly four thousand evacuees.

Outside the arena, Clinton and Bush held an early morning press conference to again announce the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. “I guess I could say on behalf of all of us that nothing we can do can be an adequate response to the agony we’ve seen,” said Clinton. “The reason we decided to do this, not that we think the governments won’t do their part, is we need to have a fund where we can fill in the blanks and help people who otherwise will be totally overlooked. A lot of people, they have no cars, no homes, nothing.”

Unsurprisingly, reporters asked the two former presidents about the national eruption of fury at the Bush administration, which showed no sign of abating. The elder Bush shrugged off the controversy, admitting that while he didn’t relish the harsh criticism of his son, “it comes with the territory” as president.

Ever the diplomat, Clinton brushed off any question of blame until days later, when he told a CNN reporter: “Our government failed those people in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it. One hundred percent of the people I’ve talked to here recognize that it was a failure, and I personally believe that there should be a serious analysis of it.”

Among the elected officials in their party was a freshman senator from Illinois and budding political celebrity named Barack Obama. When Obama had called Clinton a few days earlier about raising money for the hurricane victims in his home state, the former president had invited him to join them in Houston. Sensing an opportunity to speak to a national audience about the poverty and neglect that the disaster had exposed, the young politician had immediately accepted Clinton’s offer.

Shadowed by security, the Clintons and the Bushes walked through the Astrodome with Obama, stopping to greet families, embrace small children, and listen. At one point, Obama picked up a little girl who showed him a paper heart she had made in the shelter’s daycare center.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” Obama asked her. “You look so pretty. You made this heart and decided to give it to Bill Clinton, didn’t you?” The girl, who said her name was Kearra, nodded shyly.

“Well, I give you my heart,” said a beaming Clinton as he hugged the child. “You’re beautiful. Thank you for the heart.”

There were many less uplifting moments, as the evacuees poured out the stories of the losses they had suffered and the terror they had just barely escaped. Several days later, in an emotional speech on the Senate floor, Obama recalled their experience. “We heard, in very intimate terms, the heart-wrenching stories that all of us have witnessed from a distance over the past several days: mothers separated from babies, adults mourning the loss of elderly parents, descriptions of the heat and filth and fear of the Superdome and the Convention Center.” Obama campaign consultant David Axelrod would mark that speech as a turning point, when the Illinois senator told his staff to start thinking about a possible bid for the presidency in 2008.

The political implications were even clearer for the Clintons, as speculation about Hillary’s future presidential aspirations began to rise again. “Isn’t it interesting that Bush realizes he’s in trouble and has to
phone President Clinton for cover?” crowed Bob Mulholland, a California Democratic leader, in the
New York Times
. “You’ve got all these photos of President Clinton with both Bushes. It’s hard for a Republican in the national arena to be attacking the Clintons with these kinds of images out there.”

By noon, both Clintons were again in the air, heading home to Chappaqua. A Secret Service detail took Hillary back to Old House Lane. But idling at the Westchester airport was another private jet, which would take Bill Clinton on the first leg of a world-girdling trip. It was owned by their old friend Ronald Burkle.

Like John Catsimatidis—indeed, like nearly all of the billionaires cultivated by Clinton—Burkle was a truly self-made tycoon. Starting out as a box boy in a grocery store managed by his father, he eventually built a leveraged-buyout empire of supermarket chains and, when his exit strategies produced big profits, created a diversified investment group called the Yucaipa Companies. As a generous Democratic donor and fundraiser, with strong ties to labor unions whose pension funds he invested, he had grown close to the Clintons during the White House years. They had become so close that in 2002, the former president chose to join Yucaipa as a paid adviser to two of its domestic funds, after rejecting many other offers to join corporate boards.

Burkle would explain that he had urged Clinton to work with Yucaipa because he didn’t want to see his friend’s dignity sacrificed to earning money as a cable TV host. “I thought, let’s do something that is worker-friendly and community-friendly,” he said. “If you need to make money, let’s do something good.” Clinton did need to make money, especially during the early and very difficult period on his own—and Yucaipa paid him millions. He had flown everywhere on the company’s airliner, often with the owner aboard.

Upon returning from Houston, Clinton soon boarded Burkle’s aircraft with Band, Cooper, and his Secret Service detail to cross the Atlantic Ocean overnight, on the first leg of a long journey that would take him through Central Asia, India, and China. In the early morning hours they touched down in Glasgow for refueling—and for breakfast with Sir Tom Hunter, then the wealthiest man in Scotland and that nation’s
first homegrown billionaire. He, too, had risen from nowhere, having started a business selling sneakers from the back of a van that became Europe’s largest independent retail chain.

Hunter owned Learjets that he sometimes loaned to Clinton, and he had accompanied the former president several weeks earlier, during the first part of the Africa tour, to Mozambique and Lesotho—the latter, although tiny, being the most intense AIDS hotspot on the continent. Impressed with what he found at CHAI’s clinics in those countries, the Scotsman had tentatively pledged to donate $100 million to health and education projects in Africa over ten years. At breakfast he confirmed that commitment to Clinton—and agreed to announce it at the inaugural meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in mid-September in New York.

Much later that day, following an eight-hour flight direct from Glasgow across central Europe and Russia, the Clinton party landed in the mountainside city of Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan. Despite the late hour they proceeded directly from the airport to a meeting with the Kazakh president, the notorious autocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev; much as if Clinton were on an official diplomatic mission, they discussed political and economic conditions in the former Soviet republic and its relations with the United States and the international community.

At a joint press conference, Clinton praised Nazarbayev for destroying the nuclear arsenal left by the Russians, who had tested weapons in the remote territory. Before sitting down to a midnight banquet, Clinton signed an agreement with the Kazakh health ministry, permitting the government to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs through CHAI. And still later, around 2:30 a.m., Clinton met with Kazakh opposition leaders to hear their complaints against Nazarbayev’s regime, which the State Department and international organizations routinely charged with serious human rights and civil liberties abuses.

Within an hour, Clinton and his party were again airborne, on a southeasterly course toward the city of Lucknow, India. But they had switched planes to a well-appointed private McDonnell Douglas MD-87, owned by a man named Frank Giustra—a wealthy mining investor from Vancouver who was also the founder and former chairman of Lion’s Gate Entertainment in Hollywood.

The second-generation son of an Italian immigrant, Giustra’s consuming interest in philanthropy had led him in middle age to seek out Clinton. His charitable endeavors had been low-key and anonymous, mostly centered on the poor and homeless in his own city—until the Asian tsunami struck and he decided to host a big fundraising event in January 2005 at his palatial waterfront home in an exclusive West Vancouver neighborhood. Through his entertainment industry connections, Giustra arranged for an evening in his living room featuring comic actor Robin Williams and the Barenaked Ladies band, which brought in nearly $2 million for tsunami relief.