Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (38 page)

Through a mutual acquaintance, Giustra had also arranged for Clinton to send a “thank-you” message to his event via pretaped video, a process that put him in touch briefly with Doug Band. Then a few months later, Giustra heard through another friend that the Clinton Foundation was soliciting the loan of an airplane (as the advance staff was almost always doing at any given moment) for a trip to Central America.

After Giustra offered his plane to the foundation, he received a call from Tim Phillips, an international consultant and fundraiser who sometimes worked for Clinton. On the telephone, Giustra quickly realized that Phillips was checking him out, trying to determine what he wanted. “Can I come along?” Giustra finally asked, only to be told that Clinton “doesn’t know you.” He felt brushed off, but soon Giustra called Phillips back with a slightly different proposal: Since he needed to visit Colombia on business himself, he would depart the plane there and let Clinton fly on without him. Band approved it.

Within an hour after Clinton shook hands with the short, graying Giustra, the initial ice was broken. Aboard his plane, they somehow alighted on the topic of
Rubicon
, popular historian Tom Holland’s account of the end of the Roman Republic, a book they had both enjoyed. When Clinton started to quote verbatim from its text, Giustra was astonished.

On the way southward they had stopped in Little Rock, where Clinton dragged his new friend along to a meeting with three dozen Baptist ministers. They had flown on to Mexico City, where they dined with Carlos Slim, the magnate and philanthropist then on his way to becoming one of the very richest men in the world. And at some point on that
trip, as Giustra tried to get to sleep late one night, someone knocked on his door: “The president wants to know whether you’d like to play cards”—his true initiation into Clinton’s crew.

While playing cards, Giustra and Clinton talked about the foundation’s work, with particular focus on CHAI, which the Canadian businessman judged “a brilliant idea.” He offered to help any way he could. His initial pledge to CHAI amounted to $30 million, and he provided his plane whenever possible. On this occasion, his own visit to finalize a major uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan had coincided with Clinton’s stop there—and Giustra seized the chance to travel on with him through Asia. Years later, journalists would suggest that Giustra’s presence with Clinton in the Kazakh capital had been no coincidence, but an attempt to promote the mining executive’s prospects there. In fact, Clinton originally had been encouraged to visit Kazakhstan by the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, another foundation donor who did business there.

Arriving in Lucknow, they crashed in hotel rooms until late morning. Thanks to his connections in the Indian American community, Clinton had tapped into the power networks of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where he met with several state ministers and business leaders.

Clinton hosted a fundraising dinner for his foundation in Lucknow that evening before departing on Giustra’s plane for Zhengzhou, China—the beginning of another five days of frenetic plane-hopping to Kunming to Urumqi to Hangzhou to Beijing, where he marked the September 11th anniversary with the American ambassador and staff at the U.S. embassy. Along the way, as he visited CHAI-assisted clinics in Zhengzhou and Beijing, Clinton delivered paid speeches—including an address to a meeting in Hangzhou hosted by Alibaba, a then-obscure Chinese company that would become the largest online retailer in the world, with estimated annual sales of nearly $13 billion.

The last stop on this frenetic odyssey was Hong Kong, where he spoke at not one but two dinners on the evening of September 12, including a fundraiser for his library, which had not yet fully discharged its debts. He flew back to New York that same night. The Clinton Global Initiative was scheduled to open at the Sheraton in Midtown Manhattan in two days.

The first time Bill Clinton mentioned CGI in a public forum had been almost nine months earlier, when he took the World Economic Forum stage in Davos on January 27, 2005. Sitting for an interview with the American television journalist Charlie Rose before an audience of hundreds of corporate executives, heads of state, artists, scientists, academics, journalists, and nonprofit leaders gathered in the big auditorium, he waited for the question that the American TV anchor had been quietly directed to ask by Doug Band.

“You’re creating something called the Clinton Global Initiative—September, New York,” drawled Rose, “because you believe there is a necessity to do . . . what?”

“Give homework assignments!” retorted Clinton, to a ripple of laughter from the audience. “I’m a big supporter of Davos, but the world leaders of the rich and the poor countries and everybody in between come to the U.N. every year in September. . . .

“So what I thought we would do this year is to have a somewhat smaller version of what we do at the World Economic Forum, but that it would be focused very much on specific things all the participants could do. . . . Everybody who comes needs to know on the front end that you’re going to be asked your opinion about what we should do on AIDS, TB, malaria; what the private sector can do about global warming . . . and then you’re going to be asked to participate in very specific decisions about that and to make very specific commitments.” He emphasized that final word, then paused and smiled. “We may only have ten people show up!”

Not wishing to denigrate the Forum, where he drew large and enthusiastic crowds every year, or its ingratiating impresario Klaus Schwab, Clinton said that CGI would be “very complementary to Davos”—although its stated aims implied a critique.

“I just see all these people leave here every year full of energy,” said Clinton, “wanting to
do something
and wanting to know there is a place where they can actually go and say, OK, what is my assignment?” He would not only give out the assignments, he concluded, but grade the homework, too. It was vitally important to “keep score” of every effort to make change in the world, he admonished: “We need to know, we did
this thing
and it got
that result
,”
smacking his hand on the coffee table.

Clinton was inclined to grade his own humanitarian efforts quite harshly. “The AIDS thing drives me nuts,” he told the Davos audience. “At the end of this quarter”—in March 2005—“we will be treating 100,000 people with our contracts with the Indian and South African [generic drug] companies. That’s, I think, more than what any other country is doing except Brazil—and it’s appalling.”

But, he continued, “We have 30 other countries about to go onto our [generic drug purchasing] contracts through the World Health Organization, so we could have two million of the six million [AIDS victims] who need it by the first quarter of next year. . . . I feel better than I did three years ago. And I still don’t feel that we’re doing a very good job.”

By the time Clinton announced CGI at Davos, a year after it was conceived there, Doug Band had brought together a small team of former White House aides with Richard Attias, the event planner and impresario who had long managed the staging of Davos.

The first person Band had called was Mary Morrison, an energetic, multilingual, and highly effective young woman who had started in 1995 as a White House intern, graduated to the scheduling office, and ended as deputy chief of operations in the Oval Office. All that they knew for certain at that point was that they wanted to put on a Davos-style event—but one that would require participants to “do things, not just talk about doing things.”

Early on, the CGI team had chosen a conference date: three days in mid-September that coincided with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, when many heads of state would be present in New York. (Clinton had met personally with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to ensure that he found the plan agreeable—and invite him to participate.)

The foundation’s financing was still too insecure to justify a significant risk on a project that would clearly cost millions of dollars to produce. Within its first four years, Clinton and his associates had raised $168 million for the foundation, including CHAI and the library (which had consumed the great bulk of funding), plus another $74 million in pledges, but were still carrying a substantial debt. They had achieved
that level of success without a dedicated development structure and—as Band, Bruce Lindsey, and others in the leadership well knew—without the kind of systems that raise money efficiently for other public charities.

At the same time that the foundation was attempting to launch its “global initiative,” Clinton agreed to a formidable new domestic project—a national effort to reduce childhood obesity, in cooperation with the American Heart Association. A charitable powerhouse with thousands of employees and an annual budget in the hundreds of millions, the AHA had reached out to Clinton in the wake of his heart surgery, after he had expressed a strong urge to raise public consciousness about heart disease, diet, and exercise—and asked him to serve as a spokesman for its existing campaign. Having acknowledged his own difficulties as an overweight boy, and his lifelong history of poor eating habits, he could become a sympathetic role model for kids struggling to become fit. He could tape a public service announcement and appear occasionally at events.

But that role wasn’t enough for Clinton, who believed he could do more to
solve
the problem than merely speak on behalf of AHA. On May 3, he appeared at a public school in Manhattan to announce that his foundation would join the AHA in creating and sponsoring a series of programs to turn back the growing wave of obesity among American children and adolescents. By his side, as he talked about how heavy he was at age fifteen (five feet nine inches, 210 pounds), stood Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an old political antagonist who had lost more than one hundred pounds after developing type 2 diabetes.

Glancing at Huckabee, Clinton quipped: “He is about half the size as when I first met him. While I am always trying to shrink the ranks of Republicans, I never really thought this was the way to do it.”

But the potential cost of this fresh initiative was no joke—especially because in the months since Clinton first agreed to work with AHA, Ira Magaziner had developed an ambitious plan that involved engagement across the country with local schools, food and beverage companies, and health care providers, under the banner of a new organization to be called the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. It would cost millions of dollars that had yet to be raised.

By then, the foundation had raised at least some of the money re
quired to launch CGI. The first “investor” was Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financial consultant who had traveled to Africa with Clinton on his plane in 2002, and their mutual friend Ghislaine Maxwell, socialite daughter of the late British publisher Robert Maxwell. Together Epstein and Maxwell provided a loan of $750,000 in CGI seed funding. The first-year cost would ultimately hit $7 million, with much of the additional financing provided by grants from Google (as promised), the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, and Thomas Golisano, an iconoclastic billionaire from Rochester who had once run as an independent for governor of New York.

Mary Morrison had started work on the still nameless conference during the spring of 2004, from a cubicle in Attias’s offices at the Manhattan outpost of Publicis Groupe, the big French advertising and public relations agency. Joining her at Publicis over the summer was Ed Hughes, another former intern whose history with Clinton dated back to his volunteer work in the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary as a college undergraduate.

Along with Eric Nonacs, the former president’s foreign policy adviser, who worked from the Harlem office, the diligent Hughes oversaw program development—while Morrison handled every aspect of the event’s logistics, from security arrangements for participating heads of state down to lunch boxes and the color of tablecloths, not to mention the process of designing and selecting a logo. (After much consideration, Clinton picked a starry blue swoosh that resembled the European Union flag.) From lighting and sound systems to communications, food service, press accommodations, and gift bags filled with donated items, the problems multiplied. Morrison and Hughes worked late into every night for weeks on end. Some days, Morrison felt so exhausted and overwhelmed that she put her head down on her desk and wept.

Still, the work moved forward.

Over the course of many meetings and memos, Clinton articulated four broad areas of focus for CGI—governance in the developing world, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and conflict resolution. Those vague guidelines formed an early framework to which Nonacs gradually added ideas for specific topics, panels, and speakers, drawing heavily upon the advice of Clinton’s former White House chief
of staff John Podesta, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Mideast policy adviser Robert Malley, and former economic adviser Gene Sperling, as well as David Sandalow, a former assistant secretary of state for environmental affairs, and Gayle Smith, a former special assistant to Clinton and chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

As he commented on the content memos from Nonacs, Clinton constantly emphasized the need for “doers as well as talkers” to participate, and his desire to bring together as diverse a group as possible, from geography to gender. The event’s content would reflect not only Clinton’s will, but his worldview. Every participant would have to agree in advance to undertake real action after the conference ended, each of which would be announced publicly as a “commitment.”

And they had set the price of annual “membership” at $15,000, a very pricey ticket but well below the cost of admission at Davos, high enough to cover costs while allowing a significant percentage of complimentary admissions for those unable to pay. They had determined to limit attendance to eight hundred or so paid guests, plus two to three hundred who would be admitted free, in order to ensure a “substantive and interactive” experience for all.