Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (39 page)

As the days dwindled before CGI’s debut, the new event began to draw excited media coverage—an hourlong CNN special with footage shot in Africa, interviews with Clinton on ABC’s
This Week,
CNN’s
Larry King Live
, NBC’s
Today
show and
Meet the Press,
BBC TV, and National Public Radio—more attention than he had received since the publication of his memoir.

They had no idea what was going to happen when they opened the doors for the first time at the Sheraton Midtown on the afternoon of September 15.

The first couple of hours of the inaugural Clinton Global Initiative were inauspicious, if not quite disastrous. Long lines of grumbling “members” who had paid thousands of dollars to attend stretched further and further into the huge lobby of the Sheraton. Volunteers organized by Mary Morrison were trying to register them, photograph them for security badges, hand them gift bags, and see them through a rigor
ous security screening. But the unpaid staffers were inexperienced, the process slow and cumbersome. Just getting people into the building took much too long, cutting into the schedule and stoking frustration.

When the registration logjam finally cleared, the program began to move more smoothly.

With lights dimmed, the hotel’s enormous grand ballroom had been set up to resemble an oversized television studio with a seated audience. Buzzing with conversation, hundreds of men and women, mostly wearing dark-hued business attire, milled about and then seated themselves in rows facing a blindingly white stage accented with sky blue. Looming behind them were several raised banks of TV cameras pointed at the stage, where a pair of mammoth video screens flanked a row of blocky, overstuffed white leather chairs.

Over the loudspeakers came the smooth baritone voice of a professional announcer, politely urging everyone to sit down. A few moments later, the announcer said simply, “Bill Clinton.” To the cool techno hum of Moby’s “Porcelain”—an instrumental tune often played as background sound in car and liquor commercials—he ambled out from behind the set as the audience rose to applaud.

Lean and at ease in a tailored blue suit coordinated with the décor, Clinton brandished a wireless microphone. Joining him moments later were Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, and King Abdullah II of Jordan, all prepared to engage in a rambling and agreeable chat, prompted by questions from Clinton about Mideast peace, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, clean energy, and international trade, sounding much like guests on a high-minded talk show. Lurking in the audience were current and former heads of state, such as Israeli president Shimon Peres, Ireland’s Gerry Adams, and the presidents of South Africa, Ukraine, Nigeria, Turkey, and the Dominican Republic; pop stars including Mick Jagger, Barbra Streisand, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tony Bennett, and Bono; and chief executives of several of the world’s largest companies, notably Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical, seated with nonprofit leaders and social activists from around the world.

The theme music, the elaborate stage set, the mood lighting, the production values, and the surfeit of political, business, and entertainment celebrities—the “optics” of the entire event—were anything but modest. To Clinton’s implacable critics, this could have looked like nothing more
than a chance to shine the spotlight on himself. It looked slick—a term often applied unflatteringly to its impresario himself.

For much of the two days that followed, Clinton held court in a hotel suite forty-five floors above the panels and plenary sessions, conferring with the great and the good to commit themselves and their resources to global improvement. He discovered that many of the world leaders in town for the U.N.’s opening session wished to see him, and he seized the chance to advance his foundation’s objectives in those meetings. CGI had created a completely new platform that enhanced his status and his causes. He would venture down to the stage from time to time to announce a major new “commitment,” whether from basketball star Michael Jordan’s mother, promising to build a new hospital in Kenya, or a Swiss Re insurance executive vowing to invest $250 million in clean energy; after making each announcement, Clinton stood still and smiled for a photo with each commitment maker.

The most heavily attended panel, unsurprisingly, featured a discussion of climate change with Hillary Clinton and former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the retired four-star Army general from Arkansas. Clark had run for president briefly in 2004 as a Democrat, while Hillary was expected to run in 2008. And in contrast to her husband’s cordial exchanges with Condoleezza Rice, the New York senator lambasted the Bush White House.

Noting that she had recently returned from her second visit to the melting Arctic polar ice cap, she said, “We were a leader in the Kyoto process,” referring to her husband’s administration, “and since then we have abdicated leadership on this crucial issue.” She called for a market-based cap-and-trade regime to reduce atmospheric carbon, a “crash program” to advance renewable energy technologies by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and intensified negotiations with the governments of China and India over emissions reduction.

But perhaps more surprising was the appearance of a special guest at the Saturday luncheon plenary session in the grand ballroom. Bill Clinton strode to the podium, accompanied by piano music, where he announced several CGI commitments—including a plan by Swiss Re to invest $250 million in European renewable energy projects. The insurance giant’s chief executive, John Cooper, showed up for the photo and handshake with Clinton.

Then Clinton introduced his former vice president, noting that he had read Gore’s prescient 1992 book,
Earth in the Balance
, “before I knew we would be running together” on their party’s presidential ticket that year. “He is one of the most important thinkers our public life has ever produced,” said Clinton. In his own remarks, Gore warned that Hurricane Katrina was the first harbinger of “a global emergency, a deepening climate crisis that requires us to act.”

Not all of the panels were so high-minded, and one of the sessions moderated by Clinton himself proved rather comical, as News Corp chair Rupert Murdoch jousted with Time Warner’s Richard Parsons and Sir Howard Stringer of CBS and Sony in a discussion of global media. When Parsons praised CNN—a division of Time Warner—as “the best and best-positioned global media company in the world,” he provoked Murdoch to growl: “I don’t think he watches CNN International. It’s so unwatchable and so anti-American!” The audience roared.

When the first Clinton Global Initiative concluded, after two very full days of panels—and nights that saw the former president hopping from one restaurant to another, beginning with a dinner party on opening night at Nobu, the super-swank sushi restaurant—he would announce that the participants had signed agreements to sponsor, finance, and oversee more than two hundred separate projects valued at $2.5 billion. They had pledged to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy, small business credit for women entrepreneurs, clean water for Ghana and terrorism insurance in Gaza, environmental protection for Tierra del Fuego and youth employment in the Balkans.

For his part, Clinton pledged publicly at the final plenary session that his foundation would monitor the fulfillment of all the bold promises made at CGI—an undertaking that would prove to be a perennial challenge. He also promised that he and the foundation would continue to host CGI annually for at least ten years.

The question that lingered beneath the surface was whether any of the hundreds of commitments would generate substantial improvement in the lives of the world’s downtrodden, so distant and disconnected from all the very important people Clinton had summoned. Two and a half billion dollars was undoubtedly a decent down payment on progress, and a substantial marker of success for CGI, but that sum wouldn’t
go very far on a sweltering planet where more than a billion people existed in conditions of extreme poverty and untreated disease.

Clinton was well aware of the issues of scale—a word he used often—but nevertheless felt excited by the debut of CGI and grateful to those who had created the conference from what had once seemed like a fleeting notion. On a formal thank-you letter that went out on his personal stationery to everyone who had assisted with CGI, he scrawled a handwritten note to Doug Band: “This is yours [underlined twice]. I hope you’re proud of it,” signed “Bill.”

While the outcome of the commitments was yet to be measured, CGI had inspired the usual suspects among the global elite—and a lot of other well-intended people—to
do something
. Interviewed a week later, Clinton said, “I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t think it would do this well. Maybe not half as well! And I’ve had probably dozens of people come up to me and say it was the best meeting of this kind they’d ever been to.” He smiled. “Because there weren’t speeches, everybody was serious, everybody was working on very specific things, and they really did feel like they had the power to make a difference. It worked out even better than I thought it would.”

He dismissed critics who complained that he had just put on the show to gain publicity, or to promote his wife’s political ambitions. “This thing got a lot of media coverage because it was a big thing, and it was in New York so it was easy to cover, and it did a lot of good.” He grinned and mimicked the critics. “Yeah, it’s a good thing, yeah, it’s gonna help a lot, yeah, it’s going to do a lot of good for a lot of people, it’s going to save a lot of lives—but he probably still shouldn’t have done it because he just wanted publicity.” He paused. “That’s pretty lame, I think. I could think of all kinds of ways to get publicity. I could get lots of publicity if I just sat right out on the street.”

Clinton had come to believe that the CHAI model—pointing toward a new system that would bring together governments, companies, nonprofit groups, international organizations, and private donors—had implications beyond its own mission of delivering medical treatment to AIDS victims. He thought great things could be achieved by leveraging the money and power of states and corporations with the flexibility and skills of the nonprofit sector. The enthusiastic response to the launch of CGI was a signal that the world in which he operated
was ready for higher levels of cooperation and perhaps even global leadership.

“This movement has grown so rapidly, and there’s so many people doing it, and it’s so entrepreneurial, that I think it would profit from better coordination, more information sharing, and combining efforts. . . . I think that since so much money is going out there, and since on the whole it’s fairly cost-efficient, it would be beneficial if we all worked together more.” Even he had no idea then just how broadly and deeply CGI would reshape global philanthropy in the years to come.

Whatever Clinton’s wonkish hopes, the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative had proved enormously beneficial to his image as a respected world leader. Media coverage of the event was overwhelmingly positive, although not every report could resist a touch of snark. Skeptical outlets suddenly found reason to praise him. Even his implacably Republican hometown daily, the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
, restrained its editorial mockery of CGI’s do-gooding liberal internationalism and concluded with a stunning paean to its longtime target:

Bill Clinton isn’t just another politician. Say what you will about the old boy (and we do) but you can’t just call him another pol. He can work not only the room but the world. If he can put all his mind and energy into fighting poverty, conflict, climate change and government repression, then . . . watch out poverty, conflict, climate change, and government repression. There are worse things an ex-president could do with his political capital.

In the
Washington Post
, another newspaper where he had few friends, Tina Brown suggested that “Clinton seems to have found his role as facilitator-in-chief, urging us to give up our deadly national passivity and start thinking things through for ourselves. Commandeering the role of government through civic action suddenly feels like a very empowering notion—the alternative being to find oneself stranded in a flood waving a shirt from a rooftop. . . .

“No one would have believed that Clinton—the king of spin, who went out under a cloud of indecency five years ago—could climb back
to such credibility. Monica is fading and he’s backlit now by his disciplined handling of the economy, the unsought comparisons of how well FEMA used to perform under his watch, and the enlightened nature of his global activism.”

In that sense of astonishment, she was not alone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

If the true nature of the bond between Bill and Hillary Clinton continued to fascinate a curious public, the importance of their relationship endured for both—even during a long period when they mostly lived apart. With the onset of the midterm political cycle in 2006, as New York’s junior senator looked toward her first bid for reelection and perhaps beyond, the stakes in their marriage again began to rise.

Leaving aside the Clintons’ emotional connection—which few people who knew them well doubted, despite the humiliation inflicted upon her by his misconduct—their continuing impact on each other’s lives and aspirations was complex. Bill had always admired Hillary, depended upon her, and promoted her. Having spent decades promoting Bill, Hillary had fully emerged from his shadow to become one of the most admired women in the world, a testament to her talents and her determination to vault every obstacle, including the misogyny that perpetually confronted female politicians. Despite their marital crises, they had been effective political partners while building a closely knit family around their daughter.

But the unfolding of his post-presidency and her Senate tenure exposed inherent tensions, as their paths diverged. Although Bill would never say so, Hillary’s political prominence sometimes created difficulties for him as a former president and global philanthropic leader. From the perspective of the aides helping to shape his post-presidency, particularly Doug Band, partisan conflict continually risked damage to Bill Clinton as a statesman, by limiting his outreach and diminishing his broad appeal. But as a lifelong political pro, Clinton still loved the game that her career encouraged him to keep playing.