Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (45 page)

The book mentioned nearly everybody connected with his post-presidential endeavors, from Ron Burkle and Carlos Slim to Frank Giustra and Tom Hunter, and included a long and quite moving paean to Paul Farmer, writing, “I hope I live to see him win the Nobel [Peace] Prize.”

Giving
was launched on September 5 in a Harlem gymnasium, under the auspices of a local nonprofit—not with the usual round of cocktails and canapés, but a panel discussion on philanthropy led by PBS host Tavis Smiley, with a roster of celebrity guests that included Princeton professor Cornel West, home cooking guru Rachael Ray, and sportscaster Pat O’Brien. (The
day before, Oprah Winfrey hosted Clinton on her television show.) The initial print run was 750,000 copies.

Planning the book tour, Clinton had hoped that
Giving
would afford him a chance to go to places he didn’t usually visit and take the country’s political temperature, as a sort of advance mission for Hillary. Once her campaign got under way, however, that plan no longer made sense. It was impossible to mesh promotion of the book—and its warm, nonpartisan, we’re-all-in-this-together message—with the cooler, hard-edged dynamic of Democratic primary politics. He did book events in only ten major cities, and sales never reached the spectacular level anticipated by the publisher.

Still, the slender, two-hundred-page volume made its September 23 debut on the
New York Times
nonfiction bestseller list at #1 and Clinton pocketed a $6 million advance—of which he donated $1 million to charity.

At the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York that month, the publication of
Giving
was amplified by three new components. The gala dinner featured the advent of the Clinton Global Citizen Awards, a prize to be given to leading philanthropists, activists, or public officials, nominated by CGI members, whose work had demonstrated “innovative and effective approaches to making positive global change” and “potential for scalable growth and sustainability.” The award’s inaugural recipients included tennis star Andre Agassi, who ran an education-oriented foundation; Cisco Systems chairman John Chambers, a Republican who had made significant donations to CGI and CHAI; Vicky Colbert, a renowned Colombian educator; and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, a major South Asian antipoverty organization.

Clinton also announced the Clinton Global Initiative University, a new program based on CGI that would challenge college students to create fresh solutions to global problems. Students wishing to attend CGIU, which would be held at a different campus each spring, would submit a “Commitment to Action” in advance—and thus become eligible for a scholarship covering the costs of travel and attending the conference.

And in keeping with the egalitarian thrust of
Giving
, Clinton established a new CGI website, MyCommitment.org, which he hoped to develop into an “online community”
for like-minded citizens to connect with each other and foster positive change.

As Clinton’s publishers anticipated,
Giving
drew the attention of all the major broadcast, cable, print, and online outlets. What they didn’t expect was a highly favorable feature in
Newsmax
—the largest-circulation conservative news magazine in the country, which was owned by two men who had fanatically pursued the destruction of Clinton’s presidency.

Yet there on the cover of its November issue was a smiling photo of Clinton, hyping a friendly interview conducted by editor-in-chief Christopher Ruddy.

A lifelong conservative, Ruddy had earned a measure of journalistic fame on the right for his bloody-minded investigation of the tragic suicide of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel who shot himself in suburban Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park in July 1993. Although he never accused the Clintons of murdering Foster—who had been Hillary’s law partner in Little Rock and Clinton’s friend since early childhood—Ruddy disputed the official finding of suicide by six separate investigations, and insisted that lawyers in the Clinton White House had covered up the real circumstances of his death.

Ruddy published his theories about the Foster case in the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
, a right-wing daily owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil and steel fortune and one of the chief financial backers of the American right. So powerful was Scaife’s disdain for the Clintons during those years that he spent more than $4 million on the “Arkansas Project,” a secret effort to defame Bill and Hillary Clinton by any and every method available.

Several months after the Arkansas Project was exposed in 1998, Ruddy started Newsmax Media, a new conservative website, and eventually added a printed monthly magazine edition and a variety of health and financial newsletters. His main financial backer was Scaife—and Newsmax continued to bash the Clintons, their fellow Democrats, liberals, and progressives with predictable regularity for several years, while establishing itself with a large audience and big profits.

Ruddy was a Long Island native who had worked at the
New York Post
in
the 1980s, and had become friendly with Ed Koch, then the city’s Democratic mayor. That friendship endured—and one day in 2005, Koch had suddenly told Ruddy over lunch how much he had come to like Hillary Clinton, then New York’s junior U.S. senator. Ruddy said he wasn’t interested in meeting her. But two weeks later, he received a note from Clinton, saying she was “pleased to know we have a mutual friend in Hizzoner.”

To Ruddy, that note was a sign of “tremendous guts” on her part, and he wondered whether he should invite her to lunch. Scaife told him not to do it, and he sent back a friendly note without an invitation. Almost two years later, when Ruddy saw Koch again, the retired mayor mentioned that he intended to support Hillary for president.

At that point, Ruddy recalls, “I started looking at [Bill] Clinton and his foundation.” He discovered that Clinton wasn’t calling for “socialization of industry,” but promoted development and entrepreneurship. He was deeply impressed by CHAI’s work on health care and AIDS treatment.

After Koch offered to set up a lunch with Bill Clinton, Ruddy raised the issue with Scaife again—and discovered that the eccentric billionaire had been reevaluating their old enemy, too. But after Koch sent a message to Clinton’s office raising the possibility of lunch with Scaife and Ruddy, he received no reply.

Finally in July 2007, Ruddy found a message on his cell phone: “This is Douglas Band. I’m counselor to President Clinton. I’m in Iowa and I’d like to talk with you.” When Ruddy called, Band said, “Sorry we didn’t get back to you sooner. Do you want to set up a meeting?”

“Yes, let’s get together,” said Ruddy.

“Are you taking back what you said in the Nineties?” Band asked.

“No,” Ruddy replied, “but let’s get together and talk about things we agree on.”

After a few more calls, they scheduled a meeting on July 30. When he told Scaife, Ruddy recalls that the older man was “thrilled.” They flew down to New York together from Scaife’s summer home on Nantucket in his personal DC-9, then took a limousine to Harlem. They waited in a Starbucks on 125th Street for a Clinton aide to take them up to the foundation offices. Merely sitting at a coffee shop in the nation’s legendary African American neighborhood was an adventure for
Scaife, a tall blond man with bright blue eyes, whose privileged life had rarely led him to meet any black people who weren’t servants.

Only minutes after Band settled them in a conference room, the door opened and they heard that familiar voice. “Hi Dick. Welcome! Hey, Chris! Thanks for coming,” said Clinton, smiling broadly as he brought them into his private office, where he showed off the magnificent view and some of the books, paintings, and artifacts he had collected from around the world.

Although Ruddy felt “pretty nervous,” he said Clinton “soon put us at ease.” Over a catered lunch of Mediterranean chicken, they listened as Clinton explained the inner workings of CHAI and the foundation’s other projects for forty-five minutes, and then spent almost two hours more talking about presidential politics. Before they left, he gave each of them an inscribed copy of
My Life
.

When a reporter for
Newsweek
learned about the remarkable Harlem meeting months later, he asked Ruddy to comment—and Ruddy called Doug Band. “Doug said, say whatever you want. And President Clinton wants you to know, he doesn’t care whatever they might say about you and all that old stuff.” Eventually Ruddy told a writer for
Vanity Fair
that, looking back, he could have been “more level-headed” in his reporting on the Clintons: “I was overzealous.” And around that same time, one of Scaife’s foundations sent the Clinton Foundation a check for $100,000.

While Ruddy and Scaife were hardly alone in reconsidering Clinton, their reversal was a symbol of how far the former president had come from the dark time after his departure from the White House. For his part, Clinton had lived up to Mandela’s lesson, liberating himself with generosity toward those who had grievously wronged him.

Now even his most ardent former enemies had come to acknowledge and support his humanitarian work. The press that once vilified Clinton now sought him out and even celebrated him. Prominent journalists—
New York Times
columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof,
Financial Times
editor Lionel Barber, NBC News’ Tom Brokaw, among others—participated in CGI sessions. Many Republicans in the corporate world supported the Clinton Foundation, and Republican officials had appeared at CGI in the wake of his entente with the Bush family.

Bill Clinton’s poll ratings both at home and abroad were strongly fa
vorable. By some measures he was the most popular man in the world. As the election year loomed, there was nowhere to go but down.

Until late autumn, Hillary seemed poised to walk away with the Democratic nomination. Polls over the summer had showed her with substantial leads over every other contender, including Obama. With her strong performance in the first debates, the attitude of “inevitability” cultivated by Penn from the beginning seemed less imperious and more assured.

Then she stumbled in a debate at Drexel University—over the obscure issue of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants—and her opponents pounced. So did her old adversaries in the political media, many of whom had never quite reconciled themselves to her unscathed emergence from the conflagrations of Whitewater, the independent counsel investigation, and impeachment.

A few weeks later, at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, the combination of weak planning by her staff and a boilerplate speech, delivered poorly, left Hillary suddenly looking like a loser. The hall was filled with Obama loyalists, who responded with wild enthusiasm to his inspirational address, in which he rejected cynical Clintonite “triangulation” to build toward a soaring promise: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.” From that evening forward, Hillary remained at a disadvantage in the kickoff Iowa caucuses. And she soon turned to her husband for help.

Clinton had long believed that his wife’s campaign should go after Obama more aggressively. He knew that the Obama campaign had been quietly leaking negative material on him and Hillary for months. Media hostility toward Hillary had been amplified by favorable coverage of Obama, a phenomenal politician who was quickly becoming popular with the press.

But the Clinton campaign’s experiments with potential negative advertising themes about the Illinois senator—his financial relationship with a shady real estate developer in Chicago, his shifting statements about the Iraq War, his equivocal record as a state legislator—were all flops when tested on Iowa voters. Clinton spent much of December in
Iowa, without effect. Hillary came in third, behind Edwards, in the caucus on January 3.

When the polls there showed that she might lose again in New Hampshire, Hillary unexpectedly displayed the emotions roiling inside, as she talked earnestly with a roundtable of undecided voters at a diner in Portsmouth. “It’s not easy. . . . You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political, it’s not just public. I
see
what’s happening.” Cameras caught the pain on her face, her eyes welling with tears.

The next day, during a town hall meeting at Dartmouth College in Hanover, Clinton finally ripped into Obama. Wagging his finger, in hoarse, angry tones, he complained bitterly about the media’s failure to vet the young senator.

“It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war . . . and never got asked one time, ‘Well, how could you say that, when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the [war] resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush . . . and there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since.’ Give me a break! This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen!”

Then Clinton turned to another rankling story—a leaked document from inside the Obama campaign, urging an assault on both Clintons over campaign contributions and speaking fees from Indian American business leaders, referring archly to her as “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).”

Although Obama had rejected that idea, Clinton spoke as if he had been personally attacked. “What did you think about the Obama thing, calling Hillary the Senator from Punjab? . . . Or what about the Obama handout that the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook, scourging me, scathing criticism over my financial reports. . . . The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take.”

When the primary returns came in with a narrow but crucial victory for Hillary, Clinton took special notice of the vote in Hanover. He felt certain that his double-barreled blast had held down Obama’s margin in the college town, and perhaps beyond.