Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (46 page)

Following New Hampshire, the management at Hillary 2008 headquarters underwent a rapid change. Worried about the upcoming contests in Nevada and South Carolina, where she felt at a disadvantage, Hillary recruited Maggie Williams, who had served as chief of staff in Clinton’s Harlem office, to join Patti Solis Doyle as campaign “comanager”—and Williams quickly drew Bill Clinton into the campaign’s brain trust. In a meeting at Whitehaven, political director Guy Cecil briefed him and his top aides on the campaign’s outlook. Cecil’s candid observations worried Clinton—the campaign had spent a lot of money and time without achieving anything like the inevitable path to the nomination that Penn had predicted.

What bothered him still more, as the South Carolina primary drew closer, was the sense that this political contest was turning into some kind of vaguely racial dispute—with the press and some politicians holding him responsible. Rep. James Clyburn, a black member of the Democratic House leadership from South Carolina who had made no primary endorsement, criticized Clinton’s Hanover speech as if the former president had mocked the idea of a black man running for the nation’s highest office.

“To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us,” he said. While Clinton had meant no such insult, Clyburn was reacting to an emerging racial theme. More than one Clinton surrogate, including Penn, had referred publicly to Obama’s admission that in his youth he had not only smoked plenty of marijuana but had sampled cocaine (“a little blow”) a few times.

In another incident, Hillary and Obama tweaked each other on the theme of “hope” versus practical politics. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she responded to one of his jabs. “It took a president to get it done.” A
New York Times
editorial twisted that remark into a criticism of King.

To suggest that he or Hillary might be subtly trying to inflame racism made Clinton furious. Nobody who knew them believed that either was racially prejudiced. Mandela’s adopted son had been fighting racism his entire adult life, standing up against Klan-backed political
adversaries in Arkansas, erasing the last vestiges of Jim Crow from the state constitution, appointing the first African Americans to top positions in state government and his presidential cabinet, and, more recently, insisting that Africans were just as deserving of AIDS treatment as Americans and Europeans. He understood the evil of racism better than most white politicians, and certainly had done far more than most to extinguish it.

When Hillary won a narrow victory in the Nevada caucuses, her campaign had to decide quickly whether to put time and resources into South Carolina, a state where she lagged Obama in polls—and where African Americans dominated the Democratic primary. Although her campaign’s consensus was to spend little effort there and move on to the Super Tuesday states that would vote on February 5, Bill Clinton disagreed vehemently, arguing that he could win South Carolina for his wife. Rather than head off elsewhere to stump and raise money, he would spend the week before the primary crusading in the Palmetto State.

To say that week went poorly would be a profound understatement. Within the space of a few days, Clinton fulfilled the baleful predictions of Band and Cooper, who worried that his intense campaigning and acid comments about Obama were “un-statesmanlike,” to say the least.

The first warning came from Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, who had eagerly sided with Obama against Hillary. Daschle said Clinton’s verbal attacks on his wife’s principal opponent were “not in keeping with the image of a former president.” Former Democratic state chairman Dick Harpootlian, another former ally, started to follow Clinton around, spouting sound bites that accused him of using racial tactics and the “politics of personal destruction.”

On January 23, outside a Charleston auditorium, Clinton finally took the bait when a reporter asked him about Harpootlian’s remarks. With video recording every word, he vented about Nevada, Obama’s negative campaigning, and the “Senator from Punjab” memo. Jabbing his forefinger, he accused the Obama camp of using race against him, with the connivance of the media. “This is almost like once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something, the facts become irrelevant. . . . They are feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for.” He walked away, then turned once more to the gaggle of reporters: “Shame on you!”

This astonishing display of raw fury was a turning point in the primary, confirming what Daschle had said and causing some close to Clinton to wonder whether he truly wanted Hillary to win. He had eclipsed his wife—exactly as he had vowed not to do—and harmed his own reputation.

On Primary Day, Clinton made an offhand remark as he was about to exit the state. Flanked by a pair of African American members of Congress who had endorsed Hillary, he tried to explain what was happening in historical context. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” He didn’t know yet that her principal opponent would crush her by almost 30 points.

With that loaded observation, Clinton had confirmed the racial indictment—or so his critics insisted, although black politicians, including Jackson himself, said they took no offense. Badly timed and clumsy, but surely not racist, Clinton’s remark fell well within the bounds of acceptable commentary in American politics, where analysis of ethnic voting preferences is unavoidable and utterly mundane. Yet the press and Clinton’s political foes swiftly imposed the worst interpretation: The former president was attempting to “blacken” Obama.

The next blow came within a few days, when Caroline Kennedy and her uncle Ted, the dean of the Senate Democrats, stepped forward to endorse Obama at American University in Washington. Senator Kennedy’s move followed a long series of telephone calls from Bill Clinton, asking him to support Hillary. Clinton believed that Hillary not only deserved Kennedy’s endorsement but was owed it, for many reasons—including his appointment of the senator’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith as ambassador to Ireland. They had spent time with the Kennedys in Hyannis Port and felt a connection with them.

None of that made any difference to Ted Kennedy, immensely attracted by Obama’s charisma and, he told friends, troubled that the Clintons were playing racial politics. On the day of the endorsement, he called Bill Clinton to inform him of his decision, in a very brief conversation. Minutes later Clinton called back, asking him to spell out his reasons. Kennedy replied that Obama’s capacity to inspire the young had impressed him, and that he felt Obama might be able to heal the nation’s divisions. In a way, Clinton appreciated the call—other old
friends who endorsed Obama, including John Kerry for whom Clinton had risen from his sickbed, never bothered with that courtesy—but Kennedy’s defection hit him hard.

Following the Kennedy endorsement by only three days, the
New York Times
struck an even harder blow at the former president—and his foundation. The front-page headline, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton,” sat atop a suggestive lead:

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton
.

Clinton was not, in fact, aboard Giustra’s aircraft when it landed in Almaty that evening. He would not arrive until four days later on Ron Burkle’s plane with an agreement for the Kazakh government to purchase HIV/AIDS medicine for its citizens through CHAI.

However he got there, the article by Jo Becker and Don van Natta hinted strongly that Clinton’s influence with Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev had greased the way for Giustra to obtain a lucrative uranium mining deal there, in exchange for a later $31 million donation to the foundation. Recounting a “sumptuous midnight banquet” hosted by Nazarbayev, the
Times
reporters noted that Clinton’s toast to him for “opening up the social and political life of your country” whitewashed his authoritarian record and ignored severe criticism of his regime by none other than Senator Hillary Clinton. Two days later, according to the
Times
, Giustra won the Kazakh deal, despite his “newcomer” status.

The
Times
account was not only misleading on the minor question of how Clinton arrived in Almaty. Far from being a novice in Kazakhstan, Giustra had completed successful mining deals there for more than a decade. He had been working on the uranium deal, which was done well before Clinton left New York, for months. The deal he made was with two private firms that owned uranium interests there, not the Kazakh government (although officials there would later say government approval was important). By then Giustra had already donated $5 million to CHAI. Although the
Times
reporters had no way to know it, Giustra would continue to work closely with Clinton, pledging more than $100 million toward antipoverty and development projects in the decade that followed the Kazakh trip. And the generous foundation donor who had urged Clinton to visit Kazakhstan was not Giustra but Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian industrialist who had major mining and steel production facilities there.

Yet neither Giustra nor the foundation complained to the paper’s editors about the mistakes or the story’s thrust at that time. (The errors would remain uncorrected until January 2009, when
Forbes
magazine published an article by Robert Lenzner titled “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal.”) They ignored it in the hope that it would fade away.

Preventing such negative coverage was the reason that Clinton had decided, in the weeks before the publication of the
Times
story on Giustra, to withdraw from his personal business relationship with Ron Burkle and the Yucaipa Companies. Three of Burkle’s companies were registered in the Cayman Islands, as Bloomberg News and other outlets had discovered. And the
Wall Street Journal
had opened up the matter of a Burkle investment that was about to draw still more unfavorable press, thanks to a twenty-nine-year-old Italian playboy and con man named Raffaello Follieri.

More than two years earlier, Band and Burkle had met Follieri simultaneously through Aldo Civico, a Columbia University anthropology professor who was assisting the Clinton Foundation. Follieri said he was helping the Vatican and local Catholic bishops to sell church property. His connections in Rome meant he could get valuable properties at low prices, and he was looking for investors. Burkle signed a
deal with Follieri, but ended up suing him for misspending the proceeds on fancy hotels and chartered aircraft to woo his girlfriend, actress Anne Hathaway.

Meanwhile, Band had helped to introduce Follieri to another friend of the foundation, Canadian investor Michael Cooper, who put up a few million dollars toward the real estate deals—and had paid Band a finder’s fee of $400,000. The
Journal
headline—“How Bill Clinton’s Aide Facilitated a Messy Deal”—caused embarrassment, although Band gave half the money to another friend who had made the introduction, and returned half to Cooper.

The amounts earned by Clinton from the Yucaipa Cayman accounts were minimal, although he stood to make much more if the investments prospered. He had not avoided taxation on those earnings, which were listed in Hillary’s personal financial disclosures as a senator and presidential candidate. But all the Democrats had criticized the misuse of offshore shell companies to avoid taxation—and Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for president, was reported to have used such entities while working at Bain & Co., his Boston hedge fund. Competing with Obama, who had sponsored legislation to curtail offshore tax shelters, Hillary could not afford any hint of financial taint.

In early April, after verbal jousting between campaigns over “transparency” and “vetting,” Hillary Clinton released her joint tax returns with Bill for all the years since they had left the White House. Combined with the returns they had already released, dating back to his tenure as governor, they had put almost thirty years of personal tax data in the public record—far more than any other political candidates in American history.

The impact of the release was stunning, as reporters learned for the first time how rich the Clintons had become. Their earnings over seven years totaled $109 million, described in the
New York Times
as “an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001.” Based strictly on annual income, they had flown to the top of the one percent. The returns showed $12 million or more from Burkle, which didn’t include possible future payouts of up to $20 million; another $3 million or so from Vin Gupta, the controversial chairman of telemarketing firm infoUSA; about $29 million in book
advances and royalties; and $52 million from Clinton’s speeches, even though, as the
Times
noted, his paid speeches represented far less than half of all those he had delivered.

While urging greater transparency from the Clintons—although Obama had failed to disclose nearly as many years of tax returns as they had—the Obama campaign had insisted they should disclose all of the donors to the Clinton Foundation as well. For the moment, they could ignore that demand.

Over the next few months, as Obama steadily accumulated victories and delegates, Clinton spent almost every day on the road for Hillary and continued to provide his strategic wisdom to the campaign. His public appearances, however, were largely confined to places like Billings, Montana, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and Yankton, South Dakota. “We were going to Indian reservations in the middle of nowhere,” recalled one of his traveling aides.