Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (50 page)

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Authors: Joe Conason

Tags: #Presidents & Heads of State, #General, #Leadership, #Biography & Autobiography, #Political Process, #Political Science

BOOK: Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton
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When Hillary called Obama on November 19, she had a set of talking points, reviewing the process, expressing her gratitude, but ex
plaining why she would remain in the Senate. The Clinton team had prepared a statement for release to the media. Much as she appreciated his offer, it said, “in the end, this was a decision for me about where I can best serve President-elect Obama, my constituents and our country. And as I told President-elect Obama this afternoon, my place is in the Senate.”

But she didn’t reach Obama until after midnight on November 20. She talked about the foundation, her campaign debt, and whether she could accomplish more in the Senate or the State Department. He listened sympathetically and promised to make sure her concerns were addressed. When she reiterated her reluctance, he refused to accept her refusal. They hung up without reaching a conclusion.

The next day Hillary changed her mind for the last time—above all because, as she later wrote, “When your president asks you to serve, you should say yes.” Obama announced her appointment to the press in a Chicago hotel ballroom on December 1, with her standing beside him. He briskly dismissed questions about their campaign criticisms of each other, and they left the podium arm in arm.

Bill Clinton watched their press conference on a hotel television in Hong Kong, where he was hosting the first—and for several years to come, the last—CGI International gathering. Tentative plans for a 2009 CGI conference in Brazil would soon be canceled in accordance with Obama’s strictures.

Over the following weeks, with a break for Thanksgiving, the Clinton and Obama teams worked on a final “memorandum of understanding,” to be signed by Bruce Lindsey and Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s top adviser and cochair of his transition team. This document codified the arrangements they had already negotiated concerning foreign donations, speeches, and business arrangements.

The foundation released the names of its donors on December 18, provoking a frenzy of coverage—“In Clinton List, a Veil Is Lifted on Foundation,” announced the
New York Times
on page A1—that focused on contributions from celebrities like Barbra Streisand, big sums collected almost a decade earlier for the library from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and donations from a small collection of figures whose pedigrees might raise an eyebrow—“a businessman who was close to the onetime military ruler of Nigeria, a Ukrainian tycoon who was son-
in-law of that former Soviet republic’s authoritarian president and a Canadian mining executive who took Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan while trying to win lucrative uranium contracts.”

The unprecedented revelation, which Clinton’s office said “would insure against even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” didn’t mollify their critics. Neither did a statement from Obama’s spokesperson insisting, ‘’Past donations to the Clinton Foundation have no connection to Senator Clinton’s prospective tenure as secretary of state.” The
Times
story dismissed those reassurances with an editorial tone: “Such contributions could provoke suspicion at home and abroad among those wondering about any effect on administration policy.” The editorial pages and cable commentators tended to agree, describing the disclosure protocols as inadequate and doomed to failure.

Her Senate confirmation nevertheless appeared certain—so certain that between Christmas and New Year’s, she started serious discussions with potential recruits for top State Department positions. To keep that process quiet, she invited prospective aides and envoys to a location in New York rather than Washington. Anyone entering her home in the capital was likely to be spotted. But nobody noticed who went in and out of a busy tower overlooking Central Park, where Hillary had borrowed the residence of Doug and Lily Band as a “State Department annex” to conduct interviews and meetings.

When Hillary appeared before her colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the week before Obama’s inauguration, the mood was jovial, even celebratory. She offered smooth, smart answers to every question, displaying her impressive grasp of policy issues, from the international Law of the Sea treaty to tensions between Turkey and Armenia. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the committee and a moderate who had befriended both Hillary and Obama when they arrived in the Senate, sounded the first discordant note.

He hinted at concerns that the former president, whose personal network encompassed most of the world’s heads of state, might say or do something damaging to U.S. prestige—”freelancing,” as other critics put it. After eight years of Bush, however, nobody could name a single
instance when Clinton had embarrassed the president. On several occasions, he had helped, despite their many policy disagreements.

But that largely imaginary concern wasn’t what troubled Lugar most.

“Foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the Secretary of State,” said the Indiana senator, warning Hillary that “even well-intentioned foreign donations carry risk for United States foreign policy.” She responded evenly that the memorandum of understanding negotiated as a condition of her appointment would ensure full transparency and ethics review. Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican best known for his own ethical lapses, suggested that the Clinton Global Initiative might serve as a conduit for hidden donations; she replied that the CGI donors had always been public and would continue to be disclosed regularly.

But Lugar, veteran of a more bipartisan Senate, whose intentions were undoubtedly benign, was not fully persuaded. Neither was John Kerry, who had ascended to the committee chair. Before the committee voted, Lugar urged changes to the agreement governing the foundation, including the immediate disclosure of all actual or pledged donations over $50,000, with all foreign donations submitted for ethics review by the State Department.

“If there is a slightest doubt about the appearance that a donation might create,” he said, “the foundation should not take that donation. If there are issues about how a donation should be disclosed, the issue should be resolved by disclosing the donation sooner and with as much specificity as possible.”

Hillary said she took his point. “I respect you so much, Senator,” she said directly to Lugar. “And I can, you know, certainly guarantee to you that I will remain very sensitive to this and I will work with you and [Kerry] as we go forward.” The committee voted to affirm her nomination almost unanimously; Vitter voted no.

On January 20, the day of Obama’s historic inauguration, the full Senate still had not yet confirmed her. At the inaugural luncheon, Senator John McCain ran into Doug Band and Huma Abedin, who asked him why no action had been taken on Hillary’s nomination since the Foreign Relations Committee vote. “I’ll take care of it,” he assured them.

The next day, the Arizona Senator moved to cut off debate on her
nomination to speed a full Senate vote. “We had an election and we also had a remarkable and historical time yesterday and this nation has come together as it has not for some time,” said McCain. “The message the American people are sending us right now is they want us to work together and get to work right now.” Later that afternoon the Senate confirmed her, with only two voting no—Vitter and South Carolina’s ultraconservative Jim DeMint.

Not many months into Hillary’s tenure, Madeleine Albright—the first female secretary of state, appointed by Bill Clinton, and a close friend—hosted a small, low-key, celebratory dinner at her home in Georgetown. All the others at Albright’s table, too, once held the responsibilities Hillary had recently assumed: Henry Kissinger, who had served under Presidents Nixon and Ford; Warren Christopher, who had served under President Clinton before Albright; and Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both of whom had served under President George W. Bush.

Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nation’s next top diplomat. Much of the advice was joking, like Warren Christopher urging her never to vacation in August, a month when crises always erupted. But Powell suggested that she use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer on his desk. Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, Powell thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier—to keep her personal account and use it for most messages. She would also continue using the email server from her presidential campaign, which aides had installed in Chappaqua. Those were choices of convenience that would, years later, cause her untold trouble.

Scarcely a full week into the Obama administration, Bill Clinton and his small retinue—including Band, Cooper, hedge-fund manager Marc Lasry, and Los Angeles sports entrepreneur Casey Wasserman—arrived in snowy Davos, Switzerland. Exactly five years earlier, in this same setting, Doug Band had first envisioned an international conference that would not just inspire but require action on global problems.
That had been a more optimistic time. Amid a worldwide recession, with no economic revival in sight, the mood among the hobnobbing elites at the 2009 World Economic Forum was glum.

More accustomed to flattering themselves and each other as benevolent masters of the world, the corporate, media, and philanthropic titans had no choice but to confront a catastrophe that had badly diminished their financial assets and moral credibility. Nobody doubted where the blame belonged, namely on the criminality and stupidity of American bankers and the government that had failed to constrain them—an undeniable fact that the Russian and Chinese leaders present in Davos mentioned more than once.

Yet even on this uncertain terrain, the former U.S. president drew a full and attentive auditorium at a special plenary session interview with Klaus Schwab, the Davos impresario. There at least, the indignities and errors of the presidential campaign no longer clung to him. Clinton didn’t attempt to evade or minimize his country’s responsibility. Referring to an earlier speech by China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, he said, “The Chinese premier was right: It all started in the United States.” Even so, he quickly added, China had no choice but to continue underwriting U.S. budget and trade deficits for the sake of its own economy. “Global interdependence is more important than anything else in the world today,” he said. “We cannot escape each other. Divorce is not an option.” Speaking out forcefully in defense of the Obama administration’s economic priorities, especially its $800 billion stimulus plan, he insisted that world leaders had to act resolutely, in the tradition of the West’s wartime leaders.

He had little patience for the bathos he sensed in his audience. “This is not a time for denial or delay,” he urged them. “Do something. Give people confidence by showing confidence.” He scolded them at a panel discussion of a “philanthrocrisis,” as donors grew stingier and charitable budgets tightened. The responsibilities of the fortunate had not shrunk with their declining portfolios.

“We’re all still doing pretty well, or we wouldn’t be here,” he said with an edge of sarcasm. “So many private planes here, some are parked as far away as Milan!” The financial implosion had exposed a world that “is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable, and inequality is the cause of this crisis. . . . Too much of the wealth went to too few people.”

According to Clinton, many at Davos were suddenly asking themselves, “What are we supposed to do about the fact that we have less money?” For him, the answer was that efforts to provide better health care and more robust development in poor countries should be redoubled, not reduced. His greatest current worry, he told Schwab, was that “because so much wealth has been lost, the impulse to help the poor will be lost too.” Redressing the world’s gross inequalities remained the moral imperative for humanity, regardless of cost. Like all nonprofits and charities, his foundation had suffered a steep decline in donations, he noted. “But we went into our endowment to sustain our AIDS work, because otherwise people would die.”

Staying only one day in Davos, Clinton remained busy all afternoon, meeting privately with foreign dignitaries such as the prime minister of Qatar. That evening, the Clinton Global Initiative hosted cocktails and snacks at the Kirchner Museum, a glassy box across the road from the Congress Centre where the forum was held—a motley scene typical of Davos, with faces ranging from actor Jet Li , Prince Haakon of Norway, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to Israeli president Shimon Peres and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

But not long after greeting the assorted party guests, Clinton and his entourage bundled into a black Volkswagen van for a quick trip down the mountainside, stopping at the entrance to Hotel Waldhuus, the local Sheraton franchise.

Waiting to greet them inside the hotel lobby was Vladimir Putin himself, ready with a small glass of vodka to toast the arrival of “our good friend” Clinton. The Russian prime minister, whose early days in office had overlapped with the end of Clinton’s presidency, was hosting his own celebration, attended by the likes of Oleg Deripaska, billionaire oligarch and principal shareholder of the world’s largest aluminum company. For several minutes, Clinton and Putin stood with drinks while a pianist pounded out “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s
Peer Gynt
, as waiters passed vast trays of smoked salmon and caviar canapés and poured more iced vodka.

When the musical entertainment ended, Putin swiftly escorted Clinton and Band to a table at the far end of a separate room, with an interpreter, guarded by a phalanx of Secret Service and Russian security agents. Visible on the other side of a glass wall, they talked in
tensely for nearly ninety minutes, before finally rising and walking out together for a few handshakes and photos with the other guests.

Later Clinton declined to comment publicly about the substance of their conversation, except to hint that the Russian leader seemed ready to resume discussions on missile defense issues. (It was a topic they had last discussed when Clinton, still president, had made a final trip to Moscow in 2000.) Putin wanted to learn more about Obama, but their conversation ranged widely, touching on Iraq and Afghanistan.

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