Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (54 page)

For Clinton, however, it was nevertheless troubling to learn that one of the bypass grafts to his heart had already become blocked, five years after the original operation. Soon after leaving the hospital he had heard from Dean Ornish, the cardiologist and author who advocated drastically reducing dietary fat to cure heart disease. Ornish had read Schwartz’s comments in the press and sent his old friend a “blistering” email: “Yeah, it’s normal, because fools like you don’t eat like they should.”

When Clinton got home, he reread Ornish’s
Reversing Heart Disease
and two other studies that made the same point. He wanted to live to be a grandfather and not go under the knife again. With some prodding from Chelsea, he decided to drop at least twenty pounds before he walked her down the aisle at her July wedding. To reach that goal—and to protect his arteries from further blockage—he immediately stopped eating meat, poultry, fish, milk, cheese, and eggs.

Overnight, he became that rarest of Arkansans: a vegan.

Giving up meat didn’t make Clinton feel deprived. His reputation for wolfing down McDonald’s hamburgers in Little Rock was always a myth, although he did love French fries. But while Hillary had tried for years to encourage him toward healthier eating, now he went further than she had ever imagined. (And she continued on as a carnivore, with no signs of heart disease.)

On his new diet, Clinton reduced the total intake of fat in his diet
and consumed very little saturated fat. At first that meant too little protein, leaving him terribly fatigued. For a more nourishing breakfast he added a smoothie prepared from almond milk, protein powder, and fruit; for lunch, a salad of some kind; and for dinner he would have a dish of legumes or grains, often quinoa, which he liked. Between meals he ate nuts, “because those are good fats,” or hummus, a favorite snack. He easily met his goal and kept the weight off. He underwent regular blood tests to monitor his levels of iron and other minerals; whenever they dropped too low, and to maintain muscle tone, he ate eggs or wild salmon occasionally. Otherwise, he kept to his regimen zealously.

When Clinton went to Africa for his annual trip in late June, he carried a new title that he had acquired a month earlier, when he was named honorary chairman of the United States bid committee for soccer’s World Cup. Along with an assortment of soccer enthusiasts that included Henry Kissinger, film director Spike Lee, boxing champion Oscar de la Hoya, and a number of business and media figures, Band was already a member of the committee, and he had persuaded Clinton to join the effort to bring the World Cup to the United States.

He arrived in South Africa as the 2010 World Cup competition was under way there. It was the first time that FIFA, the international soccer federation, had ever held the championship in Africa, a source of enormous pride and excitement for the entire continent.

Although he was a devoted—some said “crazy”—follower of football, basketball, and baseball, Clinton quickly picked up an enthusiasm for soccer, the sport that best suited his global outlook. He even developed a multicultural pitch for the U.S. bid: “In our country, every team from around the world will be able to attract a hometown crowd in at least one of our cities.”

While he would still make his regular visit to Mandela in Johannesburg and his stops at foundation projects in several countries, Clinton and his party had box seats for what seemed likely to be the final World Cup match for the U.S. team against Algeria, at a stadium in Pretoria.

That match turned into one of the most exciting and momentous in U.S. soccer history, when at the very end, captain Landon Donovan scored a stunning overtime goal to win. As the stadium erupted,
Clinton and his party were escorted from their box to the team’s locker room. The American players roared with pride as the former president walked in and was enveloped in a maelstrom of embraces, handshakes, chest bumps, and high fives.

With an arm around Donovan’s shoulder, he congratulated them. “I’m so proud of you. . . . You are amazing!” He posed for photographs with the shirtless, whooping players. They invited Clinton to join them in their inner locker room, where he could be glimpsed toasting them with a can of beer, amid much additional hollering.

The surprise victory meant an abrupt change in schedule, since the Americans would play again a few days later, in the northwestern city of Rustenburg. They lost when Ghana scored in overtime to break a 1–1 tie. But Clinton enjoyed the game and welcomed an unexpected friend—mad soccer fan Mick Jagger—to his box.

His thrilling experience at those matches intensified Clinton’s desire to bring the World Cup to his own country. The bid committee had turned in a heavy proposal, the size of two telephone books, to FIFA, the sport’s governing body, in Switzerland a few weeks earlier. Decisions on both the 2018 and 2022 World Cup locations would come before the year ended. In a corrupt process, the U.S. lost both.

Between World Cup matches, Clinton spent time with Mandela and visited health clinics in the city and countryside that had partnered with CHAI. The new South African government of President Jacob Zuma had fully endorsed the partnership with Clinton and CHAI that his predecessor Mbeki had undertaken only hesitantly. More than 700,000 AIDS victims were on treatment there, but millions more needed it and as many as 365,000 were estimated to have died due to the Mbeki government’s delay in responding seriously to the pandemic.

After several years, the foundation’s work in Africa was starting to be felt beyond the clinics and health systems that CHAI strengthened. In Dar-es-Salaam, he met with Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, who complained that under Western policy, it was possible to open forests to loggers for profit and then receive carbon-credit subsidies as a reward for replanting the raped land. Kikwete hadn’t done that, but he had watched his neighbors in Kenya exploit the system.

Such stupidity astonished Clinton. The Tanzanian leader expressed frustration as well over the imperial style of Western environmental efforts, with foreign personnel parachuted in to certify projects for carbon credits—precisely the opposite of the Clinton Foundation style of guiding and assisting governments, letting them take responsibility and credit.

Later that day Clinton traveled hundreds of miles south to Kikere, a rural village where foundation staffers were assisting a local clinic—in essence a very basic hospital, serving thousands of destitute farm families—to improve its services with solar electricity. Using a photovoltaic system, the clinic produced enough clean energy to power lights (replacing dirty kerosene lamps), refrigerators for medicine, lab equipment, a laptop computer, all displayed proudly by the young technician trained to maintain the system. For a capital cost of $38,000 it provided enough wattage for five clinic staff houses, where, as a doctor said, “our children can now do schoolwork at night.”

Although much of the clinic’s operation still appeared rudimentary by U.S. standards, electrification had enabled doctors there to treat illness much more effectively and save many lives. Across Tanzania, more than fifty clinics had installed similar solar arrays, at very low cost. To Clinton, this pointed toward a simple climate bargain: Western capital and technology, free or deeply discounted, in exchange for preserving African forestlands.

Coping with climate change was a major aspect of the Clinton Development Initiative as well, whose outposts he visited in both Rwanda and Malawi. (Its name had changed after 2009, when recession losses forced Tom Hunter to reduce his financial commitment.) To reach one of the projects run by CDI in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, his party flew into the capital’s airport, Lilongwe International, which boasted a single asphalt runway next to a rusting Quonset hut.

Hours later, after a bumpy and extremely hot ride through flat, arid countryside, they reached the CDI “anchor farm” in Mchinji district. There Clinton met with farmers growing soy and maize whose incomes had risen by 150 percent since the program began to provide them with certified seed, cooperative buying of fertilizer and marketing of their crops, and training in advanced agronomic techniques—with a special emphasis on “climate smart”
methods of conserving water and improving soil.

Wielding a shovel and a watering can, he planted a sapling, one of more than 1.9 million trees that the farmers in the program had planted for fruit and wood. As those trees grew, they had captured nearly a quarter of a million tons of carbon dioxide. With the right incentives of better nutrition and cash crops, the project’s aim was to begin to reverse the deforestation still occurring across Africa.

The farmers and their families were excited to see Clinton, and to show him the low, dark grain warehouse where they stored the harvested maize, and the small health clinic that had been erected by CDI. A woman told him that with more money, more local children were in school. The government of Malawi wanted to expand the program to 56,000 farmers in three districts.

When the farmers and their families started dancing in celebration of the Americans’ visit, McAuliffe suddenly joined in, jumping and spinning around, his arms waving in the air, as Clinton laughed.

For Clinton, the International Conference on AIDS had become a semiannual marker, ever since he had attended the 2002 conference in Barcelona with Mandela as a private citizen for the first time. Since then he had spoken at every one, and on July 19 in Vienna, he delivered the keynote address to an audience of physicians, academics, health workers, and activists estimated at 25,000. While much had been achieved—five million were then receiving treatment—much still remained to be done before the pandemic could be ended.

“To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said when the British finally started winning a battle or two in World War II,” he said, “this is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. It is only the end of the beginning. In other words, we ramped up. You’ve done a great job. But we have to transition now from what has essentially been a make-it-up-as-you-go-along emergency response to one that we can sustain.”

Rather than debate whether to spend more on global health or on specific programs such as AIDS treatment or maternal health, Clinton said that as PEPFAR and the Global Fund had increased spending on
health care around the world, fewer women and children were dying every year.

“The fight against AIDS has raised a lot of boats,” he explained, “to fight tuberculosis and malaria, to improve health systems, to challenge and motivate governments and NGOs alike, to deliver more and better health care. Fighting AIDS in the right way clearly improves maternal and child health.”

Clinton went out of his way to defend Obama, under harsh criticism at the conference and at home for failing to fulfill a promise to increase PEPFAR’s funding. After saying he would increase the AIDS treatment program created under Bush to $50 billion a year, the federal appropriation had fallen far short and wouldn’t reach that figure while he was president.

“I do not think it is either fair or accurate to say the president has gone back on his promises, as if this was a callous walking away,” he said. “When he signed that petition saying he would support greater AIDS funding, it was before the American economy led the world into the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Since then, he has tried to keep his commitments.” He urged them to lobby Congress instead, because he was certain Obama “would never veto an increase in AIDS funding.”

They gave Clinton a standing ovation, less for what he said than for what they knew he had done.

To friends, Clinton jokingly complained about the cost of his daughter’s wedding, sounding rather like a sitcom dad all year. But the projected expense of the lavish event, estimated at well over $2 million, wasn’t a joke. As the location Chelsea had chosen Astor Courts, a 1904 Beaux-Arts mansion with a fifty-acre estate on the Hudson River in Rhinebeck. That rental alone was over $200,000 for the weekend. The catering for over four hundred guests was probably more than three times as much.

The July 31 wedding had become a source of friction not only due to the enormous bills but the problem of the guest list, which couldn’t possibly encompass the vast number of people in America and around the world who regarded themselves as close friends of the Clintons.
People who had done major favors for Bill Clinton—loaning him a plane, or donating millions to the library or the foundation—were offended to learn that they had not been invited.

And then there was Donald Trump, who had hosted a somewhat reluctant Bill and Hillary at his third wedding in 2005. The real estate mogul was the sort of person who, though not an actual friend, still aspired to attend Chelsea’s wedding, which he clearly considered a prestigious event. An avid reader of gossip columns, he had probably seen mentions of a guest list that was expected to include the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, and Ted Turner (none of whom ultimately turned up). And having given Bill Clinton free access to his northern Westchester golf club, Trump National, where he proudly hung photos of the former president—and had even cleared the links once for the Clintons to play on Bill’s birthday—Trump may well have felt that there was simply no way he was not on the guest list.

So when the wedding invitation didn’t arrive, he called Doug Band with his characteristic self-assurance.

“I’m supposed to be at the wedding, Doug,” said Trump briskly, “but I didn’t receive the invitation, and I need to know where to go.” Band knew Trump wasn’t on the list, of course, and politely urged him to get in touch with Chelsea for directions. After a fruitless call to another Clinton staffer, Trump apparently gave up.

Conducted jointly by a rabbi and a Methodist minister, the celebration of Chelsea’s marriage was described as “a storybook wedding” by
People
magazine, with media coverage resembling a royal event. The bride wore a beaded Vera Wang gown, while her mother wore a dress designed by her friend Oscar de la Renta.

Following the ceremony, the secretary of state and former president released a statement: “Today, we watched with great pride and overwhelming emotion as Chelsea and Marc wed in a beautiful ceremony at Astor Courts, surrounded by family and their close friends. We could not have asked for a more perfect day to celebrate the beginning of their life together, and we are so happy to welcome Marc into our family.”