Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (57 page)

But Kelly was moving on, with a longtime associate named Paul Keary, to create a new corporate consulting firm called Teneo, Latin for “to guide”—and their new partner Doug Band would be going with them. Early on, Clinton himself had urged Band to work with Kelly, whose acumen impressed him, and the two younger men had indeed become friends. The opportunity to make money was attractive to Band, but he also felt the pull of family life. Life with Clinton was a great adventure, exciting and exhausting—and not the life for a man nearing forty with a wife and children.

For well over a decade, Band had spent more time with Clinton than anyone else, including the former president’s family, and inevitably, such intimate knowledge had tempered his admiration. He felt that he understood what was good about Clinton, and what was less good. Yet he also felt an intense gratitude for the remarkable experiences and
opportunities that their relationship had afforded him. He and his new partners intended to offer Clinton a share of their new company, without expecting that his involvement would be more than peripheral.

Band and Kelly explained their plans for Teneo and their invitation to Clinton at a meeting in his Harlem office before they launched the firm in June. Present at that meeting was Chelsea Clinton, along with her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. In the months before Band began to withdraw from full-time engagement with the foundation and the former president, she had arrived—and began rapidly expanding her role.

Emulating her parents, Chelsea was tough, smart, and driven, with an enduring interest in public health issues. (As she would later put it, she was “obsessed with diarrhea,” a reference to diseases that still killed hundreds of thousands of infants and children every year in developing countries.)

Before turning her attention to her father’s institution, she had worked for several years in the private sector, logging three years at McKinsey & Company, the management consultants, and two years at Avenue Capital, a financial firm owned by her parents’ friend and supporter Marc Lasry. She had taken time off from Avenue to campaign for her mother between 2007 and 2008.

Then for a year or so, she had taken on a job as an assistant vice provost working on international programs at New York University, whose president John Sexton had known her since childhood. And meanwhile, she had completed a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University in 2010, studying nights and weekends. Not long after receiving her master’s, she had renewed her Oxford connection to seek a PhD in international relations with a remote study course. She had also worked as a “special correspondent” at NBC News.

Although she had shown scant interest in the foundation during most of those years, her attitude changed sharply in the months after her July 2010 wedding. She would later suggest that the publicity whirlwind had revealed that she, too, was an American celebrity—and that the foundation could serve as a platform to direct the energy surrounding her toward humane and useful purposes.

Both Band and Magaziner, who had known Chelsea since White House days, welcomed her involvement in the foundation. But both had also hinted that she might want to spend more time out in the
field, learning its operations from the bottom up—a suggestion she ignored. With her father’s support, she joined the foundation board as vice chair, armed with her credentials in management consulting and public health.

In the jargon of Silicon Valley, where she had gone to college and imbibed the new tech culture, she believed the time had come to “disrupt” the foundation with data-driven metrics and to “break down silos” between its sprawling programs.

At the meeting with Band and Kelly, Clinton seemed eager to participate in Teneo, with an honorary title and annual compensation of $3.5 million, an amount similar to what he had been paid by Burkle and Bing. The Teneo founders would have been glad to award him an equity share, but Hillary’s job at State precluded Clinton from accepting that form of compensation. For the same reason, he couldn’t take an executive or board position with the firm.

Chelsea would later insist that her father understood Teneo to be “something different from what it became,” although what she meant by that distinction was unclear. As for Band, he still expected at that point to continue as a senior adviser to his longtime boss—and believed, correctly, that his new venture would position him to raise additional money for the foundation. But in what was later described as a move to isolate Band—who had relinquished his foundation salary in 2010—Chelsea Clinton urged her father to bring in the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett for a study of the foundation’s operations.

For his part, Clinton was preoccupied that summer with another book project, reflecting his continuing concern over the domestic and global economy and the malign influence of the antigovernment “Tea Party” movement within the Republican Party. He had spoken out forcefully against the Tea Party and its extreme ideology during the 2010 midterm campaign, only to see its influence increase as the Democrats lost control of both the House and Senate.

Furious over his party’s paralysis and the president’s passivity, he decided that the time had come to write another book. Rather than a benign ode to generosity and civic involvement, this would be a defense of Obama’s effort to revitalize the economy, a review of how his
own economic policies had succeeded, an agenda for action—and a straight-talking takedown of the Tea Party. Its blunt title was
Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy
.

Clinton believed that a Tea Party Republican takeover of the federal government in the 2012 elections, including the White House, would be nothing less than tragic for America and the world. Wholly aside from their retrograde domestic policies, they had adopted a troglodyte attitude toward climate change, which he, like many others, suspected was a reflection of the fossil fuel investments of the billionaires, Charles and David Koch, whose money financed the movement. Clinton and his publishers at Knopf agreed that the book should be published no later than November 2011, which would allow a year for its arguments to percolate through political and media networks.

He finally began to write in June, working closely with Justin Cooper in the same style they had honed on his previous books: While Clinton typed pages, Cooper would provide additional research and read the pages, then return them marked up with notes about clarity and accuracy. Facing a deadline just after Labor Day, they continued through the summer, concluding with two weeks of labor in late August.

By then, Clinton and Hillary were vacationing, more or less, at a beachside estate they had rented on East Hampton’s Lily Pond Lane, where the neighbors included Jon Bon Jovi, Martha Stewart, and Steven Spielberg. Clinton sat in the sunny dining room, writing and faxing back and forth with Cooper, until the 196-page manuscript was finished.

Between the moment that he turned in the draft of
Back to Work
and its publication in November, Clinton enjoyed a peripatetic festival of events to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday and to commemorate his entry into national politics.

Over the weekend of October 1, Clinton and his family returned to Little Rock, where the foundation’s popular executive director Stephanie Streett had overseen the planning of parties, luncheons, speeches, and panel discussions.

The kickoff event on September 30 was the dedication, after seven years, of the Clinton Presidential Center’s final elements—a stunning $10
million pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River, connecting the library and surrounding park to the city of North Little Rock, and thirteen acres of restored wetlands named for the late Bill Clark, an old Clinton friend, outdoorsman, and city civic leader whose construction firm built the library. Clark had died in 2007. In his brief remarks, Clinton couldn’t help repeating favorite jokes about the critics who had initially disparaged the library for resembling an oversized house trailer—which somehow kept winning architectural plaudits for its handsome appearance and environmental design.

That night, James Carville hosted a lavish party at Doe’s Eat Place, the ramshackle steakhouse that had served as a Clinton campaign hangout, with big platters of superb porterhouse, beef tamales, and broiled shrimp circulating while he and his old comrades-in-arms held forth over beer and wine. Vegan though he was, Clinton turned up at a long table with Carville, pollster Stan Greenberg, and several other campaign cronies, nursing a glass of red wine while expounding on the latest research into red meat and heart disease.

The next morning, hundreds of veterans of the 1992 campaign, from former cabinet secretaries to the many rank-and-file “Arkansas Travelers” who fanned out across the country, showed up in front of the Old State House, yelling and applauding in the place where Clinton had announced his candidacy so long ago.

When Carville took the stage, he thundered, “Let me tell you something that this day is not about. It is not about
nostalgia
! This is a day about
pride
! Pride in the kind of presidency that President Clinton had, pride about his humanity, as evidenced by the unbelievable work that goes on in the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative all over this world.”

The former president then took the lectern. Wiping a tear from his eye, and then another, he confessed that the Little Rock weekend—and all the anniversary events—were at least a little about nostalgia. “I want this anniversary weekend more than anything else to be about thanks from me to you.”

But after he had thanked them all, his forty-minute speech reflected political themes from
Back to Work
, emphasizing the grossly unequal distribution of income in the nation’s fitful recovery, and the raging debate about “whether government is the problem, or whether we need
smart government in a changing world to create the opportunities of tomorrow.”

No politics intruded on the Hollywood Bowl birthday concert that honored his foundation’s tenth anniversary (on October 15, almost two months after his real birthday), where Lady Gaga made gossip headlines with a crooning, flirting reprise of Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” serenading of JFK. As Clinton sat in the front row next to Hillary and Chelsea, the singer gazed directly at him.

“Bill,” she sighed, “I’m having my first real Marilyn Monroe moment. I always wanted to have one. And I was hoping that it didn’t involve an accident with some pills and a strand of pearls, so here we are.” As she sang and swiveled, Gaga stripped away her costume until she was wearing nothing but a pale bodysuit and high heels. “It’s a good thing I used to dance on bars, right?”

Live-streamed on Yahoo.com as a fundraiser for the foundation, the “Decade of Difference” concert featured a stellar cast, including Stevie Wonder, Usher, Kenny Chesney, the Colombian singer Juanes, and, not surprisingly, Clinton friends Bono and The Edge of U2, who closed their set with “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

Smiling gamely, his wife and daughter had clapped along with Lady Gaga’s risqué routine, but her boldness had clearly discomfited the love object himself. When he took the stage to speak later, Clinton joked: “I got nervous when Gaga said she was planning to have a Marilyn moment. I thought, my God, I get Lady Gaga and I’ll have a heart attack celebrating my 65th birthday.”

In an amusing contrast that defined the cultural poles of Clinton’s life, that month’s final event was very wonkish and almost sedate: a morning conference at Georgetown University, Clinton’s alma mater in Washington, D.C., on “Clinton-Gore Economics: Understanding the Lessons of the 1990s,” which featured several former Clinton administration officials.

Former treasury secretary Robert Rubin described his old boss in opening remarks as “a visionary. . . . He recognized what all of us know today, that the global economy was in the early stages of transformation that would create enormous opportunities but also great pressures, and that information technology and communication were on
the threshold of revolutionary changes that would have enormous impact on our economy.”

The discussion highlighted the deficit reduction and public investment strategies that Clinton liked best to recall, with considerably less attention to the financial deregulatory legislation—the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act—that many critics had blamed for the financial chaos that led to the 2008 crash and the Great Recession. Now that he was promoting the role of “smart government,” Clinton didn’t dwell on those bills, although he had admitted that he had listened to the wrong advisers on derivatives regulation, if not Glass-Steagall. (Among those providing the mistaken counsel had been Rubin, of course.)

Introducing Clinton to deliver the morning’s closing address was Scott Murphy—a former Democratic congressman from upstate New York, whose reelection campaign had drawn Clinton northward on that cold morning before Election Day in 2010. Like all the others whose races Clinton had flown around to support on that very long day, save one, Murphy had lost his seat. Clinton thanked Murphy, praised him as a smart fellow who should be returned to Congress—and then launched into a speech drawn heavily from his new book, which had been born out of Clinton’s anger and concern over the Tea Party midterm.

Today, there is not a single solitary example on the planet of a truly successful economy that is pursuing this militant anti-government theory,” he said, wagging a finger. “You can be a little to the right or a little to the left, but all the successful countries have both a vibrant private sector and an effective government. . . .

I ask you again to ask yourself, is it better to have a partnership or an anti-government strategy? Is it better to believe in ‘invest and grow’ or ‘trickle down’? Is it better to believe in shared prosperity, or you’re on your own? I don’t think it’s a close call. Everybody needs to calm down and do what we know is best for the future.