Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (63 page)

The brew at the Rwanda Coffee Company factory, an impressive foundation project designed to market the country’s superior beans while raising farmer incomes, tasted considerably better. They all drank it again that evening at a dinner hosted by President Paul Kagame, who was celebrating the latest Clinton project in his country, a comprehensive feeding program created by CHAI that was designed to
ensure that infants received sufficient calories and nutrients from conception to the age of two.

It was one thing to hear about new programs that had yet to produce results, but something else to see living evidence of the foundation’s concepts, commitments, and projects. That same afternoon in Kigali, the delegation met doctors from top American teaching hospitals who had come to Rwanda to work with physicians at the capital’s Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali, which Clinton and Chelsea (and Magaziner, since it was part of a larger CHAI project called Human Resources for Health) had launched the year before.

The delegation toured the hospital, observing resident physicians as they performed procedures on simulator dolls and received clinical instruction on patient rounds. The project was an integral part of CHAI’s broad and ambitious mission in Rwanda, working with Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health group to build a modern health system.

The trip’s remaining days were spent in South Africa, where the delegation first arrived in the tough, economically depressed Eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth. There they visited the Ubuntu Education Fund, an oasis of innovative services for families and children, particularly those orphaned by AIDS.

Starting out with two friends who decided to distribute pens, pencils, and other academic supplies to poor children, Ubuntu had grown over more than a decade into a model for child development, with a “cradle to career” approach emphasizing the best possible health and education services. Its success had attracted a worldwide network of donors, led by South African natives like New York investment banker Vincent Mai. The impressive new building in Port Elizabeth that housed their programs was a CGI commitment.

On their final night in Africa, Clinton and Chelsea hosted “Embrace Tomorrow,” a live-streamed “conversation about the future” with eight mostly young “change-makers”—a media event cosponsored by the Clinton Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Although Mandela himself was not well enough to attend the event at the Pretoria Fairgrounds outside the capital, his chief aide, Zelda la Grange, was present, pacing nervously and talking on her cell phone until the event was under way. Speaking before a live audience, the conversation participants could have formed a CGI panel: a foundation director, a
wealthy wireless executive, a young orphaned scholar from Ubuntu, a feminist refugee leader, and the CEO of the bank with the largest customer base in Africa.

The topic was quite vague—simply “the future”—but the conversation provided a showcase for the Mandela Foundation, for Clinton, and for Chelsea, gingerly stepping out of her parents’ shadow to become a bona fide public figure.

But for Clinton and Magaziner, a real event earlier that afternoon had crystallized the difficult, often frustrating work of a decade in South Africa. With the delegation they had driven north from Johannesburg, getting lost once or twice, to find a rural village called Ramotse.

An old tribal facility dating from the apartheid era, the village clinic had been upgraded with CHAI funding to provide HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis treatment. As Clinton and Chelsea finally walked up the driveway to meet a crowd of hundreds of local residents who had waited two hours to see them, dozens of children clad in zebra-striped loincloths broke into traditional songs, played drums, and danced. The South African health minister, a medical doctor named Aaron Motsoaledi, had trekked out from Pretoria, joined by a carload of national and regional officials. ‘’Because of your help,” he said, “we are able to treat three and a half times more people than we used to.”

The effusive minister’s declaration was fairly accurate. Under Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor as president, the South African government had blocked CHAI from operating in the country with the world’s largest HIV-infected population for years, costing perhaps a million lives. In 2003 Mbeki had relented, but the health ministry had never fully welcomed CHAI—and by 2009, only 700,000 people were on treatment there. The situation didn’t improve until a new president, Jacob Zuma, replaced Mbeki.

Following CHAI’s return to Pretoria in April 2010 with a contingent of fifty advisers, the government had tripled the number of people getting treatment and expected to reach well over three million by 2015. That was possible because the number of clinics and hospitals providing testing and medication had grown since 2010 from 495 to more than 3,500. One of those facilities was the Ramotse Clinic.

Through negotiations with manufacturers of drugs and diagnostics, CHAI had achieved savings of more than $1 billion for the government’s
AIDS program, and brought the most sophisticated TB testing into the country as well. But above all, they had at last reversed the trajectory of the pandemic on its largest front.

On the morning of August 8, Clinton and his guests visited one last CGI commitment in Johannesburg, part of a Coca-Cola company project called 5by20 that counseled very small-scale female entrepreneurs—in this instance, a group of women who ran food stalls at the bus station. Their work looked very hard, and their appliances looked old. The women explained cheerfully how the kind ladies from Coca-Cola had taught them to know their products, know their customers, and always be friendly; the advisers had showed them how to manage their finances carefully, and even tipped them off about selling lunch combination plates.

The company had enrolled them in the 5by20 program, pledged to help five million women by 2020, because they belonged to its “value chain.” That meant they sold Coke—and as the lunchtime crowd began to stream in, that was what they did.

That night, the delegation flew back to New York on the Sun Country jet, exhausted but exhilarated. Clinton had brought them to an Africa tourists never saw. He had showed them what he and his partners were trying to do there—and how they might feel if they joined him.

Chelsea had performed with aplomb in Africa, winning media plaudits as she moved into the spotlight next to her parents. But as with them, the press remained more interested in political ambitions than humanitarian endeavors. While she was traveling, a flurry of comical speculation over her potential future as a candidate erupted in
Politico
, CNN.com, and the
Washington Post
political blog, which published “Where Chelsea Could Run,” a post closely analyzing the residency requirements for a New York City Council seat in her Manhattan district.

Lacking the desire to run for any office, she found such stories, which repeated in a continuous cycle, to be pointless and slightly frustrating. “I wish that someone wanted to talk about diarrhea and why I think we really have the chance to eradicate diarrhea, even before every country across the African continent or across the world has strong public health systems of sanitation and clean water,” she said. “Yes, I
wish the mainstream media were interested in things like our growing work in diarrhea, or the work that we’re doing in agriculture or the work we’re doing on HIV/AIDS and how important that is.”

Her annoyance notwithstanding, most of the profiles that appeared in the weeks and months following her sojourn in Africa were flattering—and more important, took her seriously. The story that appeared in
Glamour
provoked the
Washington Post
media critic to write a blog item headlined “5 Hilarious Excerpts from Glamour’s Puff Piece on Chelsea Clinton.”

The positive coverage could only help, considering the harsh deadline confronted by her father, Dennis Cheng, and the foundation staff as they raced to raise an endowment. During the fall season, they had slated a series of big-ticket fundraising parties and events across the country and as far afield as London. The explicit goal was to secure the future, beyond Bill Clinton’s own lifespan.

“We had to have another way to raise the funds that we need in order to keep the lights on,” explained Bruce Lindsey in a press statement. “You cannot continue to rely upon a single individual to raise all the money you need to raise on a yearly basis. First of all, it is unbelievably grueling on President Clinton, and second of all, if anything were to happen to him, it would end.” But they needed to get it done before anyone might need to raise money for a presidential campaign, just in case.

The clearest signal of what another presidential candidacy would portend for the Clinton Foundation arrived on August 14, when the
New York Times
published a front-page story under an ominous headline: “Unease at Clinton Foundation over Finances and Ambitions.” In nearly three thousand words,
Times
reporters Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick outlined a view of the foundation that emphasized every embarrassing tidbit they had been able to uncover, including plenty of anonymous gossip.

The story’s opening paragraphs suggested that the foundation had been financially mismanaged and possibly misused for personal enrichment—themes that Hillary Clinton’s critics on the right would immediately amplify and exaggerate, just as they had done with the
Times
investigation of the Whitewater land deal decades earlier.

Alluding to the Simpson Thacher report, the
Times
scolded:

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm—which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser—while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

The article didn’t dwell on the successes of the foundation, but emphasized the disputes between Band and Magaziner, and their clash over management and budget issues. Evidently the notion that disagreement and anger might occur in a worldwide organization, with thousands of employees and big personalities, shocked
Times
editors (who had been irked when other publications reveled in similar scuttlebutt about the paper’s executive editor Jill Abramson and her relationships with colleagues).

The
Times
also revealed that the Clinton Global Initiative had once paid to fly Natalie Portman “and her beloved Yorkie” to a CGI University gathering, first-class—“according to two former foundation employees”—and that unnamed sources also recalled how Magaziner had once reclined on a conference table when in pain from back spasms, “snapping at an employee.”

More substantively, the article identified Band as the nexus of worrisome “conflicts of interest.” But instead of outlining any actual conflict—meaning a specific action that benefited him while harming the foundation—the article merely listed a few Teneo clients, including Coca-Cola, UBS, and Standard Chartered Bank. Those firms had also donated money as CGI sponsors. Indeed, at first glance it would seem that Band’s relationships with corporate leaders had benefited CGI and the foundation, since he had encouraged them to donate if they weren’t doing so already.

How those actions had compromised the foundation or harmed anyone at all, the
Times
failed to explain. The article noted that during the 2012 CGI conference, Coca-Cola chairman Muhtar Kent “won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company’s partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa,” as if the beverage giant had attained that glorious moment by hiring Teneo. Yet it didn’t mention Coke’s multiple CGI commitments, or its pathbreaking agreement with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to slash shipments of sugary drinks to public schools—any of which would have earned its chairman a turn in the CGI spotlight.

Just as troubling as the backstairs backbiting, however, were its assertions about the Clinton Foundation’s finances:

In 2007 and 2008, the foundation also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign for donors amid a recession. Millions of dollars in contributions intended to seed an endowment were diverted to other programs, creating tension between Mr. Magaziner and Mr. Band. The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years, according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.

In an open letter posted on the foundation’s website, Clinton himself responded to those claims. The
Times
reporters, he wrote, had misunderstood how nonprofits are required to report their cash flows on the Form 990 documents that they file annually with the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the former president:

When someone makes a multi-year commitment to the Foundation, we have to report it all in the year it was made. In 2005 and 2006, as a result of multi-year commitments, the Foundation reported a surplus of $102,800,000, though we collected nowhere near that.

In later years, as the money came in to cover our budgets, we were required to report the spending but not the cash inflow. Also, if someone makes a commitment that he or she later has to withdraw, we are required to report that as a loss, though we never had the money in the first place and didn’t need it to meet our budget.

In other words, the “deficits” in 2007 and 2008 were at least partially offset by earlier commitments. Moreover, as Clinton’s letter also noted, he had set aside substantial cash reserves that hedged against the financial crash and recession—leaving him able to maintain the foundation’s service to HIV/AIDS patients, mothers and children, and other vulnerable groups despite a historic recession that proved devastating to many charities and businesses. If anyone understood the vicissitudes of fundraising, and how to hedge against them, surely Clinton did.