Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (64 page)

In a country that had seen stunning mismanagement, corruption, and deception at such major charities as the Red Cross and the United Way (whose late chairman William Aramony had been convicted and sent to prison for myriad abuses), the Clinton Foundation’s problems were in no way scandalous. But the Clintons and their associates had long been held to a harsher standard in the national media.

Immediately,
Times
op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd showed how the Clintons’ most embittered critics would interpret the paper’s investigation, filing a column filled with far-fetched contentions.

“If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons,” she wrote, as if nobody had ever heard of the Koch brothers or the dark-money machinery operated by former White House political boss Karl Rove. Teneo was “an egregious nest of conflicts,” she exclaimed excitedly, without naming any actual conflict. “We are supposed to believe,” Dowd sneered, “that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world.” Of course that wasn’t a claim the Clintons had ever made—but Dowd set an unrealistic standard for them that no political figure could meet.

If there was no scandal at the Clinton Foundation, its absence wouldn’t discourage any would-be critic from using the term freely. As Clinton himself had noted in the past, any story featured on the
Times
front page could establish a narrative that permanently inflected other media coverage—
in this case, by encouraging anonymous critics to depict Doug Band as a self-serving schemer.

Just before CGI convened its annual meeting on September 23, the
New Republic
dropped its new issue, featuring a cover story with a sensational headline: “Scandal at Clinton, Inc.: How Doug Band Drove a Wedge Through a Political Dynasty.” The magazine had published maddeningly inaccurate stories designed to damage the Clintons in the distant past, and its new management seemed equally hostile.

Written by Alec MacGillis, the article was presented as investigative reporting, but the first half of its nearly nine thousand words was more of an innocuous profile, sprinkled with anonymous quotes about Band’s sometimes engaging, sometimes prickly personality. It disclosed that to keep Band on staff, rather than let him wander off to a more lucrative job, Clinton had authorized Ron Burkle to engage him as an adviser and supplement his salary. It noted that Band had created CGI, and quoted Paul Begala, John Podesta, and others praising him, on the record.

MacGillis acknowledged forthrightly that “the good [the foundation] achieves is undeniable. . . . It has formed partnerships with multinationals and wealthy individuals to distribute billions of dollars all over the globe. Its many innovative projects include efforts to lower the costs of medicines in developing nations and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in major cities.”

But, he added vaguely, “it’s hard to shake the sense that it’s not all about saving the world. There’s an undertow of transactionalism in the glittering annual dinners, the fixation on celebrity, and a certain contingent of donors whose charitable contributions and business interests occupy an uncomfortable proximity.” Of course, many charities depend on gala events and endorsements by celebrities—who increasingly launch their own nonprofits, whether for commercial publicity, saintly devotion, or just a tax deduction.

No scandal there, but the story’s second half included several damaging charges, starting with an anonymous quote that described Band as “a gatekeeper who charged tolls.” Yet the article offered no evidence that he had ever shaken down anyone who wanted to see Clinton. It noted that at least one foundation donor, a businessman named Victor Dahdaleh, had been indicted by British authorities for allegedly paying
a bribe in Bahrain (charges that were later dropped). It mentioned the
Times
coverage of Frank Giustra, without mentioning the errors uncovered by
Fortune
magazine. It revisited the Follieri affair at length.

But the nub of its complaint did not appear until near the end. According to those anonymous sources, Band and his partner, Declan Kelly, had founded Teneo on the premise that they could charge tolls for access to Clinton indefinitely, and keep raising the price. While conceding “it was only natural that Band would tap his existing network,” the article emphasized “the extent to which Teneo’s business model depends on [Band’s] relationship with Clinton,” and quoted a “longtime Clinton associate” claiming that “Band’s pitch to clients was that he was ‘able to fly around [with Clinton] and decide who flies around with him. . . . The whole thing is resting on his access.’ ”

In due course, however, that premise proved to be entirely wrong. When the
New Republic
article appeared in the fall of 2013, Band’s communication with Clinton already had diminished. Raising three children in New York, he hadn’t traveled with the former president for several years. With Chelsea Clinton running the foundation, his influence there was long behind him, too. And nevertheless, even though all of its corporate clients knew that Band no longer worked with Clinton and spoke with him far less often than before, Teneo grew even more quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that a year after the
New York Times
and
New Republic
articles appeared, the major private equity firm BC Partners invested hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a minority share of the firm. By then Band and his partners had drawn up plans to develop a dozen divisions, from executive recruitment to corporate governance, business acquisitions, public relations, and strategic planning.

The firm had a sports advisory division, too, called Teneo Sports—which, in July 2014, announced the signing of its first four athlete clients: basketball superstars LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan, and the Irish golf champion Graeme McDowell. None of them had signed up with Teneo because of Bill Clinton.

Notwithstanding the negative media coverage that rippled out from the
New York
Times
and
New Republic
articles, both Bill and Hillary
Clinton continued to collect honors and awards as well as speaking fees. That spring they had returned to Little Rock for a ceremony that marked the renaming of the city’s newly renovated airport, which would be known as Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

In September, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia bestowed its Liberty Medal on Hillary, in an atmosphere where her eventual presidential candidacy seemed to be taken for granted. The Constitution Center’s chair, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, quipped, “Hillary and I come from different political parties, and we disagree about a few things, but we do agree on the wisdom of the American people—especially those in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina.” University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann spoke rapturously of “something many of us can’t wait to celebrate: the first woman president of the United States.” Mayor Michael Nutter, a black Democrat, bluntly predicted that first female would be Hillary. “And I assume,” he added, “that she will take President Clinton along with her.”

Celebrating its one hundredth anniversary in October, the Harvard School of Public Health presented its Centennial Medal to Bill Clinton, along with Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank and cofounder with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian prime minister and director general of the World Health Organization. It was a Harvard public health expert who once had urged Magaziner to drop the idea of AIDS treatment in the developing countries. More than a decade later, the school honored Clinton for ignoring that advice. And in his remarks, he stressed the cooperation between his foundation and the school, which had recently sent doctors to train their counterparts at Rwanda’s teaching hospital.

A week before Thanksgiving, Clinton returned to the White House to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, from Barack Obama, who also hung the medal on fifteen other distinguished Americans, including Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Loretta Lynn, Ben Bradlee, and Ernie Banks. “This is one of my favorite events every year,” said Obama. “And this year, it’s a little more special because it marks the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy establishing this award.” Reviewing the recipients, he spoke of Clinton last, thanking
him for his advice, “on and off the golf course . . . and, most importantly, for your life-saving work around the world, which represents the very best in America.”

Afterward, Clinton and Obama went out to Arlington Cemetery with members of the Kennedy family to mark the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy at the gravesite shared with his wife, Jackie. It was a cold day but the sun was shining as the two presidents escorted Ethel Kennedy, wife of President Kennedy’s slain brother Robert, to the gravesite and helped her to lay a wreath.

Wherever Clinton went, he could not escape the question of his wife’s presidential ambitions. On December 8, when Clinton Global Initiative held its first overseas conference since 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, featuring Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, he agreed to an interview with Fusion TV’s volatile host and correspondent Jorge Ramos.

“You know, I have to ask you this question. . . . So let’s just get it out of the way. So is she running or do you know if she’s running?”

“No,” replied Clinton, in a tone that signaled irritation. “I don’t.”

“You don’t know?” Ramos asked.

“No,” said Clinton. “She’s trying to finish her book,” a memoir of her State Department experiences. “She’s gotten several projects up and going with our foundation. And she believes and I believe that the four-year campaign mania is a big mistake. . . . We should work on the business at hand . . .”

Taking a swipe at the
New York Times
, which had already assigned reporters, two years before the election, to cover Hillary’s campaign, or proto-campaign, or not-yet-campaign, he continued.

“You know,” Clinton said, “we have newspapers that have people devoted to doing nothing but covering a campaign that doesn’t exist. So then they have to decide to create stories. You know, we don’t need that. We need to focus—the American people have economic and other challenges. And our region and world have challenges. We should be focused on those things. And that’s what Hillary thinks too.”

Almost instantly a volley of sarcastic comments flew out from the
Times
, where reporters didn’t appreciate Clinton’s excursion into media criticism or his suggestion that they were inventing stories. “If HRC doesn’t
want to be covered as a likely 2016 candidate, she could just say she’s not running,” tweeted Nicholas Confessore, one of the authors of the
Times
’s foundation story. “Crazy idea!” responded Amy Chozick, whose byline had also graced that article—and who had been assigned to cover Hillary.

But all of the snarking and sniping in both directions was beside the point. Only days into the New Year, Maggie Haberman filed a long report in
Politico
about Hillary and the “shadow campaign on her behalf” that had been gathering momentum for at least six months. Six months earlier, according to Haberman, Hillary had listened quietly to a presentation by consultants from Dewey Square Group, where her old friend Minyon Moore worked. Her story reviewed the jockeying and prepping by a pair of super PACs, Ready for Hillary and Priorities USA, media groups, and a crew of Clinton loyalists waiting for her signal. These organizations all had at least her tacit approval.

Just below the surface, in fact, the first scouting missions and partisan skirmishes of 2016 were already occurring. In early February, a right-wing website called the
Washington Free Beacon
released a set of documents its researchers had discovered in the archives of the University of Arkansas, including notes, memos, and letters that had belonged to the late Diane Blair, one of Hillary’s closest friends. There was little news, beyond Hillary’s fretting over the “bimbo eruptions” of the White House years and a private reference to Monica Lewinsky as “a narcissistic loony toon.”

But the story got wide circulation—there was nothing the national media relished more than revisiting the Lewinsky scandal—and showed just how early and how deeply their adversaries would dig to undermine the Clintons.

Although Clinton could hardly deny the presidential aspirations that his wife and her supporters still nurtured, he wasn’t entirely wrong to question the journalistic obsession with an election that would not begin for at least another year. The nation and the world had bigger, more urgent problems that preoccupied him. And Hillary would leave her momentous decision aside for months. But there was nothing that she, he, or anyone else could do to change the media mind-set that kept his wife’s future at the top of the agenda—and in fact, they and their friends had done little to discourage the endless speculation.

For Bill Clinton there were certainly more pressing events than a presidential election that still seemed far away—including the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center, and the tenth annual conference of the Clinton Global Initiative, both occurring in autumn 2014.

The library anniversary promised to be a celebration of Clinton’s contribution to the life and growth of his old hometown, which had seen tourism, tax revenues, and cultural life grow enormously during that decade. There would be music and barbecue, lectures, panels, tours, and at least a week of more or less related events around the city, in remembrance of that miserable rain-soaked day when the library welcomed its first guests. Bringing off the event would require much preparation, skill, and expense, but it wasn’t difficult to determine what should be done.

Marking ten years of CGI was a different challenge for an event that would take place, as always, in the world media capital of New York. What was there to say about CGI after ten years? It had long since proved itself as an innovative model, helping to move the worlds of philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and nonprofit ventures toward entrepreneurial cooperation. Indeed, it had nudged the World Economic Forum—the place where Doug Band had conceived CGI as a kind of protest—to renovate itself as a more action-oriented event. It even had inspired dozens of new events and activist discussions around the annual September meeting of the UN General Assembly, which had formerly stimulated little more than a frenzy of cocktail parties. By 2014, CGI had outlasted the unique quality that made it so significant, even if Clinton’s presence as host remained a powerful draw.