Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (65 page)

But there was a deeper issue that haunted CGI. Despite all of the quarterly and annual reports from its “action networks” and diligent staff, did anyone know what the thousands of commitments, valued in tens of billions of dollars, had actually accomplished? How many of the commitment makers, praised with such enthusiasm by Clinton every September, had achieved what they pledged to do? How many had failed? And whether they succeeded or failed, did anyone know why?

In the wonkish environment of the Clinton Foundation, where
Chelsea valued data streams and measurements, and Eric Braverman brought a complementary worldview from McKinsey, these were questions to attempt to answer, not avoid. They were certain to be asked by other people when the tenth conference opened, which suggested strongly that it would be better to look for the answers first.

The upshot was a formidable attempt to collect and analyze all of the information about CGI commitments that had flowed into its offices since the first conference in 2005—a data-mining task well beyond the foundation’s own capacity. The job was outsourced to Palantir Technologies, a software giant based in Palo Alto, California, that specializes in solving “big data” problems for major corporations, hedge funds, and banks. The Pentagon and several U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism agencies had used its software programs continuously since its founding in 2004.

Although Palantir’s biggest shareholder was the libertarian investor Peter Thiel, its management was friendly to the Clintons and had enlisted as a CGI member years earlier. Palantir had maintained contact with the CGI staff through its own commitment to improve disaster relief with “philanthropy engineering,” a method of using computer technology to more effectively harness volunteers who showed up to help victims of hurricanes, earthquakes, and similar catastrophes.

The Palantir commitments study required months of work and no small expense, yet the company performed all the work pro bono. When CGI unveiled the results at the annual conference in September, they were revealing and highly instructive.

Of nearly 2,900 commitments made between 2005 and 2013, nearly 42 percent, or 1,202, had been completed. Just below 40 percent, or 1,145, were still being executed. Only 46 commitments, or 1.6 percent, were deemed to be “stalled,” and 139, or just below 5 percent, were marked as unsuccessful. Roughly 12 percent were considered “inactive,” because the commitment makers had not reported to CGI for at least two years. (While the inactive commitments could be reactivated, their removal from the portfolio and metrics represented an effort to keep the data honest.)

The Palantir analysis went deeper in a search for clues to what had made some commitments successful and others fail. What the most productive commitments shared in common was a partnership model
that paired a nonprofit with a corporation, as in Procter & Gamble’s work on providing clean water through charities like WorldVision and ChildFund. What the failed commitments shared in nearly every instance was that they ran out of money.

Other intriguing data points were highlighted in the Palantir report. Over the years, direct monetary donations had declined rapidly as a form of commitment, while “cross-sector” collaborations between corporation and nonprofit participants had increased. The countries with the largest number of commitments were India, Kenya, and the United States (where the numbers had probably been inflated by CGI America). Some findings seemed obvious, such as the spike in commitments that occurred in Haiti following the hurricanes of 2008 and the 2010 earthquake; other spikes could be traced to a focus on particular issues, such as those oriented to helping women and girls after CGI emphasized their issues in 2009.

Clinton, Chelsea, and the CGI team felt no shame in the failures—not even the big ones, like the disappointing result of Richard Branson’s promise to invest $3 billion in clean energy. Branson had spent less than a tenth of that amount. Writing in
The Guardian
a week before CGI opened, Naomi Klein had denounced the Branson commitment as a prime example of “corporate greenwashing,” noting that the flamboyant billionaire himself had lately characterized it as a “gesture.” Her reporting showed that even as his investments in a new green fuel languished, his aviation empire had spent hundreds of millions of dollars vastly expanding its operations—and its carbon emissions. Even if he had been entirely sincere in 2006, Branson’s spectacular failure indicated that relying on “green capitalism” to save the earth might well prove disastrous.

Aside from the harsh lesson of Branson, there was much else to be learned from all the commitments that fell short, as Chelsea said in a brief video that accompanied the report’s release. But the rate of reported accomplishment was impressive—a much higher average, as
Forbes
social entrepreneurship columnist Tom Watson remarked, than the survival rate for start-up ventures. Did that mean the CGI members weren’t taking enough risks?

Having endured the fire of intense “scandal” coverage as he left the White House, and watched how that scorching heat drove away donors, speeches, and money, the negative media coverage prompted by Hillary’s political profile made Bill Clinton nervous. Raising $250 million for the foundation endowment would be difficult even in a favorable media environment, but reporters didn’t usually look for happy stories. Amazingly, given how much coverage CGI tended to get every year, the positive findings in the Palantir report on CGI had received little attention from American newspapers or broadcast outlets.

But when the donation figures for 2013 were added up, the summaries showed that the endowment campaign led by Dennis Cheng had performed exceptionally well. Total donations had risen from $51.5 million in 2012 to $144.4 million in 2013, according to the foundation’s tax documents. The enormous increase partly reflected the consolidation of CGI back into the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Big donors had played a big part, with nine donors accounting for $64 million, including four who gave more than $9 million each and one who gave $15 million alone.

The spate of bad press had done little to damage the foundation or its namesakes. But as the presidential election drew nearer, their opponents on the right opened a new phase of investigation into Hillary, the foundation, and her husband, backed by millions of dollars from wealthy Republicans who were determined to defeat her, by any and every means necessary.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In the concluding weeks of 2014, the likelihood that Hillary Clinton would again seek the Democratic presidential nomination became a certainty, although political observers had merely awaited the formality of an official announcement since September—when she and Bill Clinton showed up at their friend Tom Harkin’s annual “steak fry” on a farm in Indianola, Iowa. Although the setting was picturesque and the event, in its own way, historic—as the last beef-based fundraiser hosted by the retiring Democratic senator after thirty-seven years—the presumed presidential front-runner neither confirmed nor denied her aspiration.

“It’s true, I’m thinking about it,” she said, still a bit coy—but then, at the end of a short speech about the travails of the middle class, she dropped a stronger hint. “It’s really great to be back,” she told the thousands of party activists in the crowd. “Let’s not let another seven years go by.”

By December, the hotly debated question in Clinton circles was when she should declare her candidacy—no later than spring 2015, was the knowing consensus among friends and former aides. Setting a date was at the top of the decisions she pondered in Chappaqua, holding daily seminars with former aides on the enormous changes in the political and media environment since 2008.

Before a new campaign could begin, the converging narratives of her political career and her husband’s philanthropic activism had to be harmonized. The Clinton Foundation and all its disparate initiatives were sure to come under the harshest, most hostile, and partisan scrutiny ever as a consequence of her candidacy. To whatever extent possible, any discordant news from that quarter had to be minimized, including the management disputes that had roiled the foundation from time to time over the years.

Those disagreements had not ended with the elevation of Bruce Lindsey to board chairman and his replacement as CEO by Eric
Braverman in July 2013. While Braverman’s effort to implement the recommendations of the Simpson Thacher management review had succeeded in large measure, those changes had come at a high cost to him. He had incurred the enmity of Lindsey and Magaziner, among others, who privately derided him as a “bureaucrat” who didn’t understand how the organization worked.

Concerns about the foundation’s direction and leadership resulted in a curious series of events leading into the election cycle. At its December 2014 meeting, the board voted to engage Simpson Thacher to conduct a follow-up review of the foundation’s operations, and to hire Nygren Consulting, a California firm, to evaluate the performance of Magaziner and recommend whether and how to end CHAI’s separate status, bringing it back into the foundation.

During the same meeting, the board commended Braverman by approving a salary of $395,000 for him, plus housing allowance, and an extension of his seat on the board until 2017. (The CEO’s tenure had been the subject of a separate Nygren evaluation during the fall of 2014 that was never released or leaked.)

The December meeting was an ominous moment for Magaziner, who had already clashed with Braverman over the Clinton Climate Initiative. Both he and Clinton had been very excited about the possibilities for progress on renewable energy—in the absence of serious action by national and international authorities—by organizing and assisting the world’s biggest cities to act together in what was called the C40.

Running the C40 scheme was complicated, very expensive, and exceeded the resources and capacity of the Clinton Foundation alone. In 2011, Magaziner lost control of the cities project when Michael Bloomberg’s foundation invested tens of millions of dollars and assumed control of it after a negotiation with Bruce Lindsey that excluded him.

The Clinton Climate Initiative had continued to operate a forestry project and a project assisting small island nations in reducing their use of fossil fuels and changing to renewable energy sources. But not long after Braverman arrived, he had appointed a new director of the Climate Initiative, with support from Clinton, to displace Magaziner, who believed that the attempt to roll CHAI into the foundation represented another step in the same direction.

Within days, however, the internal debate over the fate of CHAI
was overshadowed by the surprise resignation of Braverman, who evidently had grown weary of dealing with resistance and criticism he considered unfair. Whether he was pushed out or quit was never clear. On January 9, the foundation press office announced his resignation and released anodyne quotes from him and the Clintons.

“In the last few years, all the initiatives and programs have worked together to make the Clinton Foundation even stronger, and now is the right time for a new leader to take the foundation into the future,” Braverman said, according to the press release. “When Eric came onboard, the foundation had been growing quickly for more than a decade,” said a statement attributed to all of the Clintons. “Our individual initiatives were doing well, but Eric’s leadership helped us improve our governance structure, increase coordination across the foundation and build better internal processes. We are very grateful to Eric for his leadership and these efforts.”

Maura Pally, the Hillary aide overseeing her foundation projects, was named interim chief executive as the board began a search for Braverman’s successor.

The consultant reviews ordered by the board were on a very tight schedule, with reports and recommendations due by February. Over Christmas and into the New Year, foundation and consulting staff had worked overtime to schedule interviews and provide documentation. The report on Magaziner echoed many of the complaints heard years earlier from Band and Lindsey, characterizing him as “disdainful” and not transparent in his dealings with the CHAI directors, especially Bill and Chelsea Clinton.

While the report also praised Magaziner as a “visionary” whose ideas had a “transformational” impact on global public health, its interviews with present and former CHAI staff included unflattering descriptions of his style as “intimidating,” “abrasive,” and “arrogant.” It laid blame for “unhealthy” tensions between CHAI and the Clinton Foundation on him.

Magaziner regarded the Nygren report as a renewed attempt to oust him—the first since CHAI had been spun off in January 2010 and renamed the Clinton Health Access Initiative. His alarm grew when he learned that the consultants had been tasked to consider how an eventual “successor” to him might be found.

It surprised nobody that he and the CHAI managers who reported to him were determined to resist any attempt to return control of their operations to the Clinton Foundation board. Four dozen of the top managers at CHAI sent Bill Clinton a letter to that effect in late January, voicing their worries about the political and financial impact of such a change.

The Nygren and Simpson Thacher reports were delivered in a strained atmosphere at the Clinton Foundation’s March board meeting. Tempers rose over the Nygren review, which Magaziner denounced as unfair. The Simpson Thacher report’s findings shed more favorable light on Magaziner and CHAI, describing the initiative as well managed and noting its rapid growth, programmatic successes, and the independent audits of its finances by major donors such as the Gates Foundation. In the weeks after the March meeting, Magaziner and Clinton met privately and agreed to “let it all calm down.” That agreement would hold until after the 2016 election.

In the meantime, the question of institutional authority had been resolved. With her father’s encouragement, Chelsea had recruited retiring University of Miami president Donna Shalala, an old friend who had served for eight years as secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration.