Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (47 page)

Keeping her husband away from the limelight didn’t brighten her prospects. Even when she won big primaries in March and April, the Democratic Party’s superdelegates—party officials whose convention votes either she or Obama would need to secure the nomination—seemed allergic to her. The task of calling them had fallen largely to Bill Clinton, but his appeal and persistence were failing. The supers were gravitating steadily to Obama. On April 30, Penn emailed Hillary a memo outlining his concerns.

“I am worried generally that we are doing what we need to do in the races but that the super-delegate operation is not picking up despite the wins. . . . Overall, about 45 announced for Obama, 20 for HRC, and 3 switched from HRC to uncommitted,” noting that Obama had won more women, more liberals, more moderates, and every region except the Northeast. “He even has more Senators,” the consultant wrote. “So I am just taking a look at a primary operation that has been winning primaries but it would appear that the super-delegate operation is unsuccessful and there is no evidence we can get the numbers we need.”

Forwarding his analysis, Hillary attached a note. “I feel the way Mark feels. I’m working as hard as I can, winning where I must, and
bleeding superdelegates every day. . . . The hill is getting steeper as [Obama] gets weaker.”

In fact, he was only a month away from winning. Numerically, Obama clinched the nomination on June 3 with a victory in Montana and a final rush of superdelegate endorsements.

With the primaries over, the Clintons confronted a massive debt, owing almost $13 million to Penn and other contractors, and the loss of another $12 million they had borrowed from themselves. Bill’s reputation was badly bruised; so were some of Hillary’s relationships in the Senate. Those problems would only deepen unless they did their utmost to elect as president a man they had come to dislike deeply—and who seemed to have no great regard for them.

Bill Clinton knew very well that he had no choice in coming to terms with Obama, despite the dismissive chill he felt emanating from the Obama camp in the wake of his wife’s concession. Although Hillary knew her Illinois colleague well, Bill had only spoken with him very briefly on a few occasions. He faced the prospect of campaigning for someone he felt that he didn’t know at all.

He believed they had to discuss the charges of racism that had wounded him so badly; a joint appearance would bury those accusations. He wanted Obama to personally ask for his help in the campaign, before public pressure forced him to make the endorsement. A former president should be treated with at least that much respect.

After weeks of waiting, however, the message from Obama headquarters in Chicago was more insulting than encouraging. Evidently the prospective nominee was too busy to meet with the only Democratic president who had served two terms since FDR. Or perhaps, as Clinton suspected, Obama and his advisers wanted to avoid appearing to pay homage to him, which might blur their rejection of “old politics.” But Obama’s staff promised to make time for a telephone call.

The call came on a Monday morning, a few days after a highly choreographed “unity rally” in Unity, New Hampshire, where Hillary had sworn “our hearts are set” on electing Obama. He and Bill talked for twenty minutes, a brief chat that the nominee’s aides later described as “terrific.”

“He
has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, “and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel.” But Clinton thought their chat had been perfunctory and superficial. He was not impressed and not mollified.

The cost to his image could be measured by “The Comeback Id”—a vitriolic, ten-thousand-word profile in the June issue of
Vanity Fair
by Todd Purdum, the magazine’s national affairs editor and husband of former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Replete with unattributed quotes and assertions, allegedly from concerned friends of the former president, Purdum depicted Clinton as an angry narcissist and aging satyr, jetting around with loose women on Burkle’s plane, which was supposedly known to the cognoscenti as “Air Fuck One.” The writer attributed Clinton’s “questionable” choices to the bad company he kept, naming his friends Steve Bing and Ron Burkle, and possibly to the emotional impact of his heart surgeries—while conceding there was no “proof of post-presidential sexual indiscretions on Clinton’s part, despite a steady stream of tabloid speculation and Internet intimations” on that score.

Among the not-so-small cadre of Clinton friends and former aides, concern about the company the boss keeps is persistent, palpable and pained. No former president of the United States has ever traveled with such a fast crowd, and most 61-year-old American men of Clinton’s generation don’t, either.

To Clinton and his staff, the article was nothing but low-down gossip in the guise of high-minded anxiety. “Air Fuck One” was strictly a myth, as Band and others who had traveled with Clinton on Burkle’s plane would attest. Jay Carson issued a statement denouncing the piece as “the journalism of personal destruction at its worst. . . . President Clinton has helped save the lives of more than 1,300,000 people in his post-presidency, and
Vanity Fair
couldn’t find the time to talk to even one of them for comment.” Purdum acknowledged Clinton’s post-presidential achievements—he had included at least one or two laudatory sentences about the foundation—but insisted that good works weren’t relevant to his profile.

By the time Clinton left for Africa on his annual summer trip in late July, his indignation about Obama had swollen to volcanic proportions. Not only had the Democratic victor treated his overtures with complete indifference but, far worse, he had bluntly rejected Hillary as a possible running mate. “Barack Obama would rather have every one of his teeth pulled out without Novocaine than accept Hillary on the ticket!” Clinton roared. The campaign to promote her for vice president had hardly been subtle; Bill had played his part, trying to send messages through various intermediaries to the Obama camp. As one friend later said, “He really seemed to want them to choose her.” He left the country knowing that it wouldn’t happen, partly because of him.

On Clinton’s summer tours of Africa, the long hot days began around dawn, when his entourage would depart from their hotel, usually the best available, and end very late in the evening—often at a different hotel in another city, where the former president could be found playing cards with weary aides and friends, chewing an unlit cigar, nursing a glass of red wine, and talking on the telephone with someone back home.

The summer trip of 2008, spanning the last few days of July and the first few days of August, provided respite for him from the pressures and disappointments of presidential politics. The conflict with Obama had marred his image and frayed his unique bond with the African American community. In Africa, where public admiration had not been diminished by campaign controversies, he could again immerse himself in the duties and rewards of his post-presidential life. There he could begin to redirect the narrative.

But given the inclinations of the political press corps, that was a forlorn hope. And the trip did not begin auspiciously.

Although the itinerary was shorter than normal, covering only four countries in six days, the traveling contingent was bigger and included Chelsea Clinton, still on campaign hiatus from her job at a New York hedge fund; traveling physician Roger Band; Roger Clinton’s son Tyler; former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe; former ambassador Joe Wilson; former transportation secretary Rodney
Slater; and actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, longtime friends of the Clintons from Arkansas days.

The media contingent, which tended to range from very small to nonexistent on the annual trip, was larger than usual, too, with correspondents from ABC News, the
Washington Post
, and the
Guardian
of London, a young blogger from the
Huffington Post
, and a crew dispatched by Hollywood directors Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard to shoot video for a prospective documentary on the foundation.

Transporting this oversized retinue required not one but two passenger jets. Traveling aboard a luxuriously appointed Boeing 767 loaned to the foundation by a group of Google executives were the former president, his family members, several personal friends, and his Secret Service detail. The press corps, the documentary crew, some foundation staff, and assorted other passengers were assigned to an older, more modest 727 chartered for the trip, which turned out to be in dismal condition.

For more than two days after the former president and his entourage lifted off from Newark Airport, the aging 727 suffered one malfunction after another: a broken air conditioner, an aborted takeoff due to fuel tank problems, a cracked cockpit window, a minor fire, and a defective fuel valve. Several passengers, including Slater, abandoned ship in frustration, while frantic foundation staffers tried to locate another large aircraft available on short notice. Rocker Jon Bon Jovi intervened to make a last-minute rescue by providing an even older Boeing 707 used by his band for touring, which was quickly cleaned up and flown to Newark from a Bahamas hangar.

By the time the media contingent reached Addis Ababa on Air Bon Jovi, the staff had been forced to cut back the schedule. The aviation jinx continued when the 767 suffered an engine malfunction on takeoff and had to turn around immediately for an emergency landing at the Addis airport. The press plane turned around, too, and returned to Addis to retrieve the Clinton group, forcing everyone to find seats on the smaller plane.

Yet despite the endlessly irritating and occasionally frightening aviation difficulties, those few days in Africa lifted Clinton. The curtailed visit literally flew by as he and his companions moved through Ethiopia to Rwanda, then across the continent to Liberia and Senegal on the
western coast, before he headed to the annual World AIDS conference in Mexico City and then homeward.

They visited Rwandan coffee and cassava farmers, whose production had grown substantially thanks to fertilizer grants, technical assistance, and marketing help from the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative. They spent a few hours in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, where Clinton delivered an address to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, her cabinet, and Liberia’s parliament concerning the foundation’s new agreement with pharmaceutical manufacturers to slash the price of malaria medicine, enabling the government to pay for the treatment of tens of thousands who might otherwise die. He joined representatives of the United Nations and the French government at a hospital in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to announce a new protocol and funding for the treatment of infants born with HIV/AIDS, which would eventually save hundreds of thousands from death before their second birthday.

Nearly everywhere they went—even to remote places like the village of Debre Zeit in Ethiopia’s northwestern highlands, where the traveling party made one of its first stops to inspect a new health clinic—throngs showed up to greet the ex-president with a joyous enthusiasm that never failed to astonish jaded Americans. People chanted and waved flags (including American flags) and sometimes danced to welcome Clinton, with a spirit that seemed almost anachronistic, as if the United States still enjoyed the lost prestige of an earlier time.

The Godino Health Clinic in Debre Zeit was a modest single-story structure with a white corrugated roof, one of fifty built by the Clinton Foundation to serve rural families in a partnership with the national government. Those sites represented the beginning of an effort to develop thousands of clinics across Ethiopia, a nation of nearly 80 million, and tens of thousands spanning the continent.

Fanning out from each of those clinics every morning were dozens of rural health workers, mostly young women without high school diplomas, trained by CHAI to deliver medicine and care to AIDS and malaria patients in even more remote places. That strategy was designed not only to eradicate those diseases within the next decade, a project requiring much more than simply dropping off truckloads of cheap medication, but to construct a functioning health care system across Africa.

Hundreds of people, led by schoolchildren in spotless dress clothes, lined the rutted road as the Clinton motorcade slowly pulled up outside the clinic. Greeted by the clinic director, a middle-aged gentleman in doctor’s whites, Clinton and Chelsea quickly toured the facility before walking up the road to the town center, where a small stage had been erected behind a twine cordon.

A length of string wasn’t much to hold back the surging wave of humanity, but then the Secret Service detail that traveled with Clinton had long since come to understand that he would no longer tolerate the security constraints of his White House years. People wanted to touch him, and he wanted to touch them, so the agents would simply stand as close as possible and hope that nobody wanted to do him harm.

More than once, intense emotions had driven spectators forward suddenly, shouting with excitement while stampeding over fences and cars and scaring everyone—except Clinton, who would turn, hold up his hands, and grin happily as the rushing crowd surrounded him. On that particular morning, however, there was no impassioned stampede. The people of Debre Zeit gathered to listen quietly as Clinton thanked the Ethiopian government for supporting his foundation’s work, discussed the plans for the new clinic, and described what the health workers would be doing. They applauded and cheered loudly, then jostled to get near him for a touch or a handshake before allowing him to depart.

The roster of countries on Clinton’s annual Africa tour varied from year to year, but he always visited Rwanda, the scene of what he has often described as the worst failure of his presidency—the tribal massacres in 1994 that killed hundreds of thousands, unimpeded by U.S. or any other outside forces. One of the stops on the 2008 summer visit to Rwanda was the groundbreaking for a rural hospital in the last district that still lacked one—and that would become, when completed in 2009, the most modern health facility in Africa.