Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (53 page)

During the White House visit, they also made plans for a lunch in New York. On September 14, they met at Il Mulino, a legendary Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village—the owners, friends of Band, turned the place over to the Clinton-Obama party. The two presidents sat at a table alone, dining on salad, pasta, and fish, while their staff members ate at a separate table.

Eight days later, Obama was with Clinton again—as the main attraction at CGI’s opening session. The president drolly described how Clinton, over lunch, had secured his “commitment” to show up that evening. “You know how it is,” he said, gazing out into the audience from the Sheraton stage. “He looks you in the eye. He feels your pain. He makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room. What can I say? I was vulnerable to his charms.”

Then Obama took a moment to talk about his host. “After a lifetime of service, he would have been forgiven had he settled for a life of quiet, a life of ease, a life of improved golf scores. I understand they have not improved that much,” he said, deadpan. “But he chose a different path. He asked, what can I do to keep making a difference. . . . Around the world, Bill Clinton has helped to improve and save the lives of millions. That is no exaggeration.”

For several minutes the president talked about the meaning of service, recalling his mother’s work against poverty in the slums of Indonesia and his own stint as a community organizer in Chicago. He said that he hoped “the spirit of this gathering” would infuse his own administration.

With Obama’s enthusiastic embrace of CGI, the clouds over Clinton and his work clearly had dissipated, along with the sonorous warnings that he would somehow embarrass the United States. Typically, Clinton couched his boasting in data: “We’re announcing over 250 commitments to action, sponsorship is up 20 percent, and—more than ever before—over 60 current and former heads of state will be discussing the major challenges of our time.” So confident were Clinton and CGI
director Bob Harrison—who was acknowledged personally by Obama from the podium—that they opened all the sessions to the media.

Even as Clinton’s public image recovered dramatically during 2009, the internal disagreements that had long divided the foundation’s leadership became an urgent problem. Ira Magaziner resisted ceding control of the two programs he had built—the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, by far the largest, and the Clinton Climate Initiative, still comparatively small—and continued to argue with Lindsey, Band, and others over fundraising, governance, and procedures. As the discord intensified, major donors to CHAI such as the ELMA Foundation, the CIFF Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were drawn into the dispute.

Magaziner had persuaded the principals of those foundations, which had given millions to Clinton’s projects over the years, not to oppose him in the ongoing bureaucratic battle. As a result, he and Lindsey began a lengthy negotiation over how to restructure CHAI and its relationship with the Clinton Foundation, with both sides contemplating a permanent rupture—not the outcome desired by the former president under any circumstances. After seven years, CHAI and its mission were too important to him and his post-presidency for him to walk away.

Before the year’s end, Magaziner and Lindsey reached an agreement, with Clinton’s assent, to reorganize CHAI as a separate 501(c)(3) charitable entity. It would remain under the foundation’s umbrella, but with separate financial and operating systems. Clinton would chair its new board, with Magaziner as the vice chair, and the three major donors would also be represented. Imperfect as this arrangement seemed, especially to Band, who believed that Magaziner had attempted a coup, it prevented a public split that would have embarrassed Clinton and possibly diminished CHAI’s capacity to serve as a lifeline and a source of hope for impoverished and ill people around the world.

On December 10, the foundation’s press office issued an announcement of the changes, describing the new structure and noting how CHAI’s mission had changed, from dealing solely with HIV/AIDS treatment to encompass malaria, tuberculosis, and the improvement of health systems in developing countries. In recognition of CHAI’s ex
panded purpose, its new incarnation would be renamed the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

This agreement didn’t resolve the fate of the Clinton Climate Initiative, a contentious issue that flared again within weeks of the CHAI announcement. Despite cordial conversations with Clinton that suggested a “new spirit of cooperation” to Magaziner, suspicions remained strong on both sides—thwarting the prospects for the strong climate program that Clinton yearned to build.

Shortly before sunset on January 12, 2010, a cataclysmic earthquake with 7.0 magnitude struck just west of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, shaking the entire island and locations as distant as Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Thousands of buildings fell instantly, filling the streets with tons of rubble and killing as many as 200,000 people in the initial moments of the disaster while injuring even more.

Among the buildings destroyed or badly damaged in the capital’s central district were the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, the Presidential Palace, and the National Assembly building; much of the city’s main hospital collapsed, as did the hotel that served as headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The government estimated that the quake had destroyed as many as 250,000 houses, leaving a million Haitians homeless.

It was a crushing blow to the hopes of the Haitian people, then just beginning to see signs of real recovery from the ruinous hurricanes of 2008.

The next evening, Bill Clinton arrived at the United Nations building in Manhattan with Band, Cooper, Paul Farmer, and a Secret Service contingent, to address an emergency plenary session of the U.N. General Assembly at the request of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Standing next to Ban before the rows of seated ambassadors, Clinton exhorted the member countries to honor the memory of the lost U.N. workers and officials by saving the survivors. Nobody knew yet how many had died in the collapsed MINUSTAH headquarters and around Port-au-Prince, but among those missing was the mission’s chief, Tunisian diplomat Hédi Annabi (whose body was found two days later).

Talking about how rescue efforts would proceed, with the assis
tance of the U.S. military and the immediate release of $10 million by U.N. agencies, Clinton said, “We have a thousand details to work out, but we’ll do that. I ask for your support. . . . We owe it to our colleagues who perished in that earthquake yesterday. No one can ever doubt again what the relevance of the United Nations is in the 21st century, or what the devotion of its employees is to the common cause of humanity. We owe it to them to respond in the right way.”

Soon after delivering his remarks, Clinton left the General Assembly Hall—while the special plenary was still in session—for a series of media appearances on NPR, CNN, and on
ABC World News Tonight
with George Stephanopoulos to appeal for relief funds. Between interviews, he was editing an op-ed “call to action” for the next morning’s
Washington Post
, outlining Haiti’s immediate and long-term needs.

Those who are still alive under the rubble must be found. The bodies of those who have died must be taken away. Power must be restored and roadways cleared. But what Haiti needs most is money for water, food, shelter and basic medical supplies to bring immediate relief to those who are homeless, hungry and hurt,” he wrote. “The entire United Nations system is working hard to meet these needs and to regroup on the ground in Haiti after the collapse of our headquarters building and the loss of many of our colleagues. . . .

But after the emergency passes, the work of recovery and reconstruction will remain. . . . Already, the Haitian government and citizens, the Haitian Diaspora, neighboring countries and allies, NGOs and international groups were committed to a plan for long-term development. These efforts will need to be amended because of Tuesday’s disaster, but they cannot be abandoned.

Within the first twelve hours or so of Clinton’s fundraising appeal, his foundation’s dedicated web page raised $2.6 million for Haitian relief—a total that didn’t include money raised via the new technique of mobile texting at $10 per call, which immediately began to catch on, according to a foundation spokesperson, “like wildfire.”

For almost two years, Clinton had been trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for Haiti from international donors, with intermit
tent success. Now in the face of unspeakable tragedy, he felt that the checkbooks of the wealthy governments as well as ordinary citizens might open.

That same evening, Ban quietly asked Clinton to assume still greater responsibility for Haiti. Raising money to clear the wreckage and rebuild was sure to be hindered by lack of faith in the notoriously corrupt and incompetent Haitian government. But if Clinton agreed to cochair an interim reconstruction commission, donors would feel more confident.

To his advisers, including Band, this was like asking Clinton to enter a minefield wearing a blindfold. The obstacles to getting anything done in Haiti, as they had already discovered, were numerous and daunting. Many of the Haitians, disillusioned by decades of promises left unfulfilled by foreign agencies and nonprofits, were understandably suspicious, even hostile to outside forces. Nor was the U.N. mission popular there. Any realist could see that the likelihood of failure—and blame—was very high. The chance for success was almost nil.

For those reasons and others, Band urged Clinton not to take on Haiti’s reconstruction. But he understood that he had lost the argument before he uttered a word. Clinton accepted the assignment and, four days later, agreed when President Obama asked him and George W. Bush to chair another ad hoc relief effort—the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

The former presidents appeared on five television talk shows the following Sunday, and taped a public service announcement in the White House Map Room. Clinton flew home to Westchester, only to rise early the next morning to head out to Kennedy Airport, where a comfortably furnished Boeing 737 owned by Google waited to take him, a group of foundation staffers and friends, and several pallets of medical supplies to Port-au-Prince. Joining the trip were Chelsea Clinton and her fiancé, Marc Mezvinsky, as well as Google founder Sergey Brin, clad in T-shirt and jeans and toting a camera with a huge telephoto lens. On the flight down, Brin lounged on the plane’s beige leather seating while he asked Clinton about China, where his company was encountering difficulties with the government.

By then, almost a week after the earthquake, most of the Port-au-Prince airport was under the command of the United States Army, with State Department and National Security Council officials present to oversee the relief effort. When the plane landed, soldiers unloaded
the pallets of medical supplies into a cinder-block warehouse, while Clinton and his entourage climbed into jeeps that took them through the capital’s rubble-strewn streets to the Central Hospital. The vista of destruction was extraordinary, even more shocking than what he had encountered in post-tsunami Indonesia and Thailand.

Driving past the ruins of the Presidential Palace in the center of town, Clinton shook his head and talked about what the city had looked like before the quake. It was hard to imagine the army that would be needed to clear the thousands upon thousands of chunks and blocks of concrete that filled every sightline. The hospital, too, was a ruin, with patients lined up in makeshift cots outdoors, for fear that more buildings would collapse, many surrounded by weeping family members. Doctors had flown down to volunteer, including Clinton’s friend Mark Hyman, but there seemed to be few nurses or attendants to provide a service as simple as bringing water.

Clinton escaped at day’s end and returned to New York. The contrast between the jet’s luxurious interior and the squalid chaos of the broken city felt almost grotesque. He would return many more times to that frustrating, heartbreaking, and yet seductive place.

The Haitian earthquake slammed Clinton’s usually hectic schedule of travel, speeches, and events into overdrive. When he flew down to Port-au-Prince with his cargo of medical supplies, he had been working for five days straight without rest, alternating between planning meetings in the daytime, nights of telephone calls with world leaders, and media bookings that often began around dawn. He could be excused for thinking that overwork was what caused him to wake up one day in mid-February, feeling exhausted and looking pale, with a disturbing ache in his chest. He was supposed to fly to Washington that morning.

He called Allan Schwartz, his cardiologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, who listened to Clinton’s complaint. “Oh, you’ve dropped a vein,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

The doctor told him that roughly 25 percent of patients who undergo a quadruple bypass “drop a vein” within five years because the veins used in those procedures are thinner and weaker than the original arteries. “We can fix it,”
Schwartz assured him. “But you’re not going anywhere.” When he checked into the northern Manhattan hospital later that day, Hillary and Chelsea came up to join him. After a series of tests, surgeons placed two stents into a coronary artery.

“I was awake for the whole thing. I watched them do it on the screen,” he later recalled. “It was fascinating. And then [the doctors] went out,” to talk with reporters who had gathered at the hospital. “They were trying to reassure the public that I wasn’t on the verge of death, and so they said, ‘You know, this is actually fairly normal.’ ”

Clinton was up and walking around the ward within two hours of the operation, and went home the next day. According to Schwartz, who had become accustomed to answering media questions about his famous patient, Clinton’s “very active lifestyle” had not caused the narrowing of the artery. There was no reason, his doctor said, for Clinton to slow down. And the prognosis for a full recovery was “excellent.”