Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (62 page)

And not incidentally, as the
New York Times
and other publications noticed, addressing those concerns before an American audience meant drawing renewed attention to her status as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. “Mrs. Clinton appeared alongside her husband, Bill Clinton, in a crowded ballroom here,” reported the newspaper of record, “and left little doubt that she planned to reclaim the political stage she exited more than four years ago to become the nation’s top diplomat.”

Actually, her remarks were mainly concerned with the work she planned to do at the foundation, with a special focus on the benefits of full female participation in work, business, politics, and society—reforms that were not only morally imperative but were proved to grow economies and raise incomes. The
Times
reporter found her speech dry and excessively burdened with facts and numbers, but it also showed that, if she had evaded the question of gender as a presidential candidate in 2008, she would never make that mistake again.

Speaking at CGI America, Hillary had emphasized Chelsea’s expanding role at the foundation, crediting her with efforts to “widen our reach to a whole new generation of young people,” and hinting that she had
somehow brought about CGI University, the student component of the global conference. While that suggestion wasn’t accurate—CGIU long predated Chelsea’s ascent—it showed how the Clintons were framing her new role. She was extending her reach into all of the initiatives and little of any consequence occurred in the foundation without input from her. Naturally, that included the selection of a new chief executive.

The Simpson Thacher review of the foundation’s operations had recommended, among other things, the appointment of a full-time CEO and president. Bruce Lindsey, who had filled that role for years, had suffered a stroke late in 2011 and was ready to move to a less demanding position as board chair. Chelsea, the vice chair, had a candidate lined up to replace Lindsey, someone who shared her devotion to data streams and managerial efficiencies: a former McKinsey colleague named Eric Braverman, who had been a precocious partner in the consulting giant’s Washington office.

Braverman joined the foundation as CEO in mid-July, with a mandate for sweeping reforms in line with the Simpson Thacher recommendations—a bigger and more independent board, an audit committee to oversee internal financial controls, complaints, and possible conflicts of interest; stronger management of personnel, expenses, outside employment, and CGI membership; and clearer rules and procedures for vetting of donors and their gifts to the foundation. Or so he thought.

Only weeks after Eric Braverman joined the Clinton Foundation, the young executive found himself on a plane to Africa. The annual trip had been scheduled for July, and he joined a motley contingent of wealthy friends, staffers, and initiative directors, including Ira Magaziner, along with actors Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg, a
Glamour
writer following Chelsea, and a camera crew dispatched by Martin Scorsese, who had agreed to produce a film about the foundation for HBO Documentaries. The potential donors included John Catsimatidis, Jr.—son of oil and grocery billionaire John Sr., a New York Republican activist—as well as several young friends of Chelsea and Marc who had made their fortunes in technology and finance.

With a large group of donors and potential donors to shepherd, the foundation’s development director, Dennis Cheng, had assumed sub
stantial responsibility for trip logistics. Cheng was ramping up his drive to build the foundation endowment, and hardly wanted to entrust his donors’ care to anyone else.

Led by Clinton and Chelsea, the trip through six sweltering countries in nine days was a demanding excursion, not a pleasure jaunt. As a rule the mornings started with a very early luggage call, and the evenings could run very late, with the plane touching down at the next destination around midnight or even hours later.

The two dozen members of the “delegation,” as the Clinton entourage was known, had little time to lounge around a swimming pool or shop for souvenirs. To exercise required getting to the hotel gym before 6 a.m.—where Chelsea would be on the treadmill already, running flat out. For eight full days, the hours from dawn to dusk were spent trundling across the African landscape, often in vans without air-conditioning, despite the stifling heat. The reward at day’s end was dinner with the president, who would often hop from table to table, holding forth over a glass of red wine.

Early on July 30, the delegation left Kennedy Airport on a chartered Sun Country 737 to fly eighteen hours, including two fuel stops, before landing at the single-runway Lilongwe International Airport in Malawi’s capital.

In Lilongwe, the country’s president, Joyce Banda, accompanied Clinton, Chelsea, and the delegation to the Central Hospital, where CHAI had brought improvements in HIV testing along with inexpensive generic medicine, early diagnosis and treatment of infants, and the use of SMS technology to send test results. Waiting at the hospital was a group of AIDS patients from districts around the country, whose children had been spared the virus thanks to CHAI’s assistance in preventing mother-to-child transmission. The children had come to thank Clinton, too.

From the hospital, the delegation piled into vans for a two-hour ride on rutted dirt roads out to a commercial “anchor farm” operated by the Clinton Development Initiative in the rural town of Santhe, where foundation staff worked with neighboring smallholder farmers to produce maize and soybeans with better fertilizers, cheaper seeds, cooperative marketing, and “climate smart” farming methods that conserved water and soil.

Clinton believed strongly that past Western policies had been ruinous to small farmers, worsening their poverty and driving them off the land. His foundation’s projects aimed at reversing that terrible error—and as he walked through the harvested fields, Clinton boasted that the anchor farm had raised its neighbors’ annual earnings more than 400 percent. As a result, the farmers said, they had better food, tin roofs on their homes, and enough money to pay their children’s school fees.

Overnight they flew to Victoria Falls in Zambia, where the fauna at the Royal Livingstone Hotel included giraffes and zebra (one of which kicked Jesse Eisenberg when he wandered too close). But while Clinton took his retinue out that evening to hike around the waterfall, the day was devoted to foundation projects. The delegation traveled by van along dirt roads to a rural “health post,” where CHAI staffers had trained dozens of “community health assistants” to provide basic care and treatment to thousands of local families, in a national program funded by the British Department for International Development (one of the largest CHAI donors).

That afternoon, on the hotel grounds, the Starkey Hearing Foundation staged a pop-up hearing clinic as part of its CGI commitment to give away a million hearing aids in developing countries. Bill Austin, its conservative Republican founder, had been channeling some of the hundreds of millions in annual revenue from his company, Starkey Hearing Technologies, to the charitable foundation for many years. But he told the delegation members that Clinton had twisted his arm to do more. Having donated millions of dollars to CGI, Austin, his wife, and stepson often crossed paths with Clinton in Africa during the summer.

Although he had seen this process many times, Clinton never tired of watching the emotional moment when a child—or an adult—was able to hear a sound for the first time. Under Bill Austin’s careful guidance, several members of the delegation, including Clinton and Chelsea, spent two hours helping to fit local children with hearing aids. To see a boy or girl suddenly smile at the sound of another person’s voice—and see that child’s mother erupt in tears—was so moving for some of the delegation members that they had to turn away to conceal their own weeping.

Arriving the next morning in Dar-es-Salaam, the delegation accompanied Clinton to a CGI site in a run-down neighborhood where Bar
clays Bank, cooperating with CARE International, was carrying out a microfinance commitment to help woman-run small businesses with loans and financial management. The afternoon brought them to the presidential palace, where Clinton signed a memorandum of understanding with Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete to extend the foundation’s smallholder farming program into the rural highlands, with $3 million in funding from the Netherlands government.

In a last-minute detour, Clinton brought the delegation to the U.S. embassy, which was preparing to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the suicide truck bombing that killed eleven and wounded eighty-five on August 7, 1998. That attack, coordinated with an even deadlier simultaneous truck bombing at the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, had been the first incident that brought Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to the attention of U.S. intelligence authorities.

Surrounded by a Marine guard, Clinton and his guests listened as U.S. ambassador Alfonso Lenhardt spoke briefly about the incident and then read the names of the victims. The former president said a few words about the bombing’s impact on him and his presidency, shook hands with the ambassador and several embassy employees. Then the delegation departed.

The Clinton retinue arrived early on August 4 in Zanzibar, the legendary spice island, where CHAI was active not only in providing AIDS medications and diagnostics, but in mounting a major, multipronged attack on malaria, which still infected as many as 200 million people every year and killed nearly half a million, mostly African children, despite considerable progress in eradicating the mosquito-borne disease.

In a local stadium, thousands of cheering Zanzibaris showed up to celebrate their success in defeating malaria with a semipro soccer match that also honored the presence of Clinton and Chelsea. A kiosk manned by CHAI staff distributed free repellent-laden bednets and educational pamphlets promoting tests and treatment. After seven years of steady work on the island—and a sharp reduction in malaria diagnostics negotiated by CHAI—the incidence of infection had dropped from 25 percent to less than one percent.

During their visit to Zanzibar Clinton experienced what may have been, for him, the trip’s most affecting moment.

Returning from the stadium to Stone Town in vans, the former
president and his group stopped at a building called ZAPHA House, where hundreds of men, women, and children awaited them. On the Muslim island, many of the women wore colorful headscarves and waved paper signs that read “Welcome!” and “ZAPHA.” The two-story building was the home of ZAPHA+, once a tiny and beleaguered AIDS advocacy organization. He had first visited their office eight years earlier when his foundation was just starting to penetrate Tanzania with medicine, diagnostics, and moral support for the pandemic’s victims. He had assured its members that he would stand by them, no matter what kind of social and government hostility they faced.

No longer stigmatized and no longer scared, the handful of women he met in 2005 had been joined since then by dozens of families, proudly showing off to Clinton and Chelsea their large new headquarters, where robust counseling and educational programs as well as treatment had taken root with CHAI’s assistance. The “Zanzibar People HIV/AIDS Positive” weren’t only living, they were thriving—and so were their children.

To see the impact of years of his foundation’s work touched the former president, as it had in many other circumstances. But as he walked into the building’s sunny courtyard, something else happened.

A sturdy teenager approached Clinton, holding in his hands a big, blown-up photograph. The picture, taken in July 2005 at the old offices of ZAPHA+, showed Clinton sitting on a chair, surrounded by children and clutching two of them on his lap, a boy and a girl. Grinning at Clinton, the teenager pointed to the boy in the picture. Eight years earlier, he had been that boy with AIDS—and he had lived because of the care and medicine brought to Zanzibar by CHAI.

Clinton stood before the boy, gazing at the picture in wonder as the throng of noisy kids gawked and yelled. Smiling broadly, he embraced the young man for several seconds, and then discreetly wiped his eyes.

Engine trouble with the Sun Country 737 delayed the Clinton delegation’s departure from Zanzibar until after midnight, which meant arriving in Kigali hours later. But quite a show awaited them in the morning at a primary school in the Rwandan capital, starring Chelsea Clinton, with her father as straight man.

One of the largest, most enduring, and socially valuable obligations ever undertaken at Clinton Global Initiative had occurred at its opening conference in 2005, when Procter & Gamble—with annual sales over $20 billion, the world’s largest household products company—signed a commitment to provide millions of liters of clean water to communities around the world. A year earlier, working with the federal Centers for Disease Control, the company’s scientists had developed a simple nontoxic chemical powder that destroyed all water-borne bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. Using a four-ounce packet, anyone could transform ten liters of foul swamp bilge into clean, potable drinking water within minutes.

So pleased was P&G management with the results of their commitment that they continued to renew it annually, working through the foundation with relief organizations on every continent. In the summer of 2013, they had purified more than seven
billion
liters of water or, as Clinton liked to say, enough for every human being on the planet. To mark the occasion, Clinton and Chelsea delivered packets to a group of schoolchildren in Kigali, while representatives of P&G and the charity WorldVision demonstrated the remarkable product.

Standing in the schoolyard, children in blue and yellow uniforms lined up around a table to watch as Chelsea dumped a packet of powder into a clear plastic bucket of dark, sludgy water. She and her father took turns stirring the bucket with a large, long-handled spoon, and she jokingly nudged him when he seemed to slack off. In five minutes, all of the dirt had precipitated to the bottom, leaving crystal-clear water. But the powder was still working to kill off whatever traces of cholera, hepatitis, or worms might lurk, so they waited another twenty minutes. Then father and daughter each took a glass and, toasting each other, drank it down. Several of the children and a few of the braver adults in Clinton’s delegation tried it, too, pronouncing the taste “not too bad.”