Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (8 page)

The former president was truly surprised, in a way she found poignant, to discover that quite a few people whose reputations and careers he had fostered, if not entirely created, were avoiding him. They wouldn’t take his phone calls. They wouldn’t meet with him. It saddened and upset Hillary to see him treated in a fashion “that he would never treat anybody, ever, that he had any relationship with—and certainly not anybody he thought he owed something to.”

CHAPTER THREE

In the long aftermath of the pardon debacle, Bill Clinton was often surprised—and hurt—by the disdainful attitude of old friends and allies. Amplifying the negative media coverage, which he seemed unable to ignore, their withdrawal represented a judgment that sometimes seemed universal. More loyal friends worried that he was moody, sometimes angry, and worse still, distracted from thinking seriously about his own future.

Visiting him in Chappaqua, former White House chief of staff John Podesta—a calm and trustworthy figure to whom Clinton often turned at times of difficulty—left feeling concerned. Podesta always thought of his former boss and old friend as “a guy who never stays down.” But that winter, Clinton struck him as downcast, “stuck in a negative cycle.”

Nor did Clinton’s mood improve when he called a meeting of longtime aides and friends to advise him on “what to do next” at Hillary’s Washington home, situated among the capital’s fanciest embassies and residences. Podesta, Band, and Tramontano were present, as were pollster and strategist Mark Penn, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, and Hillary, who had been enduring her own bout of bad publicity. She sat with her husband and listened as they told him bluntly, “You need to stand down for now. You are damaged goods.”

So much reputational damage had been sustained, they advised, that he should stay out of sight for the coming six months, perhaps as long as a year, focusing quietly on his library and his memoirs. This moment of unanimous, undiluted candor left their former boss “very pissed off,” as one observer later noted. But even as the advisers spoke, they all knew that hiding away for an extended period was not really to be expected of him. Even if he had wanted to do so, finding shelter from the deluge of public scorn during the first year of his new life would not be easy.

Whatever he had lost, however, Clinton still possessed an unusual capacity to “compartmentalize,”
as Podesta liked to put it—to turn his mind away from his own troubles, and focus his attention elsewhere, at least temporarily. Soon he and his staff came to realize that however diminished his popularity might be in his native land, much of the rest of the world was ready to welcome and even celebrate him. And he was more than ready to extend himself to an emerging global community.

Actually, the first opportunity had materialized just four days after he arrived in Chappaqua. Late on the evening of January 25, news outlets began to report an incredibly destructive earthquake in the province of Gujarat, India. The massive temblor measured 7.7 on the Richter scale, far stronger than the Northridge or Loma Prieta earthquakes in California, and with far greater casualties: Tens of thousands believed dead, hundreds of thousands more injured, perhaps a million or more homeless, and untold billions of dollars in property damage.

As president, Clinton had been proud of improving America’s relationship with India, which had declined for many years as a consequence of Cold War politics. His outreach to Delhi had been strategically valuable in South Asia and paid political dividends at home, encouraging successful members of the Indian American diaspora, many of them in the financial and technology industries, to befriend the Clintons and contribute generously to them.

Over the years, Clinton had become particularly close to a few Indian American businessmen, notably Vinod Gupta, who had built infoUSA, a leading information brokerage firm that was probably worth a billion dollars, and Sant Singh Chatwal, a Sikh hospitality entrepreneur whose far-flung properties included Manhattan’s Bombay Palace restaurant. Both men had visited the White House; Gupta had played golf with Clinton and even slept once in the Lincoln Bedroom. Occasionally Chatwal still sent some of Clinton’s favorite menu items—butter chicken, lentil dal, kebabs, and fish curry—up to Chappaqua.

During the days that followed the earthquake, Clinton began calling Chatwal, Gupta, and other members of his Indian American circle, including Raj Gupta (no relation to Vin), a managing director at McKinsey & Company, the international management consulting firm, and Victor Menezes, a senior vice chairman at Citigroup.

“Now is the time for you and everybody who has done well in your
community to step up” and organize aid to the flattened villages of Gujarat, he told Menezes. “And I will do everything in my power to help.”

Clinton sent the same message to a friend in New Delhi—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the prime minister whom he had gotten to know while touring India as president in March 2000. The first trip by an American president to the subcontinent since Jimmy Carter’s visit in 1978, Clinton’s warmly received visit had been widely regarded as inaugurating a new partnership between the two countries. Now, Vajpayee’s staff arranged a telephone call between the Indian leader and the former president for the evening of February 1. During that call, Vajpayee officially requested Clinton’s assistance for the earthquake victims. They set a short-term funding goal of $1 million, but Clinton knew that his Indian American team would be good for much more.

The next day, Victor Menezes hosted a meeting in a conference room on one of the upper floors of the imposing aluminum-sheathed Citigroup Center in Manhattan, where Clinton presided over the creation of the American India Foundation. Chosen unanimously as the new group’s honorary chairman, he would oversee a coast-to-coast fundraising sweep.

Within two weeks, the AIF publicly announced its founding in a press release that led with a quote from Clinton: “The Gujarat earthquake in India has brought about tremendous human suffering. It is important to harness the management skills, financial resources and entrepreneurship that reside in the Indian community in the U.S. and use these to benefit India in its hour of need.” Its board included Menezes, Chatwal, the two Guptas, along with a score of other financial, business, and technology leaders—and just for an extra touch of glitz, the bestselling wellness guru Deepak Chopra.

All this frenetic philanthropic activism went on well beneath the radar of the mainstream media, too preoccupied then with pardons and other embarrassments to take notice of any good works. But that scarcely deterred Clinton, who was well aware that he would accomplish nothing if he had to depend on positive press clippings. His staff regarded the Gujarat initiative as properly presidential in scope and, beyond that, highly therapeutic for him at a time of depressing daily abuse.

Collaborating with the Indian American CEOs and academics,
Clinton felt refreshed and energized. Every conversation and meeting about Gujarat pulled him out of his claustrophobic existence as a media target. Unlike other friends, they weren’t going to dump him over the pardons or worry whether his bad press might be contagious. When he was with them, he remembered how it felt to be recognized for qualities he liked in himself—his compassion, his intelligence, his openness to the world, his concentration on problems and solutions, his capacity to bring people together for a constructive purpose.

Yet wherever he went, in the United States, at least, the controversies and enmities of his presidency pursued him. Not long after the debut of the American India Foundation, Clinton flew to San Jose for a major fundraising event to aid Gujarat, where he appeared onstage alongside Deepak Chopra and M.C. Hammer, the rap-star-turned-preacher, at the city’s biggest evangelical church.

Raising more than $2 million in a single evening, that event sparked a lively controversy within the evangelical community, whose strongly conservative and Republican orientation included powerful feelings of hostility toward Clinton. During his presidency, the evangelical right’s assessment of him had ranged from merely “immoral” to “anti-Christ.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dick Bernal, the founder and minister of Jubilee Christian Center, which hosted the Gujarat fundraiser, had endured a barrage of criticism from many of his own twelve-thousand-strong flock as well as other local pastors and congregations since the announcement of Clinton’s participation.

Five families quit Bernal’s church, and he received no fewer than six hundred “hate letters,” including death threats and dark predictions that he and his family would be “blown up” when God passed judgment on them.

“They wanted to know if he was bringing Monica Lewinsky with him,” the bemused pastor later recalled. “They wanted to know if Clinton was going to come here and violate women in the church.”

Responding to the unexpectedly severe backlash, Bernal placed a large advertisement in the
San Jose Mercury News
a week later, apologizing for Clinton’s appearance at the church. This act of contrition irritated the local Indian American businessmen who had sponsored the event. “
Some of the most sophisticated people in the Silicon Valley were there that night,” complained Kailash Joshi, a tech entrepreneur and Clinton friend who had organized the event. “Although there is no anger here, I think the apology he put in the newspaper was an insult.”

Yet while Bernal might have appeared to disavow Clinton, his own opinion of the former president was more complicated. Both the pastor and his wife had felt a surge of empathy for the former president while they watched him that evening. To her, Clinton had “looked sad,” while he observed that Clinton “doesn’t get invited to a lot of churches.” Later, Bernal told the evangelical magazine
Charisma
that he believed Clinton had repented his sins—and that God still had “great plans” for him.

Confiding what a “well-known televangelist” had told him of a prophecy for Clinton, Bernal said, “The word was, God’s hand is on him for a higher purpose than even being president. And God will never remove His hand from him.” Within that enigmatic prediction lay the question that Clinton still had not answered. Aside from paying off his debts and building his library, exactly what was he supposed to do with his energy and talent?

While Clinton certainly felt gratified by the appreciation of the Indian American community, moving toward a global presence made very practical sense for him as well. Morgan Stanley and other American organizations had backed away from him and even canceled his speech bookings, yet the same reaction had not occurred overseas—a difference reflected in his schedule, which would send him far from home during much of that difficult initial year.

By early March, he was preparing to fly across the Atlantic for his first post-presidential trip abroad. Don Walker had booked a series of well-compensated speeches in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, where Clinton would also confer informally but publicly with several heads of state. None showed any sign of wishing to shun him.

Releasing news of the trip, his new spokeswoman Julia Payne assured the New York
Daily News
that Clinton “really could be booked every day this year. He is the most sought-after speaker in the history of the lecture circuit.” Payne, a former White House staffer brought on to handle the press, didn’t mention that bookings in the United States
had not recovered yet; cancellations were still occurring. But those losses were offset by the demand in other countries, where tickets for his appearances—priced from $200 and up, and as high as $10,000 to sit with him at dinner—quickly sold out. Speeches were booked in cities large and small, from Norway, Poland, and Ireland to China, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. More than a thousand tickets for a hospital fundraiser in Hamilton, Ontario, sold out in a single day. Certain that they could attract many more paying guests, the organizers seriously considered moving to a venue that would accommodate 3,500 seats. On the global platform, “Bill Clinton” was a stellar brand.

Karen Tramontano had hired a speechwriting team, including Jeff Shesol and Paul Orzulak, former Clinton White House staff wordsmiths who had formed a company called West Wing Writers after leaving government. They came up to Chappaqua several times with her to discuss the tone, frame the subjects—settling, very broadly, on globalization and the future of humanity—and begin crafting a draft. The speech, which would be delivered in slightly varying forms over the coming months to many audiences, “had to be tops,” she told them. They all knew from years of experience how Clinton would rework their prose until it could not be regarded as belonging to anyone but him. Ultimately he used little of the speechwriters’ work at all, building a speech informally titled “Our Common Humanity,” arguing why what binds people together is more important than what divides them. He would use and adapt the same basic text, with appropriate introductions and fresh wonkish digressions, for well over a decade in most of his paid appearances.

Before leaving for Europe, he conferred by telephone with both Sandy Berger and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. They agreed that as an ex-president, he should be careful in his remarks and conversations not to step too hard on his successor in the White House. Already Bush was becoming widely disliked in Europe for his administration’s abrupt decision to kill the Kyoto treaty on reducing carbon pollution, without consulting America’s allies, among other offenses of substance and style.

Especially sensitive on this trip would be Clinton’s visit to Germany, where he was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at an event honoring Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. As president, he had enjoyed a close relationship with Schroeder, a Social Democratic reformer some
times known as “the German Clinton.” But the U.S. relationship with Germany was changing under Bush, owing to strong disagreements over climate change, missile defense, and relations with Russia.

Just before he departed New York on a private jet, Clinton’s staff let the organizers of his European speeches know that they were imposing one final requirement: No reporters or photographers would be admitted to any of his appearances on the continent. That demand proved extremely awkward, since members of the press had already received invitations to attend his talks in The Hague and Copenhagen.