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Exclusive Excerpt 2: ‘Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton’

Exclusive Excerpt 2: ‘Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton’

In Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, published on September 13 by Simon & Schuster, National Memo editor Joe Conason tells the remarkable story of the 42nd president’s life and times since his presidency ended. Having departed the White House under the cloud of controversial last-minute pardons, Clinton saw his popularity in the United States plummet almost instantly. But he soon discovered that overseas he still could do useful work — and find friendly audiences. That discovery began when he decided to bring relief to Gujarat, India — the site of a ruinous earthquake on January 25, 2001, less than a week after he left office. The Indian prime minister asked for Clinton’s help, and he swiftly organized friends in the Indian diaspora in the United States into a new organization, the American India Foundation.

..

In Gujarat, Clinton had found a compelling cause—with donors so enthusiastic and generous that the American India Foundation increased its fundraising goal to $50 million and scheduled a weeklong visit to the subcontinent, led by Clinton, primarily to assess conditions in the desolated western region. His experience as governor and president had afforded him considerable expertise in dealing with disasters, both natural and man-made.

Returning to India little more than a year after his historic March 2000 state visit, Clinton’s itinerary included a couple of days touring the damage in Gujarat state, a morning at the late Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta, and a banquet hosted by the prime minister in New Delhi. No paid speeches were on the schedule. With a far smaller entourage (including a dozen AIF leaders) and a humanitarian rather than geopolitical agenda, the trip established a post-presidential style that would serve as the template for many of his foreign tours. Usually he would enjoy all the perquisites and comforts due a visiting head of state: traveling via sleek private aircraft, staying in the very finest hotel suites, eating at the best tables in the best restaurants, riding in black Chevy Suburban SUVs with his Secret Service detail, flanked by local police vehicles and motorcycles. His staff made a valiant effort to uphold that standard, as did his hosts. It wasn’t always possible.

When Clinton stepped off the Indian Airlines plane that had taken him from New Delhi to Bhuj, one of the largest and most heavily damaged cities in the state of Gujarat, the temperature under the glaring sun was 41 degrees Celsius—or just under 106 Fahrenheit. Wearing only a dark green T-shirt and khaki slacks, he jumped into a blue Jeep with [his chief aide] Doug Band, joining a slow crawl of two dozen vehicles—somehow without air-conditioning or bottled water—that were packed with members of the AIF contingent and local dignitaries. The perspiring convoy headed out from Bhuj’s airport for the towns of Ratnal and Anjar, a trip of less than thirty miles that would take nearly two hours to complete. Along the roads, thousands of men, women, and children had lined up to greet the motorcade, applauding loudly and crying “Clinton! Clinton!” as it arrived an hour late.

What they found in the flattened villages left Clinton and his companions stunned, stricken, overwhelmed. There simply wasn’t much left of those places, their small stone houses and concrete storefronts all tumbled into a jagged rubble of rocks, broken red roof tiles, and smashed wood beams, all strewn amid streets that nobody had cleared, two months after the quake. Yet the people of the towns, furious that the government had so far failed to restore their villages or homes, were nevertheless thrilled to see the tall white-haired man from America, an important man whose presence would, they hoped, draw fresh attention to their dismal living conditions. Dozens of young women and children greeted him with tossed rice and flower petals, as an elderly woman anointed his forehead with a reddish dot of blessing. Their energy lifted Clinton as he spoke.

“Today I have come to look, listen, learn, ask questions, see what we can do to help,” he said. “The people of this place have lived through an unimaginable tragedy. The most important thing is to see whether this can be rebuilt.” He said the world had not forgotten them, and prom- ised that soon much more help would be forthcoming, a message he repeated at every stop. “He’s a big personality in the world,’’ a dazzled truck driver told the New York Times. ‘’Something good will come of his visit, though we don’t know what it will be.’’ (The Times headline on the trip, featured on page one, treated him like a down-market showbiz personality: “Whatever Happened to Bill Clinton? He’s Playing India.”)

———

Gujarat state officials handed out a glossy brochure in every town Clinton visited, which claimed that following the earthquake, “the state government immediately swung into action and mobilized all available resources. . . . The entire machinery of the state responded to the ca- lamity with fortitude and determination.” That blatantly aggrandizing message contrasted distinctly with what the survivors told Clinton and his friends. Government at all levels had failed them so far, providing little more than a $40 stipend along with some sheet-metal shelters and plastic tents. After two months, many thousands remained destitute and homeless.

“Nothing has been done, and nothing is going to be done. This is all for show,” complained a teacher, as he waited to see the former president. “If Clinton stayed here a month, maybe then we would get some proper help.”

Reaching Anjar, their main destination, the visitors from America went straight to a street where one of the most horrific incidents had occurred. More than two hundred elementary school students were parading on the morning of January 26 to celebrate Republic Day, a national holiday, when the temblor suddenly toppled buildings from both sides of the narrow lane and killed all of them. He was supposed to unveil a memorial plaque there, but that plan—like the relief efforts in general—had gone wrong. The memorial assemblage had been placed mistakenly on private property whose owner, irritated because the authorities had not first asked whether his land could be used, had re- moved the plaque, leaving only the modest stone pedestal.

Rotting garbage and ponds of sewage surrounded the area, a situation that local workers had tried to remedy by hastily covering the ponds with dirt and broken stones. The smell combined with the heat was almost overpowering. In remembrance of the dead children, Clinton set a bouquet of roses down on the stone pedestal and bowed his head for a moment of silence.

There were no words adequate to this tragedy, but he had to try. “We will raise funds to help the people of Anjar to confront their loss,” he promised. “We have a plan to see if money can be given to people to rebuild their lives. We are interested in seeing results.”

Sweat running down their faces and soaking their clothes, Clinton and his companions piled into their cars for the long, hot drive back to Bhuj, where the International Red Cross was operating a makeshift medical clinic to replace the city’s badly damaged Jubilee Hospital. A CNN reporter at the clinic described Clinton as “visibly shaken” by what he had seen already. At the Red Cross site, located on the ruined hospital premises, he held a news conference with a crowd of mostly Indian reporters.

Saying that much of the money raised for disaster relief had not been deployed “very well” in years past, Clinton explained that the AIF planned to collaborate with other nongovernmental organizations and the Indian government on focused action to restore jobs, education, and housing to Gujarat. They would develop a program based largely on what he and his colleagues had witnessed. In the years ahead, Clinton would try repeatedly to improve the world’s response to the desola- tion and trauma of such vast disasters.

Now, his voice quavering slightly with emotion, he mentioned the March 2000 state visit. “I will never forget it. I have always wanted to come back, but this sad event has brought me back earlier than expected.” Before climbing into his Jeep, Clinton made another vow that he repeated at every stop: “I intend to come back to India for the rest of my life.”

He met with relief officials from the Red Cross and other agencies the next morning in Ahmedabad, to discuss what they needed in Gujarat and how the AIF could be most helpful. By then, the scale of the destruction and suffering that they had witnessed was spurring him and his AIF companions toward more and more ambitious plans. Later that day, they announced that AIF had raised its fundraising goal for Gujarat to $100 million, with tentative plans to adopt one hundred villages for reconstruction.

In his meeting with the relief agencies, Clinton seemed to be grasping at larger aspirations for himself as well. According to Vimala Ramalingam, the secretary general of the Indian Red Cross, he expressed a desire in that meeting to support other humanitarian work across India—particularly to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. He also talked about discovering new ways to solve problems in Gujarat that could improve the lives of people in poor villages around the world.

“One of the things I am interested in,” he later told reporters, “is coming up with a model which will be helpful in developing other villages in India or Africa or Latin America, that may not have had natural disasters, but would like to build a different future.”

During the afternoon he toured Akshardham, a ten-story, hand- built, pink sandstone edifice in Gandhinagar that is one of Gujarat’s largest Hindu temples. He was received with a big garland of crimson and white flowers hung around his neck, as women devotees chanted a peace prayer. Standing before the great temple he looked up, marveling that such an enormous building still stood perfectly intact, without any support from steel or concrete. “The earthquake has not damaged Akshardham?” he asked Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the guru of the modern Swaminarayan sect, which emphasizes service and tolerance. It had not. The swami walked him through the complex, trailed by monks swathed in orange robes, and Secret Service agents, perspiring heavily in polo shirts.

Despite the torrid air, again over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Clinton noticed that he felt surprisingly calm and comfortable. Scheduled for fifteen minutes, the tour stretched into an hour as the swami and the former president ventured beyond the temple into a garden, filled with statues and carved stones, including a life-sized likeness of Gandhi. Then Clinton’s glance fell upon an extraordinary artwork—the figure of a man, sculpting himself with a hammer and chisel from a giant block of yellow stone. “What an amazing, incredible idea,” he blurted. “So powerful!” The swami smiled.

The sculptor’s metaphor of self-realization intrigued Clinton, who stood and gazed at it for minutes. At last, someone reminded him that they had fallen behind schedule—and that some of his companions were almost fainting in the heat. Before he left, Pramukh Swami introduced him to temple volunteers working in the earthquake relief effort—and to a Muslim man who told Clinton that although there was not a single Hindu family in his village, Akshardham had sent workers, construction materials, and food to aid the people there every day since the quake.

In the visitor’s book, he wrote:

April 5, 2001

Thank you—


for welcoming me

.
for making me feel at home.

for reaching out to all God’s children


for helping the people hurt by the earthquake

for working for peace and reconciliation.

—Bill Clinton

Excerpted from Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, by Joe Conason. Copyright © 2016 by Joe Conason. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Exclusive Excerpt: ‘Man Of The World: The Further Endeavors Of Bill Clinton’

Exclusive Excerpt: ‘Man Of The World: The Further Endeavors Of Bill Clinton’

In his new book Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, published today by Simon & Schuster, National Memo editor Joe Conason tells the remarkable story of the 42nd president’s emergence from the dark days of his White House departure to become, perhaps, one of the most recognizable and admired men in the world. Conason examines Clinton’s achievements, his failures, his motivations, and why he continues to inspire (and infuriate) on a grand scale.

What follows is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s opening pages.

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On the first morning he woke up as a private citizen there was nobody around to serve breakfast to Bill Clinton. For eight years he and Hillary had lived in the White House, where staffers and servants rushed to meet every need; and for ten years before that, they had lived in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, where similar if not quite equal personal service had always been available at any hour.

It was Sunday, January 21, 2001—and that was all over now.

Both Clintons rose to face their new life somewhat exhausted from the long ordeal of Inauguration Day, which had begun in the White House greeting the new occupants, then continued through the ceremonial investiture of President George W. Bush amid snow and sleet, a protracted farewell with hundreds of friends and staffers at Andrews Air Force Base, and an unusually long journey from Washington to their new home.

Under the foreboding sky, a freezing downpour had grounded the Marine helicopter that was supposed to transport them from the capital, and had later slowed the usual hour’s drive from John F. Kennedy Airport to Chappaqua, roughly forty miles north of the city. There they had ended the day dining late at a local restaurant with daughter Chelsea, their close friends Terry McAuliffe and his wife Dorothy, and Douglas Band, a former deputy assistant to the president who had agreed to stay with Clinton into his post-presidency.

Nobody had known just how tired the former president was until he fell fast asleep in the Chevy Suburban that brought them all from Kennedy Airport to Westchester.

When the Clintons came downstairs on that first morning, the former president and first lady realized that not only was there nobody available to prepare breakfast for them, but that they had no idea how to make even a cup of coffee in their sparsely furnished and rarely occupied new home. Neither did any of the others standing around in the kitchen with them. But everyone needed caffeine, badly.

“Let’s go get some coffee,” said Clinton.

The first executive decision of William Jefferson Clinton’s post- presidency was to venture into the snowy little town to visit the local delicatessen and bring back some coffee and sandwiches. Pulling on a bright yellow fleece sweatshirt over his T-shirt and jeans, Clinton joined Band in an armored Cadillac limousine, driven by a Secret Service agent, followed by another vehicle with four more agents.

Clinton noticed the first hint of trouble a few minutes later, when they arrived at Lange’s Little Shop and Delicatessen on King Street, the town’s main drag. The deli’s Sunday morning crowd of customers was friendly enough, with a few people shouting “Eight more years!” and “We love you, Bill!” But reporters were milling on the sidewalk, too. When they spied Clinton’s small entourage pulling up, a few began to bark questions. At first he could barely hear what they were saying.

“Why did you pardon Marc Rich?”

Alarmed, Doug Band leapt out of the back passenger seat and walked around to the other side of the car, where Clinton already had stepped out. He put an arm around Band’s shoulder and whispered softly but firmly: “I’ll give you five minutes to clear all this away.” He didn’t want the armored limousine and all the agents swarming around the closed street. He wanted to arrive in his new hometown more in the style of an ordinary citizen.

Minutes later, Clinton ventured into the crowded deli, where spontaneous applause lit his face with a smile. While Band placed their order, including an egg-salad sandwich for Clinton, he shook hands with his new neighbors, posed for cell phone snapshots, and signed autographs on scraps of paper.

There was no means of escape from the gang of perhaps a dozen or so reporters, which felt to Clinton and Band like a horde of hundreds who suddenly had total access to the former president. Nor did Clinton feel he could simply walk away without answering any of their questions—some friendly, some not so friendly. New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney, who had covered both Clintons for years, would later write that the president appeared “in a chatty mood,” relaxed and rested as he mingled with neighbors and reporters.

 “So far it’s been wonderful,” Clinton said of life after the presidency. On his first night in Chappaqua he had slept “like a rock,” he added— and no, he hadn’t bothered to read the Sunday papers or turn on the television yet.

With pleasantries out of the way, what ensued was an impromptu press conference. The journalists peppered a wholly unprepared ex-president with inquiries about the scores of pardons and commutations—totaling 177—he had signed during his last day in the White House. Mostly he responded to the questions in generalities, offering a promise to prepare a memo on the “pardon process” for his successor, and a short lecture on compassion toward former sinners.

“The word ‘pardon’ is somehow almost a misnomer,” said Clinton. “You’re not saying these people didn’t commit the offense. You’re saying they paid, they paid in full.” In fairness, he suggested, “we ought to be more open-minded” about individuals who have discharged their debt to society.

Perhaps those deserving of compassion included people like Susan McDougal, the Whitewater figure who had refused to implicate the Clintons in wrongdoing and spent miserable years in jail, or Henry Cisneros, the former housing secretary convicted of paying off a mistress with public funds, who had left office in disgrace. He had pardoned both of them. Arguably even a repentant narcotics smuggler who had done serious time might deserve consideration. That “paid in full” category, however, most assuredly did not include Rich, the “fugitive financier” holed up in a luxurious Swiss chateau while refusing to face multiple charges of tax fraud and violating the U.S. embargo against Iran.

Why would you pardon him?
“I spent a lot of time on that case. I think there are very good reasons for it,” Clinton replied, and referred further inquiries to Rich’s Washington attorney, Jack Quinn, who had formerly worked for him in the White House counsel’s office. Quinn could explain the legal theory behind the pardons of Rich and his business partner, Pincus Green, who had faced similar charges, fled to Switzerland with Rich, and received a pardon, too.

At last Clinton said he needed to go home, to continue the weekend’s work of unpacking with Hillary, who was thrilled to have a private home again and always loved to organize anything and everything. Sitting in the house were well over a hundred boxes of books alone. He needed time to get himself together, he chuckled, and get some more sleep.

But back on Old House Lane, reporters and TV crews would soon line up on the street, outside the tall white security fence surrounding the Clintons’ rambling Dutch colonial residence. Notoriously unfriendly to the press and sensing a media emergency, Band placed a call for help to Howard Wolfson—a tough and loyal pro who had handled press and communications for Hillary’s Senate campaign the year before. Wolfson dutifully drove up from the city and, before sundown, Clinton stepped into the chilly air outside for a photo opportunity and a few offhand remarks so that everyone else could finally could go home, too.

The newly sworn junior senator from New York stayed inside all day, wisely insulating herself from even the appearance of entanglement in her husband’s latest burgeoning crisis. That afternoon, a familiar atmosphere of tension loomed over the house, a feeling that things might be descending once again from bad into much, much worse.

Excerpted from Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, by Joe Conason. Copyright © 2016 by Joe Conason. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.