Man of the World by Joe Conason

Author:Joe Conason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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The first time Bill Clinton mentioned CGI in a public forum had been almost nine months earlier, when he took the World Economic Forum stage in Davos on January 27, 2005. Sitting for an interview with the American television journalist Charlie Rose before an audience of hundreds of corporate executives, heads of state, artists, scientists, academics, journalists, and nonprofit leaders gathered in the big auditorium, he waited for the question that the American TV anchor had been quietly directed to ask by Doug Band.

“You’re creating something called the Clinton Global Initiative—September, New York,” drawled Rose, “because you believe there is a necessity to do . . . what?”

“Give homework assignments!” retorted Clinton, to a ripple of laughter from the audience. “I’m a big supporter of Davos, but the world leaders of the rich and the poor countries and everybody in between come to the U.N. every year in September. . . .

“So what I thought we would do this year is to have a somewhat smaller version of what we do at the World Economic Forum, but that it would be focused very much on specific things all the participants could do. . . . Everybody who comes needs to know on the front end that you’re going to be asked your opinion about what we should do on AIDS, TB, malaria; what the private sector can do about global warming . . . and then you’re going to be asked to participate in very specific decisions about that and to make very specific commitments.” He emphasized that final word, then paused and smiled. “We may only have ten people show up!”

Not wishing to denigrate the Forum, where he drew large and enthusiastic crowds every year, or its ingratiating impresario Klaus Schwab, Clinton said that CGI would be “very complementary to Davos”—although its stated aims implied a critique.

“I just see all these people leave here every year full of energy,” said Clinton, “wanting to do something and wanting to know there is a place where they can actually go and say, OK, what is my assignment?” He would not only give out the assignments, he concluded, but grade the homework, too. It was vitally important to “keep score” of every effort to make change in the world, he admonished: “We need to know, we did this thing and it got that result,” smacking his hand on the coffee table.

Clinton was inclined to grade his own humanitarian efforts quite harshly. “The AIDS thing drives me nuts,” he told the Davos audience. “At the end of this quarter”—in March 2005—“we will be treating 100,000 people with our contracts with the Indian and South African [generic drug] companies. That’s, I think, more than what any other country is doing except Brazil—and it’s appalling.”

But, he continued, “We have 30 other countries about to go onto our [generic drug purchasing] contracts through the World Health Organization, so we could have two million of the six million [AIDS victims] who need it by the first quarter of next year.

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