On a sunny September day in a poor, sprawling black settlement south of Johannesburg, Bill Clinton takes the microphone at a community center and implores a gathering of young people to battle the scourge of AIDS that is sweeping across Africa.
“I’m here because you represent the two things I believe are critical to all of Africa’s future: young people taking responsibility for themselves, and turning back the tide of HIV and AIDS,” Mr. Clinton says, as South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela sits nearby. “We have not done enough to mobilize people like you to stop people from getting it in the first place, and we have not done enough to demand that leaders like me get people the medicine and the care and the treatment they need once they do get it.”
Mr. Clinton quietly concludes: “All I really want is for you to have a life I had. I hope you avoid some of the pain and mistakes I had. But I hope you have all the joy.”
Mr. Clinton’s presence at the AIDS event -- sponsored by loveLife, an HIV-prevention program for young people that was started by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and that gets substantial support from the South African government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- follows the blueprint the former president says he has drawn for living the rest of his life.
At one time the most public, and publicly scrutinized, man on earth, Mr. Clinton has spent the past 21 months as a private citizen quietly but forcefully laying the groundwork for a new career as a powerful figure in the nonprofit world.
In an interview with The Chronicle during a week-long tour of African countries, Mr. Clinton, 56, for the first time talked in detail about his philanthropy.
Since leaving office in January 2001, the former president has sought to use his clout, connections, and charisma to be a catalyst in building and supporting nonprofit institutions that tackle some of the world’s most daunting problems and encourage everyday citizens, especially young people, to serve their communities.
Among Mr. Clinton’s chief priorities: grappling with the global AIDS pandemic, spurring economic development at home and abroad, promoting racial and religious understanding, and encouraging public service by young and old citizens everywhere.
“You leave the White House and you lose a lot of power, so you have to trade power for influence and impact,” says Mr. Clinton. “You try to find the things that you care the most about, that you think are of real importance, and where you also think you can have an impact.”
“Our scorecard at the end of my nearly two years out of office -- in terms of what we’ve done to advance the public interest and how many lives we’ve touched and how many people are better off -- is I think going to be quite impressive,” he says. “I just want to make sure that every year we’ve done more.” He adds that he approaches his projects to be sure, “if I dropped dead, that the work would still go on.”
Determined to Make a Mark
Mr. Clinton left office mired in controversy: weathering a scandal involving a White House intern, facing questions about pardons he had granted hours before his term expired, and saddled with large legal bills stemming from government investigations during his tenure. Two years later, some public-opinion polls show that he still has low credibility among many Americans, although he is much admired abroad, especially in poor countries.
In many ways, like President Jimmy Carter, who also left office facing some doubts about his legacy, Mr. Clinton seems determined to make certain his post-presidency is marked by good works. (Last week Mr. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.)
To be sure, Mr. Clinton currently travels frequently to raise money for Democratic candidates and earns millions of dollars making speeches, and such activities lead some to question how much time he will ultimately spend on philanthropy and public service.
“He’s a young man by former-president standards, he’s a man with a great deal of energy, and I do expect that he’ll spend some of that energy doing good works,” says Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Yet I just have to believe that he’s going to be doing a lot of other things besides.”
Mr. Clinton says that dedicating a great deal of his life to public service is exactly what he should do. “I’m young and healthy,” he says. “I was given the life of my dreams. I got to be president. I loved it every day. So I ought to be doing this.”
Global Agenda
A review of his philanthropic portfolio shows that Mr. Clinton is trying to accomplish through nongovernmental organizations -- including his own William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Foundation -- what he once pursued at the White House. Only now, this former president, whose eight years in office featured a big focus on domestic matters, is also turning much attention to the international stage. He frequently works to continue the policies of his administration by working with people he employed in the White House.
Epitomizing his approach is Mr. Clinton’s two-pronged effort -- both as educator and health-care activist -- to fight AIDS worldwide. “If we don’t deal with it,” he says, “fragile democracies will fail in Africa and elsewhere, and that will lead to more civil wars and more murders and more devastation.”
Mr. Clinton, who is co-chairman, with Mr. Mandela, of the International AIDS Trust advisory board, made several other public appearances to focus attention on AIDS during his trip through Africa.
The trust, formed in Washington by Mr. Clinton’s White House AIDS “czar,” Sandra L. Thurman, focuses in part on educating world leaders, governments, businesses, and philanthropies about what the group says is a critical need for immediate stepped-up spending on preventing and treating AIDS. The charity’s employees are largely former workers from Mr. Clinton’s White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
Ms. Thurman says the former president brings “passion and a sense of urgency” to the organization’s work, and says that Mr. Clinton does not hesitate to bring his intensity to the charity itself. “We haven’t always agreed on every issue, and we’ve sometimes locked horns on the direction we ought to take the trust,” she says. “But it’s not been in any way that can’t be resolved, and that’s one of the wonderful things about his involvement.”
Help With Health Care
Mr. Clinton’s other approach to fighting AIDS involves his own foundation, which recently signed formal agreements to help in Mozambique, Rwanda, and a group of 15 Caribbean countries.
In the agreements, Mr. Clinton’s fund has pledged to help government leaders in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to obtain patented and generic drugs, and to help provide antiretroviral drugs for patients. It also pledged to send specialists to provide health-care training and to help expand health-care services.
“President Clinton is trusted in the developing world, which cannot be said of many former leaders of developed countries, and he has the capacity to mobilize resources there,” says Ira Magaziner, a former White House senior adviser on health care and other issues who volunteers for Mr. Clinton’s foundation. “And yet he can also mobilize the developed world to take action. A lot of people everywhere want to work with him.”
Mr. Magaziner says he encouraged Mr. Clinton to take on the project. “I told him, ‘You did a lot of good things as president. But it is rare that a world leader gets an opportunity to contribute to saving millions of lives, and that’s what is really at stake here.’”
Mr. Magaziner adds: “It’s a big challenge. We could fail. We could not succeed as well as we would hope. But that’s no excuse for not trying.”
Citizen Service
Another key element in Mr. Clinton’s new agenda is his plan to expand overseas the concept of AmeriCorps, the national-service program that was a hallmark of his presidency.
With City Year, a Boston group that was a model for AmeriCorps, the former president has created the Clinton Democracy Fellows program. Through it, young leaders from overseas will come to the United States for training and return home with ideas for starting their own national-service efforts.
An inaugural class of fellows from South Africa just completed training and arrived back home last month as part of Mr. Clinton’s promise to Mr. Mandela to help build a “South AfriCorps” program.
“The thing that will be unique about the City Year program in South Africa is that nobody even now has seen young black and white kids show up every day for a year in a community and work together on projects on this scale,” Mr. Clinton says. “My goal is that no one believes it is ‘make work’ but that everybody thinks what they think about AmeriCorps: that this is work that needs to be done.”
Mr. Clinton says he is pleased that his successor in the White House not only continued the AmeriCorps national-service program in the United States but has moved to enlarge its work. “President Bush did a good thing to embrace the national-service movement and ask Congress to expand it,” Mr. Clinton says. “I hope President Bush will continue to support it. I’m very grateful for that.”
By all accounts, former president Clinton, always known as a policy wonk who enjoys detail, takes a hands-on approach to his own philanthropy.
Pradeep Kashyap, executive director of the American India Foundation, in New York, says Mr. Clinton’s keen attention resulted in the former president’s having “the most significant role in actually giving birth to our organization.”
After an earthquake struck India -- killing 20,000 people in Gujarat a few days after Mr. Clinton left the White House -- the former president went to that country. At the suggestion of India’s prime minister, Mr. Clinton soon began talking with Indian-Americans, such as Rajat Gupta, managing director of McKinsey & Company, and Victor Menezes, chairman of Citibank, about what to do.
Under Mr. Clinton’s guidance as honorary chairman, the American India Foundation was formed to replace houses, hospitals, and schools wiped out by the disaster and to promote social and economic change. The organization eventually started its own national-service program -- sending Indian-Americans and others on months-long fellowships to India.
The former president continues to be deeply engaged with the charity, says Mr. Kashyap, making speeches at fund-raising events, writing personal notes to new trustees, and planning a return trip to India early next year to promote the charity’s work.
Says Mr. Kashyap: “If it weren’t for his personal involvement, we would not be here.”
Avoiding Bureaucracy
Mr. Clinton carries out his charitable endeavors with the help of about 17 people, including government-paid staff members in his Harlem office and foundation employees in Little Rock.
“I try not to have my foundation reinvent the wheel or become a separate huge bureaucracy, but to leverage what we do by working with others or creating other organizations,” he says. “There’s no real need for me to try to build an empire, so we have kind of a lean operation.”
For all his philanthropic objectives, Mr. Clinton seems to be mindful of criticism during his presidency that his administration was often too ambitious. Yet he clearly wants to be able to add projects to his plate if the unexpected occurs.
As an example, he describes how, following the September 11 terrorist attacks, he joined Bob Dole, retired Republican senator from Kansas, to raise more than $100-million for the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund, which will send children of victims to college.
Mr. Clinton says of his philanthropic work in general: “You want to retain enough flexibility to react to an opportunity that presents itself, but you have to have enough discipline that you don’t say Yes to everything. Otherwise, you may not have a discernible impact on anything. I’ve tried to make the right calls.”
Mr. Clinton says he chooses his projects carefully and is not afraid to decline to get involved.
“For example,” he says, “I care a lot about peace in the Middle East, and actually I still talk to leaders there a lot. But I could have no impact there unless I had an official position authorized by the government. So that’s one that can’t be on my list, because even if I care about it and I could have an impact, I can’t -- because I don’t have the portfolio.”
Now that he is himself raising money for charity and promoting nonprofit causes, Mr. Clinton says he is even more sensitive to the importance of encouraging philanthropy.
He and the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, held the first White House Conference on Philanthropy in 1999. But he says he regrets that he was not able to get Congress to pass legislation that would help promote charitable giving, including a proposal to allow people who do not itemize on their tax returns to claim deductions for gifts to charities.
The former president says he wants to talk up philanthropy in general because he is concerned that all charities get a black eye when a few engage in bad behavior and nab negative headlines.
Most people who donate to and work with nonprofit organizations “get their money’s worth out of philanthropy,” Mr. Clinton says. “There are a lot of phenomenally effective things going on.”
In setting his course for the future, Mr. Clinton says he admires the example of John Gardner, a Cabinet official in the 1960s who founded Common Cause and Independent Sector as he promoted public service, citizen activism, and leadership through nonprofit organizations. Mr. Gardner died last winter at 89, and Mr. Clinton delivered an impassioned eulogy at a memorial service. “He was an amazing man,” Mr. Clinton told The Chronicle. “If I live to be 89, I hope I’m still juicin’ it like he was, all that time.”