Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton by Joe Conason Page B

Clinton friend present at the luncheon, who later said, “I felt like I was in a Fellini movie and I was walking along with Mick Jagger.”
    The next day, Clinton flew into Copenhagen to address the six hundred members of a businessmen’s club sponsored by Børsen , a daily newspaper whose name means “stock exchange,” at a beautiful, century-old theater in the city’s center. Before departing for home he stopped by Marienborg, the eighteenth-century residence of Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, for a pleasant lunch with Rasmussen, the U.S. ambassador, and their wives. For those few hours in Denmark, he was paid $125,000. All told, his two weeks crossing the continent would net well over a million dollars.
    The European jaunt had been ideal from his point of view, with plenty of appreciative citizens in his audiences and seeking his autograph on the streets, not to mention the lucrative fees—and no pestering questions from journalists. He didn’t mind the frequent flying or the grueling pace. He valued the meetings with world leaders. He took great joy in his newfound freedom to walk around Europe’s cities, many of them places he had visited in his youth, without a presidential schedule. And of course he loved to talk and talk, whether at a podium or a dinner table. But he knew that his post-presidential existence could not be defined by a banal, mercenary routine of speechifying. He needed to do something .
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    In Gujarat, he 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 hadafforded 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 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