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4

       Bill Clinton Kaligani

      SOUTH AFRICA, 2012

      Bill Clinton was holding a glass of chardonnay but not drinking it the night I walked into his suite at the Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg. It was after midnight. I’d just flown to South Africa in a cramped coach cabin with a team of teenage rugby players who were bursting with testosterone and fist pumping during the entire sixteen-hour flight, plus a refueling stop in Senegal.

      I’d checked into my room in the main house of the Saxon, once the palatial private residence of Douw Steyn, an eccentric billionaire who befriended Clinton during his presidency. As I walked toward Clinton’s private luxury villa, I passed rows of photos of Steyn with a younger, plumper Clinton. I crossed a wooden bridge over a pond, the sound of peacocks and fireflies and the hum of cicadas in the distance. I opened the villa’s heavy engraved doors. The stand-alone suite had a private bar and a living room decorated in tasteful neutral hues with a scattering of African sculptures.

      A handful of Friends of Bill, also known as FOBs, sat at a nearby table playing oh hell!, Clinton’s card game of choice. They made small talk about Hillary’s 2016 prospects. (“If Romney wins, the party will have to pave the way for her …”)

      Clinton stood by a row of neatly arranged beige leather bar stools, wearing a baby-blue V-neck cashmere sweater, tan driving shoes, jeans, and a friendship bracelet tied around his frail wrist. Chelsea sat on a sunken taupe sofa sipping Evian alongside Bari Lurie, her chief of staff.

      I’d later confess to one of the donors, Raj Fernando, an algorithmic trader in Chicago, that I felt guilty about how much the Times had paid to send me on the Clinton Foundation trip—a six-night swing through Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, plus a pit stop in Cyprus so Clinton could deliver a paid speech. “Believe me,” Raj said. “I paid more.”

      It was the summer of 2012, right before Clinton’s spellbinding speech renominating Obama at the Democratic National Convention, when no one was paying much attention to Bill Clinton. I’d been in Sun Valley, Idaho, chasing down media moguls and crashing a cocktail party with Wendi Murdoch (“Rupert hates the New York Times, but I love you!”) when Jill Abramson approved the Africa trip, never mind that it had nothing to do with my beat at the time.

      Looking back, it’s astonishing that The Guys ever allowed me to cover this philanthropic swing. We were all so simpatico then that when the Times photographer showed up from a stint in Yemen with no luggage, Clinton loaned him a razor. I was the only reporter who stayed the entire trip, starting with that first night at the Saxon when Bill Clinton talked my ear off well into the early-morning hours.

      Among about a million other topics, he explained that Nelson Mandela had written his memoir on the grounds of the Steyn mansion before it became a five-star hotel.

      “Where you’re staying was his home, and that’s where I stayed until 2010,” Clinton said. He looked around at the villa, with its high, airy ceilings and spotless marble floors. “It’s a wonderful place. I love this place,” Clinton said.

      He paused for a moment. He’d visited the Soweto slums earlier that day. The next day we would fly to Rwanda where we’d take a military helicopter to a red-dirt village to visit a children’s hospital.

      “Yeah, I always feel slightly guilty staying here,” he said. He took a sip of chardonnay. “But I get over it.”

      OVER THE NEXT six days, I vacillated between awe at Clinton’s brainpower and verve—feeling blessed to be in this brilliant man’s presence—and total exhaustion from his self-absorption and driveling on. After a couple of nights of hotel-bar banter, I began to feel like the lucky passenger upgraded to first class on a transatlantic flight only to wind up next to a raconteur who never needs a nap and who rambles on because of some internal hole they need to fill.

      By the final night in the Kampala Serena Hotel in Uganda, Clinton has relayed his own obscure accomplishments (“In Arkansas, we went from forty-eight percent to fifty-three percent forested land when I left office …”). He has summed up how to solve Africa’s food shortage (“We need to do things Americans did literally eighty years ago during the Depression …”), and he has, for what feels like hours, extolled the virtues of soybeans (“You can grow it with just a thin layer of topsoil …”). He starts every other sentence with “In the 1990s …” and “When I was president …” The Guys even had a name for one defensive monologue I got trapped in after asking about Clinton’s decision to invade Somalia in 1993. “You got Black Hawked,” they said.

      It was after 1:00 a.m., and all I wanted to do was go to sleep when Clinton told me his advice for how Obama could improve his speech making. “Suppose we’ve been friends for forty years,” he said, resting a palm on my shoulder. “If you came to visit me in the hospital and said something pretty and eloquent instead of saying, ‘God, I’m sorry. This sucks. I wish I could do more about it,’ it’s an insult. So I told the president the eloquence should go at the end of his speeches now, never in the middle …”

      I nodded, smiling politely and checking that the red light of my voice recorder was still glowing.

      He changed outfits at least three times a day, usually reappearing in the verdant hotel gardens for dinner with donors wearing a linen guayabera and khaki cargo pants. Africa chic. “He’s like Lady Gaga,” an aide said.

      The other thing I noticed about Clinton was how often he talked about dying. He hardly thought he’d live to see the 2016 election, never mind wind up back in the White House.

      When the manager of a soybean processing plant asked him to come back next year, Clinton said, “I’m older than you. We have to make sure I’m still around.” When I asked him about Chelsea recently joining the Clinton Foundation board, he said, “We’re trying to build it up so it’d still run if I drop dead tomorrow.”

      In Nicosia, we sat down for coffee, and when Cypriots weren’t swarming him for photos, I asked whether Hillary would run for president in 2016. “She points out that we’re not kids anymore and a lot of people want to be president,” he responded.

      I saw things in Africa that made me less cynical about the Clinton Foundation. Under tamarind and mahogany trees, aid workers set up a station where deaf children from the local villages could be fitted with their first hearing aids. It’s hard to care about whether some sleazy foreign donor wants something from the State Department after you’ve seen a child hear for the first time.

      And when the Clinton Foundation is maligned, I think of Bill Clinton Kaligani. We were all standing on the tarmac at the Entebbe International Airport, and I’d completely run out of topics to ask Clinton about. I just extended my voice recorder to pick up his stream of consciousness when a military helicopter emerged on the yellow-orange horizon.

      “Is that him?” Chelsea said, cupping her hand over her eyes as she looked into the setting sun.

      Moments later, a slender fourteen-year-old Ugandan boy in his threadbare school uniform stepped out of the helicopter. His name was Bill Clinton Kaligani. His mother had named him after Clinton when he visited Uganda in 1998.

      A photograph hangs in the Clintons’ Chappaqua home. Clinton is holding the newborn as Hillary, in a wide-rimmed Out of Africa hat, looks on. “He was born the day before we got there,” Clinton told me over the hum of the helicopter. “It was one of the most memorable days of my presidency.”

      He walked over and pulled little Bill into his arms. The boy wrapped his hands around one of Clinton’s hands and rested his head on that doughy spot on the chest beneath the shoulder. They stayed there like that.

      After they visited for a while, and Clinton said he’d pay the boy’s school tuition fees, the staff and donors prepared to board our chartered 737. Aides tugged Clinton toward a separate Gulfstream, but he wasn’t done. He called me over and told me that on that same Africa trip in 1998, a Senegalese

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