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

quite a few people whose reputations and careers he had fostered, if not entirely created, were avoiding him. They wouldn’t take his phone calls. They wouldn’t meet with him. It saddened and upset Hillary to see him treated in a fashion “that he would never treat anybody, ever, that he had any relationship with—and certainly not anybody he thought he owed something to.”

CHAPTER THREE
    In the long aftermath of the pardon debacle, Bill Clinton was often surprised—and hurt—by the disdainful attitude of old friends and allies. Amplifying the negative media coverage, which he seemed unable to ignore, their withdrawal represented a judgment that sometimes seemed universal. More loyal friends worried that he was moody, sometimes angry, and worse still, distracted from thinking seriously about his own future.
    Visiting him in Chappaqua, former White House chief of staff John Podesta—a calm and trustworthy figure to whom Clinton often turned at times of difficulty—left feeling concerned. Podesta always thought of his former boss and old friend as “a guy who never stays down.” But that winter, Clinton struck him as downcast, “stuck in a negative cycle.”
    Nor did Clinton’s mood improve when he called a meeting of longtime aides and friends to advise him on “what to do next” at Hillary’s Washington home, situated among the capital’s fanciest embassies and residences. Podesta, Band, and Tramontano were present, as were pollster and strategist Mark Penn, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, and Hillary, who had been enduring her own bout of bad publicity. She sat with her husband and listened as they told him bluntly, “You need to stand down for now. You are damaged goods.”
    So much reputational damage had been sustained, they advised, that he should stay out of sight for the coming six months, perhaps as long as a year, focusing quietly on his library and his memoirs. This moment of unanimous, undiluted candor left their former boss “very pissed off,” as one observer later noted. But even as the advisers spoke, they all knew that hiding away for an extended period was not really to be expected of him. Even if he had wanted to do so, finding shelter from the deluge of public scorn during the first year of his new life would not be easy.
    Whatever he had lost, however, Clinton still possessed an unusual capacity to “compartmentalize,”as Podesta liked to put it—to turn his mind away from his own troubles, and focus his attention elsewhere, at least temporarily. Soon he and his staff came to realize that however diminished his popularity might be in his native land, much of the rest of the world was ready to welcome and even celebrate him. And he was more than ready to extend himself to an emerging global community.
    Actually, the first opportunity had materialized just four days after he arrived in Chappaqua. Late on the evening of January 25, news outlets began to report an incredibly destructive earthquake in the province of Gujarat, India. The massive temblor measured 7.7 on the Richter scale, far stronger than the Northridge or Loma Prieta earthquakes in California, and with far greater casualties: Tens of thousands believed dead, hundreds of thousands more injured, perhaps a million or more homeless, and untold billions of dollars in property damage.
    As president, Clinton had been proud of improving America’s relationship with India, which had declined for many years as a consequence of Cold War politics. His outreach to Delhi had been strategically valuable in South Asia and paid political dividends at home, encouraging successful members of the Indian American diaspora, many of them in the financial and technology industries, to befriend the Clintons and contribute generously to them.
    Over the years, Clinton had become particularly close to a few Indian American businessmen, notably Vinod Gupta, who had built infoUSA, a leading information brokerage firm that was probably