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

worth a billion dollars, and Sant Singh Chatwal, a Sikh hospitality entrepreneur whose far-flung properties included Manhattan’s Bombay Palace restaurant. Both men had visited the White House; Gupta had played golf with Clinton and even slept once in the Lincoln Bedroom. Occasionally Chatwal still sent some of Clinton’s favorite menu items—butter chicken, lentil dal, kebabs, and fish curry—up to Chappaqua.
    During the days that followed the earthquake, Clinton began calling Chatwal, Gupta, and other members of his Indian American circle, including Raj Gupta (no relation to Vin), a managing director at McKinsey & Company, the international management consulting firm, and Victor Menezes, a senior vice chairman at Citigroup.
    “Now is the time for you and everybody who has done well in yourcommunity to step up” and organize aid to the flattened villages of Gujarat, he told Menezes. “And I will do everything in my power to help.”
    Clinton sent the same message to a friend in New Delhi—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the prime minister whom he had gotten to know while touring India as president in March 2000. The first trip by an American president to the subcontinent since Jimmy Carter’s visit in 1978, Clinton’s warmly received visit had been widely regarded as inaugurating a new partnership between the two countries. Now, Vajpayee’s staff arranged a telephone call between the Indian leader and the former president for the evening of February 1. During that call, Vajpayee officially requested Clinton’s assistance for the earthquake victims. They set a short-term funding goal of $1 million, but Clinton knew that his Indian American team would be good for much more.
    The next day, Victor Menezes hosted a meeting in a conference room on one of the upper floors of the imposing aluminum-sheathed Citigroup Center in Manhattan, where Clinton presided over the creation of the American India Foundation. Chosen unanimously as the new group’s honorary chairman, he would oversee a coast-to-coast fundraising sweep.
    Within two weeks, the AIF publicly announced its founding in a press release that led with a quote from Clinton: “The Gujarat earthquake in India has brought about tremendous human suffering. It is important to harness the management skills, financial resources and entrepreneurship that reside in the Indian community in the U.S. and use these to benefit India in its hour of need.” Its board included Menezes, Chatwal, the two Guptas, along with a score of other financial, business, and technology leaders—and just for an extra touch of glitz, the bestselling wellness guru Deepak Chopra.
    All this frenetic philanthropic activism went on well beneath the radar of the mainstream media, too preoccupied then with pardons and other embarrassments to take notice of any good works. But that scarcely deterred Clinton, who was well aware that he would accomplish nothing if he had to depend on positive press clippings. His staff regarded the Gujarat initiative as properly presidential in scope and, beyond that, highly therapeutic for him at a time of depressing daily abuse.
    Collaborating with the Indian American CEOs and academics,Clinton felt refreshed and energized. Every conversation and meeting about Gujarat pulled him out of his claustrophobic existence as a media target. Unlike other friends, they weren’t going to dump him over the pardons or worry whether his bad press might be contagious. When he was with them, he remembered how it felt to be recognized for qualities he liked in himself—his compassion, his intelligence, his openness to the world, his concentration on problems and solutions, his capacity to bring people together for a constructive purpose.
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    Yet wherever he went, in the United States, at least, the controversies and enmities of his presidency pursued him. Not long after the debut of the American India Foundation, Clinton flew to San Jose for a major fundraising event to aid Gujarat, where