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

he appeared onstage alongside Deepak Chopra and M.C. Hammer, the rap-star-turned-preacher, at the city’s biggest evangelical church.
    Raising more than $2 million in a single evening, that event sparked a lively controversy within the evangelical community, whose strongly conservative and Republican orientation included powerful feelings of hostility toward Clinton. During his presidency, the evangelical right’s assessment of him had ranged from merely “immoral” to “anti-Christ.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dick Bernal, the founder and minister of Jubilee Christian Center, which hosted the Gujarat fundraiser, had endured a barrage of criticism from many of his own twelve-thousand-strong flock as well as other local pastors and congregations since the announcement of Clinton’s participation.
    Five families quit Bernal’s church, and he received no fewer than six hundred “hate letters,” including death threats and dark predictions that he and his family would be “blown up” when God passed judgment on them.
    “They wanted to know if he was bringing Monica Lewinsky with him,” the bemused pastor later recalled. “They wanted to know if Clinton was going to come here and violate women in the church.”
    Responding to the unexpectedly severe backlash, Bernal placed a large advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News a week later, apologizing for Clinton’s appearance at the church. This act of contrition irritated the local Indian American businessmen who had sponsored the event. “Some of the most sophisticated people in the Silicon Valley were there that night,” complained Kailash Joshi, a tech entrepreneur and Clinton friend who had organized the event. “Although there is no anger here, I think the apology he put in the newspaper was an insult.”
    Yet while Bernal might have appeared to disavow Clinton, his own opinion of the former president was more complicated. Both the pastor and his wife had felt a surge of empathy for the former president while they watched him that evening. To her, Clinton had “looked sad,” while he observed that Clinton “doesn’t get invited to a lot of churches.” Later, Bernal told the evangelical magazine Charisma that he believed Clinton had repented his sins—and that God still had “great plans” for him.
    Confiding what a “well-known televangelist” had told him of a prophecy for Clinton, Bernal said, “The word was, God’s hand is on him for a higher purpose than even being president. And God will never remove His hand from him.” Within that enigmatic prediction lay the question that Clinton still had not answered. Aside from paying off his debts and building his library, exactly what was he supposed to do with his energy and talent?
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    While Clinton certainly felt gratified by the appreciation of the Indian American community, moving toward a global presence made very practical sense for him as well. Morgan Stanley and other American organizations had backed away from him and even canceled his speech bookings, yet the same reaction had not occurred overseas—a difference reflected in his schedule, which would send him far from home during much of that difficult initial year.
    By early March, he was preparing to fly across the Atlantic for his first post-presidential trip abroad. Don Walker had booked a series of well-compensated speeches in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, where Clinton would also confer informally but publicly with several heads of state. None showed any sign of wishing to shun him.
    Releasing news of the trip, his new spokeswoman Julia Payne assured the New York Daily News that Clinton “really could be booked every day this year. He is the most sought-after speaker in the history of the lecture circuit.” Payne, a former White House staffer brought on to handle the press, didn’t mention that bookings in the United Stateshad not recovered yet; cancellations were still occurring. But those losses were offset by the