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

people on how to take the medicine.”
    The obvious question for Clinton himself was what he could do, besides delivering speeches, to advance the cause. It was good to hug an AIDS patient on TV, so that the stigma surrounding the disease might diminish. But however warm and sincere his embrace might be, he knew that this gesture alone would save no lives. Without treatment, every person—every little child—that Clinton hugged would die, as would millions more.
    He could not expect to sway U.S. government policy, which was at best equivocal toward the U.N. effort. Annan wanted the United States to pay up to $3 billion annually toward his global war chest, but word from Washington indicated skepticism in the White House toward any program overseen by the United Nations. “There are still a lot of questions to be answered,” said a Bush administration official on the eve of the conference.
    Privately, the distrust ran in both directions. Angered by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s decision to send a lower-level delegation to the conference—rather than attend in person—the organizers responded by removing the new secretary of state’s “message of hope” from the opening ceremony schedule. Only a forceful intervention by U.S. embassy officials persuaded Nigerian and OAU officials to put Powell’s message on the program at all.
    The conference concluded with the approval of a “framework for action,”requiring African leaders to fund primary health care in their countries and create “sustainable mechanisms” to fund HIV prevention and treatment, especially to protect vulnerable women and children. The heads of state also signed an “Abuja Declaration,” taking personal responsibility for leadership in their own countries against the pandemic, and committing a “target allocation” of 15 percent of national budgets for “improvement of the health sector” as well as HIV/AIDS prevention. Not surprisingly, the declaration also pleaded for increased foreign assistance and debt forgiveness.
    For the moment, Clinton was obliged to place a higher priority on his own problems—completing the transition to the new office in Harlem, shopping a book deal for his memoirs, and raising as much as a hundred million dollars for his presidential library in Little Rock. But on the list of useful functions he might still serve, leadership in the fight against the AIDS pandemic appealed to all his instincts. He instructed his staff to respond positively whenever the international community of scientists and activists requested him to appear.
    When Clinton visited China a few weeks later to speak at business events in Hong Kong and Shanghai, he talked at length about AIDS in Africa and the threat posed by the pandemic to a globalizing world. Meeting for over an hour in Hong Kong with Jiang Zemin, he tried to draw out the Chinese premier on the topic of HIV and AIDS on the mainland.
    While on Chinese territory, Clinton also sought to improve his relationship with the Bush administration and to ameliorate tensions between the U.S. and China—which had risen sharply after the midair collision between an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet over Hainan Island on April 1. Although the Chinese government had released the American plane’s pilot and crew, it was still refusing to release the downed U-2.
    On the day after Jiang appeared at a forum sponsored by Fortune magazine, Clinton urged his listeners not to assume that present tensions would always define the relationship between China and the United States. “The world will be a better place over the next 50 years,” he said, “if we are partners.” Acknowledging the “difficulties and bumps in the road” that are inevitable between two great powers with differing cultures, he added, “The recent incident involving the airplane and—in my time—the terrible accident in which the American plane bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade” during the 1999