At 1:45 in the morning one day this past July, Bono, the lead singer for U2
and the world's foremost agitator for aid to Africa, was in a van heading back
to his hotel in Edinburgh from Murrayfield Stadium; he had just performed in,
and expounded at, a concert designed to coincide with the beginning of the
summit meeting of the major industrialized nations, held nearby at the
Gleneagles resort. Despite the hour, practically everybody in the van was on a
cellphone. The bodyguard in the front seat was calling the hotel to see if a
huge crowd would still be camped outside hoping to catch a glimpse of their
world-straddling hero. (Roger that.) Lucy Matthew, the head of the London office
of DATA, Bono's policy and advocacy body - the acronym stands for Debt AIDS
Trade Africa - was whispering to some contact in the States. And Bono, who had
been conferring 12 hours earlier at Gleneagles with President George Bush, Prime
Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, was sharing an anxiety
attack with a friend. The leaders of the G-8, as the group is known, were going
to offer far less in aid and trade to developing nations in Africa than the
activists had led their followers to expect. Thousands of bright-eyed young
recruits to the cause were going to go home in disgust.
Bono, normally the most courteous of men, shouted an obscenity in Matthew's
general direction, though the intended target was himself, or perhaps fate. "What's
the point of coming back to talk to Chirac?" he said. "It's going to be too late
then." The French president had reached Gleneagles late, and was probably sullen
given that Paris had just lost out to London in its bid for the 2012 Olympics.
(This was several hours before the terrorist bombings in London.) Bono was
leaving later that day for a concert in Berlin and so would be unable to see
Chirac until the day after. The thought was making him desperate: "Lucy, is it
too late to call somebody with Chirac?" Matthew gently pointed out that it was,
after all, the middle of the night for most people. Bono digested this unwelcome
news and then said, "Look, let's call them tomorrow morning and say I'd be happy
to meet with him any time he wants. I'll bring him breakfast.. . .I guess I
won't bring him an English breakfast." (Chirac had notoriously declared English
food the worst cuisine in Europe, save Finnish.)
Bono did not, in fact, talk to the French president until the third and final
day of the conference. But by then his despair had lifted. The summit meeting's
final communiqué offered significant pledges on aid and debt relief for Africa,
as well as new proposals on education and malaria eradication. Bono's own
embrace of the package was treated with a solemnity worthy of a Security Council
resolution. When I saw him the day after the summit ended, over tea in the
courtyard of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, he said, "I feel like I've got a
right to punch the air."
And so he did. Bono had moved the debate on Africa, as five years ago he moved
the debate on debt cancellation. This past week he was trying to move the debate
set to take place at the big United Nations summit meeting, which he says he
hopes will consolidate the gains made at Gleneagles, or at least not erode them.
He's a strange sort of entity, this euphoric rock star with the chin stubble and
the tinted glasses - a new and heretofore undescribed planet in an emerging
galaxy filled with transnational, multinational and subnational bodies. He's a
kind of one-man state who fills his treasury with the global currency of fame.
He is also, of course, an emanation of the celebrity culture. But it is Bono's
willingness to invest his fame, and to do so with a steady sense of purpose and
a tolerance for detail, that has made him the most politically effective figure
in the recent history of popular culture.
When I first met Bono last January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a
gathering that answers almost perfectly to the conspiracy-theory view of global
domination by a corporate-political-cultural elite. A core function of Davos is
to mix different kinds of authority, which makes it the site par excellence of
the Celebrity Prince and the one-man state. Bill Gates was there, as was George
Soros - figures whose global currency, of course, is currency, and who deploy
their philanthropy strategically, just as states deploy their aid budgets.
Angelina Jolie, roving ambassador for the United Nation's refugee agency, showed
up, too. Bill Clinton came, as did Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor and
unofficial economist to the third world. And a giddy nimbus of wannabes
surrounded these regal figures and basked in their company.
When I went to meet Bono at the bar of his hotel, I saw Richard Gere seated at a
table with a gorgeous woman in a little fur jacket and a leather cap. Bono, on
the other hand, had removed himself to a quiet back room, where he was keeping
company with a plump, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie. (Bono was wearing
a T-shirt and a fuzzy sweater whose sleeve needed mending.) This was Randall
Tobias, head of the Bush administration's AIDS program. The administration had
just announced that the program was providing antiretroviral drugs to 155,000
Africans with AIDS. Another kind of activist might have said, "That leaves 25
million more to go." But not Bono: he looked his cornfed interlocutor in the eye
and said, "You should know what an incredible difference your work is going to
make in their lives." Tobias looked embarrassed. Bono said various wonderful
things about President Bush. Tobias beamed.
The glamour event of the following day, indeed of the whole forum, was a
symposium on efforts to end poverty in Africa. The guests were Tony Blair and
Bill Clinton, Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South
Africa, Bill Gates and Bono. The heads of state, leading off, candidly
acknowledged the obstacles to development - violent conflict, poor governance,
corruption, lack of political will in the donor states and so on. It was all
terribly somber and Davos. Then Bono was asked what he would like to see changed.
"The tone of the debate," he shot back. The Celebrity Prince was wearing a black
T-shirt under a black leather jacket, and he appeared to have shaved the stubble
off his jutting, bellicose jaw. "Here we are," he went on, "reasonable men
talking about a reasonable situation. I walk down the street and people say: 'I
love what you're doing. Love your cause, Bon.' And I don't think 6,000 Africans
a day dying from AIDS is a cause; it's an emergency. And 3,000 children dying
every day of malaria isn't a cause; it's an emergency."
The crowd of C.F.O.'s and executive directors, silent until then, burst into
applause. Bono had put music to the words; that's one of the things the
rock-star activist can do. Moments later, an inspired Bill Clinton, throwing
reason to the winds, cried: "The whole corruption and incompetence issue is
bogus! And whoever raises it should be thrown in the closet." (Clinton later
calmed down and said he meant that the corruption and incompetence of many
African governments should not be used as a pretext to withhold aid.)
Bono gave Davos its music; but he also operated in prose. His chief goal was to
win commitments, or the possibility of commitments, to be redeemed six months
later at Gleneagles. A major item on the agenda for Gleneagles would be
canceling $40 billion of debt that the poorest countries owe to the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions; and in
Davos, Bono met with John Taylor, an under secretary of the treasury, to try to
move the Bush administration's position on the issue. He huddled with Gordon
Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer and heir apparent to the British prime
ministership, to strategize on financial mechanisms to "front load" the
increased aid that donor states had promised. When Chancellor Schröder arrived
to deliver a speech on aid to Africa as well as on the German economy, he met
beforehand with Bill Gates and afterward with Bono.
As soon as the Schröder meeting ended, I was summoned to the war room in which Bono
and his troops were camped. "Schröder just agreed to .7 by 2015," Bono cried.
"It's fantastic!" In 2002, the industrialized states pledged to increase
foreign-aid spending to 0.7 percent of G.N.P. by 2015, but the German economy
was tanking, and Schröder, who faced a political challenge from the right, had
been loath to lay out a timetable for increased spending. Now, to Bono, he had
done just that. Of course, a skeptic might have noted that since Schröder was
unlikely to be in power in 2006, much less 2015, this was not a pledge he would
have to honor, but Bono is not a skeptic.
One night I went out to dinner with Bono and the gang. Richard Curtis, the
British screenwriter responsible for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Love
Actually" and a prominent activist on poverty issues as well, told Bono that he
and Bob Geldof had been talking about arranging simultaneous mega-concerts in
major world cities for July 2, to focus attention on the Gleneagles summit - the
germ of what would become Live 8. Bono, who was carving up a large steak, got
more and more excited. Those eight leaders, he suggested, should think that the
whole world will be watching. It wouldn't be, of course; but it should feel that
way. "I'm a salesmen," he told Curtis. "And I know I can sell this to NBC or
CBS." Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sachs was crouched over in the corner, trying to make
himself heard on his BlackBerry. Jamie Drummond, the head of DATA's Washington
office, was running down a list of stars - George Clooney, Cameron Diaz, Brad
Pitt, Mos Def - who had agreed to appear in a commercial for the One Campaign, a
confederation of major development organizations that was assembling an army of
activists to fight for increased aid.
Bono had started with a glass of white wine, but when I said I was drinking red,
he switched over and ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. U2's manager,
Paul McGuinness, is a wine nut, and Bono caught the bug from him. Bono has
unabashedly bourgeois tastes, and he spends his money on the kinds of things
most of us would spend our money on if we had as much as he does - a family-size
Maserati, a house on the Riviera, a charming hotel in Dublin, great food and
wine. I was raving about the Brunello, which was many stations above the norm
for me. Bono was less impressed, but he didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm. "It
is," he said, after some consideration, "a not immodestly great wine." This dash
of wine snobbery, which would have been insufferable from a London banker,
became somehow endearing when delivered from behind pink sunglasses in an Irish
publican brogue.
When he is not lobbying heads of state on multilateral debt relief, Bono, who is
now 45, still earns his keep as one of the most famous rock stars in the world.
And in order to understand how he has come by his Celebrity Prince status, it's
helpful to attend a U2 concert. In May, a few months after Davos, I saw the band
perform in Madison Square Garden. First, the entire arena went dark, and then,
in a cone of white light through which innumerable bits of confetti fluttered
and danced, Bono materialized, twirling slowly, ecstatically, his arms raised to
the light as if asking to be drawn up to the heavens. It was a gesture with
intimations of the messianic. And yet what you felt, throughout the evening, as
Bono pranced and hopped along the catwalk that extended out into the crowd in
the pit, inviting girls up to dance with him, was that he was beckoning his fans
to join him in the ecstatic place where the music came from. Even his political
appeals, which he generally kept in check, felt like an invitation to the
transcendent. Invoking the spirit of American courage and enterprise that once
put a man on the moon, he called on President Bush to increase aid to Africa and
thus "put mankind back on earth" (whatever that meant).
Bono may be a one-man state, but he is not a one-man band. U2 is a rock
phenomenon because the Edge, the lead guitarist, the drummer, Larry Mullen Jr.,
and Adam Clayton, who plays bass guitar, are very talented musicians who share
Bono's gift for conjuring a sense of rapture. But the voice of U2 is Bono's
voice, which seems to rise up out of a great pool of naked yearning. It takes
the form sometimes of an arena-enveloping shout, sometimes of a keening wail and
sometimes of a piercing falsetto. The voice, like the stage presence, is easy to
spoof, for as a performer, Bono generally does without the irony that he deploys
as a bantering citizen. The ironist will not, however, touch a stadium full of
hearts, as Bono does.
Bono, who was born Paul Hewson, had more than enough unhappiness and loss
growing up to give a sharp edge to that wail, but not too much to kill his sense
of delight. He was reared by a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in
Dublin's ragged middle class, a smart boy who was playing in international chess
tournaments at 12. But when Bono was 14, his beloved mother suddenly died,
leaving him with an older brother and a father who, he has said, "would always
pour salt - and vinegar - onto the wound." He was a very angry teenager, but at
16, he and some of his angry, barely middle-class school chums began noodling
around on instruments. By the following year, 1977, they were performing in
local clubs. They weren't very good, but even then there was something fiercely
affirmative in their music. At a time when many performers looked as if they'd
just emerged from electroshock therapy and were wont to incite a crowd by
pelting it with offal, U2 had a bond, a benevolent relationship, with the
audience. "We were never adversarial," Adam Clayton says. "We were much more Irish."
The band has been together ever since. Even Paul McGuinness, their manager, has
been with them from the beginning. This is not only rare in the rock business;
it is just about unheard-of. U2 is also one of the very few bands in which all
revenue is shared equally; Bono and the Edge could have claimed the songwriting
revenue but didn't. Nor do any of them appear to have succumbed to drugs,
alcohol or raging ego. Religion played an important role in the band members'
lives, if not always in their music; indeed, the band's survival was threatened
only when, early on, Bono, the Edge and Larry Mullen Jr. thought of leaving to
join a Christian fellowship. Bono remains religious, and not in the cosmic, New
Age sense you expect from rock stars. He describes himself as a "meandering
Christian," and his four children attend the Church of Ireland, which is
Episcopalian (and thus splits the difference between his mother and father).
Unlike his dyspeptic fellow activist Sir Bob Geldof, Bono is a hugger, a giver
and seeker of affection. Geldof himself has compared the two by saying: "He is
in love with the world . . . he wants to give it a cuddle. I want to punch its
lights out" - as if Bono were an Irish John Denver. Bono understandably hates
this crack, but in fact he doesn't want to punch the lights out of life. He's an
extremely courteous, minutely attentive person who signs every object thrust at
him by delirious fans and never forgets to thank everyone for everything. Though
he has, over the years, written a great many aching ballads about women with
"Spanish eyes" and so forth, he has stayed married to his first wife, Ali, whom
he met at age 12 and started dating at 16.
From the outset, the members of U2 have been committed to rescuing the planet
from various evils. Back in the 1980's, when the band was building its
reputation, every tour seemed to come with its own moral sponsor - Amnesty
International, Nelson Mandela, Greenpeace. Bono has since come to think of this
as the era of Rock Against Bad Things. Should he ever want to mortify himself
utterly, Bono need only cue up the incantation at the end of his 1987 song
"Silver and Gold": "This is a song about a man . . .who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa. A man who has lost faith in the peacekeepers
of the West while they argue.. . .Am I buggin' ya? I don't mean to bug ya." But
Bono has the saving grace of self-awareness; he keeps close track of his own
absurdities. Like any pop star, he sorted through various personae over the
years - brother of the oppressed, Christian visionary, ironic trickster, devoted
husband and father - and ultimately arrived at the soulful, watchful,
perpetually unsatisfied grown-up that he is. And at that point he was ready to
take up issues that other rock stars were unlikely to bother with, since they
couldn't be reduced to a songwriter's hook.
In 1997, Bono was approached by Jamie Drummond, then working with a
church-sponsored campaign to cancel the debts that the most impoverished nations
owed to the industrialized nations. (This was "bilateral debt," owed by one
state to another, as opposed to the "multilateral debt" debated at Gleneagles.)
Many countries, especially in Africa, were so crushed by foreign debt, often run
up by long-gone tyrants with the happy connivance of Western banks, that
scarcely anything was left over for schools, health care and the like. The
movement made real headway in England, but was virtually unknown in the U.S. U2
played in the Live Aid concert to raise money for Ethiopia back in 1985. So did
everyone else, of course. But Bono actually wanted to understand the problem he
was sloganeering about, so the following year he and Ali spent several months
living and working in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. He was ripe for a deeper
involvement.
Bono agreed to spearhead the American debt-relief effort and began by educating
himself on the subject. As a superstar, Bono had the advantage of being able to
conduct his education at a very high level. Bobby Shriver, a record producer and
member of the Kennedy clan, set up meetings for him with James Wolfensohn, who
was the head of the World Bank, and with Paul Volcker, David Rockefeller and
other colossi of the financial establishment. Bono traveled to Cambridge, Mass.,
to meet with Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard. But he also asked Sachs to find him
an academic who opposed debt cancellation, a very peculiar request for a
graduate of the school of Rock Agitprop. "I'm always attentive to the bearers of
bad news," Bono told me, "because they're a little more reliable." They also, of course, sharpen your debating skills.
By the summer of 1999, Bono was ready to take on Washington. The Clinton
administration was already committed to canceling two-thirds or so of the $6
billion that the poorest African countries owed the United States, but Bono
wanted 100 percent cancellation - not only because he thought it was right, but
also because you can't sing about two-thirds of something. "It has to feel like
history," he says. "Incrementalism leaves the audience in a snooze." Shriver arranged for Bono to meet with Gene Sperling, President Clinton's chief economic
adviser, and with Sheryl Sandberg, chief of staff to Lawrence Summers, who had
just been named secretary of the treasury. Summers himself was not about to
waste precious time meeting with a rock star. He did agree, however, to "drop
by" while Bono spoke to Sperling. Bono laid out his argument. "He was deeply
versed in the substance," Sandberg recalls. "He understood capital markets, debt
instruments, who the decision makers were."
Summers tried to give Bono the polite brushoff. "These are complicated issues,"
Summers told him. "I'll have to take it up with the G-7 finance ministers." And
now this earnest, impassioned rock star with the accent of a racetrack tout
issued a call to destiny. "You know what," he told Summers, "I've been all over
the world, and I've talked to all the major players, and everyone said, 'If you
get Larry Summers, you can get this done.' " It was, Sandberg says, "a really
important moment. I think we were all inspired and motivated."
Africa? Why not, say, global warming? Part of the answer is happenstance: Africa
is what Bono got swept up into. But Africa, or so Bono feels, needs what only a
certain kind of world figure can give - a call to conscience, an appeal to the
imagination, a melody or a lyric you won't forget. The cause of ending extreme
poverty in Africa speaks to Bono's prophetic impulse. Rock music, for him, is a
form of advocacy, but advocacy is also a form of rock music. His definition of
"sing" includes speeches and press conferences, and his arenas include Davos and Capitol Hill. Among his best work is the rallying cry. He often says, "My
generation wants to be the generation that ended extreme poverty." There's not
much evidence that this is so; but Bono has helped make it so, in part by
repeating such resonant phrases.
God knows Africa could use a song or two. The reason that debt relief required
such an excruciating effort is that foreign aid has virtually no constituency; a
politician is only going to hurt himself by vowing to spend more money helping
poor people in Africa. By the time the Bush administration took office, the
percentage of G.N.P. devoted to development assistance had been shrinking for
more than three decades. And the case for aid had dwindled just as drastically.
Countries like Nigeria and Kenya had received tens of billions of dollars over
the years with scarcely anything to show for it. Not only conservatives like
John Kasich but also Clinton administration "neoliberals" argued that aid was
powerless, perhaps even harmful, in the face of corruption, civil conflict, weak
governance, self-defeating economic policies.
Whatever its merits, the neoliberal argument began to feel morally unsustainable
as much of Africa retrogressed throughout the 90's. Was the West to offer
nothing more than pious advice about free markets and small government while
whole portions of the globe slid into misery? Did all African countries suffer
from bad values, bad governance and bad policies? Liberal economists and
activists formulated an alternative argument: a combination of "natural" factors
- poor soil, high incidence of infectious disease, lack of access to ports -
along with disadvantageous trade conditions and wrongheaded neoliberal policies
had gotten many countries stuck in what Jeffrey Sachs called "the poverty trap."
They could not escape, absent outside help. This view, which was widely accepted
outside the United States, was given a global endorsement in 2000, when the U.N.
adopted the Millennium Development Goals, pledging to radically reduce such
problems as extreme poverty, child mortality and infectious disease over the
next 15 years. Recipient countries pledged to reduce corruption and improve
accountability; donor countries pledged to increase aid, lower trade barriers
and grant further debt relief.
Bono passionately embraced this expansive view of the obligations of the
industrialized world, and of the possibilities of Africa. In 2001, he went to
Bill Gates and others to finance an organization that would lobby for action on
Africa. DATA has offices in London, Los Angeles and Washington, but it was plain
from the outset that the real challenge lay in Washington, both because
historically the U.S. spent so small a fraction of its budget on aid - one-tenth
of 1 percent of G.N.P. as of 2000 - and because the incoming Bush administration
believed so single-mindedly in free-market solutions to problems of development.
At the G-8 summit in Genoa in the summer of 2001, Bono managed to wangle a
meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who was then the president's national security
adviser. Rice is only a few years older than Bono, but her training in classical
music and her rather forbidding public persona do not exactly suggest an
affinity for rock music or rock musicians. Apparently, this is a misconception.
"I'm a baby boomer," Rice pointed out to me when we met in her office in July.
"I love rock music." She is, she says, "a U2 fan." And in Bono she discovered a potential partner. The administration, she says, was grappling with ways to
"rebuild a consensus about foreign assistance." Rice was surprised to learn that
Bono took the hard-headed view that "there's a responsibility for the recipient"
as well as for the donor. In fact, Bono championed a new paradigm in which aid
would be conditioned not only on need but on demonstrated capacity to use that
aid effectively - which was precisely the kind of reform the administration had
been thinking of.
After the meeting with Rice, the policy wonks at what would become DATA (it had
not yet been formally organized) produced a proposal for a two-pronged strategy
to "reward success" in six to nine well-governed countries and to keep others
from "falling back" through major increases in funding on AIDS, TB and malaria.
The proposal might have gone nowhere, but then 9/11 changed all contexts,
including the context of development assistance. Aid became a national-security
issue (if a rather marginal one), for it was clear that fragile states could not
be allowed to become failed states, as Afghanistan had been. And as the
administration geared up for war, it needed to prove that its new foreign policy
would not be limited to routing terrorists.
In early 2002, Jamie Drummond recalls, he was "summoned to Washington and asked
not to leave." In a series of closed-door meetings, he says, he worked with
White House officials on the details of an aid program based on the principles
Bono had proposed. (These officials bridle at the suggestion of Bono's
authorship: Joshua Bolten, then Bush's deputy chief of staff for policy, will
say only that Bono "was working with the president at a time when he was
considering" such a program.) The administration vowed to put real money behind
the Millennium Challenge Account, as the program came to be called. By the third
year of operation, it was to be dispensing $5 billion, which all by itself would
increase the aid budget by nearly half.
But the administration wanted something from Bono in return - his imprimatur.
The idea seems laughable on the surface, but the fact is that Bono had enormous
credibility in an area where the administration had virtually none; or, as
Secretary Rice put it to me, "It's great to have a person who would not normally
be identified with the president's development agenda as a part of it." Bono had
bargaining power, and he now used it. Jeffrey Sachs had long argued that the
AIDS epidemic was wrecking the economy and social order of the most affected
states, so that development assistance could not work without a major AIDS
campaign. Bono told Rice that he would appear with Bush at an event promoting
the president's development-assistance program if Bush would also commit to "a
historic AIDS initiative." The day before the planned appearance, in March, Bono
learned that the president would not do so. He was now playing for dizzyingly
high stakes. Virtually everyone around Bono despised Bush; and now some of his
most trusted advisers urged him to deny the administration his precious gift of
legitimacy. And Bono, in an uncharacteristic act of confrontation, called Rice
and said he was pulling out of the joint appearance.
Rice was very unhappy. She recalls telling him, "Bono, this president cares
about AIDS, too, and let me tell you that he is going to figure out something
dramatic to do about AIDS." But, she added, "You're going to have to trust us."
Bono accepted her pledge. According to Scott Hatch, a former aide to the
Republican House leadership whom Bono hired to help him gain access to
conservatives, "Bono really took it on the chin from the left for dealing with a
Republican president." But Bono says he felt that the administration deserved
praise for the aid package; and he trusted the Bush White House, though his
friends thought him ludicrously naïve. He says that he has not regretted his
trust. "I have found personally that I have never been overpromised," he says.
"In fact, the opposite - they tell me they won't do something, and finally they
do it."
As he was being taken to meet Bush, Bono recalls, he told the driver to circle
the block a few times while he sat with a Bible in his lap, hunting frantically
for a verse about shepherds and the poor. He was getting later and later.
Finally he found a passage to his liking, and he went into the Oval Office.
There he recited the passage he had chosen from the Gospel of Matthew: "For I
was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was
a stranger, and ye took me in.. . ." Bono then presented Bush with an edition of
the Psalms for which he had written the foreword.
Bono's most celebrated collaboration with the Bush administration was his
African caravansary with Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in May 2002. The two
men, so oddly matched, had a striking effect on each other. In the course of the
trip, O'Neill, a highly successful corporate leader who preached the gospel of
"value for your money," came to conclude that small investments of public money
could produce extraordinary value, at least in the exemplary countries on their
itinerary - Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia. He became obsessed with the
idea that donors could create a supply of clean drinking water for a entire
country for a pittance. But he also tried to impress on Bono the liberating
power of the global market. Bono was accustomed to prating about the evils of
the I.M.F. and the stinginess of donors; he was taken aback when O'Neill
escorted him through factory floors and explained that Africa would benefit more
from even a modest expansion of trade than from a radical increase in aid. An
account in The Washington Post suggested that a "momentous. . .alliance between
liberals and conservatives to launch a fresh assault on global poverty" was in
the offing.
O'Neill returned to Washington with the fervor of a convert - and ran into a
brick wall. The trip had provided great publicity for the White House, but
nobody wanted to hear about water projects. When O'Neill took advantage of a
one-on-one meeting with Bush to propose a $25 million demonstration project to
provide clean water to Ghana, the president "looked blankly at him," according
to "The Price of Loyalty," an account of O'Neill's time in Washington written by
Ron Suskind with O'Neill's extensive cooperation. O'Neill's impolitic
enthusiasms and intellectual honesty marked him as a hopeless outsider in the
Bush White House; he was fired at the end of 2002. And with him went hopes for a
historic conjunction of soft hearts and hard heads.
The Millennium Challenge Account, announced with such fanfare, now proceeded to
sink to the bottom of the administration's priority list. Only in early 2004,
two years from the announcement, did the president sign the law creating the
body. The first executive director, Paul Applegarth, was a complete unknown who
impressed scarcely anyone. Congress appropriated only $1.3 billion for the first
year and $1.5 billion for the second. This year President Bush asked for $3
billion rather than the $5 billion he had once promised; and Congress may
appropriate little more than half that. Why should legislators do otherwise?
Since the corporation has disbursed a grand total of $400,000 to date, there's
no evidence that it works.
Administration officials and legislators give various explanations, none
terribly persuasive, for the dilatory pace. Senator Rick Santorum, who has been
one of Bono's key conservative allies, says that he has tried to persuade White
House officials that the M.C.A. is "part of our war on terror" and should be
financed accordingly. But when Santorum tries to push the budget director,
Joshua Bolten, he says, he hears "the 'Jerry Maguire' answer: 'Show me the
money.' " Bolten is another White House Friend of Bono, and he, too, speaks of
aid as "an integral part of the national-security strategy." But when I asked
him what happened to the Millennium Challenge Account, he said that it fell
between budget cycles.
The Bush administration, critics say, has fumbled the opportunity to transform
the aid debate. In March, Paul O'Neill said that he found it "unforgivable that
we and other mature nations" have refused to do something as simple as providing
clean drinking water. Many of Bono's own allies have lost what little patience
they had. Jeffrey Sachs, whose moral sensibilities are comparable to those of U2
circa 1985, calls the operation of the M.C.A. "a disgrace." When I asked Sachs
if he thought that Bono should stop cultivating the president and start
denouncing him, he said, "Even aside from him saying it publicly, I'd just like
him to say it to himself."
I saw Bono soon after my conversation with his mentor and sometime foil. In late
May, U2 made a swing through New York for the Madison Square Garden concert.
Bono insisted on having lunch at Balthazar, the downtown bistro, where the staff
welcomed him as an old friend. He ordered half a dozen oysters, the filet mignon
and a half-bottle - and then, sometime later, another half-bottle - of a Clos de
Vougeot. When my lunch came, he ate the French fries off my plate, Bill
Clinton-style. I told him about my talk with Sachs. Bono frowned and said: "I
understand his rage; I share it. What I will not agree with is the belief that
we can do this just by the moral force of our argument. We need the right as
well as the left. We have achieved an enormous amount this way." Bono will not
say anything that will drive the administration away, but it is not wholly a
matter of tactics; he continues to believe, with what can only be described as a
touching faith, that President Bush, while utterly indifferent to the political
value of aid, is deeply committed to helping Africa according to his own lights.
And the proof, for Bono, is AIDS. Condoleezza Rice had promised him a historic
AIDS initiative. Throughout 2002, Bono pressured the administration, lobbying
key representatives, White House officials and, above all, leaders in the
conservative Christian community. In the first week of December that year, he
organized a bus tour through Middle America - the Heart of America tour - to
demonstrate that ordinary Americans wanted action on AIDS. And the
administration made good its pledge: in his 2003 State of the Union address,
President Bush proposed a five-year, $15 billion effort to combat AIDS in 15
hard-hit countries, 12 of them in Africa. The President's Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, has been fully financed every year. And because, unlike
the M.C.A., it was built on existing programs, the AIDS initiative began
operating on the ground within months - which is why Bono heaped praise on
Randall Tobias at Davos. Bono did not, however, see fit to remonstrate with
Tobias over the damage that may have been done by the AIDS program's
ideologically inspired guidelines: a requirement that one-third of prevention
funds go to programs promoting abstinence and sexual fidelity, stringent
restrictions on the use of condoms and even a demand that groups receiving funds
must formally oppose prostitution. An editorial in The Economist characterized
Pepfar as "too much morality, too little sense."
And the administration has been far less generous with international approaches
to AIDS. When, in 2001, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations
announced the establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, President Bush offered only $200 million as the American contribution.
Congress has agreed to finance up to one-third of the fund's budget, but in each
of the last three years, the administration submitted a lower figure and then
Congress raised it. Rick Santorum offers only a middling grade to the
administration on AIDS: "The president put up a very good number for bilateral
aid, but didn't put up a good number for multilateral aid." Had Congress
approved the administration's most recent budget request, Santorum says,
thousands of people would have lost their supply of antiretroviral drugs.
The leader who deserves the greatest credit for placing Africa at the top of the
world's agenda, or at least near it, is Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. It
was Blair, who, at the urging of Bob Geldof, impaneled the Commission for
Africa, whose report, released earlier this year, painstakingly laid out the
case for an enormous increase in aid to Africa. Blair seems actually to believe
what the Bush administration only says, for he uses the same ringing tones to
talk about the West's responsibility to Africa that he does to discuss the war
on terrorism. But Blair also knows that his crusade enjoys broad political
support. And for this he has Bono and Geldof, among others, to thank. Justin
Forsyth, Blair's special adviser on development, credits Bono with making Africa
an urgent issue in Britain, and with helping Blair "keep the bar very high" by
insisting on big, breakthrough goals.
The Gleneagles momentum began building in the spring. In May, European Union
development ministers pledged to double global aid from $60 billion to $120
billion by 2010. The following month, Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish former
Pentagon official who had just left the administration to become head of the
World Bank, embraced the 0.7 percent target. The Americans and the Brits had
worked out their differences on multilateral debt relief. But the Bush
administration remained a conspicuous holdout. White House officials were
mystified that they hadn't gotten the credit they felt they deserved for
reversing decades of indifference to aid, and felt no pressure to do more.
When I saw Bono in late May, he was close to despair about Bush's intransigence.
The next day he was going to Washington to see Rice, Bolten and the political
mastermind Karl Rove. He planned to say, "I know that important programs are
being cut, but this kind of momentum doesn't come along every year." He was
going to suggest a major initiative on malaria, and another on girls' education.
Blair and Bono speak regularly, and the week before Gleneagles, Bono hatched a
plan to visit 10 Downing Street when the eight "sherpas," who map out the summit
for their heads of state, would be meeting there. Lobbying sherpas is simply not
done, but Bono dropped in on their meeting as if he just happened to have been
in the neighborhood. Once he was in the door, he started talking for all he was
worth. "First I tried to get them to laugh," he told me. "And I did get them to
laugh. Then I tried to inspire them. I think I inspired them."
The Bono operation in Scotland, quartered in a spacious suite in the Balmoral
hotel in Edinburgh, was far larger than it had been in Davos. A planning meeting
on Day 1 of the summit meeting included all sorts of unfamiliar young men in
fashionable glasses, as well as George Clooney. Jamie Drummond was trying to
come up with a crisp sound bite on debt relief for Clooney to use on the
American morning talk shows. Bob Geldof, his ginger locks tucked under Andy Capp
headgear, wandered into the meeting trailed by a TV crew and talking on the
cellphone to a senior British treasury official. Geldof held out the phone so
everyone could hear, if barely. The official was saying that Chancellor Schröder
was balking at an airlines tax to be used to raise money earmarked for aid. Bono
said that he was trying to persuade Angela Merkel, Schröder's electoral
opponent, to give the chancellor political space by agreeing not to raise the
issue - a stupefying proposition. "We'll be working on that all day," he said
blandly. (The idea was eventually dropped.)
Bono, Geldof and the key aides then choppered over to Gleneagles. Bono spoke
with Schröder and Blair about the issues that were still up in the air -
financing mechanisms and trade reform. He met with Bush, who had announced new
initiatives on malaria and access to education the week before - the two issues
Bono raised with the White House in late May. It was good, but it was all done
in prose. "They keep saying, 'We're spending this much, and it's this much of a
share of world spending,' " he told me the next morning. "I want them to say:
'Malaria just can't be allowed. We're going to get rid of malaria.' " That was
how the president talked about terrorism; Bono conceded that if he didn't talk
about aid that way, it was probably because he didn't feel that way.
The Live 8 concerts on July 2 had been crowded, star-studded and distinctly
upbeat - Rock in Favor of Good Things. One last concert was staged on July 6,
the first day of the G-8, in the Murrayfield Stadium. It was a fabulously
bizarre event. One dressing room had been set aside for George Clooney, Susan
Sarandon, Claudia Schiffer and the archbishop of Canterbury (who did not show,
alas). The concert lasted five and a half hours, including inspirational
addresses by Clooney, Schiffer, Bono and others, and was finally closed down,
with magnificent incongruity, by James Brown himself, driving the crowd insane
with "I Got You (I Feel Good)." At some point during the endless evening,
I sat down with George Clooney and quite a few vodka-and-cranberries. Bono has
enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Brad Pitt, Cameron
Diaz, Justin Timberlake and Clooney. For all his effortless charm, Clooney has
serious aspirations, and he spoke of Bono with a respect that bordered on
reverence. "He calls on everyone to be their best," Clooney told me. "If you
fall short, you feel embarrassed. That's a unique thing. And we all want to be
that person."
Clooney had been tasked to buttonhole Paul Wolfowitz and get him to press the
administration to finance the World Bank's program to provide free public
education. As Clooney and I were talking, the glass door separating our V.I.P.
lounge from the roar of the stadium slid open, and who should emerge but the
president of the World Bank himself. Wolfowitz, who had rolled up the sleeves of
his dress shirt, seemed to be delighted, or at least amused, by this
extraterrestrial environment. He and Clooney held a brief palaver and agreed to
speak at greater length.
The next day, Bono flew to Berlin to rejoin the band for a gig at the arena
Albert Speer built for the 1936 Olympics. There, standing in front of U2's
towering electronic screen, with a vast crowd spread out before him on the
playing field, Bono praised Chancellor Schröder's "leadership" on debt
cancellation and fair trade but added that leadership also required committing
an additional $50 billion a year in aid. "We are watching," he shouted. "We are
waiting. If he can deliver this by 4 tomorrow, I believe you should welcome your
chancellor back home a hero." He implored the crowd to send e-mail and text
messages demanding action that very moment.
Bono flew back to Edinburgh that night in order to be at Gleneagles for the
third and final day, when the communiqué would be issued. He finally met with
Chirac and with Kofi Annan. During the afternoon, he started seeing leaks of the
communiqué, which was drawing ever closer to his own agenda, the agenda he had
tirelessly, and often fruitlessly, championed since 1999. After worrying for
months, and as recently as a day or two before, that the summit would fail, and
that he would look like a fool, the relief and the gratification had the force
of epiphany. He remembers thinking, Oh, my God, this is really happening - and
in real time. And he had one last coup de théâtre in him: he persuaded Blair,
against G-8 tradition, to hold a formal signing ceremony so that each head
signed a document with his own pen.
The "movement" did not, in general, share Bono's enthusiasm. Activists bitterly
complained that the communiqué included no real progress on trade, no expansion
of debt relief to additional countries, no movement by the Bush administration
toward 0.7 percent. But when I saw Bono the following day in Paris, he was
ebullient. The heads of state had promised that by 2010 they would increase aid
to Africa by $25 billion a year, and aid worldwide by $50 billion a year.
Schröder hadn't agreed to the airlines tax, but he had promised - perhaps not
the world's most binding promise - that he would find a way to raise the money.
They had extended debt relief to Nigeria, a goal activists had long sought. They
had added to President Bush's commitment on malaria, so that the number of
victims should be reduced by 85 percent by 2010. They had vowed to ensure that
all children had free access to school by 2015. "I know how big this is," Bono
said. "Even Jeff Sachs was emotional about it."
The next five years will offer Bono and Geldof and Sachs and Action Against
Hunger and all the other activists the laboratory experiment they've been
seeking. It's an experiment that needs to be tried, even if it seems likely to
disappoint the advocates' hopes. In years past, aid has proved extraordinarily
effective on issues like disease eradication (which makes the malaria
initiative, for example, so important); the same cannot be said for promoting
growth. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Nancy Birdsall, head of the
generally liberal Center for Global Development, and two co-authors, asked why
it was that Vietnam, long isolated from the West, has been growing so much
faster than Nicaragua, a major recipient of aid. "The answers are internal,"
they wrote. "History and economic and political institutions have trumped other
factors in determining economic success." The activists and the Bush
administration now agree that large-scale aid should be directed not only at
highly impoverished but also well-governed countries - those with strong
"internals." But how many such countries are there? Quite a few, argues Sachs,
who insists that it is poverty that causes corruption rather than the other way
around. This debatable hypothesis will now receive its road test.
Bono left Gleneagles to meet the band in Paris. That night, before a sellout
crowd of 80,000 in the Stade de France, he read a text, in French - a language
he does not speak - listing the brave commitments of President Chirac, a figure
few in the audience were likely to admire. The next morning, as motorcycle cops
were leading Bono's van on a slalom ride through the Paris traffic, he turned to
me and said, "Guess who called this morning to say he had seen the reviews?"
"I don't know. Blair?" "No." "Clinton?" "No. Think what country we're in."
"Chirac?" "Yeah. A lot of his people were at the concert last night. He said
that he had heard about what I had said. He wants to work with us very closely."
No doubt he meant it. But then along came the grande vacance, and a few days
after returning to Paris, Chirac was stricken with a mysterious illness that
confined him to the hospital. It appeared that Chirac would not attend the
United Nations summit meeting; nor could Chancellor Schröder, who was facing the
fight of his political life in an election this weekend. With them went Bono's
hopes for immediate progress on an airlines tax, or perhaps on trade. Things
went from bad to worse. By the first week in September, Bono's friends in the
Bush administration seemed fully prepared, even eager, to scuttle the long and
windy statement on development prepared for the summit meeting. The White House
prepared an edited draft that proposed to eliminate practically every pledge
made by donor countries - even the very words "Millennium Development Goals."
And then Hurricane Katrina scrambled everything. When Bono called from his house
on the Riviera in early September, he said, "I have to be sensitive about
putting my hand in America's pocket at a time like this." He would, he said, be
keeping a low profile in New York. He was feeling a bit more hopeful about the
White House. The administration had climbed down just a bit from its rhetorical
high horse, and it appeared that a face-saving compromise might be in the works.
Jamie Drummond and his colleagues at DATA had also gotten a few choice bits
about AIDS and education inserted into the American draft. But the whole episode
was a reminder of how far the Bush administration remains from the rough
consensus on development issues that obtains in much of the world. "I'm really
bleak about the next six months," Bono said. "There could be a few black eyes
for us and for our work, and criticism of working too close with these
characters. But I'm sure it was the right thing to do."
It has been a frantic time, this year of Africa. The other members of the band
love the cause, but they fret that Bono's hobby is eclipsing his day job. "The
band has survived," Adam Clayton told me, "but there's been a price in terms of
relationships." Bono has promised to let the world spin on its own axis for a
while. But it can't be left alone for long; there's so much proselytizing still
to do. Bono's next target is the American people: he expects to have an army of
10 million activists signed up for the One Campaign by 2008. He believes - he
knows - that the American people would demand action on Africa if only someone
would tell them the facts. "Middle America," he said to me one day. "Don't get
me started. I love it."