Bill Clinton to the rescue?

When I was writing Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, I spent many hours interviewing physicians about the work Bill Clinton was doing, mostly in Africa, and mostly, at that time, helping to bring down the cost of drugs used to treat HIV-positive children. No matter what one thinks about Bill Clinton, it was good, necessary and effective work. And if he continues with it — one of the smartest of the physicians I interviewed told me that he is always worried that Clinton’s interest will wane and that he’ll find something flashier on which to focus — he might even win that Nobel peace prize he so covets.

Since the earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12, Clinton has been on the scene often. As he should be. He is, after all, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, a responsibility he undertook months before the earthquake.

Still, there remains a sense about Bill Clinton that he manages to turn everything he does — even humanitarian missions — into a starring role for Bill Clinton. The lower-lip-biting, the misted-over eyes are all part of a need to be admired and loved. For me as a biographer, it was a recurring motif of his life.

So I was struck by a comment from Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister, who, according to an account in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, lives in a “tent outside his damaged official residence” in Port-au-Prince. He is surrounded by 672 homeless families also camping out on what, pre-earthquake, was the garden of his house.

Reporter David Gauthier-Villars quotes Bellerive, besieged with emergencies and decisions that must be made immediately, as saying, his voice showing exasperation, “If I must, I guess I can go and meet Bill Clinton at the airport.” Bellerive then asked his aide, “What is he coming here for, again?”

To answer the PM’s question, Clinton was touring some of the most devastated areas of the wrecked city with Paul Farmer, the internationally renowned physician and humanitarian who is the deputy special envoy to Haiti. Clinton and Farmer saw human waste running in gullies along the ground and declared the urgent need for latrines and sanitation supplies.

In the United States, their pleas were overshadowed by news about the 10 American missionaries — women, men, teenagers — who have been charged with abducting 33 Haitian children. The dreaded phrase “child trafficking” hangs in the air. The leader of the group was said to lack the proper documentation. The 10, eight from Idaho, are being held in prison cells. Members of their families tremble at the miserable conditions in which their relatives are incarcerated. Others who have followed the disaster can’t help but think that many homeless Haitians wouldn’t mind the shelter of a cell.

Those family members are now complaining that the American government is not doing enough to help them. They claim that their relatives had written permission from the parents of these children to take them across the border into the Dominican Republic to a promised orphanage.

When I first read the news stories about the missionaries, I thought that this is the perfect assignment for Bill Clinton. Remember last August when he flew on Hollywood producer Stephen Bing’s private jet to North Korea and a meeting with despot Kim Jong-il. Clinton triumphantly returned with two young American women, television journalists reporting a story about the trafficking of women. Convicted on charges of crossing from China into North Korea, the two spent several months in a North Korean prison, awaiting the fulfillment of their sentence to 12 years of hard labor. When they were summoned from their cells, they thought their hard-labor nightmare had commenced. Instead they were taken to a room in which stood Bill Clinton. Later, as one of the women said after descending the stairs of Bing’s plane to put her foot on American soil, “We knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end.” Clinton was their savior.

Sunday brought the first reports that the former president is going to reprise that role. He is working to free nine of the 10; the leader of the group will likely remain in custody.

Here’s hoping that he will be successful, and quickly. The legal limbo of the missionaries is not the most urgent matter for Haiti, which faces many plagues of biblical proportions. What a shame if the plight of these evangelicals, perhaps well-intentioned if extremely naïve, overshadows the misery in Haiti — which should remain, for Americans, the front-page story.