On September 29, 1999, at a speech at the World Bank, with Summers’ numbers in his back pocket, President Clinton announced that the United States would cancel 100 per cent of the $6 billion debt owed it by the world’s poorest 33 countries – the first country in the world to make such a huge commitment.
Bono was in France when he heard the news of Clinton’s announcement. ‘I got a phone call from Bobby and it felt like, you know, just the biggest thing ever. We had been working so hard, I was jumping up and down. It was a real break-through. One hundred per cent, no nonsense, no games. The United States were stepping out in front. Okay, it was only 33 countries [Jubilee had been calling for the cancellation of the debts of 52 poor countries] but it was a clear melody, a clear cut idea.’
It seemed as though they were on track. But when Bono started to hear the critics say that Clinton was only doing this because he knew it wouldn’t get past Congress, that Congress would never fund the scheme, he was reminded of just how complicated his mission was. Because in the United States, it is Congress and not the Administration that holds the purse strings. And Congress was controlled by the Republicans. If the money to fund Clinton’s 100 per cent debt cancellation pledge, as well as meet the commitment he had made at Cologne to contribute to bailing out the IMF and World Bank – $545 million in the first instance – was to be found, it was Republicans who were going to have to vote for that amount to be released.
Getting $545 million dollars allocated to what is essentially foreign aid was, in a Republican-controlled Congress, never going to be easy. Money to poor countries doesn’t tend to poll well for American politicians. ‘It was very hard even for people who wanted to be for this, to be for this,’ explains Sandberg. ‘Debt relief for Africa? The United States just doesn’t do this.’
It was time to get the Terminator involved.
Bobby Shriver, who had done such a majestic job in getting the bankers, liberals and cognoscenti on board, wasn’t the man when it came to bringing the Republicans on side: his Kennedy lineage got in the way. His sister Maria, however, was married to someone who helped him get over that problem. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star and Bobby’s brother-in-law, was already, five years before becoming Governor of California, moving in Republican circles.
‘Bono and I explained the idea to Arnold,’ remembers Bobby, ‘and Arnold thought about it and said, “I know a guy who might help you. A friend of mine who’s the Congressman from Columbus, Ohio, John Kasich.”’
Kasich, who Schwarzenegger knew through the ‘Arnold Classic Body Building Contest’ which is held in Columbus each year, was, at the time, the Chairman of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, a very influential position. He was no nambypamby liberal. ‘John was a hard, right-wing guy,’ says Shriver, ‘and someone who was very smart. Not book smart like Larry. But, you know, street smart. Smarter than most people in Congress. And he got what we were talking about. He had travelled overseas, and could see that people did not like Americans. This was before 9/11. And he didn’t like that. And he saw that cancelling their debts, for what, in his view, was a relatively small amount of money, was a way to say to people, “Look we’re not just a bunch of pricks flying B1 Bombers over your country.”’
Kasich came on board, and his-support was key. Not only did he bring with him other important members of the Republican leadership including House Speaker Denis Hastert, and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, but also lower-profile but equally essential Republican politicians from both House and Senate.
And, in November 1999, two months after Clinton’s historic pledge, Congress agreed to appropriate $110 million.
Although this was a start, the $110 million was far less than the $545 million the campaigners had been after. This would only cover the first year of America’s own debt cancellation schedule, and it didn’t cover any financing for the participation of the regional development banks in the debt cancellation initiative, nor provide for the IMF and World Bank, the poor world’s major creditors, to cancel any of their debts. If the international Cologne initiative was not to crumble, an additional $435 million had to be found.
‘I called Bono,’ recalls Sandberg, ‘and said, “If you want to help get this through, you’ve got to come back to town.” We needed him. Bono could get in to see any member of Congress and we needed to rally support. He said that he was recording his new album, and making a documentary and couldn’t come to town over the next few weeks because they were filming. And I said if you can’t come now it’ll be too late. Two days later, he was here. And once he landed in DC he was a machine. He went round from member to member telling them that they could change the world if they got behind us. He would get up early in the morning, and would walk the halls and work it all day. And then we would have dinner late at night and he would still bring a Member of Congress or some staffer. He was tireless. And when you think of the combination of a rock star who can get in to see anyone and someone who knows as much as some staffer who works on it full time and can speak with the kind of passion that he speaks with, well, the world had never seen anything like it.’
But although politicians from every end of the political spectrum were falling under the Bono spell, one key man continued to hold out. Sonny Callahan, the libertarian conservative Congressman from Alabama, was Chairman of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, and he held the cheque book. It was up to him to recommend how much money to allocate to debt cancellation. And Callahan wasn’t having any of it. He believed that the additional monies being asked for ‘would encourage the World Bank and others to continue to make bad loans and leave poor countries to have to borrow and get into debt all over again.’ As far as Callahan was concerned, debt cancellation was ‘money down a rathole’.
Shriver got his feelers out and tried to influence Callahan through an old fishing friend, but to no avail. And, in June 2000, Callahan’s committee recommended to the House of Representatives that Congress fund only $69 million of debt relief that year even less than Congress had agreed in November, a sixth of what the campaigners had been gunning for, and an amount, effectively, that meant Clinton would have to renege on both what he had pledged at Cologne and the 100 per cent debt cancellation he had announced at the World Bank in September.
‘We had basically failed,’ says Shriver. ‘With the Committee reporting that, it was basically over. It’s almost never the case that Congress overrides a Committee recommendation.’
There was one last avenue available. If they could stage, and then win, what is colloquially known as ‘a floor fight’ in Congress, a challenge on the floor of the full House of Representatives against what the Committee had recommended, the recommendation could be stopped from going through.
But to win that fight they would need even more Republicans on board. And they would need to work fast – the House and Senate would make their decision on how much to appropriate for debt relief by the beginning of the new fiscal year, October 1.
With less than four months to go, the campaigning shifted up to an even higher gear.
‘John Kasich [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s friend, the Republican Chairman of the National Budget Committee] took the lead, and agreed to launch the fight. But we needed to ensure that when he got up and said “We’re not going to accept the Committee’s recommendation,” others would get up and say, “John is right – I agree with him. Let’s not accept these recommendations, let’s do the full $435m,”’ Shriver recalls. ‘So we met with Jim Leach from Iowa. We met with Clinton’s staff. We started calling everybody who could help challenge Callahan’s recommendation. And then we called them back again and again. We got Volcker to call them, we got the President to call them. We were like animals, we would not leave them alone.’
Bono flew from Europe to Washington eight times that summer. ‘He came back and forth like a tired old dog,’ says Shriver. ‘I would do the red eye from Los Angeles, meeting him there [in Washington]. We were pretty bedraggled. It had