The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Salman Rushdie, meanwhile, was seen in public for the first time in five years when he walked out onto the Wembley stage in front of 70,000 people on that same strange ‘worst’ night in 1993. (Someone should tell McGuinness that the fans really got their money’s worth.) The writer had been living in hiding because of an Iranian fatwa prompted by his novel The Satanic Verses. He and Bono were friends – indeed, there was controversy and anger at the risk to the safety of Bono and his family when it was publicly revealed that Rushdie had visited Bono at his Dublin home – but it was extraordinary, strange, and even a bit brave nonetheless when Bono turned one of his regular onstage prank-phone call schticks into an introduction for Rushdie in person, not just on the phone. ‘I have enormous respect for Islamic culture,’ Bono said later, ‘but I would encourage extremists to consider the murder of a novelist as sacrilegious to my faith.’56

  THE SPIRITUAL AMERICAN: BEFRIENDING PRESIDENTS

  During the early part of the Zoo TV tour, the White House was a target for those onstage prank phone calls, not a regular destination on Bono’s social calendar. But that was in the days of Bush the Elder. Bono was making friends with Bill Clinton even before he was elected president in November 1992.

  The relationship had got off to a ribbing, roaring start in late August of that year on a US radio programme called Rockline. Fans were phoning in to talk to the band, and on the line came caller ‘Bill from Little Rock’. Clinton and Bono joshed a bit – ‘You can call me Bill’, ‘And you can call me Betty’ – then settled into an amiable discussion that earned nice PR for both parties.57

  Two weeks later, the story goes, the band arrived at their Chicago hotel at 3 am, drunk and disorderly, to be told that Bill Clinton was staying there too. ‘Well, go bring him here! We want him,’ Bono joked. U2’s flunkies took him at his word, but the Secret Service refused to wake the sleeping candidate. When Clinton rose at 7 am he was annoyed to hear that he had missed this invitation from Bono, and went looking for him. Bono had crashed in Edge’s suite, but he was roused to meet the presidential favourite. Still in his stage clothes from a gig in Madison, Wisconsin the night before, Bono put on his sunglasses, lit a cigar and made an entrance down a spiral staircase. Clinton’s laughter, it is said, sealed the friendship.58

  Clinton’s casual charm, legendary even by Ireland’s elevated standards, was easily a match for Bono’s. He impressed each and all of U2 over the course of an hour’s chat. Larry challenged him, saying the system was corrupt, and Clinton looked him in the eye and said: ‘This is going to sound corny. But I do love my country and I do want to help people. I know the system is corrupt, and I don’t know if the president can change it. But I know this: no one else can.’59

  The gory details of this encounter, including Clinton’s gut-wrenchingly ‘corny’ response to Mullen, only emerged later, but the fact that it took place got wide publicity, and fitted right into the media narrative that suggested Clinton was a new, and ineffably cool, sort of candidate. Clinton’s opponent, President George H. W. Bush, soon desperately attempted to mock Clinton’s down-with-the-kids parlay. American journalist Bill Flanagan was with Bono to see Bush’s speech on TV:

  ‘Governor Clinton doesn’t think foreign policy’s important, but he’s trying to catch up,’ Bush tells the crowd. ‘You may have seen this in the news – he was in Hollywood [sic] seeking foreign policy advice from the rock group U2!’

  Bono looks up. ‘Rock group?’

  Bush continues: ‘I have nothing against U2. You may not know this, but they try to call me every night during the concert! But the next time we face a foreign policy crisis, I will work with John Major and Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Clinton can consult Boy George!’ Bush goes on to declare that if Clinton is elected you, too, will have higher inflation, you, too, will have higher taxes. You, too! You, too!

  Bono doesn’t get it. ‘Does he think I’m Boy George?’ he asks.

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘He’s damning Clinton by association. He probably had a team of consultants sitting up all night trying to think of a rock star they could insult without offending any potential Bush voters. Madonna’s too big, Springsteen – need those electoral votes in New Jersey. Boy George is foreign, gay, and no longer sells any records. He’s perfect.’60

  Between the president’s Boy George jibes and Clinton’s charming attentiveness, it’s not surprising that Bono and his bandmates were jubilant at the latter’s November victory, and the joy never really wore off. Half the band, though not the unavailable Bono, played at an inauguration party. Bono later called Clinton ‘a new kind of politician, the first of our kind’, with ‘real brainpower, real charm, a real sense of humour’.61 In 2003, speaking at a celebrity-heavy Grammy function in his own honour, Bono called Clinton ‘more of a rock star than anyone else in this room’.62 (Thankfully, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown weren’t in the room to provide Beatle-like competition.)

  Bono in 1992 was, like many people, swept up in what has appeared since 1960 to be a sixteen-year cycle of unwarranted hope that a seemingly idealistic Democrat is going to change the world by moving into the White House. It was not a hope that was limited to liberal elites, as Bono found when he attended an inner-city church full of society’s outcasts in San Francisco the Sunday after the election. Much of the congregation was ecstatic, he said.

  That’s the moment when I knew how important this small victory was. I was looking around and I was thinking, ‘Wow, if you’re HIV, if you’re a homosexual, if you’re a member of the underclass or if you’re a woman or if you’re an artist – and that covers just about everybody in this church – this is no small thing.’ … This was from ‘We don’t exist’ to ‘We do exist’, you know?63

  Just as liberals had done in 1960 and 1976, and would do again in 2008, Bono even went so far as to speculate about the new president’s inauguration and administration as an opportunity for America to expiate its past sins, from the carnage in Central America all the way back to the extermination of North America’s native people.64 It is not really clear why Bono or anyone else should have believed this to be likely, but the emotion appears to have been genuine, and based on some then-still-enduring progressive sympathies of someone who regarded the Reagan–Bush era as a nightmare from which he feared he would never wake up. Like many of Clinton’s supporters, he shows no sign that he ever did wake up from such delusions – though any members of that San Francisco congregation who were, for example, reliant on Aid to Families with Dependent Children would have got a ringing signal of Clinton’s true qualities when he abolished that welfare programme in 1996, most notably driving many single mothers off welfare and into menial, low-paid jobs, if they were lucky.

  At any rate, these private thoughts about Clinton’s election, recorded in 1992 by American journalist Bill Flanagan, amount to the last time Bono is on the record elucidating a politics that, however naively expressed, sounds connected to the anti-imperialist Left with which he had been associating in the 1980s. By the time he became involved publicly in the debate on global development more than six years later, he was speaking a language that was much more reconciled to the reality of US power. As discussed in Chapter 2, Bono would eventually work closely with the Clinton White House in 1999–2000 on African debt-cancellation, before moving seamlessly into that of Bush the Younger. Once you’re in there close to power, it seems, the logic of remaining there is almost always impeccable. Bono, once its earnest critic, would become its servant.

  By the turn of the millennium, Bono’s Virgil, guiding him through the Washington underworld, was the ultra-smooth Bobby Shriver, who could introduce the singer not merely to the partisan players in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but to the permanent class of experts, technocrats and assorted influence-peddlers who lurk around them. Bono became one of them, effectively a Washington lobbyist.

  Thus Bono recalled meeting such helpful figures as Pete Peterson, chair of the highly influential Council on Foreign Relations, and himself a former
commerce secretary, Lehman Brothers CEO and co-founder of the powerful private-equity firm the Blackstone Group; Shriver’s old venture-capital boss and friend Jim Wolfensohn, head of the World Bank; and even David Rockefeller himself, the living embodiment of the government–business–philanthropy nexus.65 These people, as much as the politicians he also encountered, helped him to drive the debt and AIDS policy initiatives described in Chapter 2. It was no joke when Bono’s name was floated by some as Wolfensohn’s potential successor as president of the World Bank when the latter’s term was due to run out in 2005: the Los Angeles Times editorialised in favour of Bono’s appointment, and Treasury Secretary John Snow wouldn’t rule it out when pressed on a TV talk show. Bono was widely rumoured to be on Bush’s short-list. Such an appointment was unlikely, and would of course have been fundamentally a public-relations stroke by the Bush government, but it would also have reflected Bono’s status as a trusted insider in the corridors of political and economic power where such men resided. None of the many stories that raised questions about whether Bono should guide the World Bank suggested that the problem had anything to do with some perceived radicalism – merely that he lacked sufficient financial background.66

  When Bush instead nominated the notorious neocon hawk Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank presidency, there was some disquiet among the denizens of those corridors of power. Although there was inevitably some spin to the effect that Wolfowitz had a soft, slightly social-democratic Brooklyn heart beating under his hard, Pentagon exterior, it was considered unduly offensive to global opinion about the tainted Iraq invasion, of which Wolfowitz had been a leading advocate and planner, and to the beloved bipartisanship in Washington, to pick such a partisan, ‘ideological’ figure. Part of Wolfowitz’s response to the criticism was, inevitably, to reach out to Bono: within a few days of his being picked for the job, his team ensured that Reuters could report he had already had two long phone conversations with the Irishman. According to a Wolfowitz spokesman, uncontradicted by Bono, the men ‘clicked’: ‘They were very enthusiastic, detailed and lengthy conversations … incredibly substantive about reducing poverty, about development, about the opportunity to help people that the World Bank presidency provides and about charitable giving and social progress around the globe.’67

  Bono, for his part, was scarcely going to reject the overtures of the World Bank president in the run-up to the Gleneagles summit, which (as noted in Chapter 2) had become something of his own project. Thus Wolfowitz mingled backstage with Bono and other celebrities at the Live 8 concert, associated himself with Bono’s priorities at every opportunity, and sang the singer’s praises when he got the chance. In a worshipful profile of Bono in Time magazine late in 2005, Wolfowitz – no doubt to his own delight – featured in the first paragraph, and offered the perfect soundbite endorsement of the great man’s common touch: ‘Pomposity and arrogance are the enemies of getting things done. And Bono knows how to get things done.’68

  If Bono cooperated with Wolfowitz by granting him humanitarian cover by association, it would be an exaggeration to say that he reciprocated all that affection. Wolfowitz resigned from his World Bank post in 2007, damaged by a minor scandal, mainly to do with pay increases to a World Bank employee with whom he was in a personal relationship. By that time, Bono was not in the running for the nomination to replace him – having moved on from concentrating on global lobbying efforts to shopping sprees with Oprah; but it is probably fair to assume that his guru, economist Jeffrey Sachs, spoke for them both when he said that Wolfowitz had been ‘absolutely the wrong guy for the job’. More revealing than the criticism of Wolfowitz, however, was Sachs’s cautious endorsement of Bush’s new nominee, Robert Zoellick, formerly Bush’s deputy secretary of state and a senior executive at Goldman Sachs; Sachs hoped Zoellick, yet another man who had spent his life spinning through the Washington–Wall Street revolving door, would offer ‘less ideology’. The likes of Wolfowitz had contributed, Sachs said, to lost leadership for the US in the world, because they were ‘obsessed with the Persian Gulf … a huge, huge distraction’.69

  The problem for Sachs, in other words, was not that the US, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, insistently claimed global leadership; it was that it had been failing in that leadership mission because it was caught up in this particular war, aka ‘ideology’ – an error embodied by Wolfowitz. ‘Ideology’, in such technocratic discourse, is always what the other guy is suffering from. Sachs also differed publicly with Wolfowitz’s heavy emphasis on anti-corruption initiatives in countries receiving aid, with Sachs suggesting corruption should not be such a priority and was sometimes used as an excuse for inaction; it’s an often-confusing argument that rages well beyond those two men.

  Sachs is a complex character with an apparent penchant for the spotlight – he arrived, for example, at Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to associate himself with its goals. He was the director of the Millennium Development Project, a UN body set up to pursue anti-poverty measures, and before that Sachs advised governments in Latin America and eastern Europe. He is associated with the fast and shocking switch to market economics that radically increased poverty, reduced life expectancy and gave rise to a new oligarchy in Russia, and he has never repudiated his work there, though he has implied his ideas were imperfectly applied by Russians and inadequately assisted by the West.

  Bono’s foreword to Sachs’s 2005 opus The End of Poverty, helped ensure it got noticed well beyond the development-economics journals. ‘To Jeff’, Bono wrote, global poverty is ‘a difficult but solvable equation that crosses human with financial capital, the strategic goals of the rich world with a new kind of planning in the poor world.’70

  To be sure, in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis, Sachs has often mouthed radical-sounding critiques of free-market economics and the way corporations distort politics. But in 2004, when he wrote that foreword, Bono had characterised Sachs exactly right, and had signed on to his agenda – a strategic agenda that would suit ‘financial capital’ and US hegemony, erasing poverty, eventually, it was hoped, through the working of markets and technocratic planning in Washington and on Wall Street, not through any democratic mobilisation of poor people on their own behalf. The problem of global deprivation would be solved through a congruence of interests, not conflict. The ‘equation’ had nothing to do with ‘equality’.

  In that foreword Bono underlined his own embrace of a US-centred strategic view – ‘not just heart, it’s smart’ – warning that 9/11 made it ‘too clear’ that the ‘destinies of the “haves” are intrinsically linked to the fates of the “have-nothing-at-alls” ’. The ‘wealthy Saudis’ who perpetrated 9/11 ‘found succor and sanctuary’, Bono wrote, in the ‘collapsed, poverty-stricken state of Afghanistan … Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.’71

  In linking anti-poverty goals to ‘the war against terror’ – and in accepting and repeating that absurd label – Bono was thinking strategically about how to find space in Washington, or, to put it more crudely, looking for a piece of the action. His efforts saw him forge some striking partnerships during those Bush years: for example, he attended, and was used to promote, the high-tone ‘Business Summit’ organised by the influential Corporate Council on Africa, a US-based trade body loaded with oil and infrastructure interests such as Halliburton, even as Halliburton’s own man in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, helped lead the US into a bloody invasion of Iraq.72

  MORE WAR: STANDING BESIDE BUSH

  The build-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and early 2003 must have posed a considerable dilemma for Bono. Western elite opinion was genuinely divided over the prospect of a US-led invasion of Iraq, so it was possible to oppose the potential war without cutting oneself off from respectable society. Moreover, he and his band had come to prominence two decades earlier with an album called War and an anthem, ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’, that, as far as most listeners were concerned, expressed an
abhorrence of violence as a means to political ends; they had drawn attention to the bloody siege of Sarajevo; they had earnestly attacked and playfully satirised all manner of militarism. And now there was a worldwide movement against this war even before it started – a gathering of benign forces with which, on the face of it, a campaigner for justice such as Bono would want to associate himself.

  And yet, there were also his most powerful friends and patrons – Bush, Powell, Rice and, perhaps most importantly, Blair – all of whom had staked their reputations on this invasion. Blair, with his mad-eyed facsimile of idealism, had been a crucial instrument in rallying politically ‘moderate’ opinion to the war.

  Bono’s solution for quite some time was to be one of the few people in the world without a known view on the subject. On 15 February 2003 – five weeks before the invasion – a small, simple placard at the big anti-war protest in Dublin read: ‘Where’s Bono?’ Perhaps the large, peaceful and media-friendly nature of those February demonstrations all around the world was enough to shake him into a statement of sorts. On Sunday, 23 February, an exclusive interview with him appeared in the mid-market tabloid newspaper Ireland on Sunday. The paper presented it as his coming-out against the war, but it was more like, ‘Be careful now, pals’, addressed to his friends Tony and George. In keeping with his revisionist post-peace process version of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Bono was now, in 2003, an advocate of inclusive dialogue rather than state violence. ‘Over the top’ responses to terrorism, he said, deploying all the local knowledge he could muster, only exacerbated the problem:

  I think the way terrorism in Ireland was encouraged by a very over the top British response is a good example. You had 300 active service members of the Provisional IRA in the ’70s and ’80s and they sent in 30,000 troops. They also interned everybody who was suspicious without fair access to trial lawyers. Internment was the thing that actually grew the IRA.73