Bono

by Michka Assayas

  Who were they?

  The best phone call I ever made in my opinion was to the most extraordinary woman in the world: Eunice Shriver Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, the woman who in her forties, after having changed the world once advising to elect JFK to president, changed the world once more by starting the Special Olympics. A legend and a lesson in civic duty. All the Kennedys are, and I’m not just saying that because they’re Ireland’s Royal Family, but because I’ve seen how hard they work.

  What advice did Eunice Shriver give you?

  She told me to ring her son Bobby, which I did. And he immediately put the family Filofax to work for me. Remember Filofax?

  In a different lifetime, yeah.

  Well, it was contacts. And more than just giving me numbers, he called them and often accompanied me to those appointments.

  Would a member of the most famous Democratic family have influence with Republicans?

  Actually, some. But there were more than a few meetings where he would hide in the corridor outside. Mind you, his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger had a lot of Republican friends. Arnie called a congressman from Ohio called John Kasich, who became an important guide through the Republican side of the Congress.

  So you feel that without you, the American side of the Drop the Debt campaign would not have been as effective.

  Myself and Bobby Shriver. I think that if you asked President Clinton how he got a hundred percent of the bilateral debt canceled for twenty-three countries, he would say that DATA’s forerunner Jubilee 2000 more than helped. If you asked him how it made it through Congress, he would say: “A lot of footwork by a few people.” And I’m certainly one of them. Bobby Shriver and I, Larry Summers, the then treasury secretary, we were dead in the water without John Kasich. President Clinton believed in it, but we had to fight hard to get his way. It’s funny, I thought the president of the United States was the Big Cahuna, the Boss. But he’s not. In the United States, the Congress is in charge. When President Clinton announced his commitment to full cancellation, we thought we cracked it, we were jumping up and down. But then I started getting calls: this isn’t gonna get past Congress. And that’s how I found myself inside the body politic, trying to figure out how it lived and breathed, how it behaved—a rock star wandering around the corridors of power rather than placarding at the gates outside. Strange. Every few weeks I had to travel to Washington, D.C., to go and meet all kinds of unexpected people, in an attempt to get debt cancellation accepted in the United States. It was uphill. Myself and Bobby Shriver were entering a world not just of ideologue politicians, but one of bankers and economists, and a certain elite who guard America’s piggy bank. For most of these people, especially the bankers, it’s against their religion to cancel debts. Bobby had a background in finance, but I was way out of my depth.

  So what was your line in that part?

  I had one answer and two questions.

  I’m not surprised you’d start off with an answer. What was it?

  Go back to school. Bobby fixed me an appointment with Professor Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard, which completely changed my life. He emboldened me. He turned the math into music. I spent a lot of time with him on and off campus. He’s a man who sees no obstacles to a great idea.

  But did you also meet people who didn’t think that way?

  Yes. I also asked and got to meet very conservative economists like Robert J. Barrow, for example. I wanted to get to know the people who might oppose the idea.

  What was he like?

  I liked him. In the end he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, offering us “Two Cheers.”

  OK. Now tell me about the two questions.

  And the second?

  The first, I have just mentioned. “Who can stop this from happening?” I wanted to meet the people who could roadblock us . . . to roadblock them. The second was: “Who’s the Elvis here?” In whatever area I was, I wanted to know who’s the boss, who’s the capo di tutti capi here. “Who’s Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they’d say: “Well, in development, it’s the World Bank, it’s Jim Wolfensohn, it’s the people running the International Monetary Fund.” So I used to go and meet them. It’s Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it’s Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. I just went all the places they didn’t expect me to turn up. I didn’t go because I wanted to, I went because we had to, to get it through the Congress. It wasn’t enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton’s staff used to call him Elvis anyway. That was his nickname. The Southern twang, I guess. But it turns out Elvis wasn’t enough. In the United States, the president is not the most powerful force—the Congress is. We needed a Colonel Tom* to get our bill passed. And Colonel Tom was the Congress.

  So it was like a crash course in how power works.

  That’s what it was.

  So how did you put that knowledge into practice? What were you able to achieve?

  On debt cancellation we won the day. It was close, but with a lot of help from a few people, particularly John Kasich. He was incredible. He passionately made the case to the Republicans. In a floor fight in the House of Representatives, he shouted down opposition to the bill and we made it. It took him months, and me months traveling back and forth from Dublin. Internationally, it was no small victory. If the U.S. hadn’t moved, everyone else would have gotten out. As I say, there was a hundred billion dollars in play, and I’m very proud of our part, however small it was.

  So you think your photo with these politicians paid off.

  Well, there is three times the amount of children going to school in Uganda now, three times the amount of children as the result of debt cancellation. That’s just one country. All over the developing world, you’ll find hospitals built with that money, real lives changed, communities transformed. And if it didn’t go through Congress, then the Europeans could have fudged there. You see, they move en masse. Would we have gotten there without people taking to the streets, banging the dustbin lids and raising the temperature of the debate? No. You need both. What the protesters are asking is to get in the room. So then, when you get in the room, occupy it, make your argument, and don’t leave till you get the check.

  It’s another kind of power: star power.

  You know, celebrity is ridiculous. It’s silly, but it is a kind of currency, and you have to spend it wisely. And I’ve learnt that much.

  In the U.S., you went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W. Bush . . . Please explain, because I’m getting confused here . . .

  I was in a photo with President Bush because he’d put 10 billion dollars over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. It is an amusing photograph. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Bank. I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered under his breath, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.” [laughs]

  What an amusing and self-effacing guy. It’s hard to buy that, don’t you think?

  You know, I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humor. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the Free World, and him waving back. I say: “You’re pretty popular here!” He goes [Texan accent]: “It wasn’t always so . . .”—Oh really?—“Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.” Isn’t that funny? [laughs]

  So you liked this man?

  Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the AIDS pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I c
ouldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn’t have to have me there at all. But, you know, you don’t have to be harmonious on everything—just one thing—to get along with someone.

  You put other stuff out of your mind: tax cuts for the rich and an up-and-coming war in Iraq?

  You become a single-issue protagonist. You represent a constituency that has no power, no vote, in the West, but whose lives are hugely affected by our body politic. Our clients are the people who are not in the president’s ear. My mouth, because it is, belongs to them. Our clients are the people whose lives depend on these Western drugs, whose lives will be radically altered by new schools and new investment in their country. That’s a position I take very seriously. They didn’t ask me to represent them. Jubilee 2000 asked me to represent them, and, yes, Jubilee 2000 is a North-South, pan-African, pan-European, and pan-American operation, but those people didn’t actually say: “Hey, Bono, would you do that?” The ball kind of fell to my feet, it’s the truth, and I saw a way past the goalkeeper. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna do what I can. It’s already preposterous to have that position. I’ll let somebody else be war watchdog.

  Speaking of watchdogs, was there uproar within the band when they saw you in some of these photos?

  Yes, but they also know the strategy is effective. If it’s not, they’re going to torture me. They’re results-oriented. They also push me to sharpen my arguments.

  So being in a band prepared you for what you’re doing now.

  It turns out that a lot of the things that you learn from being in a band are analogous to politics. And not just politics, even the so-called nasty old world of commerce, anywhere you’ve got to get your message across. I know much more than you’d expect about these things, just from trying to keep on top of U2’s business. We like to say our band is a gang of four, but a corporation of five. I understand brands, I can understand corporate America, I can understand economics. This is not at all so difficult. U2 was art school, business school. It’s always the same attitude that wins the day: faith over fear. Know your subject, know your opponent. Don’t have an argument you can’t win. On the Africa stuff we can’t lose, because we’re putting our shoulder to a door God Almighty has already opened. We carry with us—this is something that’s important—the moral weight of an argument. That’s much bigger than the personalities having the debate. I might walk into an important office and people are looking at me as though I’m some sort of exotic plant. But after a few minutes, they don’t see me. All they’re hearing is the argument, and the argument has some sort of moral force that they cannot deny. It’s bigger than you, and it’s bigger than them. And history as well as God is on its side.

  So you became an insider in the political world. I’m sure you had preconceived notions about politicians. Were those proven wrong or right?

  Well, as you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes. As we moved from the eighties to the nineties, I stopped throwing rocks at the obvious symbols of power and the abuse of it. I started throwing rocks at my own hypocrisy. That’s a part of what that work was about: owning up to one’s ego. These characters in the songs like “The Fly” are owning up to one’s hypocrisy in your heart, your duplicitous nature. There’s a song called “Acrobat” that goes: Don’t believe what you hear, don’t believe what you see /If you just close your eyes/ You can feel the enemy . . . I can’t remember it, but the point is: you start to see the world in a different way, and you’re part of the problem, not just part of the solution! [laughs]

  It’s probably the same when you start a band. You also have these preconceived notions about the corporate labels and corporate management. Once you get to the other side of the fence, maybe you begin to see things differently.

  It is exactly analogous. So who’s the devil here? Bureaucracy! It’s like a Kafka story. The labyrinth of red tape that excuses inaction. But it’s not an excuse, and you have to go through it. Even if a lot of them are not bad guys, even if they’re just busy guys, they have to be held responsible and accountable, because these people are in power. Like, Congressman Tom Lantos talks about, as a child, being put on a train to a Hungarian concentration camp and how crowds gathered to watch them being put on the trains, and how this haunted him later in life, not the mistreatment at these death camps, but the blank looks of the passersby, how he repeated the question often to himself: “Didn’t anyone ask where those children are going?” I said to him: “Aren’t we doing that now with AIDS? We have the drugs, but . . .” And he said: “Yeah, we are. This is exactly analogous. We are watching them being put on the trains.”

  And what should be the response?

  I want to find people who will lie across the tracks.

  So, are the politicians the train conductors?

  No, it’s our indifference that should be on trial. As for politicians, I’ve got to meet and know quite a lot of them; I’m surprised by how much respect I have. They work a lot harder than I thought, they’re not paid that well, the most talented of them would definitely make tons of cash in the commercial world, but stay in politics out of a sense of civic duty. People say power is their drug of choice, but in these days the CEO of a large corporation is the one with power. It’s true that in the U.S. special interest ruins a lot of politics, and runs a lot of shows, that’s the closest you can find to outright evil in politics. The National Rifle Association can buy their way in an argument. How many Americans think it’s a good thing that you can buy a gun in a shop? Hardly any! But the ones that do have put so much money into the National Rifle Association that they can get their issue through Congress. It’s amazing! Why can’t we treat the people that live in wretched poverty with the kind of political muscle they have in the tobacco industry, who hire a bunch of lobbyists and go surround Washington, D.C.? They don’t just go, “Cigarette smoking is a fundamental human right. We want to smoke!” No. They fight tooth and nail for that piece of that pie and their customers, and I’m sometimes one of them . . .

  So how does DATA “fight tooth and nail” for its clients, the poorest of the poor?

  What we’re trying to do at the moment, those of us who care about the wanton loss of life and the inequalities of the developing world, is to come together under one umbrella. In fact, we’re calling it the One campaign—not a reference to the U2 song, but that’ll come in handy. We have to stop doffing our caps and shyly begging for crumbs from the table of the rich countries. We’ve got to get organized. We have to be able to hurt people who harm us, who obstruct the necessary legislation to put things right. We want to be able to take out radio ads in the constituencies of obstructive politicians, and explain that it’s not just money they’re cutting off. It’s lives, mothers, children dying, like I have seen with my own eyes in a hospital in Malawi—three to a bed, two on top and one underneath. The statistics have faces, they’re living and breathing. That is until a decision in D.C., London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin goes against them, then they stop breathing.

  And has your strategy been working?

  We’ve already done it in a small way with a congressman who should now remain nameless, who wanted to be famous for cutting foreign aid until he started to hear from every church and high school in his district that his obstruction was killing kids. We had ads all over the radio. In the end, to his credit, he apologized. You see, that’s political muscle; that’s what people can do if they work together and invest in a movement. Politicians are about “pig roasts”: it’s what people are talking about when they’re barbecuing chicken that counts. It’s what church people are saying, “soccer moms” as well as college students.

  What will happen if your dialogues don’t result in any real change?

  When there are so many lives at stake, I think we will have to consider civil disobedience—certainly, taking to the streets in numbers that will surprise the status quo. There are more regular people than you can imagine who car
e about these issues and are ready to more than put themselves out to make poverty history.

  You take a lot of moral positions in our conversations, but you’re wise enough to know that it’s not necessarily morality that will help your cause triumph.

  The moral force, finally, I do believe in the weight of it. But the apparatus is not moral. The route through it is a very cynical one.

  You said it was a labyrinth. Did you find your way through it?

  There were ways you could gang up or surround difficult people. If a politician had a hard heart, maybe the person who organized his schedule would not. “Staffers” became allies. After all, they were the ones running the show. Proper politicians were older, but the people who ran their offices were my age or younger. So if they weren’t U2 fans, they probably knew one. I found in a lot of cases their idealism still intact.

  Sometimes we run into people who are the same age as us but who have made different choices. They’d say to you: “I’m standing on the same ground as you, but in my position I can’t help because in my job I am stuck.” They tend to be schizophrenic. How do you confront that?

  I have to say that I applied the same strategy that we did as a band. When we got to the United States, or France, or Germany, in the early eighties, you had all these people in their silk jackets with the radio stations on their back, just that glazed look in their eye. I used to ask them how they got into this, and the most jaded, hardened record executive would start saying: “Oh, I used to work in a college radio station,” or “I went to see Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore,” “I saw the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones”—Really, how was it like? I would get them to remind themselves why they came to the party, because often they’d forgotten. It’s the same for the politicians: a lot of them came for the right reasons, but just forgot. And of course politicians are a little like priests and cops. They’re either there for the best or the worst reasons: to serve or to abuse their power! [laughs] But the latter are the few, not the many.