The work I had done after the Indian earthquake and 9/11 set the stage for helping out in the wake of more disasters, both natural and man-made. I found it emotionally rewarding, intellectually challenging, and much needed.
On December 26, 2004, a devastating tsunami struck South Asia, triggered by a strong undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in western Indonesia. It sent mountainous waves into Aceh, on the northwest coast of Indonesia, then moved on to Thailand, inundating the gorgeous tourist mecca of Phuket, then on to Sri Lanka and the southeast coast of India. By the end of the day the small island nation of the Maldives had been devastated, and several other countries had also been hit hard enough to cost lives and cause substantial damage. Soon the high waves reached all the way to the Pacific coast of Mexico, raising water levels and destroying drinking water supplies.
The ferocity of the tsunami and the depth of destruction it left as the waves receded were almost impossible to grasp for those of us far away. All told, nearly 230,000 people were killed in fourteen countries.
My staff called the White House to say I wanted to help, and Chief of Staff Andy Card asked if I’d consider a request from the president to join his father in a national appeal. I was glad to accept, knowing this would put the effort beyond politics. On January 3, President Bush invited me to the White House for the announcement, then he, the first lady, his father, and I visited the embassies of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand to sign condolence books and help raise awareness of the magnitude of the tragedy. We also cut ads for the Advertising Council, and the TV and radio networks donated more than $100 million to run them.
In the beginning we urged people to donate to well-known charities engaged in immediate relief, like the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, UNICEF, Save the Children, and others. Eventually we also put together a small fund of $15 million to finance specific projects, aided by a golfing fundraiser Greg Norman held at his home course in Florida. We started playing in stormy weather but had to stop after only nine holes because of the hard rain.
We knew the Bush-Clinton Houston Tsunami Fund was a drop in the bucket but hoped it would provide examples of effective projects that could be expanded across the region as more money came in. In Indonesia, just to give one example, we helped local fishermen or their survivors resume their work with new boats, but left the choice of boat, more durable aluminum or traditional wood, to them. And we gave them cell phones they could use to monitor fish prices up and down the coast. Knowing what their catch was worth enabled them to increase their income by an average of 30 percent, far more than the cell service cost.
Americans donated more than $300 million in the first week, thanks in no small measure to the excellent in-depth coverage by the news media. When President George H. W. Bush and I were announced, Steven Spielberg pledged $1.5 million, and lots of celebrities followed suit. There was even a celebrity telethon. Eventually Americans would give more than $2.7 billion to the tsunami relief, much of it coming from small donors, many of them giving over the internet for the first time.
It was the first crowdfunding of a disaster. The median contribution was $50. I remember walking through the game booths at the New York State Fair in 2005, which I attended with Hillary almost every year while she was senator, when a woman working there came up to me with a $50 bill. She said, “This is for the tsunami. As you can see I’m busy here and haven’t had time to send it over the internet.” The IT revolution, though it could also fuel rage, resentment, and paranoia, was empowering ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And President Bush soon pledged $950 million from our government.
Then, U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan asked me to serve as his special envoy for tsunami relief, hoping I could keep attention focused on rebuilding when the cameras left, and make the massive work ahead as effective, transparent, and corruption-free as possible.
It would be challenging. Hillary and I visited a Buddhist temple in Queens where the monks were collecting clothes and other supplies for people in Sri Lanka. It was touching to see the support they received from Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Baha’i, and citizens of no religious affiliation. They filled at least one cargo container. Unfortunately, at the airfield in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital city, cargo containers and other packaging sat out in the open for weeks, because there was no effective supply chain to get the donated goods to the people and places who needed them. Soon most relief organizations were asking for cash only and promising to account for how it was spent. That opened my eyes to a real problem in the relief supply chain, which, thankfully, has improved a lot in the last few years, thanks to groups like Last Mile, a terrific NGO we’ve worked with over the years that handles deliveries.
On February 18, 2005, President Bush 41 and I flew to Southeast Asia to see the damage and the recovery work underway. We started in Thailand, on the resort island of Phuket, where half the casualties were foreign tourists, including about a dozen Americans. There were still more than 1,500 bodies yet to be identified in a refrigeration center. We also flew north to a fishing village where nearly a third of the population was lost, along with houses, fishing boats, and the mangrove trees that had served as a natural barrier to high winds and rising water. Many people were still overcome by grief, but seemed grateful that we were there and that the U.S. Marines and aid workers had come so quickly and done so much.
The next morning we flew to Indonesia, site of the most destruction. After a brief meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who pledged a corruption-free recovery effort, we proceeded to Aceh, which bore the brunt of the tsunami, with 163,000 dead. Banda Aceh, the capital, was devastated, with buildings down, debris everywhere, and people still missing. Even where strong structures still stood, the damage was massive. Virtually all official records, including those establishing title to land, had been destroyed.
So many people had lost their lives so quickly. We heard story after story of people who had lost as many as five family members, saw lots of kids who had lost both their parents, listened to women describe watching the waves wash over their fisherman husbands. With their husbands and their livelihoods gone, they didn’t know what to do.
As governor I had visited small towns and city blocks laid bare by tornadoes, and had helped our people cope with severe floods on the Arkansas and Red Rivers. As president, I saw wreckage in the wake of hurricanes, the Northridge earthquake, the five-hundred-year Mississippi flood, and the man-made disasters of Oklahoma City and Waco. I had never seen anything like this. Words, especially sympathy-laden adjectives, felt empty in the face of all this death and destruction. Both George and I felt more determined than ever to help.
We left Aceh for Sri Lanka, famous for fine teas and, for decades the site of a hard-fought rebellion by the minority Hindu Tamils against the Buddhist majority, itself torn by two tribal factions. The president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, who had lost her husband and one eye to political violence, was determined to have an inclusive disaster response, hoping it would reduce, perhaps even resolve, the longstanding divisiveness in her country. She hosted a banquet for us in the backyard of her house and sat me next to the parliamentary leader of the Hindu Tamils, with President Bush next to the leader of the main Buddhist opposition.
I enjoyed my conversation with the Tamil leader. He made a comment which stuck with me: “You know, even though you never took us off the terrorist list, I liked you anyway, because I always felt you knew we faced discrimination and you cared about us.” That conversation reinforced an important lesson I’d learned as president. Even when you disagree with other leaders, you should make it clear that you understand and care about the people they represent.
President Kumaratunga made much of the fact that President Bush and I had once been bitter rivals who had joined together to help Sri Lankans in “our hour of greatest need.” I hoped her far-from-subtle message would have some impact and tried to reinforce it on future visits.
The next morning we went out to a coastal city that had been hard hit, and as we had done in Thailand and Indonesia and would do the next day in the Maldives, sat with children who’d suffered the loss of family and friends. The grief counselors we met were working with kids who were still struggling to express their feelings and often couldn’t speak more than a word or two. To bring them back, the counselors in all the affected countries encouraged them to draw pictures of what they were feeling and thinking.
Usually, the pictures were very dark at first, reflecting the impact of death and destruction seen too soon. Then there was a progression to pictures depicting people and objects trapped in the water and attempts to save them, including one showing a U.S. Marine helicopter on a rescue mission. Then the drawings began to reflect more normal, hopeful scenes, usually involving other children. In the final stage, the kids were drawing pictures in bright colors of sunny days, beautiful flowers, and happy, playing children. The art was raw and honest, and it seemed to be working. By the time we got to Sri Lanka, the children were singing and dancing, far from healed but at least able to feel again and live in the moment.
At each stop George and I received the gift of a couple of drawings. They ran the full gamut of emotions and became prized possessions. George held his close to his heart. He felt their losses deeply, perhaps because he and Barbara had lost a young daughter, long ago but never forgotten.
Our final stop was the Maldives, a small nation of 300,000, living on a chain of islands none of which was more than six meters above sea level. Though few fatalities occurred, the equivalent of two thirds of the economy, based on tourism and tuna fishing, was destroyed. Thankfully, the capital city was protected by a large seawall built several years earlier by the Japanese government. They needed fishing boats, quick repair of damaged resorts, and a loud message to the world that the Maldives was still an open, welcoming place. Soon they would be planning for the future, including removing all citizens on sparsely populated islands to thirteen of them closer to the capital and better situated to build defenses against future rising waters. The next morning, after a round of interviews, President Bush flew home to Houston and I went to China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to promote my autobiography and raise money for the foundation.
In the last few days we had begun a friendship that would become one of the great blessings of the rest of my life. According to his biographer, Jon Meacham, the barriers between us began to break when I urged President Bush to sleep in the plane’s only bed, in a compartment with its own bathroom and a TV. I thought it was no big deal. He was older, served as president first, and slept more. I used an air mattress and slept on the floor. The friendship was easier for me. I had always liked him and admired his dedication to public service.
As I recounted in My Life, I had become a real fan in 1983, when he had hosted the governors at Kennebunkport at the annual conference which was held in Maine. When I introduced him to our then three-year-old daughter, Chelsea’s first question to the vice president was “Where’s the bathroom?” George took her hand and led her there, stopping only to introduce her to his mother. I never forgot that small act of kindness.
When he was president, I led the Democratic governors in hammering out bipartisan national education goals at a special meeting for all the governors hosted by the University of Virginia. President Bush had asked us to convene and attended the opening press conference, and subsequently invited our chairman, Republican Terry Branstad of Iowa, then a moderate Republican with a good record on education, and me to the 1991 State of the Union address, where he praised our work.
The 1992 campaign was rough, of course. Just four years earlier, the Bush campaign had eviscerated Governor Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts, and I expected no less, although the blood-letting was done largely by surrogates. But politics was still a contact sport, and as long as my rapid-response team could get our side out, I thought we still had a chance.
By late 1993, our relationship was good enough that President Bush joined Presidents Carter and Ford on the White House lawn for the signing of the Oslo Accords by the Israelis and Palestinians on September 13. And the next day, the three of them were at the White House for our efforts to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. They all did well, but President Bush was in especially good form, and kind and generous to me.
We did lots of other things after I left the White House. For years, I went to Kennebunkport for a day in the summer to visit with him, Barbara, and the family members and friends who were always there. We’d talk some politics and foreign policy, but it was mostly golf, his hair-raising fast boat rides, and friendly meals.
The tsunami recovery work came early on in my postpresidential career. What sealed the bond of affection with me on that trip was watching the way George responded to the kids who had lost so much and how he treasured their drawings, holding them as if they were priceless masterpieces. For him, they were.
The only burden I put on him was talking too long to too many people. But I knew that if I was going to be effective as the U.N. special envoy for two more years, I had to learn a lot more about the people and places most affected and form good working relationships with the local leaders.
Our work together ended with the distribution of the money from the Bush-Clinton Fund, and the completion of pleas for donations. In 2006, a report by Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy concluded that, in addition to the $950 million President Bush committed and Congress delivered, 25 percent of American households eventually donated $2.78 billion to tsunami relief, often through their religious groups, with $390 million more coming from corporations and foundations. I am still grateful for the generosity of the American people and for the chance President George W. Bush gave his father and me to support the effort.
But my work for the U.N. was just beginning.
The secretary-general gave me an office in the United Nations building just across the street from the main headquarters where the General Assembly and the Security Council meet. I got a small staff of bright, dedicated young people who were eager to be involved in life-changing work on the ground, work different from days dominated by meetings and conferences. This is not meant as a criticism of the U.N. It was established as a forum for allies and adversaries to talk and talk and talk until they reached a resolution that kept them from going to war. (As Churchill famously said, “Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war.”) Now, in the post–Cold War world, with the sprouting of new countries, the elections of new leaders, and the rise in regional cooperation, there were also real opportunities for the U.N. to directly contribute to relief and recovery work through its operations-oriented affiliates like UNICEF and to coordinate the activities of others who were helping.
Over the next two years, the five original stalwarts on our team were supplemented by others who came on temporarily to do specific things. Because I was also building my own foundation, with its early concentration on doing more on the AIDS crisis and projects in New York, and getting the library and School of Public Service in Arkansas off to a good start, I couldn’t run the operation full-time. Thankfully, Erskine Bowles was willing to do the job. Erskine had served as White House chief of staff and my main negotiator with Congress in formulating and passing the first balanced budget in three decades, containing the largest increase in education funding in thirty years, including the largest increase in college student assistance since the G.I. Bill; health insurance for millions of uninsured children; and large funding increases for science and technology research and development. Erskine is an excellent leader, a wonderful man, and really knows how to make good things happen. For this job, he also had a very able deputy in Eric Schwartz, who was the National Security Council point person on human rights and humanitarian efforts in my administration, later became assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration under President Obama, then served as president of Refugees International. He and Erskine were a solid team.
My main objective was to “build back better,” with an effort that maximized good work in all the impacted countries through constant coordination, reporting on results, and quick resolution of policy and other disputes, in a process that was transparent and corruption-free. “Build Back Better” was our mantra, a slogan President Biden later used to capture the essence of his big recovery package in 2021. Even though it didn’t all pass, the idea is important. Whenever something is broken, we should all want it replaced with something better.
Over the next few years, I chaired four meetings of the main coordination group, called the Global Consortium for Tsunami Recovery, originally set up just after the disaster by then U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Jan Egeland. The membership included the affected nations, the largest donor nations, the major NGOs, international financial institutions, and the U.N. agencies involved in the recovery effort. Erskine was on board by mid-2005 and cochaired the U.N. Tsunami Task Force, which met twice a month for the rest of 2005 and 2006. We worked with other groups, too, especially the NGOs that were critical to success on the ground.
We had to keep the energy and the enthusiasm going. After the first rush of giving and emergency actions pass, the real work of building back better can be slowed or derailed by the loss of interest from funders, and the reemergence of local political, capacity, and corruption problems. I knew we couldn’t avoid all the pitfalls but also knew we’d get a lot more done if we tried.
I visited the region three more times, twice in 2005 and once more in December 2006 when I went back to Banda Aceh. The first trip in May gave me an opportunity to see the recovery efforts in India, which showcased the benefits of cooperation between the state of Tamil Nadu and local and international NGOs. The most impressive economic initiative trained widows of fishermen to make incense candles for Hindu temples and small sculpted pieces from local clay. The women were surprised and proud they could support their families without their husbands’ income from fishing. I still have one of their products, a small red-clay elephant, in our home.
The most vexing problem was getting people into livable shelters and permanent housing. The temporary housing in Tamil Nadu was a mixed blessing. To minimize fire risk, the roofs were tin, not straw, but in the stifling heat, the dwellings were almost unbearable in the daytime.
On the other hand, many of the displaced Indians were very poor Dalits, the lowest caste, who had never had access to healthy sanitation facilities before they found themselves in the temporary shelter camp. Later, when I visited a new permanent housing settlement, I was pleased to see that the new houses, in addition to being far more storm-resistant, also had much better sanitation. It was a particular source of dignity to the Dalits, whom it was no longer acceptable to call “untouchable.” Thank goodness; it was well past time.
On my trips, I tried to balance complimenting the progress with urging everyone to deal with what still needed to be done. The picture of possibility was different in each nation. In Thailand, where the damage was concentrated and the pre-tsunami economy was healthy, the restoration was largely funded and completed by the Thais themselves. I had seen their skills in action in East Timor in 2002, when the Thai government helped Timor-Leste by improving the lot of small farmers, artisans, and other self-employed people.
In the Maldives, tuna fishing and tourism began to rebound quickly and most of the work involved the relocation of the population outside the capital to fewer islands, building better defenses there, and lobbying for the quick deployment of an Indian Ocean early warning system. But alongside the progress there remained the looming fear that the tsunami was just a harbinger of things to come with global warming and rising sea levels.
I really came to admire the life and culture the small but hardy population had built on this island chain, and I hoped they could make it. In early 2019, the TV show Madam Secretary aired an episode in which the secretary of state has to persuade the young president of a Pacific island nation, which had just lost all its more senior leaders in a storm, to evacuate everyone before an even larger water wall covered his entire country for good. He ordered the evacuation just before his nation disappeared. In the last scene, the people are raising their flag on their new homeland, a more elevated island that a friendly neighbor had given them. I couldn’t help thinking of the Maldives during the show, hoping it wouldn’t happen to them, but that if it did, someone would give them a shot to begin again.
Sri Lanka’s big problem before the tsunami was the long and violent civil conflict between the Buddhist majority, which constituted more than 70 percent of the population, and the Hindu minority, at about 18 percent. The Hindus had representation in parliament but felt they would never have their grievances resolved, and many took up arms in a group called the Tamil Tigers. There was also a smaller, long-rooted group of Muslims, about 7 percent of the population, and an even smaller number of Christians.
The eastern shore of Sri Lanka was hardest hit and as the damage moved further north, there were more and more Hindus, bringing ethnic tensions that made the delivery of aid more difficult. As I said, President Kumaratunga hoped the relief effort might lead to an end of the violence. I tried to support that and vividly remember a meeting we held involving fishing families, including Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, on the grounds of a Catholic school run by an order of nuns. The biggest problem they all shared was getting back into homes, when the sites of their former houses were in newly declared buffer zones where building was no longer allowed that close to the water. Since most of the rebuilding in rural areas was to be done by the people themselves with cash grants, a lot of people were involved. There were loud squabbles when property ownership wasn’t clear, a big problem in many developing countries. Also, the fishing families feared they’d be too far away from the water to protect their boats. My office tried to be helpful on this and I think we were. But the conflict flared up again, continuing until the government appeared to win a decisive military victory over the Tamil Tigers in May of 2009. Sadly, the country’s internal struggles are back in the news today. When I ended my U.N. tenure, I was proud of our team’s contribution to the restoration of livelihoods, public services, and housing, but regretted that I couldn’t do more to end the deep divisions and governance problems that still haunt Sri Lanka.
The best and most enduring results were achieved in Indonesia, in spite of the fact that Aceh and the nearby island of Nias suffered the most damage, cruelly compounded by a severe earthquake in Nias in 2005. The progress was made possible largely by national and local leaders and ordinary people who knew they had to think and act differently to recover and build a better future.
First, President Yudhoyono made the decision to lodge all the authority and the funds in a single body, the Agency for the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Aceh and Nias, or BRR, much like our Federal Emergency Management Agency. Then he made an even better decision, appointing a nonpolitical and scrupulously honest businessman, Dr. Kuntoro Mangkusubrototo, better known as Pak Kuntoro, to handle it. The president then told his grumbling cabinet ministers that until Aceh was reborn, Kuntoro, not they, would have authority over all major decisions and expenditures. Pak Kuntoro was one of the ablest public servants I’ve ever met—intelligent, knowledgeable, good with people, persistent, and tough but good-natured. I pushed strong standards of transparency, and he enthusiastically delivered, with a website posting all contributions and their sources, all expenditures, who got the money and what they used it for, and an after-action performance audit.
Over the next two years a lot of good things happened. Livelihoods were restored and schools, hospitals, and clinics reopened. And a longstanding civil conflict between the national government and the separatist Free Aceh movement was resolved, with an agreement that kept them a part of Indonesia, but with greater local decision-making. The first regional and local elections were held. I met with some of the local leaders to thank them and encouraged them to stay the course. They said they would and asked for more help to develop their economy.
Aceh had a good coffee-producing capacity, which, like everything else, had been damaged. I knew Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz from the fight for healthcare reform when he was a stalwart supporter of Hillary’s efforts. Also Schultz’s managing director for U.K. and Ireland, Kris Engskov, had worked for me in the White House and I had known him since he was four years old, running around his grandfather’s general store in the small Ozark town of Berryville, Arkansas. I was sure they would help if they could.
Starbucks sent people to Aceh to work with the growers to improve the quality of their beans and the sustainability of their operations. At the time, Starbucks featured coffee from a different country every month in its stores, with the beans well marketed in an attractive package. Soon the coffee of the month was from Aceh, in an informative container explaining where it was from and why it tasted the way it did. If my memory is right, the whole month’s stock sold out in ten days, giving Aceh coffee more visibility, access to markets, and happier growers.
The one problem we couldn’t solve quickly enough was moving the people out of displaced persons camps, where they lived uncomfortably in hot tents waiting to transition to temporary housing. The temporary housing was much better. The houses were made of wood and there was an open public space for children to play, bordered by a mosque and another large building for community activities.
On one of my trips, I knew I had to visit the largest camp, where thousands of people were still stuck in tents six months after I had told them we’d have them out. I was met by the camp’s elected leader, his wife, and their ten-year-old son. We communicated through an interpreter, an impressive young woman who’d left her job as a television news announcer to come to work for Pak Kuntoro. She told me she could do more for her people by taking me and others through sweltering camps and ruined villages. When I told her I thought the son of the camp leader and his wife was one of the most beautiful children I’d ever seen, she smiled and agreed that he was very beautiful but that I should know his parents had lost nine relatives in the tsunami. They were grateful for their son’s safety but still grieving their loss as they did their best to take care of the people in the camp.
Thousands of people were milling about row after row of large tents, voicing their legitimate complaints about living too long in the tent city. I assured them they would be out soon, but couldn’t stop thinking about all the children who should have been there, and how beautiful all of them were to those who loved them.
Our last stop was at the medical tent. It was a clean, well-stocked facility with dedicated and trained staff. After a few minutes, the wife of the camp president joined us with a broad smile on her face, holding the youngest resident of the camp, a two-day-old boy. She explained that she was bringing the baby to me because, in their culture, a new mother is expected to remain in bed for forty days, feeding her baby and regaining her strength. She said that in honor of my visit they wanted me to name the baby. I turned to the interpreter and asked, “Does your language have a name that means ‘new beginning’?” She had a few words with the leader’s wife, then replied, “Yes, the word is Dawn. Lucky for you, in our language, Dawn is a boy’s name. We will call this baby Dawn. He will be the symbol of our new beginning.”
In July 2014, I went back to Aceh for the tenth anniversary of the tsunami, to see what had happened. Our first visit was to a park commemorating the event. The main attraction is a sizable ship which still sits where the tsunami took it, more than four miles inland from the coast. We also saw a remarkable before-and-after village which had lost 90 percent of its people, then rode on a highway rebuilt by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to a beautiful park where I saw people I’d met during my U.N. service. The couple who had led me through the camp were there. A young man I’d met in 2005 just after he’d lost his dad and brother came with his sisters and uncle. He was twenty and thriving, with his own business and home, and wearing a T-shirt with the phrase, “Faster Than You Know.” And Dawn was there with his family. They lived nearby and appeared to be doing fine. Dawn didn’t seem to get what the big deal was. Of course, he couldn’t remember the circumstances of his birth, and took the rhythms of ordinary life for granted, which felt right to me. I only wish every child could.