By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

DAKAR, Senegal, Aug. 3 -- Horns blaring, the press vans hurtled through the oncoming traffic here at dusk, racing to the airport to deposit their passengers on a third international flight of the day. We had arisen in Rwanda at 3 a.m., flown 2,800 miles across the African continent for a brief drop-by in Liberia, then headed 700 miles north to Senegal for the foreign equivalent of an airport campaign rally.

An idle witness might have thought this was some sort of urgent international mission -- shuttle diplomacy, across time zones, on methamphetamines.

But no. This was just a day on the road with former president Bill Clinton, global philanthropist.

While in office and sometimes on the campaign trail for his wife earlier this year, Clinton conveyed a chaotic urgency, always late to events, always overprogrammed, always moving from announcement to activity to long rap session after dinner.

After a four-day, 19,000-mile journey with him to Africa -- or, more accurately, chasing him across Africa, like some geopolitical version of "The Amazing Race" -- it is clear that Clinton is every bit as frenetic as an ex-president and an ex-candidate's spouse, even less measured in his pace and as undisciplined about his schedule as ever.

And his logistics, at least on this particular visit, were a mess.

To be fair, it was not the fault of the William J. Clinton Foundation staff that there were a wildly disproportionate number of mechanical airplane problems this year, on the annual trip Clinton makes to the countries where his charity operates. Between last Monday and Sunday, over the span of a week, there were two aborted takeoffs, more than seven mechanical failures on two planes and three last-minute aircraft swaps, forcing his panicked staff to revamp an already-crazed schedule halfway around the world.

Yet the lack of built-in cushion time -- not to mention the astonishing lack of rich-friend resources; weren't the Clintons supposed to know people with smoothly functioning private jets? -- struck some observers on the trip as strangely counterproductive. Clinton is eager to show he has left the primary battle behind and returned to the fight to provide AIDS patients with reduced-priced drugs and to bring sustainable-growth programs to poor populations. Yet he whizzed through Ethiopia, Rwanda, Liberia and Senegal so quickly that the humanitarian gains seemed obscured in a cloud of dust.

The trip began with all the requisite excitement. Camera-clutching, safari-gear-clad delegation members arrived by Lincoln Town Car at the private air terminal in Newark: Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen; Terry McAuliffe and his wife; former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie; Bruce Lindsey, now chief executive of the foundation; Joe Wilson, the former ambassador whose fact-finding trip to Niger before the Iraq war became a cause celebre for opponents of the war; other wealthy, charity-minded Democrats, including Cathy Lasry and J.B. Pritzker, the hotel billionaire. Eventually, Chelsea Clinton arrived, along with Roger Clinton, the former president's brother.

The group split into two: the A-list passengers (mentioned above) who would go on the plush 767 lent by Google executives; and the B-list passengers, including the reporters, a documentary film crew sent by Clinton's Hollywood friend Steve Bing, and Rodney Slater, the former transportation secretary.

But being on the B-list did not just mean an inferior transatlantic flight, with fewer moist towelettes. It meant a mind-boggling 55-hour delay because of mechanical problems. These included a shattered window, a broken air-conditioning valve, an electrical fire, a problematic oxygen valve and a nonworking fuel system part. By the time the Clinton staff had found a replacement aircraft -- a 707 so old its twin is on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as an example of relics presidents used to fly -- we had spent two nights at the Newark Marriott. People were bailing out of the excursion left and right.

Ethiopia, when the traveling press corps finally arrived, was a blur. On Friday, the entourage packed up again and went to Rwanda. In midair, another emergency struck: The Google 767 had engine failure during takeoff. So the B-list plane turned around to fetch the former president from Addis Ababa, leaving the A-list behind (they later arrived in Kigali on an Ethiopian Airlines flight).

The trip went on and on this way: With the schedule now delayed, events in all the subsequent countries had to be rearranged, airplanes moved, hotel rooms scrambled. An entire village in northern Rwanda spent a day waiting for Clinton, who did not arrive until the following afternoon. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, had to adjust her schedule to meet with Clinton on Sunday rather than Saturday as planned. And Senegal -- where Clinton was making a relatively important announcement on AIDS policy -- was barely a three-hour blip on the screen, lasting just long enough for a swarm of DEET-resistant mosquitoes to attack the traveling delegation during a hospital stop.

Kate Snow, the ABC correspondent, described it as "a lot like a campaign trip."

"No sleep, bad food, forgetting where you are . . . with the added twist of having no written schedule so you don't know where you're going next," she said. "But I can't complain too much. I just got to see four amazing places that I might not have ever seen in my life. Although, in Senegal, I actually only got to see the airport tarmac and a hotel."

When Snow interviewed Clinton, he apologized for the repeated plane debacles. "You know the first plane broke down three times, and then the second one, and then we lost the second," he said. "I've never had that happen before, that I had it happen twice. So it's still been a wonderful trip -- but it's been hard on everybody that has had to change planes. I'm sorry."

When I interviewed Clinton a night earlier, I broke the ice by saying I was trying to decide who had come closer to killing me -- him or his wife, with her brutal campaign schedule. (She once made a 24-hour trip to California and back without pausing for a nap.)

Clinton laughed and responded that their personal trainer, a tough German athlete, had observed that "she's actually stronger than she was when the campaign started, you know, physically." So the Clintons are Nietzscheans after all.

At the same time, it was impossible to dwell too much on such logistical problems as lack of power or Internet access -- even though not having either meant being unable to work -- while looking out the window at the dust-covered mothers along the roadside in Rwanda, the crumbling, bullet-ridden walls sheltering families in Monrovia, the children crawling on piles of burning garbage in Dakar. Who were we to complain when, during one leg of the trip in Rwanda that involved helicopter rides out to the countryside, we did not have access to water for most of the day?

There was a soothing sight awaiting us on the runway in Dakar: A North American Airlines jet, part of the fleet that ferries Sen. Barack Obama on the campaign trail, and for a while transported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. There were only a couple dozen passengers left, but no one had the energy to worry about the carbon footprint. When the plane finally touched down in Mexico City for the International AIDS Conference, where Clinton was giving a speech, it was hardly a surprise to discover that it hadn't landed in Mexico City at all, but some other airport -- more than an hour and a half from where it was supposed to be.