said, “I’m sure you’ve heard of this Jubilee debt relief thing?” And he said, “Of course.” And I said, “I have this friend who’s a singer, who is a sort of activist on this debt thing – and he’d like to meet you.” And he said, “Oh no, I don’t have time for that.” And I said, “Jim, he’s in Dublin. You’re in London. Why doesn’t he come over tomorrow? It’s Sunday. You have nothing to do on Sunday.” And he said, “Okay, tell him if he can be at the Berkeley Hotel at noon, I’ll have lunch with him.” I called Bono, and said, “If you can be at the Berkeley at noon tomorrow, Wolfensohn will have lunch with you.” And Bono said, “Wow, can I bring Geldof?” [the knighted lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and founder of Live Aid], and I said, “It’s up to you, man. It’s your lunch. Whatever you want.” And I called Wolfensohn back and said that Bono would be there at 12 and was going to bring this other guy.’
The lunch was a disaster. ‘Afterwards Wolfensohn called me,’ recounts Bobby, ‘and he was furious because Geldof had yelled at him the whole time.’ Bono confirms it. ‘Yeah, Bob was like, you fucking this and you fucking that, and how can you fucking sit here in your fucking seat, you prick. And Jim Wolfensohn is a real debonair sort of gentleman, and he looked over at me with that look of “help” on his face. But we got on.’
‘He liked Bono,’ says Shriver. ‘He thought he was bright. And said that if he wanted to work on trying to get money for debt relief he would do what he could to help.’
Game on.
Next up was the highly influential central banker and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker. ‘Volker laughed at me when I first raised the idea of debt cancellation,’ recounts Bono. ‘Just laughed out loud – ha ha! He said, “I hate this idea. I hated it in 1968, I hated it in 1972, I hated it in 1985, and I hate it now. You’re from Ireland, aren’t you? You should stick to fishing.”’ But Bono would not rise to the bait. He patiently explained that the Jubilee campaign was different. It wasn’t just about cancelling the debt, he told Volcker, it was a one-off opportunity to level the playing field, to put right the relationship between North and South, a relationship that had been wrong for far too long. His patience paid off. ‘At the end of a very long meeting,’ Bono recalls, ‘Volcker said “Give me your phone number.” And he not only made a few calls on my behalf. He helped. It may have been behind the scenes, but he actually helped.’
After Volcker came Rockefeller, the wise old man of Wall Street, and former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. ‘That meeting went really well,’ Bobby remembers. ‘We discussed then-current initiatives, and the problems with these. We corresponded back and forth for several months.’ And after Rockefeller came Holbrooke and after Holbrooke, Bob Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Bono and Bobby were ready to hit DC.
Robert Rubin, the US Treasury Secretary at the time, was evasive. ‘I just couldn’t get to him,’ recounts Bono. ‘I even said I would swim to wherever he was at one point.’ Rubin was a devotee of Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary, who famously insisted after the War of Independence that the individual states repay all their debt. Rubin, not surprisingly, was dead set against debt cancellation. But when they did eventually meet, thanks to Hillary Clinton’s intervention, Rubin, although clearly never going to be an advocate, indicated that he would not stand in their way.
Word got to Bono and Shriver that Larry Summers, the Treasury Secretary-in-waiting might be more proactive. Summers had formerly been the Chief Economist at the World Bank, and development was a known passion of his. But, again, just getting the meeting wasn’t easy.
‘I didn’t particularly see why I had to hang out with a singer I’d never heard of,’ Summers recounts. ‘But the young women on my staff told me I had to see him.’
‘It’s true. Larry had no idea who Bono was, nor had he heard of U2,’ confirms Sheryl Sandberg, Summers’ Chief of Staff at the time. ‘It was a cause of great hilarity in the office. But I was his Chief of Staff, which meant that requests came through me, and I would then make recommendations as to who the Secretary should or should not see. As a cabinet member, your time is the only commodity you have, so we took the scheduling process very seriously. And when this request came in, I was like, we’re doing this meeting, we’re not going to have a normal conversation.’
But Summers wanted to lie low. About to be sworn in as Treasury Secretary, the last thing he needed was a gossip item about him meeting a pop star, perfect ammunition for his political enemies already labelling him a liberal flake. The meeting could not take place in his office. Instead, it was set up in the White House offices of Gene Sperling, the Head of the National Economic Council, across the street from the Treasury.
‘There were about six of us round the table when Bono walked in, wearing jeans and sunglasses, which is not what you’d expect in the White House,’ recounts Sandberg, ‘especially as Larry didn’t really get that he’s, like, a rock star.’
‘I didn’t feel I had a very good meeting with Larry,’ says Bono now. ‘I didn’t think the pitch went very well. It wasn’t one of my better days, and he was drumming on the table with his fingers while I was talking, distracted.’
But those at the meeting remember it differently. Stephanie Flanders, Summers’ former speech writer was impressed. ‘He was massively informed on the subject,’ she recalls of Bono. ‘He was referring to a lot of turgid studies – documents on the debt issue, reports for Congress. Everyone was really impressed.’
Sandberg agrees: ‘He knew what all the acronyms were, he knew how the debt flows worked, he knew about capital risk.’ Summers himself sums it up: ‘He turned out to actually know a ton about debt.’
Finally, when the meeting was winding down, Bono, looking Summers straight in the eye, said: ‘I’ve been all over the world, and every single person says if I can get Larry Summers, I can get this done. Because if he wants this done, it’ll be done. So I’m here to get you.’
Sandberg remembers the surprise on the faces around the table. ‘It was kind of just like, whoa,’ she recalls. ‘Very few people come in with that much force and speak to the Secretary of the Treasury in that way. And it was very inspirational. I think we all wanted to believe that something like this could happen, that it was worth fighting for.’
‘Bono had an effect on me,’ admits Summers. ‘His presence suggested there was a big constituency out there who cared about debt.’ So although his response at the meeting was a non-committal – ‘let me think about it’ – Summers turned to Flanders when Bono had left the room, and said: ‘I think the Administration has just had its consciousness raised. This guy’s right. We have to fix this.’
The first step was getting then President Bill Clinton to pledge to cancel 100 per cent of the debts owed to the US by the world’s poorest countries – a goal that Professor Sachs had persuaded Bono to push for. Although various debt-relief programmes had been in place for the past few years, thanks largely to the British Treasury’s championing of the cause, they had only required that creditors cancel a percentage of what they were owed, rather than the whole amount. Debtor countries, therefore, never actually received what they needed to become solvent.
One hundred per cent debt cancellation would send a clear signal to the international community that the to-ing and fro-ing on debt relief wasn’t working. It would also set the standard for other creditors to follow suit.
‘Cancellation,’ not ‘relief of the debt was a distinction that had been made explicit a few months before, after Bono met with Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the morning the US had gone into Kosovo. ‘He hadn’t been to bed,’ Bono
