Frank Giustra is the latest plutocrat to fall under the ex-president’s spell.
Like countless people before him, Frank Giustra’s first meeting with Bill Clinton was a life-altering event indelibly etched in his memory. “We hit it off right away,” Giustra recalls. “We hit it off for a whole number of reasons. We had a very similar upbringing. We had similar interests in books. Pretty soon, we were having a great conversation. I think he liked me.”
Giustra was experiencing the famous Clinton connection, the tractor beam of personal magnetism that Clinton has deployed to pull people into his orbit since his earliest days in Arkansas. Back then, they were people like Mack McLarty, the well-to-do kindergarten classmate who became Clinton’s first White House chief of staff, and Jim McDougal, the local banker and real estate investor who was the Clintons’ partner in the Whitewater land deal and eventually wound up in jail. In Arkansas the stakes were comparatively small. Clinton had little money, and his admirers didn’t have a whole lot more. Today, in his post-presidency, Clinton has built up a multibillion-dollar family foundation with a global reach. He may soon be back in the White House. The people he solicits are the sort who gravitate to Davos, not Little Rock—people like Frank Giustra.