In December 2006, Condé Nast Traveler's Patricia Storace trailed former president Bill Clinton on his health and disaster-relief campaign in Asia. On April 30, 2007, the two sat down in his New York City headquarters to discuss Clinton's philanthropic work, the United States' global reputation, and travel's potential to do good.

Condé Nast Traveler: You've said that you woke up one morning and discovered you were an NGO. What motivated you to embark on philanthropic work?

Bill Clinton: I knew what I was doing, but I hadn't ever thought about it in those terms. But it happened somehow, sometime in 2001, that I realized that was what I was.

Well, first of all, I wanted to continue to be active on those things that I cared about when I was president where I could still have an impact. Like HIV/AIDS; economic opportunity for poor people in America; and all around the world, promoting reconciliation where I could. I had a pretty clear idea of what I could still make a difference doing and what I couldn't. And I didn't just want to make speeches. Although I think actually that the speech work I do is fine. It's important, because I try to help people think about what's going on and organize their lives accordingly. But I wanted to have an impact. And secondly, I felt obligated to do it. I knew I had to work hard, because when I got out, I had a wife in the Senate, and we had to have a home in Washington and a home here, and I was in debt. But I thought it would have been wrong for me to spend the rest of my life just trying to amass personal wealth, because of the gift I had been given. First by the people of my state, to be able to be governor for a dozen years, and to be able to be president for eight years. I think when you get that kind of life that's a gift of the people, you owe whatever time you have when you're finished. To try to give it back. And so I wanted to do it, and I felt obligated to do it, and finally I thought it would be more interesting and more fun for me than anything else I could do. And it's turned out to be.

CNT: What in your background and experience best fitted you for the work you're doing now?

Clinton: I think two things. First of all, when I go into a situation I always think about—I always have, all my life—I think about, How could we make this better? What could we do differently that would be even better? And I'm pretty good at seeing like a lot of different things happening at once and putting them in a pattern and figuring out how you can rearrange it so it might have a better outcome. The second thing is that I think, because of my background, I never thought of political endeavors primarily in terms of power and prestige, and I never thought of economic endeavors primarily in terms of wealth and position. I always thought about how all this affected ordinary people. Because I came from fairly modest circumstances, and I saw the impact of political decisions and economic arrangements on ordinary people's lives. I knew it made a difference what decisions were made and how they were carried out. And I think that really that made this a comfortable transition for me. It didn't matter to me very much that I didn't have a political office any more. All I knew was that I still had the ability to affect other people's lives in a positive way based on my own experience before I ever got into politics.