Bono is out to save Africa, with a little help from Paul O'Neill. Patrick Smyth, in Washington, profiles the US Treasury Secretary
He's been described as a pragmatist and a maverick, one who thinks for himself, an outstandingly successful businessman, and he is certainly no Republican ideologue.
Bono's travel companion in Africa, the US Secretary to the Treasury, Paul O'Neill (66), is an unusual member of the Bush Cabinet, not by virtue of his millions, but how he made them. O'Neill is an authentic creator of wealth, a man of manufacturing industry who transformed the fortunes of a huge dying company, Alcoa, earning the grateful respect of shareholders and workers alike.
He is outraged by poverty and wants to fix it yesterday. And although deeply sceptical about the developmental benefits of traditional aid and the role of multilateral international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, O'Neill certainly helped to persuade the Administration in the wake of September 11th that the security of the US depended to some extent on progress against poverty in the developing world.
Hence the announcement two months ago of a 50 per cent increase in US aid over the 2004-2006 period, an increase of the order of $10 billion, but hedged with new conditionalities about ending corruption and economic reform. But the first real increase in US aid in more than 20 years.
O'Neill is adamant that there must be a change of approach. His focus is stimulating private enterprise, not handouts for the poor.
"Believe me, I'm not rushing back to where we've been because that has not worked. One thing I've said again and again is results, results, results," he told reporters as he set out. Bono says he can show him aid that does work, and critics say O'Neill's view of the actual practice of aid is old-fashioned.
That O'Neill should travel to Africa after such a cash announcement, explicitly acknowledging that he is open to being persuaded by Bono to make the case for yet more aid, is most unusual. A politician would certainly not put himself in such a position.
Could he really come back after such a trip and turn his back on those he has just met? Those who know him say that, while he is a good listener, he also doesn't compromise easily once he finally comes upon a position he thinks is right.
"I don't characterise him as an uncaring and unco-operative character," Bono said of O'Neill this week, but he "is a tough guy, and he is going to be tough to be turned around on some matters". "I know that our travelling together has raised some eyebrows," O'Neill says. "I hope it also raises interest in getting serious about achieving real improvements in the lives of the people of Africa. For too long we've seen too little progress."
He may reject current aid policies, but in part it is because he believes them under-ambitious and he decries suggested targets of halving global poverty by 2015. "I think we're letting ourselves off too easily," he says.
The two met first over a year ago after some initial reluctance on O'Neill's part."He just wants to use me," he recalls telling his staff.
But they hit it off and impressed by the singer's knowledge of Africa, O'Neill asked him to join a trip planned originally for last October but postponed because of September 11th.
Bono used the time to plan ahead. He travelled to Africa in January with the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to make sure he picked places to visit that would help make his case.
O'Neill is no politician. His willingness to think aloud and speak his mind - "gaffes" his detractors call it - is legendary and has been the cause of repeated rumours that he would be the next member of the Cabinet to depart it. Involuntarily. Such rumours are strenuously denied by the Administration.
The days of being "a free-ranging, self-admitted maverick" are over, O'Neill said when he was appointed. "That was yesterday." It was a somewhat premature promise.
Paul Henry O'Neill was born in December 1935 in St Louis. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from Fresno State College in California and a master's in public administration from Indiana University. He is married to Nancy Jo Wolfe, and they have three daughters and one son. His hobby is painting.
He began working as a computer systems analyst at the Department of Veterans' Affairs in 1961 and later moved to the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, where he worked until 1977, serving Presidents Nixon and Ford.
It was at that time that he first met Dick Cheney, who became a firm friend and would strongly promote his name when the Bush Administration was being put together. His cause was also helped by a close friendship from that time with the Federal Reserve's boss, Alan Greenspan.
At OMB O'Neill became a budget wizard, people who worked with him said.
His youngest daughter, Julie Kloo, says: "My father is the sort of person who can quote numbers from the 1977 federal budget." He left the public service in 1977 to work as VP and president of International Paper, transferring in 1987 to become the first CEO from outside the industry of the troubled Pittsburgh-based giant, Alcoa. Conventional wisdom suggested that the future of aluminium was to be produced in the developing world by cheap labour, and his predecessor had tried to save the firm by buying other kinds of businesses.
O'Neill reversed course, shedding all but the core business, investing in new technology, flattening out the company's management structure, revamping its accounting and inventory systems.
He won over the workforce by putting a huge emphasis on worker safety, firing managers who didn't think he was serious, knocking down walls to open up the workplace. "The idea of people working together is really defeated by walls," O'Neill says, "and even more so by hierarchy." He introduced profit-sharing for employees and ended the company's political donations.
Before he took over, it took Alcoa 40 days to get aluminum plates for aircraft wings through an inspection process; O'Neill whittled that to four days. And the company is typically among the first to release its earnings each quarter, in good part because of his financial systems.
In the next 12 years, in part through well-placed acquisitions, he doubled Alcoa's global market share and more than doubled its number of workers to 145,000. After several years of depressed earnings in the early 1990s, O'Neill took Alcoa from a profit of $4.8 million in 1993 to $1.5 billion in 2000.
In that year, his last as chairman, he made $25 million personally. When he left the company, he had almost four million stock options and 2.37 million shares, worth another $80 million. He would get into trouble by holding on to those options longer that politically acceptable as Treasury Secretary, but there is little doubt that taking the job cost him many millions.
He was not an obvious choice for Treasury Secretary, however, and raised a few eyebrows when he got the job. O'Neill was not a generous contributor to party coffers, and conservatives were particularly alarmed by his past views on the paramount importance of cutting the national debt, as opposed to taxes, and his support in the early 1990s for energy taxes on fiscal and environmental grounds. He supported Kyoto.
And he was also on record as criticising the Fed for threatening the record-length economic expansion by pushing interest rates too high.
O'Neill was not too happy to return to Washington either. He had promised his family that retirement would mean an end to his punishing schedules.
O'Neill's daughter Julie, however, told the New York Times: "My mother was saying how they were going to do this and do that when my father left Alcoa, but we all knew that it wasn't going to happen."
He admits to having compiled a three-page list of reasons not to join the Administration but was relatively easily prevailed on by Cheney, who also had qualms. "Cheney had the same list I had," O'Neill says, "except his had three heart attacks on it."
In signing up, he made clear he understood, however, that his new role was to implement Bush policies. "I also understand my place in this, and that place is to let Alan Greenspan make monetary policy," he said at the time.
But he has not been entirely successful.
When Bush tried to sell his tax cut as a fiscal stimulus last year, his Treasury Secretary expressed doubt that it would speed up the economy. In January, after Bush accused the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, of wanting to raise taxes, O'Neill went on television and pronounced that Daschle "has not called for raising taxes this year." Bush backed the House of Representatives stimulus package after September 11th; O'Neill dismissed it as "show business".
In March Bush gave a speech taking credit for lifting the economy out of recession, while O'Neill declared: "It seems quite clear now that our economy maybe never suffered a recession." And he committed the heresy for a Treasury Secretary of suggesting publicly what everyone knows to be true, that the US is not pursuing a strong dollar policy.
"I thought there would be a bigger market here than there is for clarity of expression," O'Neill says good-humouredly.
During the collapse of Enron O'Neill was one of those contacted by Ken Lay to see if federal help could be forthcoming and decided firmly against it, not bothering to tell the President until much later.
O'Neill has called the theory of interconnected markets a "fashion" that needed to be retired "like the hula hoop." But he appears now to be changing that view: at least Bono must hope so.