By Mark Landler and David Barboza

New York Times News Service

Published: Saturday, Jan. 2, 2010 10:23 p.m. MST

WASHINGTON — In the hectic last week before she became secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton squeezed in a Bon Jovi benefit concert in New York, part of a frantic effort to pay off the debt from her presidential campaign. No sooner had she arrived at the State Department than Clinton discovered she needed to start raising money all over again.

This time, the cash-starved beneficiary was not her own campaign but the United States, which needed $61 million to finance the construction of a national pavilion at a world's fair in Shanghai. Under federal law, no public money could be used for the project. And Clinton, as a federal official, could no longer solicit private financial donations herself.

So she turned to her well-established network of Clinton fundraisers, and after negotiating with the State Department's lawyers about what she could legally do herself to support the project, she mounted an ambitious fundraising campaign that has netted close to $54 million in barely nine months.

With multimillion-dollar pledges from PepsiCo, General Electric, Chevron and other American corporations, the United States is on track to open a sleek, 60,000-square-foot pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010, which runs from May through October.

The prospect of the nation's chief diplomat asking for money worried government lawyers, according to officials. Referring to the first secretary of state, one lawyer asked, "Would Thomas Jefferson do this?" They imposed strict limits on the kinds of calls or other contacts she could make, allowing her to promote the pavilion but prohibiting any one-on-one appeals for cash.

Despite those restrictions and a dismal economy, Clinton is closing in on her $61 million goal. She is clearly proud of the effort, which staved off what could have been a rupture in American-Chinese relations. In a year in which she has mostly worked to prove herself a loyal member of the Obama team, the campaign also showcases her enduring political drawing power.

"The idea, for many people, of raising more than $50 million would seem really daunting," Clinton said in an interview. "Maybe because I had participated in raising so much money in the past, I wasn't daunted by it. I knew it was going to be hard under the circumstances."

By all accounts, the effort to build a national pavilion was near death at the end of the Bush administration. The near-collapse of the global economy, the proximity of the expo to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the general ambivalence of the State Department had left USA Pavilion, the nonprofit group in charge of the project, with little support or money.

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This is what I like about the Clintons. They know how to use their star power to do good for humanity.