Ex-President Clinton struggled to fight back tears Tuesday as he talked about first meeting “beautiful,’’ pregnant Harvard PhD Elif Yavuz.
Six weeks ago in Africa, “This beautiful woman comes up to me, very pregnant,’’ a red-eyed Clinton told a Manhattan audience of Yavuz, 33, who worked for his Clinton Foundation and was killed in the Nairobi mall attack.
“She was so pregnant that I assured her that I had been a Lamaze father and could be pressed into service at any moment,’’ Clinton said, recalling the lighter moment at the opening of his annual Clinton Global Initiative summit in Midtown.
“She and her baby’s father, they went to Nairobi because they thought it was the safest, best place for her to give birth,’’ he added of the malaria specialist and her architect boyfriend, Ross Langdon, 33.
“And they were just walking in the mall that day. And they were killed.”
She was a “brilliant young mother-to-be who did everything she could to make the most of her life,’’ Clinton said.
And Langdon, 33, who was born in Australia, was “incredibly gifted and good,’’ he said of her partner, who recently designed a hospital for AIDS patients in Kenya for free.
Clinton said he was “a little choked up” because he’d just spoken with the Dutch-born Yavuz’s mother by phone.
He said the grieving mom asked him, “Would you come up with a name?’’ for her daughter’s dead unborn child.
Clinton said he is considering a Swahili word for “life” or “love.”
“I’m very grateful that this young woman gave so much of her life in working with our foundation. I am sorry that she gave her life,” Clinton said of Yavuz.
“If the people who killed them are right, we’re wasting our time,” he said.
“If what we’re doing is right, we have to be a rebuke every single day to the people who’d tear it down.”
Yavuz and Langdon had traveled to Kenya from their home in Tanzania as their baby’s birth neared to be closer to the better medical care in Nairobi.
They were thrilled to be becoming parents, friends said, not wanting to know the sex of their baby so they would be surprised and having a local Tanzanian carpenter make the crib, one pal told HuffPost UK.
They had just bought lunch — burgers and chips — when the terrorists struck Saturday afternoon.
Langdon was found dead cradling Yavuz as if trying to protect her from the onslaught.
The lunch counter where they had just purchased their food was riddled with bullets from an AK-47, the Daily Mail of London reported.
On Monday night, Clinton told CBS talk-show host David Letterman that he “was just looking at a picture on my phone of one of our great employees in Tanzania,” Yavuz.
“This is very personal to me. We lost someone who was very important to us in Africa that I was standing with taking a picture of six weeks ago. So this is deeply human to us,” he said.
Tuesday morning, Clinton added to CBS interviewer Charlie Rose that people can’t be afraid of terrorists.
“We have to go on with our lives — plan our normal lives — and do our best to stop these things before they start. And answer it appropriately when they do,” he said.
Yavuz and Langdon were among at least 61 hostages killed.
Alice Karechu, who lost her Kenyan bank-manager husband, David, in the carnage, said Tuesday, “Yesterday, we were moving around from hospital to hospital looking for him.
“Now, we’re here for the post-mortem,’’ she said according to London’s Daily Mail, standing outside the Nairobi morgue.
Additional reporting by Leonard Greene