Citizen Clinton Up Close

"We live in an historical period when the fanaticism of America is on the right, and it has an apparatus to support it," he says, echoing his wife's 1998 argument about a "vast right-wing conspiracy." His enemies "felt entitled to rule," to deny his legitimacy as president from day one and sully every part of his record, even after he left office. "They think about me apparently a lot more than I think about them now," he insists with a dismissive wave of the hand, which, considering the intensity of his expression, might not be strictly true. "One night last year he called about 1 a.m. ranting and raving about something," says Julia Payne, his spokesperson. "And I said, 'Sir, are you watching Fox again?' "

Often the smile and the knife are delivered as one. Last week Clinton was chuckling over the fact that his first post-presidential interview is going to NEWSWEEK, a magazine he calls "the house organ of Paula Jones." Then, out of nowhere, Clinton the Score Keeper made a cryptic reference to the obscure case of an anti-Castro terrorist named Orlando Bosch, who blew up an airliner in 1976, killing 73, and was freed from jail in 1990 by the then President Bush under pressure from his son Jeb and Cuban exiles. "I swore I wouldn't answer questions about Marc Rich until [former president] Bush answered about Orlando Bosch," he says with a forced grin. But he did, admitting for the first time that his hard feelings toward prosecutors in his own case played a role in the Rich decision.

With notable exceptions, Clinton isn't a grudge holder. Of course if he were, he wouldn't have many people to talk to. His usual pattern is to vent, wallow and then move on. (Hillary is less forgiving.) Even the cold relationship with Al Gore thawed on Sept. 13, when Clinton waited up until 3 in the morning for Gore, grounded by the crisis, to arrive in Chappaqua from Buffalo by car. They talked until dawn, and have stayed in occasional touch.

There's a wistful and amused lilt to his conversation. Peering south toward Central Park from his office on 125th Street, Clinton told his old friend Vernon Jordan: "Who would have guessed when we met 30 years ago that you'd end up with an office in midtown and I'd have one in Harlem?" The gossip items and tabloid nostalgia trips are almost a joke to him now. "Tonya Harding looks like a pretty tough cookie to me." He chuckled after I asked him about the figure skater's boxing match with Paula Jones.

It's not a bad life, and he knows it. He golfs with Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase; dodges a flasher on a balcony in Paris ("Whatever you do, don't look!" James Carville told him as he shook hands below); hangs with Chris Tucker, who is researching a movie about a black president, at the Voodoo Lounge in L.A. ("He's like a 30-year-old black man," says Tucker, "and worse than Puffy with the two-way" pager); shops for bikinis and sarongs (for Chelsea, he says) with Anthony Hopkins in Brazil. Hot Internet rumors--that he had Mohamed Atta released from an Israeli jail or hosted Kenneth Lay in the Lincoln Bedroom--are false. So are most of the tabloid stories, but it's hard to know which ones. He long ago lost the benefit of the doubt.

The ex-president is thick-skinned about tabloids but hair-trigger sensitive when it comes to his record, especially on terrorism. He has dominated more than one social gathering with descriptions of how his team tried repeatedly to kill Osama bin Laden, foiled at least a half-dozen terrorist attacks in the United States and more than tripled the antiterrorism budget of the FBI and other agencies. He reminds his listeners, some of whom wander off to bed before he has finished holding forth, that the GOP blocked his anti-money-laundering legislation (aimed at Al Qaeda), not to mention stopping his efforts to rein in the book-cooking accountants later responsible for Enron.