Citizen Clinton Up Close

All the talking and traveling is apparently good for Clinton's mental health, easing the transition from the frenzy of the presidency. But the trips are different for him now. "He's able to meet new people, which he loves, in much more relaxed settings," says his wife. "He gets to visit tourist sites he never had time for." Her Senate career is also a plus, providing him with what one close friend calls a "healthy pipeline to the action," though she says "he's plenty plugged in" anyway. After Hillary was reduced to tears by booing firefighters at Paul McCartney's Madison Square Garden event to honor the victims of September 11, Clinton was angry and protective. And in his own speech, he gave the senator a valuable political lesson in how to tame an unfriendly crowd: produce something the audience can cheer, in this case the bracelet of a fallen hero.

"My general sense is that he's not having as hard a time as people thought he would have," says the Rev. Tony Campolo, one of the "pastoral counselors" Clinton arranged to talk to regularly after the Lewinsky story broke in 1998, instead of seeking therapy. "He stays intensely busy. He's on the road. That has a way of keeping him distracted from the existential situation."

When he's not traveling (about half the time), Clinton stays in Chappaqua and rides 45 minutes to his Harlem office in a black SUV driven by the Secret Service, always returning at night to the "old farmhouse," he says, even after a late event in the city. He's still a night owl, completing paperwork (or calling friends) until 1:30 a.m. some nights and sleeping as late as 9 a.m. Senator Clinton lives at their house on Embassy Row in Washington during the week, but she's often back in New York state seeing constituents. They try to arrange their schedules to overlap for three-day weekends in Chappaqua, and roughly twice a month when the former president takes the US Airways shuttle to Washington, where he plays golf as a congressional spouse at the Army Navy Club and keeps a low profile. (His other domestic flights are usually on corporate jets paid for by those inviting him to speak.)

Fathoming the truth about the Clinton marriage remains impossible, but he has told New York friends that unlike the 18th-century bond between John and Abigail Adams depicted in David McCullough's best seller, "distance does not make the heart grow fonder" in any marriage nowadays. So they both say they work hard to carve out time together, schedules permitting. Of course he'll take any excuse to go to England to visit Chelsea, who is studying at Oxford and is now fair game for Fleet Street. "He's very committed to seeing his family life succeed," Campolo says. "Any rumors of affairs are erroneous."

And yet the ex-president's existential predicament remains. What to do? Where to focus? How to channel the legendary energies and appetites? To the extent that Clinton has identified the priorities of his ex-presidency, they are roughly as follows: make money for his family's future, so that "if I drop dead, my wife can continue in public service and my daughter will be all right"; make progress on his book and on building his presidential library in Little Rock (which he visits once a month); make a difference on "nation building" (his term) issues like economic empowerment, conflict resolution and community service.

In the United States, many of his nonpaying appearances are connected to promoting the initiatives of his presidency. Last week, for instance, he went to a book party for Sarah Brady, who worked with him pushing gun control. And he hastily arranged a Harlem event to broadcast word that roughly 5 million working people have as much as $5,000 a year in unclaimed money coming to them thanks to the Clinton-era expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit ("We should have changed the boring name," he says with frustration). Sensitive to the charge that the good times were not his doing, he was cheered by U.S. Census figures showing that while the Reagan boom lifted 50,000 children out of poverty, the Clinton boom did the same for 4.1 million.