Citizen Clinton Up Close

Not surprisingly, Clinton begs to differ. While he knows that having sex with an intern and lying about it tarnished his presidency forever ("The biggest wounds in life are all self-inflicted," he says ruefully), he'll be damned if he lets that wreck everything he touched. He comforts himself that he had his shot during an important transitional time in world history, served longer than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and amassed plenty of accomplishments that will stand up to historical scrutiny, if only people could be persuaded to focus on them.

September 11 rendered that even harder. After the attacks, he set about doing something positive--working with Bob Dole to raise $100 million to help put the children of victims through college. But Clinton made no secret of his frustration over missing the biggest presidential leadership challenge of his generation. "It was painful for him," says one person who saw him last fall. "He has prepared all of his life for something truly big like this." Now the ex-president is contesting even that, insisting that the war on terrorism, while important, "is not like World War II at all" and will eventually be seen in the context not of the Bush presidency but of Clinton's global achievements.

This is the Clinton who infuriates people, but they better learn to live with it. Anyone hoping he'll just fade away for good, like John Wayne Bobbitt or a busted dot-com, is bound to be disappointed. By law, he cannot try, as Teddy Roosevelt did, to return to the White House (except in 2008 or 2012 as a spouse), and he says he's not interested in being mayor of New York or holding any other public office. But the greatest natural candidate of our time has already begun to run anyway, a campaign of the past (to make his humiliating impeachment an ever-smaller part of his legacy) and of the future (to be an effective ex-president). He's trailing Jimmy Carter badly in the latter contest, but it's early yet. At this point in his ex-presidency, Carter was holed up in Plains, Ga., writing his memoirs, rarely venturing into town, much less across the world.

Like a prime-time hit now in syndication, the Clinton show today is less visible but more profitable. After a lecture-date dry spell in the United States because of the pardons (foreign bookings were unaffected), Clinton's speaking schedule filled up quickly. His incisive tour of global challenges is a winner with audiences. Clinton's lawyer Bob Barnett says he has a file with $100 million in promotional offers in it. Game shows in Italy and England are looking for a host, and NBC's "The West Wing" offered a guest appearance. None has been accepted. And the rumors of Hollywood deals are false.

Clinton's legal travails are not entirely behind him. A New York grand jury is hearing evidence on the pardons, and in February a House subcommittee headed by Rep. Doug Ose recommended a Justice Department investigation of $400,000 in gifts the Clintons received as they left office.

The gift rap still angers former Clinton aides, who note that the "scandal" was mostly about a few items being mislabeled by White House personnel. The china registry set up by Clinton friends at an Omaha department store was a bit gauche, they concede, but they add that barely a peep was raised when friends bought Ronald and Nancy Reagan a house in California and gave George and Barbara Bush more than $100,000 in gifts, more evidence of what Clinton calls a "double standard." The supposed trashing of Air Force One in Clinton's final days (fanned by the Bushies) was simply untrue.