Citizen Clinton Up Close

No one--including his wife--knows what Clinton will cop to in his book, due in the fall of 2003. He has 80 hours of contemporaneous White House audiotapes he secretly made with Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. (They were vetted by Kenneth Starr's office.) But former aides are worried about the absence of other sources of anecdotal information. For fear of subpoenas, the Clinton administration had no exit interviews or oral-history projects. "I'd be sitting in an important meeting, the president would be making a great point and I'd notice, 'Gee, I'm not taking notes and neither is anyone else'," recalls one top aide.

To refresh his memory, the ex-president hired Ted Widmer, a professor and former White House speechwriter, to interview him on what are called "book-talking days." Clinton usually follows these with "book-writing days," where he writes in longhand, usually in Chappaqua. While he says he'll probably write 1,200 pages and cut it in half, nothing has been turned in yet to Robert Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf, and longtime Clinton associates fear that, as one says, "the process is going to be what all Clinton writing projects are--a train wreck."

But when it appears, Clinton will hawk the hell out of it all over the world. And Barnett came up with a novel marketing idea: extra chapters for foreign editions. So the Spanish-language version, for instance, will feature an extra section on the Clinton-led bailout of the Mexican economy, the European edition will include additional material on Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and the Middle Eastern version will detail more of the peace talks. Knowing Clinton, the joke goes, he'll write one version for the Arabs, and another for the Israelis.

Clinton is still a formidable if crass fund-raiser. Just 24 hours after having lunch with the ex-president, one wealthy donor was hit up by an aide asking for a library donation. Insulted, he refused. Even so, Clinton continues to be the major strategist in his party--the self-described "not-so-elder elder statesman." But wary of making himself a target, he prefers lashing the GOP in private. It's one thing to point across a Manhattan party, as he did last month, and say, "That bartender's Social Security shouldn't be sacrificed to cut my taxes"; another to attack a president far more popular than he was at his peak.

But even if he won't lead the Democrats' charge, Clinton spends hours on the phone with 2004 presidential hopefuls. And he'll stump this fall for Democrats, including several who worked for him--if they think it will help. Some, like former chief of staff Erskine Bowles, who is running for the Senate in conservative North Carolina, don't want Clinton's help; others, like former Labor secretary Robert Reich, who torched his 30-year friendship with Clinton with a critical book, likely won't get it.

After the buckraking and the memoirs, Clinton says he wants to do some serious good in the world. "I hope within five years to be in public service full time," he says. Already, Clinton has helped establish a City Year program (the forerunner to AmeriCorps) in South Africa. And he's popularizing the provocative ideas of Brazilian economist Hernando de Soto, who argues that poor people worldwide are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in assets (mostly in the land they squatted on) that with some well-placed legal reform can be turned into collateral, unlocking immense new development capital.