July 19: At Nelson Mandela's home, Johannesburg, South Africa.   (Photo: Steve Lawrence/AP)

Nor does it help that the former president is a bit like a bug with eyes all over his head. Though the AIDS pandemic is currently the Clinton Foundation’s highest priority, it lists many other objectives: helping small inner-city businesses, encouraging citizen service, promoting religious reconciliation, curbing childhood obesity, fighting global warming, alleviating global poverty through empowerment measures. As a result, Clinton’s postpresidency has yet to become synonymous with anything. It’s as if we’re back to the opening days of his administration, when the aides were young, bright, and large-hearted; pandemonium reigned; and the president, eager to do everything, didn’t quite seem to stand for anything.

“I don’t think something’s not worth doing just because I can’t spend a lot of time on it, particularly if I can leave something good behind,” says Clinton, who’s particularly sensitive to this charge. He lists, as examples, the American India foundation he started in the wake of the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, and the tsunami relief he did with Bush 41 and the U.N. “If I hadn’t done any of those things,” he says, “I cannot honestly say that we’d be further along than we are with AIDS, because there’s only so much of the technical stuff I do.”

Which may also be true. Like Clinton, who turns 59 this week, his postpresidency is still young, and no one can say his AIDS efforts are dilettantish or unimpressive. After three years, his foundation has helped put 170,000 people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean on anti-retroviral treatment, which may sound like a small number, but in fact (appallingly) accounts for roughly 20 percent of the people receiving anti-retroviral treatment in developing nations.

“What Clinton has to do is find a way of organizing his influence,” says De Soto. “But for us in the Third World, we don’t see that as a problem. We’re continually inventing things. Ask Vladimir Putin whether his political party existed eight years ago. Ask any African leader whether his party existed ten, fifteen years ago. What an individual can do in the United States is limited compared to what an individual can do abroad. So I told him, with all due respect to the presidency, that I think he can be a bigger historical figure in his postpresidency—if he plays his cards right.”

“Watching him today, with the self-assurance he has with foreign leaders and the knowledge of the world he’s acquired, it’s impossible not to think, Oh, if only he’d known all that when he was president,” says Richard Holbrooke.

On a blue, sunshiny day in Johannesburg, Clinton meets Nelson Mandela for lunch at his home. It’s more modest than one would expect, pretty and mustard-colored with a surprisingly low wall surrounding it, though it’s deceptively well defended by other devices, including an intricate nest of security cameras. Before Clinton heads inside, Mandela comes out to greet us—perhaps a contingent of a dozen or so—and looks, still, as if he’s never been through the world’s most pointless and unimaginable horrors. His eyes shine; his face is as unlined as a stone. Like Clinton, he’s fast with a rejoinder, capable of putting everyone at ease (a good thing, since a fair number of people who meet him spontaneously burst into tears). When greeting the woman in front of me, who Clinton informs him is from Chicago, he smiles with evident delight. “Chicago!” he says, shaking her hand. “How is Chicago? How is Oprah?” Clinton bursts out laughing. The two head inside for lunch.

Abroad, Clinton draws much simpler reactions than he does at home, affection generally uncomplicated by ambivalence. As the Lewinsky scandal garishly unfolded, Clinton spent a lot of time abroad, including eleven days in Africa. When Mandela later accepted the Congressional Gold Medal, he swept to the president’s rescue with a subtle and eloquent defense.

“Africans saw it for exactly what it was: an abuse of power,” Clinton tells me. “They got it here. And all across the world.” Seven years later, the ordeal of his impeachment still has a vibrant, ever-present life in Clinton’s mind. “During that time, a lot of world leaders would ask, What is going on? Is this serious? That kind of stuff. I kept assuring them that nothing bad had happened to America, but that we periodically went through”—he rummages for a word—“spasms.”

At home, Clinton also has another problem: To involve himself too heavily in politics would look petty and small. As a rule, he refuses to bluntly criticize George W. Bush, whose political skills he considers “extraordinary” and whose father he genuinely likes. When I ask whether he enjoys playing good cop around the world to George W.’s bad cop, he punts, saying, “It’s not true that people dislike W. all over the world. In Russia, they probably like him more than they like me.” When I mention that both McCurry and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s former national-security adviser, told me that Clinton, too, would have gone to war with Iraq, he doesn’t deny the possibility, though he doesn’t confirm it either, saying, “I’m still not exactly sure what the intelligence really said. But I can tell you this: I would have asked the Congress for authority to use force if Saddam did not allow the inspectors back in, or did not cooperate with them, or we found weapons of mass destruction. Because he never did anything he wasn’t forced to do, at least in my experience.”