Only at one point in our discussion does he allow something harsh about his successor. “I always thought,” he says, “that bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did.”

Were Clinton to engage himself in his own party’s doings, at least directly, he’d also have problems—namely in stirring up resentment. This is precisely what happened when word got out that he’d told Good Morning America that the Democrats needed a Social Security plan of their own. Before he knew it, his phone was ringing off the hook from Democratic congressional leaders: Did he have any idea what would happen if they proposed a Social Security plan when the Republicans hadn’t even done so?

But the most powerful incentive for Clinton to concentrate his energies abroad—one that dare not speak its name—is that it keeps him out of the media spotlight, and instead keeps it shining on his wife. “Obviously, he’s not going to say anything that causes Hillary a problem,” says Dole. He reconsiders. “And if he does, he’s not going to say it more than once.”

Clinton claims, rather dubiously, not to think about Hillary’s 2008 prospects very much—“I literally spend as close to no time thinking about this as possible”—but at one point during our discussion, he unwittingly reveals the obvious: Of course he does.

What, I ask him, should the Office of the First Man be?

He chuckles, waves his hand. “I don’t know.”

But I’d really like to see a female president in my lifetime—

“I would too.”

Okay, so . . .

“Okay, I’ll give you a straight answer to that,” he says. Though at first, it doesn’t seem so straight. “On more than one occasion,” he says, “I have been invited to try to do things for the White House. The most visible, obviously, was to do that tsunami thing with George Bush’s father. And the most ceremonial was to go to the pope’s funeral.”

At this point, I interrupt and ask if he’s misunderstood my question: I was asking what the Office of the First Man should be, not the role of an ex-president. “I’m coming to that,” he says. “So I think if there were a president in my party again, no matter who it was, and I was asked to do anything, I would do it. And obviously, I feel Hillary gave me all those decades and was unbelievably good, in a thousand ways, and made a real difference to my public service. So if she asked me to do anything, I would do it.”

If she asked you to do anything, you’d do it, I repeat.

“Anything,” he answers.

Without realizing it, Clinton had answered my general question with a very specific answer. What should the Office of the First Man look like? Whatever Hillary wants it to.

Clinton has decided to take a spontaneous stroll in Stonetown, a coastal trading center in Zanzibar. Whenever he does something like this, it makes his security detail, now considerably diminished, go slightly nuts. Startled residents begin to follow him by the hundreds, choking off the town’s coral alleyways; merchants line the narrow sidewalks, beckoning him into their shops. The Secret Service forms a compact solar system around us, appraising our strange surroundings: The streets are labyrinthine, and there are open balconies everywhere. Complicating matters, Clinton is wearing a bright-white pair of pants and a pylon-orange polo shirt. He might as well be wearing a bull’s-eye.

The former president, naturally, looks oblivious to the potential hazards of the situation. The locals are repeating the same plea—“Your hand, sah, your hand”—hoping for a shake. He grabs as many as he can, his eyes both vacant and alert, the inevitable product of megacelebrity and a life that demands polite listening and aggressive solicitation in equal measure.

I have now seen this kind of hysteria over and over in Africa. In a health clinic earlier, nurses in purdah were whispering excitedly into their cell phones; in Lesotho three days ago, crowds lined the road the entire way from the airport to the king’s palace, the men cheering, the women ululating at the tops of their lungs. Later, Clinton was knighted. More ululating ensued.

The irony is that Clinton, when he was president, had a much less engaged relationship with this place than he did with other parts of the world. In fact, one could easily make the case that Africa was worse off in 2000 than it was in 1992. There was the genocide in Rwanda, where the president turned a blind eye and 800,000 people died in 100 days. There was a devastating war in the Congo, in which the president pursued a similar policy of non-intervention. And from 1992 to 2000, AIDS cases more than doubled in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet in 1998, he barely mentioned AIDS on his first trip to the continent.