Today, the foundation is working directly with fourteen governments on AIDS-treatment programs, using 200 paid employees and 100 volunteers. Its work varies considerably from place to place. In India, it just announced a program to train 700,000 new doctors. In Lesotho, it just helped launch a program to treat 750 kids.

But the AIDS initiative’s most significant contribution, perhaps, is having bargained down the cost of treatment to just $160 a person per year, mostly through pharmaceutical companies in India, South Africa, and China. That’s still far too much money for most Third World AIDS patients to pay, of course, but it’s cheap enough to entice their own governments to finally subsidize their care. Clinton’s AIDS initiative has also received $17 million in private donations this year, including nearly $1 million from the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and benefactors donate their private jets for almost every trip (on this one, the plane would otherwise have cost $800,000). Most important, Clinton has personally lured the governments of wealthier nations to contribute directly to the AIDS efforts of the countries with whom his foundation’s working. Ireland, for example, has just pledged $50 million to the government of Mozambique, and the Norwegians have pledged $25 million to Kenya and Tanzania.

It’s hard to underestimate the power of a Bill Clinton imprimatur in these countries. When a governor in an African nation tried to demand kickbacks for AIDS treatment, Clinton picked up the phone, and the matter was cleared up in minutes. After Sonia Gandhi’s coalition took control of India’s Parliament, Clinton called and suggested working with her; two weeks later, Magaziner was on an airplane to Delhi. When Clinton hugged an AIDS activist in China, the prime minister went to visit an AIDS clinic a few weeks later.

Two years ago, at Nelson Mandela’s 85th-birthday party—a 1,600-person extravaganza whose guest list included everyone from Bono to F. W. de Klerk—Clinton and Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South Africa, got up in the middle of the festivities, trailed by Magaziner. “They just . . . walked out,” recalls Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “And went into a private room.” They returned half an hour later. It was after that meeting that Mbeki, famously reluctant to even acknowledge that HIV caused AIDS, agreed to allow the Clinton Foundation to assist his government in preparing an AIDS-treatment plan. (It was adopted by the Cabinet the following November.)

Back in Zanzibar, Clinton concludes his visit to the community center with a group photo. Two kids climb into his lap and instinctively lean in when the camera snaps. “Bye,” he tells them, before getting up. “I wish I could play.”

The whole week of August 30, 2004, Clinton noticed a persistent tightness in his chest. By that Thursday, he noticed his chest was clenching even when he was at a standstill. We all know what happened after that: bypass surgery on September 6, followed by surgery for obscure complications on March 10. Clinton says that in retrospect, he was symptomatic as far back as 2001.

What were his symptoms?

“Well, uh . . . ” He pauses. “The one I feel comfortable mentioning is that although I lost a bunch of weight in 2001, I couldn’t run a mile without stopping and walking. It didn’t make any sense.”

Which is interesting. Though now, of course, I can’t help but wonder what symptoms he’s not comfortable mentioning.

What should the Office of the First Man look like? “Obviously,” says Clinton, “I feel Hillary gave me all those decades, and made a real difference to my public service. So if she asked me to do anything, I would do it.”

Either way, Clinton’s health, as far as I can tell, is basically restored, though his aides still beg him to slow down. He’s not jogging, but he walks four or five miles when he can, and he goes to bed very, very late (on this trip, he never retires before four in the morning). His schedule, which borders on lunacy, is quasi-presidential: He and Hillary have basically given up on connecting each weekend, though they speak every day by phone. (The one conversation I overheard sounded . . . utterly normal. Sorry. He was describing a golf course he glimpsed in Dar es Salaam.) When in Europe, he also tries to pop in on Chelsea, who’s doing a health-care consulting project in the London office of McKinsey & Company. (They spoke four times the day of the second London subway bombings. Clinton, sounding more like a dad than a man who used to receive daily intelligence briefings, said the terrorists were just trying to spook Londoners.)

Clinton’s Harlem office continues to hum. He receives 14,000 pieces of mail a month; the job offers keep rolling in. (Recently, he got three separate offers to do movie cameos, all declined.) He still gives three or four paid speeches per month, at anywhere from $150,000 to $250,000 a pop, though his aides say the money he receives from poorer countries goes into his foundation.