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" Eight years can burn a man down to nothing. So why does he seem bigger than ever? HE MAN IS FLYING BACKWARD. HE IS seated in a helicopter, glancing down at the mansions and mobile homes of America as they scroll past his window. And he is playing cards. He has extremely long, tapered fingers, and the deck seems miniature as he shuffles and deals. The ever-present can of Diet Coke seems miniature; his aides seem miniature. Even the earth below--the hazy hummocks of Connecticut that give way to the Hudson River that shoulders past the borough of Manhattan--it all seems somehow miniature, simply waiting there to be touched, to be animated by the man.  Despite the man&amp;#039;s size--six two with a silvery mane of hair that adds at least another inch or two, his fingers double the average length--he is surprisingly nimble, flourishing the cards over the table, rushing time. This game, Oh, Hell, was taught to him by a famous filmmaker one summer on a family vacation on Long Island, and he likes to play fast. When he&amp;#039;s losing, when he&amp;#039;s been trumped or plays out the wrong card, he amends the name of the game by saying: Oh, shit! Shit, shit, shit! But he&amp;#039;s smiling. Shit, he says, then a moment later, out of nowhere, he slams down a winner. See that, he says, grinning coyly, I caught y&amp;#039;all sleepin&amp;#039;!  The man has traveled a lifetime in these last eight years, and a lifetime again from where he started. He grew up in a crowded ranch house on a crowded street in Hot Springs, and now he lives in a marble house, and commoners gawk through the gates for a glimpse of him. He wears French cuffs and shining, size-13 black cap-toe shoes and a pale-blue tie the same color as his pale eyes. He has people to carry his tailored suits and tuxedos around behind him so that he can change several times a day. He has a Navy steward who carries his Diet Cokes. He has spoken to thirty-five thousand screaming people in a square in Riga, reached to greet emotional throngs in the ruined streets of Belfast, embraced AIDS victims in Nigeria, and cried with widows brought to grief by drug traffickers in Cartagena.  He has felt their hands with his own, seen the hardest human emotions in their eyes. And he has tried to carry them all within his huge, enveloping body, on his wide shoulders. After all, he is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is the American flag. And then everything else, too: McDonald&amp;#039;s, stealth fighters, and Satan; a late-night joke, Elvis, and God. He understands the gravity of this, his station, all the good and bad that gets projected onto him, and how, even though he is human, he is still meant to reflect back the best of his country. And he understands how his mere physical presence--the bulk of his body, the corona of hair--is a message of hope to some and, for others, a totem to despise.  Soon it will be over. There will be someone else to despise. He will give the last speech. He will shake the last hand. (Wasn&amp;#039;t it just moments ago that he shook the first hand?) With goodbye, the perks will disappear, too. When he wants to golf now, he flies his plane to Florida, to a course that closes just for him, a course surrounded by men in suits concealing MP5 submachine guns, and Greg Norman meets him at the first tee. When he throws a party, Barbra Streisand sings for him, kings come to stand near him, people pay $10,000 just to share a word with him. When he wants one of &amp;quot;them thar peach Tiazzis&amp;quot; at Starbucks, his motorcade grinds to a halt, agents disembark from black SUVs, search and mag everyone in the caf\u00E9, and then in he strolls, the man himself, gleaming and pressed, smiling easily, his silver hair glowing, reaching out his hand--Hey there! How ya doing? Oh, it&amp;#039;s real good to see you! Whattaya eatin&amp;#039;? He brings with him his heightened reality. He animates everything. These are simply the facts of his life. There are no red lights.  He is the forty-second person to hold this job. And after eight years, he has dissolved into the office. It&amp;#039;s not clear who he is anymore. It&amp;#039;s not entirely clear what he&amp;#039;s done, what fingerprints he&amp;#039;s left on the furniture. People will argue about the man until the day he dies--and then they&amp;#039;ll go on arguing. He goes over it in his own mind, in almost every interview he gives now. Government ran a huge annual deficit when he took office; there is no deficit today. Economy was in the tank; the economy has grown at an unprecedented rate and grows still. His fiercest enemies once had the upper hand; his fiercest enemies have now been laid waste. His party was on the ropes; his party has prospered. He has crafted crime bills and trade agreements and education initiatives and pushed them all into law. He has tried to move his country forward by applying his photographic mind to the future. And most of all, he has tried to remind people of the one political faith he holds most deeply: The system can work; believe in the system. Above all, he is a man of belief.  Which is why these last days are increasingly complicated, why these last hours suddenly seem so full of the past for the man, so permeated by sadness. In odd moments--at a fundraiser, in the presence of his wife--he seems to choke up. He curls and presses his lower lip as if holding himself in. He has lived his entire life for this job, against all odds seemed destined for it, and now, having just turned fifty-four, where will he go? What will he do? A hard truth has fallen on him: He is no longer young. He has more yesterdays than he has tomorrows. And now, as he coldly assesses himself, he wonders how his better days will measure against the destructive chaos of his worst. There was that night three Septembers ago, a depth a man reaches once in a lifetime. Hunted and trapped by his enemies, undone by his own flesh, the man sat alone in his marble house working out a statement until after midnight, scribbling a pen across sheaves of paper that bore his seal. The next day, after meeting with a group of religious leaders, he stood before a shock of cameras, and, squinting into the glare of pale lights, he put on his reading glasses in order to decipher his own writing. I have been on a journey to the rock-bottom truth of where I am, he said. I have sinned. For the first time, the man looked small, almost afraid, deferring to some higher power. He said, I ask to be able to love my neighbor, all my neighbors, as myself, and to let the work of my hands be pleasing. And now, with so little time left, the question lingers: Has the work of his hands been pleasing? In the helicopter, in the late-afternoon light, the man&amp;#039;s head nearly brushes the ceiling. He is shuffling cards, the wedding ring on his long finger glinting gold, then he deals them in clusters. He smells faintly of soap. The helicopter revolves around the tip of Wall Street. The World Trade towers recede and loom again. The earth falls away and comes back. The river glitters. Cards are played. And the man is laughing. Shit, shit, shit! he says, then throws trump, winning one hand. Then another. Beyond the window, his limousine suddenly appears. There are agents and firemen fanning out over the landing zone--and the press pool as well, which hunts him every minute of every day, there to catalog even his allergies. He doesn&amp;#039;t bother to look as the helicopter touches down, just straightens himself once and rises toward the door, in the almost feathery way of a preacher. Let&amp;#039;s go see if we can&amp;#039;t do some good, he says, grinning, and now he ducks out into all that open space, past the marine guards who stand stock-still for him, saluting, past the horde of frozen people who move again only after he strides by them into the city. TIME IS EVAPORATING, like uncovered turpentine. Soon the can will be empty. At the United Nations, during his last security-council meeting, the man sits in a horseshoe with other world leaders. He is more than a head taller than everyone except the French president, whose Gallic nose makes him look like the human incarnation of the Concorde. As others speak, the man reads through the text of his speech, crossing out lines, sipping from a glass of Diet Coke. He leans back to take an idea from his secretary of state, a direct, owlish woman with clusters of beautiful stones at her ears. He sends a note over to the British prime minister, a joke of some sort, as the Bangladeshi prime minister carries on soporifically, and they both chuckle. He tunes in, then out again. He is a famously voracious multitasker. He can do a crossword, watch golf on television, get briefed on a conflict in Africa, and work on a speech, all at once. An adviser, exasperated by the man&amp;#039;s seeming lack of interest during one briefing, demanded that he repeat what the adviser had just said. And then the man did, verbatim. When he gives speeches--he calls them &amp;quot;talks&amp;quot;--he often looks as if he were making music. His body is an instrument. He leans forward and flicks his long fingers in time, as if he&amp;#039;s throwing cards. His hands, wrapped by veins, thump on the podium along with the point he is making. The thumping comes in three variations: the one-finger tap, a quiet notification of the rising action; the open-palm bump that begins a backbeat as his voice gains decibels; and then the full-on throttle. At a late-night fundraiser at a racetrack in New Jersey, the man is speaking in the paddock area. The faint smell of manure hangs in the air, and the crowd is racetracky, dressed in sequins and bad ties. The man appears as if he&amp;#039;d landed from another planet, hair and pale-blue tie glowing. He remembers this place from other elections, says it holds wonderful memories for him. He seems at home, draped over the podium, making eye contact with about five hundred people. Crime, he says, tapping, What&amp;#039;s our position? Our position has been one hundred thousand more police on the street. Their position is we were wrong when we passed the Brady Bill (bumping now), we were wrong when we passed the one hundred thousand police on the street. (An incredulous look, a finger flick.) All I know is, crime is at a twenty-five-year low, gun crime&amp;#039;s down 35 percent. (Pounding.) We tried it their way, we tried it our way. (Applause.) Our way works!  This year&amp;#039;s election is the first since 1974 in which the man hasn&amp;#039;t run, and yet he still runs. He gives talk after talk in support of his wife&amp;#039;s senate campaign; his vice-president, who runs for his office now; and his party. The speeches are colloquial, a reflection of the man&amp;#039;s mind--lucid and digressive, funny and righteous. After one of the man&amp;#039;s State of the Union addresses, one of his fiercest political enemies said: I hate the son of a bitch, but the words go right into you. One of the man&amp;#039;s speechmakers jokes that he writes Hemingway and the man delivers Faulkner. Fourteen-, eighteen-, twenty-hour days, he is kinetically, compulsively unable to stop. He goes to penthouses and country clubs and ballrooms, eats finger food, chugs Diet Coke, reaches out with his own huge hands to grasp all the other reaching hands. He has delivered nearly 150 of these speeches and raised nearly $100 million this year alone, because so much seems to depend on victory. He&amp;#039;s never worked harder on an election in his life, and so he knows something about almost every race in the country. He can name exactly who is squaring off for the state legislature in some forgotten corner of Ohio, and then enumerate the reasons why that race is important. He&amp;#039;s not running, but then again he is. For redemption, for history, for his wife&amp;#039;s affection, for his daughter&amp;#039;s regard, for himself. At another fundraiser in another town, the man is the sun, worshiped and adored. The women are wrapped in cashmere, men smoke cigars, and the wait staff circulates with crab cakes and chardonnay. The man has come to support the reelection campaign of a congressman named Rush Holt, who rises to speak. The man sits behind him, listening, giving weight to the candidate by his mere presence. And when Holt says, I was raised to believe politics was honorable, the man makes a face in righteous affirmation, nods his head yes, and mouths the words, That&amp;#039;s right. That&amp;#039;s right. Each day has the feeling of a revival meeting. So, has the work of his hands been pleasing? He has sinned, but can he be saved? They can ruin my reputation, he said, standing before the shock of cameras during the blackest days, but they can&amp;#039;t touch my character. After a day at the UN, after bilateral and multilateral and caucus meetings, and after a change into his tuxedo, he motorcades through the streets--traffic frozen for his passage, crowds held behind police barriers, sirens echoing in deafening pulses off the city walls--to a party that he, the man, is throwing for 170 world leaders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every minute on the minute, a new motorcade pulls up to the museum, depositing all the countries of the planet. They walk into the marble hall to a fife-and-drum colonial greeting and then are led to a skylit courtyard, where the man himself stands before a Tiffany fountain, before bubbling water and shards of aqua-green-and-blue glass. He is America, framed by the fountain, greeting his guests for the hours it takes them all to arrive.  Never once does he stop smiling, never once does he fail to strike a familiar note that opens his guests in unexpected ways. How are ya, Sheik, he says when introduced to Kuwait, I can&amp;#039;t believe you made my party! And the sheik is tickled, deferential, pleased as punch to be here at the man&amp;#039;s party. Next come Peru, Cambodia, Mongolia. They are announced over a microphone by a military aide, and he greets them equally, as if they were lost kin from Arkansas. Some, knowing this will be their only audience with him, draw close for an extended word, an impromptu bi-lat. That&amp;#039;s when an adviser steps in to take notes, for the man is so congenial, so electrically caught up in every moment, so gifted in the liquidities of language, that his aides have chased down dignitaries after meetings, saying, Now, he didn&amp;#039;t promise anything back there. One of his dreams has been to bring peace to the Holy Land; if he could right the lives of millions of people there, that act alone might release him from the weight of his own sins. Of course, peace is virtually impossible. Even now people are dying. Yet he works beyond reason, knows every dark detail and minute grievance. He&amp;#039;s spent hours on the phone with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders. In these last months, he&amp;#039;s met with them together and alone, again and again, brought them to his retreat in the Maryland mountains, often meeting from midnight to dawn. He refuses to believe that, after internalizing both sides within the enormousness of his very person, he can&amp;#039;t reconcile them. The Palestinian is a short, froggy man who tonight, as usual, wears fatigues and his black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh. Even before he is announced, he waddles up to the man, beaming, arms outstretched, and hugs him. Yasir, the man says, I&amp;#039;m so glad you&amp;#039;re here! They stand rocking with each other, and for the longest time Yasir won&amp;#039;t let him go, his face buried in the man&amp;#039;s belly. Then the Israeli appears, looking every bit as short as the Palestinian but dapper in a suit. The man opens his arms wide: Ehud, hello, how are you? And they, too, embrace. Of all the world leaders present, it is only the Russian president with whom the man has had chilly relations. Though the Russian president was recently pictured in newspapers around the world being flipped onto a mat by a Japanese schoolgirl, he is a wiry black belt in judo whose name reflects the spit and snarl of who he is: Putin. Next to the man, he, too, is short--and a bit dour. They shake hands, standing apart at arm&amp;#039;s length, tentatively sharing translated words as a photographer prepares to take their picture. And yet somehow the man gets the Russian president to laugh. Putin&amp;#039;s thin lips curl, and then the Russian president takes a step forward, softly chuckling, and says something back. The man is so disarming, so adept at this one-on-one. He gestures to a statue over his right shoulder, a bronze nude of a young woman called The Vine about twenty feet away. Her head is thrown back in the rapture of a dance, poised on tippy-toes. She holds one languid arm forward and her full breasts rotate skyward. Her long limbs, her muscled haunches, her tangled hair--all of her is glistening and chocolate-colored. She is hard to look past. I sure know better than to pose in front of that, the man says, laughing. And the Russian president continues laughing, says something suggestive in return, and the man says, Oh, no, no, that, I can assure you, is not my problem. And though she remains there as the other guests come and go, this glistening statue of a woman wrapped by a vine, the man doesn&amp;#039;t look back. No, he doesn&amp;#039;t look back once at the naked woman. EVERY MOVE FORWARD is haunted by the past. Wasn&amp;#039;t it moments ago he shook his first hand? Placed his own on the Bible to take the oath? Weren&amp;#039;t he and his wife settling into their new home, giddy with expectation, certain of their worthiness? Wasn&amp;#039;t his daughter just turning twelve, wearing braces, and his mother flying in for holidays? From the very start, he always felt he could double, triple, quadruple time--long ago training himself to live on five hours of sleep--but suddenly time has halved and quartered and become irreversible, each day another marker of his losses.  What he wouldn&amp;#039;t give to have his momma back for an afternoon. She was a willful woman, part Irish and part Cherokee, who painted on thick eyebrows, glued on fake eyelashes, and wore short-shorts and a tube top come spring. She had four husbands. The first, his daddy, was a heavy-equipment salesman who died three months before the man himself was born. His mother told him about it when he was five, talked to him just like an adult, because he already seemed to be one. The boy&amp;#039;s daddy had been working in Chicago and started back on a Friday afternoon to see her in Arkansas, a case of bourbon in the back of his maroon Buick as a gift for the boy&amp;#039;s grandfather. Trying to make time, he crushed the accelerator, zooming past car after car, crossing the Mississippi River on a clear spring night in Cairo, Illinois, and then rocketing into Missouri. The radio was blaring, the river flashed black, and the car flew. Somewhere near midnight, a tire blew out, the Buick lifted off the highway into a cornfield, flipped twice, and settled on its roof. For hours, passersby searched, but the boy&amp;#039;s daddy was nowhere to be found. The car radio still played and the headlights shone on the field, illuminating the dirt and the cornstalks, but he had vanished. Later, someone spotted a hand reaching from a drainage ditch of fetid water, which, of course, was him. There was only a small bruise on the back of his head. He&amp;#039;d drowned. What the man found out after his inauguration many years later was that his daddy had had other wives and children, which came as a shock even to the man&amp;#039;s mother. Though it shouldn&amp;#039;t have--his daddy had needed to merge with a greater whole. At the least, his daddy had another son, who once wrote to the man. His mother said, Don&amp;#039;t be surprised if there aren&amp;#039;t thirty more after him. As much as his father was a mystery, the man was half made of him--and of whatever drove him those last dark miles to a terrible end. The man grew up calling his mother&amp;#039;s second husband &amp;quot;Daddy,&amp;quot; but his stepfather was known far and wide as Dude. He could be a kind father, but he turned on and off like a faucet, often sitting down to Sunday lunch with a tumbler of whiskey, then going after the man&amp;#039;s mother. The man remembers watching Dude pull a pistol on her and shoot a bullet that went into the wall by her knee. For years, Dude terrorized his family like this--pressed scissor blades to his mother&amp;#039;s neck, punched her, threatened the children--until he became terror itself.  The man was fourteen at the time. From his own bedroom, he could hear Dude going after his mother. She was moving furniture in front of her body to block her husband, while his little brother--his mother&amp;#039;s son with Dude--was screaming. And then he heard Dude get his mother into their bedroom and lock the door. When the man broke through their door, Dude was slumped in drunken exhaustion, his mother shaken and disheveled, and the man stood over him. Daddy, he said, stand up! But Dude couldn&amp;#039;t, crumpled there, sorry-drunk woozy, wearing a sad pair of boxer shorts. He called out his name again, but Dude wouldn&amp;#039;t rise, couldn&amp;#039;t. So the man, who was by now two inches taller than his stepfather, with already-huge hands, grabbed him by the arms and lifted him, pinned him in space, and fixed him straight in the eye. Then he put him down, poured him back into a spineless slouch. They called the police, who hauled Dude to jail for the night. And it mostly became the man&amp;#039;s house after that. Even his stepfather shrunk around him. People are formed in invisible crucibles. We know nothing of their private griefs and pathologies. Of the bullets and scissor blades that push them out into the world. Of their angels and devils that come and go each day. We know only whom they aspire to be, by the face they wear in public. When he was sixteen, the man knew what he could do better than anything else. In college, he was twice elected class president, worked the campus as if he were running for the real thing. He perfected sleeplessness. He couldn&amp;#039;t cram enough people into a day; he couldn&amp;#039;t shake enough hands with his own ever-extended mitt. By the time he was thirty, the man had been elected attorney general of Arkansas, and by thirty-two he was governor. He married a woman who, almost impossibly, was more idealistic and more driven than he. (And when she announced that she was keeping her own name, the man&amp;#039;s mother cried.) He was racing time already--and leading. He poured himself into the job. And then when he ran for reelection two years later, contrary to every expectation and poll, he lost. Shocked, rejected, he fell into a terrible depression. How could others not see him the way he saw himself? He got in a car and drove around Arkansas, talking in coffee shops at dawn, shaking hands, sharing a noon hamburger, asking people what he&amp;#039;d done wrong. He confessed to them that he&amp;#039;d been arrogant. Solipsism, vanity, and ego--yes, he had all of those things (perhaps in greater measure than other public men)--but he had something else, too: He could see into people. When he spoke to somebody, time stopped; they were all that mattered. His emotions bubbled to the surface and met their emotions. The problem of the person before him became his personal problem, for he saw remnants of himself everywhere. In order to save himself, he would have to save everybody. He ran for governor again and won--then was reelected and reelected and reelected and reelected. His life was a campaign and a crusade. In a poor state, he hoped to lift people up. He worked at improving roads and schools and health care for the poor. And yet, some of his earlier idealism gave way to a new practicality, a resolve to win. Now he engaged in some of the favor-for-favor politics that actually got things done in his state. He tried to forge middle ground but made enemies nonetheless. Rumors dogged him--of marital infidelities and sweetheart deals. Some had just enough truth to get the man in trouble but always enough falsity to allow him to keep going. He was in a hurry, but had he lost track of himself? If there was a different version of the man for everyone who knew him, who was he? To his mother, the man could do no wrong. Growing up, there&amp;#039;d been no rules in her house except for the truth. No curfews, no demands, just the truth. When he was a boy, she would say, Honest Injun? And he would say, Honest Injun. And when he did, there was no doubt in her mind that he&amp;#039;d told the truth. When she died seven years ago, they closed eighty miles of road from Hot Springs to the cemetery in her birthplace so the man could bury her. The funeral procession itself was a mile long. American flags flew on overpasses and people lined the route, because he had come from her. There were protesters, of course. They held placards full of personal slurs, hieroglyphics of hate. The preacher delivered the eulogy, and though he considered speaking, the man remained silent. Recounting how the man&amp;#039;s mother had overcome the deaths of three husbands, physical abuse, and single-motherhood to see her son become president, the preacher said: She was like a rubber ball. The harder life put her down, the higher she bounced.  She did not know how to quit, the preacher said. Sitting in the front row, the man was consoled by those words. And that night he left on an eight-day state visit to Europe and Russia, passing forward through seven time zones, taking his grief with him. Some years afterward, when one of his staffers lost her mother, he was quiet a moment, and then he said, I miss my momma, too. WHILE HIS WIFE CAMPAIGNS IN NEW YORK, the man sleeps alone in the master bedroom, in the king bed, with his dog, Buddy. And yet there are still nights when she returns to make a cameo, clips back into the marble house in her half-heels, with that familiar intensity, looking for him. At the man&amp;#039;s final state dinner, for the prime minister of India, he wears a tuxedo with a white handkerchief floating like smoke from a front pocket. And she is radiating beside him, in a coppery leopard-print gown, a stunning thing, really, with a gold necklace and earrings. Into a huge cloth tent, their guests--seven hundred business leaders, media personalities, diplomats, and movie stars--arrive two by two. A famous model sweeps in wearing a body-hugging beige dress and stops everybody cold in their tracks. The man gladly presides over these people, but something has happened here since his first state dinner, since this house became his: Some part of his power is now derived solely from his wife. When he leaves office--as time cancels him--she will be the one vitally connected to the political process. There is no vice versa anymore. Even as the chilled pea-and-cilantro soup is served over marble potatoes, as the chandeliers glisten and the pale hydrangeas shudder on the tables, the man&amp;#039;s wife has emerged from the shadows of his eight years here. And even the guest of honor thanks her for taking time from her busy campaign to indulge them this evening. Yes, there have been moments in his marriage when their relationship has gone into eclipse, then burst back in bright bolts of light. Times when they didn&amp;#039;t share the same bed--and times, too, when he wondered why that fact was anybody&amp;#039;s business. Whatever the nature of their love, they love each other, that much is obvious in the way he reaches for her hand in odd moments and kisses her goodbye, presses his lips to the temple of her head. In the way they&amp;#039;ve stayed together for twenty-five years. They met at law school. She was sitting in the library and he was watching her from across the room and she looked up and caught him watching and then she, a twenty-three-year-old woman with dark hair and Coke-bottle glasses, walked the length of the library to a spot in front of him and said, Well, if you&amp;#039;re going to keep staring at me, you might as well know my name, and then told her name. For the only time in his life, he was struck dumb. And now she is running for senator. She&amp;#039;s been called a carpetbagger, a Jew-hater, a Machiavellian striver willing to abandon pride for position. Even nastier smears. The man and his wife know them well. They know that they are seen by many only as cheats and corrupters who would turn out kin if it were politically expedient. These minds, they know, they will never change. I ask that God give me a clean heart, he told the shock of cameras after betraying her, let me walk by faith and not sight. His wife campaigns as he did, tirelessly but with more discipline and less passion, and suddenly she needs him more because of it. At a nursery school in Westchester, they appear together to talk about violence in the media. Together, man and wife work the rope line afterward and then greet more people outside. She is a big fan of the television show The West Wing, starring Martin Sheen as the president and Rob Lowe as his call-girl-dating speechwriter. It&amp;#039;s the only sacred bit of network programming on her schedule. In the final episode of last season, the president was caught in a hail of bullets fired by two skinheads in Virginia, and she&amp;#039;s had to wait these four months to see if the fictionalized version of her husband was killed. When they&amp;#039;ve finished shaking hands with the nursery-school throngs--when his wife climbs into a van that will take her to the next campaign stop without the man, who is on his own way to the next event in another state--they talk for a long while about strategy, the man&amp;#039;s head ducked into the van, his long fingers pointing and gesturing, his eyes fixed on her, and hers back on him. In the thrall of another race, they both seem in a kind of momentary rapture. In war mode, they are heroic to each other. And then he kisses her goodbye and her van drives away and he falls into the back of his limo--he takes up half the seat, telling a story, rapping the knee of the person riding next to him, waving out the window, gas masks and a defibrillator bundled nearby. And his motorcade takes him through streets lined with cheering people and two men along the route who hold a sign that reads: ALL HAIL THE LIAR-IN-CHIEF. So his wife is running, and his daughter has left college for a semester to help her run. Which leaves him alone in his marble house, working on his trade agreements and budgets, his education bills and dreams of peace. A couple of nights a week, his brother-in-law, Hugh, comes and stays, and the two sit up until all hours playing 3-D Scrabble. It&amp;#039;s not normal Scrabble, of course, it&amp;#039;s 3-D. You can make words in three dimensions and get points for all of those words, and it takes a certain kind of brain to think spatially about linear things like words. Sometimes they pool their letters and play together against some invisible higher power. There are lonely nights when it must feel as if he lives in a haunted house. He sits at the desk of his hero, who was shot dead in Dallas. He is surrounded by the busts and portraits of many of the men who&amp;#039;ve sat in this pale-yellow room called the Oval. Some, at great moments, made courageous decisions, while others failed. And it is here, too, where the man is revisited by the grim year he spent fighting for his life--his actual life. It&amp;#039;s true: He had wanted her. She was an intern less than half his age, and when she lifted up her jacket to show her underwear, he had wanted her. And she had wanted him. And they ended up with each other. That was the rock-bottom truth. The public demands of his job had required him to live out of time, as a kind of god--and, yes, he loved that--rather than as a man with appetites and desires. And yet he gave in. And when con-fronted, he lied. He lied to his wife and his friends and his staff and to the people who elected him. It infuriates him even now that the world knows the story at all. He had felt violated, and he did the unthinkable, the exact opposite of what his mother had taught him. In an attempt to preserve himself, he lied, and then he was left alone, to keep company with his lie as if it were a corpse. When the independent counsel released his 445-page report, it boiled with salacious details, compiling the intimate moments of a man--yes, this man, but seemingly someone else--who was caught wondering aloud about his future with his wife. Who was this man, anyway? And who were those hunting him? Everything suddenly turned surreal. The man, who had woken each morning hoping to do good, now found his circus animals on show for the world. His staff skidded between conversations about phone sex and social security, semen stains and welfare. The opposition was calling for his resignation. Lights at his house burned all night. Aides studied tapes of Nixon during Watergate, noticed how almost every day that beleaguered president had mentioned the word Watergate in some new denial. They told the man not to mention the intern or his enemies or the pain he was feeling, but rather to tell the American people that he was going about the full-time business of America. So what you&amp;#039;re saying, the man said petulantly, is that you want me to lie? He had read a book once, Darkness at Noon, about a revolutionary named Rubashov who had been imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party to which he&amp;#039;d dedicated his life, until he confessed to things he had not done. The man told a friend he felt like Rubashov. He was half in denial and half unraveling in anger. There were times when he sat absently moving knickknacks around his desk. And mornings he woke raging, his fury aimed at the same few aides, who began to hate him.  His wife didn&amp;#039;t speak to him. His friends felt betrayed. And still the worst was to come: If nothing else, the man had thought of himself as a good father, and he saw himself in his daughter&amp;#039;s eyes as the idealized version of who he really was. When he learned that she had read the report on the Internet, he finally broke down in tears. The rest is legend: his admission, the vote to impeach in the House, the trial in the Senate. The opposition, in their stiff clothes, could not fathom the uncontrollable mystery before them on the bestial floor. That the man had shown desire and tried to conceal it from the world. That he had sinned and lied; that, even so, the majority rallied to his side; that he was somehow still bigger than they. When he stood up to deliver his State of the Union address in the midst of it all, purging himself for the moment of the hatred that he harbored for them, he made them look smaller still as they sat on their hands, unyielding. And to add injury to insult, the man led his party to victory in that year&amp;#039;s elections.  Still, he was livid. He believed that his enemies had tried to force a constitutional crisis for political advantage. That they had tried to delegitimize and de-Americanize him, standing on the floor of Congress, these pale, unsatisfied ones, repeating genitalia like a mantra. They reveled in the word.  It was Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, who helped the man work through some of his rage, reminding him that Mandela himself lost twenty-seven years in a prison cell. And Mandela--who stood on Capitol Hill during the middle of the impeachment hearings and gave a speech supporting the man--said to him: I realized that my enemies could take it all except my mind and my heart; I decided not to give them away. You shouldn&amp;#039;t give them away, either. After that, whatever was still alive in the man went back to work. It was an old reflex, something genetic. Yes, half of him had been thrown from a dark Buick and drowned in a ditch all that time ago, but the other half simply didn&amp;#039;t know how to quit. The man is singing as he falls into the back of his limo, a Tom Jones number first popularized by George Jessel in the late 1920s: One bright and shiny lightThat taught me wrong from rightI found in my mother&amp;#039;s eyes. He croons the lyrics, smiling, sweetly drawing out the i&amp;#039;s and o&amp;#039;s. With his hands, he beats a soft rhythm on his knee. There&amp;#039;s something a little vulnerable in his singing, though in the safety of his black capsule, he&amp;#039;s just being himself, a bit showy and contagious. He&amp;#039;s in a high mood; after being in a crowd of people, he usually is. But there&amp;#039;s something more today. Beyond the window, in the middle of a back-to-school afternoon, they&amp;#039;ve lined the route here in Princeton, New Jersey, waiting for him to lift a hand in their direction. And he does. Great little town, isn&amp;#039;t it? he says. Beautiful, especially in winter, walking in the fog. He has a story about Princeton, as he has a story about almost every town in America, it seems. Inside the limo, he reminisces, and he waves.  Near the end now, he is reentering his body, all 214 pounds of it. His face is a paradox. For the thick furl of hair on his head, he has faint, nearly invisible eyebrows. For the jutting chin, which is a land mass of its own, and the large bulbous nose, which on him is somehow proportionate, the fine lines radiating at the corner of his eyes seem etched there by a calligrapher. Across the planes of his lower face, there are hills and hollers of inscrutable origin, and yet he still looks relatively young and probably healthier than when he first took office. In a photograph of the man at sixteen, you would basically see the man as he is today, especially on this day, despite the certain frostings and grooves of time. He is handsome in an irregular way, an arrangement of handsome that only he defines. When he is tired or sick or fighting his allergies, his skin blooms red and his eyes swell, one more than the other, so he seems slightly cockeyed. On those days you can see the time this job has taken from him. And yet his hands remain soft. The man is a world-class hugger and handshaker. When shaking, he lets his hand go a little limp, to conserve the tendons and bone of his enterprise. He is a big man who dominates a room, and yet, surprisingly, he has a feathery touch. When he hugs, he means it. And these days, he shakes and hugs as much as he can.  Soon, he will return fully to himself, free in some way he&amp;#039;s never been before. He has a dream about that: On January 21, the day after he leaves office, he will take his wife and his daughter around the world. Perhaps to Ireland and Africa, India and China. And Antarctica--he&amp;#039;s always wanted to go to Antarctica. No one will follow him with a change of suits or tuxedo; no Navy steward will carry his Diet Cokes. There will be no briefings or phone calls from his friends Yasir and Ehud. They will go as a family then--a man, a woman, and their daughter. They will go for no reason except that indeed they are still a family. It&amp;#039;s a miracle, really, and the man is thankful for that. But no. The truth is that public service will probably intervene again. His wife may be a senator, and out of some endless compulsion, some great race against time, he will help try to negotiate peace somewhere and probably teach and work on race relations and write a book to set history straight about who he really was. Their new white clapboard house in bosky, peaceful Chappaqua, New York, is at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a high wooden fence. It cost $1.7 million. So now he will have to do something he&amp;#039;s never done before: make money. And he will need contact lenses if he wants to drive again. He will probably get his Mustang out of storage. Mornings, he may drive down to his quaint, newly adopted downtown and eat breakfast at Lange&amp;#039;s Little Store, just to be around people. There&amp;#039;s no way this town will hold him. In Little Rock, he has picked a site for his library, walked the twenty-seven-acres of glass-strewn scrub demarcated by the interstate, an old train depot, and an abandoned, rusted railroad trestle known as the Rock Island Bridge that spans the Arkansas River. Unsurprisingly, he has more presidential papers than anyone before him, enough to fill the six transport jets that recently carried them to Arkansas, where they are being stored in an empty car dealership. How can it be that the record of these last eight years--each important decision and memorandum and bill, each glimmering reflection of his ever-churning mind, every defense and attack--is now piled lifelessly in a defunct car dealership? And yet, for the next few weeks he still has a job to do: He&amp;#039;s just pushed through his number-one priority, the China trade bill, and now has turned his attention to his AIDS initiative and a plan for global debt relief. He&amp;#039;s hoping to pass a patients&amp;#039; bill of rights and a Medicare drug plan. He&amp;#039;s going to Vietnam, and when he lands there, he will be the Declaration of Independence and the American flag. He will represent our better self. This is the thing that gives him mass and meaning. If he had one wish, he&amp;#039;d ask for another four years, another eight. In the Oval, he has a moon rock given to him by Neil Armstrong, a gray, pocked piece of lava from the Sea of Tranquillity that is sealed in a Plexiglas container. When he&amp;#039;s lost in the political battle of the moment, he picks up that rock and stares at it. He holds it in his giant hands, inspects it closely, reminds himself that he is just a visitor passing through, and then throws himself back into the fight. This man communing with moon rocks, he knows that he has more yesterdays than tomorrows, and it makes him more ferocious. In the Oval, too, his desk is surrounded by photographs--of his wife and daughter, his brother and mother. He is a man who thrives on people. When he was young, he kept thousands of index cards, recording the vitals of everyone he had met, making sure they received happy birthdays. In high school, he&amp;#039;d invite friends over to keep him company as he read books. And as much as his incessant march through fundraisers is about money, it&amp;#039;s also about him, about receiving acclamation, touching each hand and thanking his loyalists one final time. He gives everyone what they want, even the press--the reporters gathering sound bites, the photographers stealing his image for their computer screens, toning his skin, whitening his hair, dulling the backgrounds. When the man dives into yet another crowd, a weary photographer says, The vampire feeds again. On one occasion, another last photo shoot in a hotel suite, a convivial British photographer banters with the man. I want you confident, Mr. President, the photographer says, firing his camera. Top shot! Who was your favorite Beatle? The man admits that, even though John seems like the smartest, it&amp;#039;s really Paul who&amp;#039;s the musical genius. He talks about the Beatles in the present tense--and about how he&amp;#039;s listening to a jazz saxophonist these days who knocks his socks off and a fantastic Brazilian vocalist, a woman who&amp;#039;s about six feet tall and 260 pounds, Virginia Rodrigues. By order of the photographer, the man adjusts his chin and looks proud. Wicked, Mr. President! says the photographer, firing again and again. Now show me the love, Mr. President. But with your eyes. Just beyond the lights, the man&amp;#039;s aides, and even the photographer&amp;#039;s assistants, are laughing. Show me the love? But the man himself is completely unironic; the man wants to please the photographer, who is working hard to please the man. Yes, the man really does try to show him the love; he leans forward in his chair and beams on the photographer as if he were America itself, and indeed it is love that seems to come from his eyes. It&amp;#039;s a simple leave-taking. Another day, another rush of faces and hands. The motorcade halts in front of the helicopter, which is set down and waiting on a playing field somewhere in America. The man emerges from his limo, his hair swirling in the wind, and strides across a playing field. He is sucking on a lozenge, puts his hands in his suit pockets, then pulls them out restlessly. He stops, slightly hunched now, and shares a word with his deputy chief of staff, then wheels for the helicopter again. As usual, his coterie of agents and aides stumbles behind him. He&amp;#039;s seen this ending from afar, and now it&amp;#039;s on him, the most surreal of all feelings. There is no way to prolong time. His moon rock can&amp;#039;t give him more minutes. His revival meeting has run its course. During his eight years in office, he&amp;#039;s buried his mother and his father-in-law, one best friend who committed suicide, and another--the commerce secretary--who died in a plane crash. His wife lives away from him. Against all odds, the man who was destined for this job and who nearly lost it outlasted everyone, and now his papers fill an automobile dealership in Arkansas and tomorrow he will be living on a cul-de-sac, driving into town for breakfast. Now is a time for turning, he said in front of the shock of cameras, in the pale glare two years ago, quoting from the Yom Kippur liturgy. The leaves are beginning to turn from green to orange. The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the south. But for us, turning does not come easily. It means admitting we have been wrong. It means starting all over again. It means saying I&amp;#039;m sorry. These things are terribly hard to do. Revive our lives as at the beginning, and turn us toward each other, Lord, for in isolation there is no life. And now he must wonder one last time: Has the work of his hands been pleasing? In his office, there is a photograph without anyone in it, no trace of humanity. It was shot by the man himself, with a borrowed camera, taken as his helicopter lit down on the edge of the Grand Canyon last year. There is red dust rising in a huge cloud and a gaping breach in the earth and the diffuse light of the sun hung high in the sky behind it. Why that photo? What does it show him? Does it remind him of the end, that day when there will be no more hands to shake? Maybe it&amp;#039;s just a good picture, the work of his own hands, a reminder that he was a human being after all, with a point of view, who held an office that required him to be a saint. The man ducks into the helicopter now and takes his rear-facing seat. The machine lifts and slowly glides backward, circles once, then starts up over the trees, one, a maple, lit orange. The cards are again in his hands, and he is dealing, Diet Coke by his elbow. The helicopter hovers momentarily, even as the earth recedes. Even as the people, frozen now, seem as if they were never real at all but statues built on this spot, waiting for the man to come, and now waiting for whatever comes next. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a119/william-bill-clinton-1200/>