Clinton had told me that the Bush Administration’s plan for post-invasion Iraq “was the sort of thing two students of international relations could have thrown together in forty-five minutes. They were arrogant. They thought it would be easy and they thought there would be no terrorism, that everyone would be on their side.” In more formal interviews, the rambling answer he gave to my questions about what the United States had to do next in Iraq was, like some of Hillary’s speeches, long on complexity and alternatives, short on direction, and unlikely to satisfy voters demanding a renunciation of the war and a rapid withdrawal of American forces.

“I think first of all you’ve got to remind people that we didn’t get into this mess overnight—and we’re not going to get out of it overnight, that we might decide that it’s a lost cause and we just have to withdraw in an expeditious fashion,” he said. “But that whether you were for or against the original action, it would be better if it did not end in calamity and chaos, mass killing within Iraq, more terrorist bases there. And I think you have to say that this is a national-security issue—and I say that because I don’t think we should have done it until after the U.N. inspections were over, until we had secured Afghanistan, and we had a consensus in the world community. I never thought Saddam presented any kind of a terrorist threat. But once you break these eggs you’ve got to kind of make an omelette. And we’ve just got to be straight about that. And, if it is obvious that there is nothing positive that can come from our committed involvement there, then we have to say we’d be prepared to say we’ll come home—but we’re not there yet. Seventy per cent of those people did vote. They voted to set up this government. And most of them, if left to their own devices without the people with the guns in the middle, would find some way to make some sort of decent go of it.”

Clinton had a long day ahead of him in Addis Ababa. In the morning, in a Soviet-style government building that looked as if it had been airlifted from downtown Novosibirsk, he met with Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister. Then it was on to an AIDS clinic and a speech at the African Union.

In every city where he had time, Clinton called for a few hours of cultural expeditions or shopping—a break. In Durban, he’d picked up an eight-foot-tall wooden giraffe for Hillary (“She loves giraffes!”) and at a crafts store in Addis he bought loads of gifts for friends and staff, including a gigantic silver Coptic crucifix. His aide Justin Cooper left the store with his arms so full he looked as if he had looted it. Then, at Clinton’s command, we visited the National Museum, which houses the bones of “Lucy,” a hominid who lived more than three million years ago. The museum was dingy and underfunded, but the guides were thrilled to open the place to Clinton, even though it was their day off. As he walked past the exhibits, Clinton listened a little and talked a lot. He talked about the giant pigs, the razorbacks, that roam his home state. And as he walked past some of the display cases he started talking about the wonders of the bonobo apes.

“They have the most incredibly developed social sense,” he said. “When one of them makes a kill, they share the food, unlike all the other apes.” And then, Clinton said, with a laugh, “they fall down to the ground and have group sex! It’s a way of relieving aggression!” Such behavior, he said, “would drive the Christian right crazy!”

There wasn’t much anyone could add to that, so we walked past the bones and the maps in silence for a while.

Then Clinton said, “Hillary used to read Archaeology and she told me all about this stuff.”

That night, Clinton invited the travelling party to Castelli’s, an Italian restaurant on Mahatma Gandhi Street, near the Mercato, the market area. The original owner had come to Ethiopia in the thirties with Mussolini’s occupying army and stayed behind; the family members who run it now speak fluent Amharic. There were plates of marinated eggplant and zucchini, prosciutto di Parma shipped to Djibouti from Italy and driven to Addis; there were two kinds of spaghetti, two of ravioli; there was roast chicken. On the wall were pictures of Jimmy Carter, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie with the owners.

I sat across from Clinton. There were bags under his eyes, and yet he seemed in a good mood, eating, joking around. (He barely touches wine or other alcohol.) And then, without a question or a prodding comment, Clinton started to talk about Whitewater, about Kenneth Starr, about how allowing the appointment of a special prosecutor had been “the worst decision” of his Presidency. He talked about old enemies in Arkansas, about the Resolution Trust Corporation, about Gennifer Flowers, about Susan Schmidt, of the Washington Post (“a Xerox machine for Ken Starr”). This went on for twenty minutes, at least. A few times, when he started pointing across the table, when his carotid artery seemed to inflate like a jammed garden hose, you could see just how deeply he still feels the attacks of the late nineties.

Someone asked him if he thought it would be unbearable to go through all of it again, as he inevitably would if Hillary ran for President in 2008.

“I don’t care,” he said, “because we know we did nothing wrong.”

Later, Clinton’s aides expressed little surprise at his outburst. John Podesta, who had been at the dinner, said, “He can bring it up and be pissed off all over again, but he really has moved on. He reminds himself of what Mandela told him at Robben Island. Clinton asked, ‘How did you forgive your jailers?’ And Mandela said, ‘When I walked out of the gate I knew that if I continued to hate these people I was still in prison.’ Clinton believes it, but he has to keep reminding himself. That story is a little bit of a prayer.”

Despite Clinton’s declarations of inner peace, his “prayer” does not always keep the furies, the old resentments, at bay. “The method he uses to live with himself is to make a clear and precise argument that this was something that others had done to him and not that he had done to himself,” Leon Panetta said. “Because of his brainpower, he can create a logic for anything. But deep down he would be such a good person if he could just accept the fact that he screwed up and made mistakes, and move on. ”

Rahm Emanuel told me that this was too harsh an interpretation, that the attack on the Clintons in the nineties was so severe and baseless, in his view, that a moment of anger over dinner was nothing. He mentioned a recent report in the Chicago Tribune which revealed that the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, began his career in Congress with a net worth of three hundred thousand dollars and now has assets of six million, owing largely to an almost fantastical increase in the value of land near a highway project that he helped push through Congress. “The Speaker came in with three hundred thousand dollars and now has six million in real estate and no one asks a question? Your question is ‘Why is Clinton so angry?’ My question is ‘Why are you so stupid?’ ”