On a clear spring afternoon in Berlin, Bill and Chelsea Clinton rode to the World Cup final in the front seats of a bus. The Olympic Stadium—a severe Greco-Roman construction with Fascist flourishes and corporate logos—was built for the 1936 Games and still looks very much as it did seventy years ago, when Jesse Owens outran the racial theories of his host. But the World Cup tournament had been a surpassingly apolitical event, and now, in the fields and parking lots surrounding the stadium, cheerful venders sold lager and wurst at non-rip-off prices. There were no drunks, no thugs, no skinhead invective. Although the Germans had been eliminated by the Italians in a brutal semifinal, the city was in a mood of lighthearted self-satisfaction. The souvenir stores sold German history as kitsch: one popular postcard was a picture of Erich Honecker over his declaration “Die Mauer bleibt noch 100 Jahre” (“The Wall will endure for a hundred years”).

Clinton left office angry, exhausted, and broke: “I identify with people who get beat up.” Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark

As the bus pulled up to the stadium, a few people stopped to greet the ex-President and his daughter, but most hustled to the gates in orderly streams. Clinton, though he may be less schooled in “the beautiful game” than in the fortunes of the Arkansas Razorbacks, said, “I’m totally psyched for this.”

The Clintons took their seats in the “statesmen’s section,” at midfield. While Clinton’s statesmanship has been strictly freelance for the past six years, he was not far from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and he spent time during the game, and during the breaks, chatting with old friends—the schmoozer in excelsis. He was in the midst of a long trip typical of his increasingly manic and global post-Presidency. He started out from his house in the New York suburb of Chappaqua, campaigned for a local Democrat in Indianapolis, gave a public interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival, gave a speech in Los Angeles, returned to Aspen, and then, flying on the private jet of one of his many wealthy friends, landed in Berlin. Immediately after the game, he was scheduled to fly to Cape Town, for the start of a seven-country tour of Africa, where he would look in on the H.I.V.-AIDS programs that the William J. Clinton Foundation, his base for good works, had established in the previous few years.

Upon arriving in Berlin, Clinton had felt the need for some improvised pre-game affection, and so he directed the bus, which carried him and a travelling party of aides, donors, a doctor, Secret Service agents, and volunteer advance workers, to the Brandenburg Gate, where more than half a million ticketless enthusiasts had gathered to watch the match on a set of huge television screens. The bus pulled up behind a stage that had been erected under the gate. Clinton climbed down from the bus and took in the mass of people. “Damn, that’s some crowd!” he said. A rock band performing onstage got the signal from the wings to wind up a song, and Clinton, white-haired, trim, and wearing the dark suit and radiant tie of high office, strode out to the microphone and began to wave. The crowd didn’t immediately know who it was—Is that. . . ? What is he doing here?—but as people began to recognize him on the big screens, with the familiar smile and the ingratiating squint, they started to cheer, louder and louder. It was impossible not to wonder what the reception would have been for George W. Bush—here or just about anywhere else in the world—and it is this implicit comparison that accounts for the remarkable popularity of Bill Clinton.

“I’m honored to be here, and thank you to Germany,” he said, lolling in the warm bath of cheers.

Clinton didn’t really have much more to say, and he knew that the crowd was not in the mood for a speech. It was enough to present himself and feel the love. He was beaming; his color rose to the high blush of a peach. And the memories! As he left the stage, he paused under the gate and pointed. “In 1994, Helmut Kohl and I stood on a stage here,” Clinton told me over the roar. “That day, there were a hundred thousand people—but nothing like this. This is great. When I was President . . .”

The band started a strangely Teutonic version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?—drowning him out for a moment.

Clinton shouted louder, the better to provide a lesson in the history of the Brandenburg Gate: “You’ve got the French versus the Germans, the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, World War One, World War Two . . .”

“What?”

“I said, these are the original gates, but they were restored!” he said, pointing to the yellow mortar. “They went about covering the bullet marks. They didn’t want Germany to be defined just by violence. A hundred years from now, the restoration will blend in completely with the original gate . . .”

“What?”

The scene reminded him of a trip to Ghana he made in 1998, when seven hundred thousand people turned out on the streets of Accra to greet him. Chelsea, who was taking a few days off from her job (she is a consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York), stood off to the side, her hands clasped in front of her, watching her father work; she seemed patient, sweetly indulgent and knowing. She had waited for her father before.

“I was the first President to speak on the east side of the gate,” Clinton went on. Then he shook some more hands and posed for pictures with a row of cheerleaders holding glittery pom-poms. Jay Carson, a diligent young Georgian who works as Clinton’s communications director, started to interject the kind of polite “Ahem”s and “Thank you”s and nods that lesser politicians know to take as signals to wrap things up.

Clinton wraps things up in his own time. We made it to the game with a few minutes to spare. The battle between the Italian azzurri and the French bleus was an epic that ended in a crime, although the crucial moment was lost on nearly everyone in the stadium. It came (as we learned later) when the referee red-carded the venerable French midfielder Zinedine Zidane for head-butting a rival who, he claimed, had impugned the honor of his mother and his sister. As Zidane was banished from the Elysian fields, the jeering, unknowing crowd went almost completely over to the Gallic side; but, in the end, the Italians, emboldened by Zidane’s absence, won the game—and the Cup—on penalty kicks.

About an hour later, Clinton was on the plane. He’d changed out of his suit and into a pair of black jeans and a lemon-yellow polo shirt.

“Pretty good game, huh?” he said, striding down the aisle of the plane, the inevitable Diet Coke clutched in his spookily large fist. (Hillary has written that she was immediately attracted to Clinton’s hands—“His wrists are narrow and elegant and his long fingers deft, like those of a pianist or a surgeon. When we first met in law school, I loved just watching him turn the pages of a book.”) One of Clinton’s aides, an efficient young man named Justin Cooper, who carries the bags and makes sure that every detail is in order, interrupted and handed him a cell phone.

“Hillary!” Clinton shouted into the phone. He started walking to the rear of the plane. “Hillary, did you see that?”

When he came back, he was wearing a pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses and was chewing on an unlit cigar. Some on the plane were starting to get calls about Zidane.

“Hillary told me all about it,” Clinton said. “I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking.”

Clinton was instantly forgiving of Zidane and wondered what would become of him. He recalled Gao Hong, the goalie for the Chinese women’s team, who, in the 1999 World Cup final, gave up the decisive penalty kick to Brandi Chastain, of the American team. Gao had played brilliantly until that point, but, like Zidane, she had to return home and endure the consequences of her defeat.

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“I identify with people who get beat up,” Clinton said. “I remember that game like it was yesterday.”

The plane was divided into three compartments. The Secret Service contingent and a few staffers were in front, press were in the middle, and Clinton and his aides in back. Through the open door, I could see him doing three or four things at once: telling old war stories, eating a yogurt parfait, drinking coffee, glancing at a stack of Xeroxed press clippings, playing cards. This was around one in the morning. The day had begun in Colorado; we were now somewhere over Algeria, headed for a refuelling stop in N’djamena, Chad. Since Clinton would eventually exhaust the card-playing endurance of his aides, the ever-industrious Carson was preparing a backup cadre: he was giving instruction in how to play Clinton’s game. For decades, including the White House years, Clinton’s game was hearts (or, when he lacked a posse, solitaire), but he dropped it when Steven Spielberg, a longtime Friend of Bill, taught him Oh Hell—a lesser cousin of contract bridge.

Nearly all Clinton’s younger aides refer to their boss as “the President,” but they also “do” him. They do the scratchy high-in-the-throat drawl, the run-on pronouncements studded with arcane facts and statistics (“And with every ten per cent of cell-phone penetration G.D.P. goes up point six per cent ”), and the trademark exclamations (“Isn’t that fascinating?”). Newcomers pick it up pretty quickly, and so, as half a dozen of us fumbled through our middle-of-the-night Oh Hell lesson, we were also cracking wise in the voice of the forty-second President of the United States. At around two-thirty, though, pillows and blankets appeared and lights were dimmed. Sleep beckoned. But, just as it did, a familiar voice beckoned from the doorway: “Hey! How you guys doin’?”

I saw some of Clinton’s aides slouched in their seats in the rear of the plane, their eyes shut, their mouths agape like murder victims in a Weegee photograph. Clinton was carrying a marked-up copy of “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” by Richard Heinberg, on how oil production led to economic modernity and how its depletion will shape the future.

“Interesting book, Mr. President?” someone asked.

Clinton sat down on the arm of the seat and eased his way into a near-soliloquy that lasted two hours. First, he talked about light bulbs—their history, their physical properties, their contribution to greenhouse gases, the latest developments in bulb technology. He talked about alternative fuels, ethanol research, the politics of ethanol, the value of tar sands, the near-inevitability of hundred-dollar-a-barrel oil. He talked about the relative virtues of hybrid vehicles and electric cars and whether Detroit had conspired to kill their development. He pronounced oil depletion an opportunity: “But we need to make fixing climate change as politically sexy as putting a man on the moon.” And as the “conversation” veered into politics Clinton talked about one of his favorite recent books, a study, by Harold Holzer, of Lincoln’s speech in 1860 at Cooper Union, which launched his campaign for the Republican nomination. It was Lincoln’s “toughness” at Cooper Union that Clinton seemed to admire most, and which led him to a theme he kept returning to all week: the need for the Democratic Party to “lean into” Republican attacks. He made no secret of his feeling that the Democrats had lost winnable elections in 2000 and in 2004; Al Gore and John Kerry were “a couple of honorable men” but had been “tarred” as men of low character, and their campaigns failed to fight back effectively. Kerry, after the so-called Swift Boat veterans, with the tacit encouragement of the Republican campaign leadership, started smearing him, “should have challenged Bush and Cheney to a town-hall debate on their respective Vietnam records. Bush and Cheney were like me—they didn’t go. Kerry was a genuine war hero!” In the gloom of the cabin, Clinton jabbed his finger to emphasize his point. The Kerry campaign was “like a deer caught in the headlights.”

We were somewhere above the Sahara, but Clinton’s mind was fixed on the condition of the Democratic Party in the Age of Bush and on the way the White House, even as Iraq verged on civil war, remained on the rhetorical and ideological offensive.

“I am sick of Karl Rove’s bullshit,” Clinton said. And yet there was a trace of admiration in the remark, a veteran pol’s regard for the way his rival had packaged a radical brand of American conservatism as “compassionate conservatism” and kept on pushing it long after its sell-by date had passed.

“Nixon was a Communist compared to this crowd,” Clinton said.

It was closing in on four in the morning. Weary heads were drooping. No matter. Without mentioning 2008 and the potential presence of his wife in the race for the Presidency, Clinton started talking about John McCain, the presumptive G.O.P. candidate, and he made sure to say how funny and decent he is, and how heroic he was in Vietnam, but soon he was pointing out McCain’s “far-right” bona fides, his being “right there with Bush” on preëmptive war and “loads” of right-wing domestic policies. We had started out on light bulbs and, with hardly a question, landed within putting range of the Iowa caucus.