White House aides banned the word "legacy" during the final year of the Clinton era. While the media loved to dwell on what the youngest retiring US president had to show for eight years in power, his staff felt "legacy" gave the wrong vibes.
Far from sitting in a lonely Oval Office brooding on what might have been, Bill Clinton was a president determined to work up to the last minute of the last hour of the last day - but to what?
Was there a Clinton vision for the US to be fulfilled or were there just tactical moves to outsmart political opponents? Was there a clear philosophy to guide foreign policy or just ad hoc decisions when they could not be put off any longer?
The assessments of the Clinton era are coming thick and fast, some from friends, some from enemies but the most useful from those who believed Clinton had the capacity to do great things but struggled with character weaknesses. Clinton himself has given numerous interviews, with self-pity sometimes breaking through as he defends himself against enemies, real or imagined.
The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, a staunch Democrat who would be sympathetic to Clinton, sees a presidency of lost opportunities. Mr Schlesinger, who worked for John F. Kennedy and wrote a history of his presidency, was asked if Clinton resembled him.
"He's reminiscent of Kennedy, certainly, in his high, swift intelligence, his impressive technical command of all the issues, his genuine intellectual curiosity. But he's not a fighter. He lacks self-discipline. He is sometimes too clever by half and he dislikes making enemies. FDR [Roosevelt] said: `Judge me by the enemies I have.' Bill Clinton, for all his intellectual and magnetic qualities, hates making enemies."
It could be argued that Clinton could scarcely be blamed for not making enemies given that he and his wife, Hillary, had more than enough to start with. From the beginning, he got little of the "honeymoon" that new presidents usually enjoy.
Republicans found it unbelievable that George Bush, who had won War with minimum US casualties, had been ousted from the White House by a draft-dodger. The conservative press was hostile and even the influential liberal organs such as the New York Times and the Washington Post harassed the Clintons over an almost incomprehensible Whitewater property deal from their Arkansas days. Eight years and $50 million (£44.4 million) later, the investigation has cleared them of any wrongdoing.
When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke rumours of resignation swept Washington, but Clinton's denials won him six months' respite. Public opinion was sympathetic and remained that way through the impeachment. In the subsequent Senate trial, there was not the required two-thirds majority to convict him of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Clinton now plays down the impeachment as "just a political deal". He told Harold Evans from the magazine Talk: "The Republicans acted as if they were just trying to get payback for Richard Nixon, as if the substance of what happened [in Watergate] was totally irrelevant." Clinton was, however, later found by a federal judge to have committed perjury, heavily fined and still faces possible disqualification from the Arkansas bar.
So, what was the President able to achieve as he expended his energies fighting off the Whitewater investigation, the Lewinsky storm and the humiliation of impeachment? Joe Klein, the political journalist and author of Primary Colours, has examined the Clinton legacy in an extensive article in the New Yorker magazine based on two long interviews with the President.
Klein says that it could be argued that Bill Clinton had come to the presidency "with a coherent, if recondite, vision and that he had pursued it rigorously, quite often in ways that were politically inexpedient. He had by turns alienated traditional liberals, conservatives and moderates during his first term."
Thus the apparent contradictions in his agenda - support for free trade (which pleased conservatives) and for universal health insurance (which pleased liberals); support for welfare reform (which appalled liberals) and for affirmative action (which appalled conservatives) were not contradictions at all but "part of a larger mission: to manage the nation's transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age".
This was to be the grand achievement of the Clinton second term, the famous "building the bridge to the 21st century". But the soaring economy and stock markets overshadowed the presidential rhetoric and little attention was paid to the Clinton "larger mission", much to his frustration.
Two years into his presidency, he was confronted with a Congress controlled by Republicans in little mood for bipartisanship. But even speaker Newt Gingrich had to concede that they were frequently outmanoeuvred by the president's political mastery, as he stole their clothes on welfare reform and balancing the budget, and "triangulated" between Democrats and Republicans, playing them off against each other.
On foreign policy, the Clinton Administration got off to a shaky start. Clinton regrets that thousands of lives were lost in Bosnia and Rwanda through excessive caution - the US does not have to take all the blame for this, but could have been more decisive.
In Kosovo, Clinton eventually authorised cruise missiles and bombing from 15,000 feet to ensure that no US lives would be lost but did not prevent slaughter on the ground of Kosovars by the Serbs, which was supposed to be the aim of the NATO intervention.
"Cruise missile diplomacy" came to be seen as a favoured Clinton method, with long-distance raids on Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan in response to terrorist threats.
Clinton's desire to achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East led him to what some saw as a gamble, bringing Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak to the seclusion of Camp David last summer. It was a bitter disappointment when the status of Jerusalem made the meeting a failure but even more dismaying were the new outbreaks of violence in the region. The search for a lasting Middle East settlement will be the main challenge passed on to the next president.
Clinton, inspired by the concept of "globalisation", tried to set foreign policy in an economic framework, rather than seeing it exclusively in a diplomatic and security context. Hence the success, in spite of opposition from Democrats, in securing the North American Free Trade Agreement and the new trade agreement between the US and China helping to bring the latter into the World Trade Organisation.
Clinton liked to hold up the Good Friday Accord, bringing nationalists and unionists together in Northern Ireland, as a model of what could be achieved in the Middle East and other troubled regions. His role in the Irish peace process has been rightly praised. It be recorded for historians in his presidential library in Little Rock, where he plans to work regularly and perhaps produce the memoirs which will throw further light on the Clinton years.