No one, it is often said, has ever wanted to be president quite as much as William Jefferson Clinton.
For much of his life before the White House - even during his hard-scrabble upbringing in Hot Springs, Arkansas - 'Bubba' had a yearning for the sort of bearing and acclaim that nothing short of the highest office in the world's most powerful office can bring.
Even when he was in the second-grade his late mother used to run around town telling her neighbours how 'my boy Billy' was going to be president someday.
And even in his darkest hours - self-inflicted events made all the more perplexing by his sheer lust for the job - he has never given any impression of fearing the presidency should not be his.
Imagine then the predicament he now faces. Constitutional amendments mean he can serve no more than two four-year terms and he is now into his last year in office as a healthy and relatively young man - he will be 54 in August.
Few presidents have faced a legacy as potentially controversial as Mr Clinton's in the wake of his impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal - merely the most famous in a whole spate of eruptions. Even fewer have left office with the prospect of living for decades once that legacy is thrown to the winds of history.