Facing the prospect that his presidency may be permanently disabled, President Clinton left Ireland on Saturday night to return to a Washington environment dramatically different than the one he left for three weeks of vacation and foreign travel.
With his political support eroding, Mr Clinton enters a crucial autumn election season needing to prove that he can still govern effectively, under intense scrutiny, and not simply go through the motions as a grievously wounded leader. Some advisers, inside and outside the administration, question whether he can maintain his fabled ability to "compartmentalise" his life, insulating political troubles from his policy agenda.
"His mood is as deeply sad as I've seen him," said an adviser who described Mr Clinton as "quite disoriented" and "very stricken" by events of the past three weeks. At times on his foreign trip, he gave the appearance of a haunted man - his face drawn, his voice subdued, his eyes weighted by bags. The adviser said Mr Clinton's despondency has been exacerbated by the fact that "Hillary has not forgiven him."
One former senior administration official who remains close to colleagues in the White House said he believes Mr Clinton has not been able to compartmentalise the Lewinsky scandal as he did earlier controversies.
"He always saw Whitewater as a political issue. He always had a psychological distance from his problems. This is closer to the bone." The August 17th speech, the official added, illustrated how Mr Clinton can no longer keep his personal problems removed from his political life: "One of the best communicators in the history of the presidency gave one of the worst speeches in the history of the presidency."
A former White House aide, Mr Bill Curry, who does not speak regularly with Mr Clinton, said he recognises a pattern in the events of the last three weeks, from the defiant first speech up to the more contrite statements issued in Dublin on Friday. "Rejecting personal responsibility is always his first instinct," Mr Curry said. But his "second or third instinct" is usually remorse and self-reproach. "His inner voice is extraordinarily self-critical."
"He is completely alone," said Mr Curry. "He must feel a profound lack of control . . . To have won re-election to the presidency and then face the possibility of extinction is something he was not prepared for."
Mr Clinton's mood evolved dramatically through the his trip abroad. In Russia, where Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared distant during joint events, the President seemed downbeat.
When he arrived at Belfast, his spirits brightened visibly as the day wore on and he met thousands of admiring people who universally hailed him for brokering the peace agreement. By the time he reached Dublin, he finally evinced his more normal jocular confidence, ad-libbing jokes throughout his speech at Gateway. He drank in the crowds at his final stop, as he reached out for a thousand hands in Limerick.
Officials said they noticed no lack of focus in private meetings. "If he was distracted, he hides it very well," said Mr Daniel Mulhall of the Department of Foreign Affairs. "Everywhere he was, you could see a real concentration. Distracted people don't ad-lib very well."
Still, while maintaining his ability to perform his duties remains unimpaired, Clinton aides acknowledged that the Lewinsky matter has distracted the President.
If Mr Clinton is losing his gift for insulating one problem from another, there are some supporters who think this may be not be such a bad thing. It is precisely this tendency to focus one thing at a time - heedless of how words and actions in one setting have consequences in another - that leads Mr Clinton to commit reckless indiscretions, Mr Curry said.