'Promise Unfulfilled'

He came to Europe 24 times as president. With him, statecraft sometimes looked like an election campaign, and what many Europeans came to see in the American president was an image of America itself: powerful and outgoing and not always perfect, CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth reports.

"I think Bill Clinton has left a mark more through his personality and through the extraordinary ups and downs of his presidency rather than through any concrete achievements. In European eyes it is more a sense of promise unfulfilled," said Peter Riddell, a political writer with The Times of London.

Europeans do give Mr. Clinton credit for the economy, for enlarging NATO without enraging Russia, and for ultimately containing Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.

Europe's press, which long ago forgave the president's personal faults, now has become almost sentimental, and Britain's prime minister's been sounding that way too.

"I want to say thank you not just to the United States but to you personally for your commitment, your intelligence, your encouragement,"Prime Minister Tony Blair told Clinton.

He won praise for pushing the peace process forward in Northern Ireland , yet the fact is, conflict there remains a real threat. As in the Middle East, Europeans say Mr. Clinton's been more a peace-seeker than a peacemaker.

"Most of the time he spent personally on these issues was at the end, not the beginning of his terms, and I would say it's too late. At the end of the two terms of Clinton, the problems remain essentially unsolved," said Thierry de Montbrial of the French Institute Of International Relations.

But by the end of his administration, said an editorial here this week, the world had "engaged" Mr. Clinton, and it showed. The British called it "the Clinton magic." The star-sized persona that has people now saying when he leaves office he won't be forgotten; he probably won't even be gone.

Out of the White House, but still in Washington, and too restless to retire, many Europeans are convinced Bill Clinton will still be a player on the global stage, with a personality big enough, as a writer here put it, to run a presidency in exile.