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The freedom she feels abroad may explain why Hillary spends so much time there. She is by far the U.S.'s most traveled First Lady. Last week's trip to Panama was her 14th solo journey. In Senegal she was called "Sister Hillary." In Bangladesh an entire village was named for her. But whatever affirmation they offered, those trips did little to help her come to terms with her skeptical audience at home. That was why, on the plane back from Beijing, in Ireland and in Latin America, the computer-illiterate First Lady curled up with a legal pad on her lap to produce, in her semilegible longhand, It Takes a Village. The book, subtitled And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, took most of 1995 to complete. "The writing of the book was important because it gave her another major project to be involved in," President Clinton told TIME. "She's never comfortable unless she's working on something big that she thinks will have an impact." For Hillary it was also a chance to redefine herself, to return to the causes that had given shape to her entire adult life. As her critics might have expected, she wrote glowingly of expensive social programs, such as France's child-care system. But the book also provided glimpses of a surprisingly conservative Hillary. She advocated school uniforms long before her husband's campaign discovered the issue. She praised the "heartening efforts" of Promise Keepers to strengthen marriage and found common cause with virtuecrat William Bennett on divorce and rap music. She even opened the shutters a crack on the most speculated-upon marriage in America: "My strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children have caused me to bite my tongue more than a few times." The book stayed on the best-seller lists for 20 weeks.
As she contemplates the years ahead, Hillary, like her husband, can't help fretting over her legacy. (She's already started to fret about the birthday and the hoopla it has engendered: friends plan a round of parties; her hometown Chicago has considered fireworks; and the Democratic Party--no surprise--has found in it another occasion for a fund raiser.) For one thing, her most tangible gift to the future, Chelsea, is on her own now. "I'm looking for ways to divert myself from my empty nest, and I'll take just about any dinner invitation I can get," the First Lady joked recently. Bill too misses having the other night owl in the family around when he is up late working, and he even misses Hillary's nagging them both to get some sleep. "The phone doesn't ring as much--not nearly as much," the President laments. "And every now and then, we ease into her room and look around." With Chelsea's departure, the First Lady who mastered Game Boy has resolved to overcome her phobia of computers. Her chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, lately caught her thumbing through a book called Internet E-Mail for Dummies.