There was no band to hail Bill Clinton as he stepped on stage behind his wife at the celebration of her Senate victory last Tuesday night in a Manhattan hotel. Always he enters to the strains of Hail to the Chief but as power remorselessly slips away, so does the pomp and circumstance as the exit signs beckon.

Instead, there was a palpable air of a torch passing amid all the joy and celebration. The president did not speak, contenting himself with playing the proud spouse. Hillary Clinton's victory and her transformation from presidential wife to senator has punctured the F. Scott Fitzgerald maxim that there are no second acts in American life. Her husband, however, will not find it so easy to craft a new life after January 20th.

He tells close friends he is bound for Manhattan, for an office space already picked out there. He will write his memoirs the first year, join some corporate boards, give some lectures and pay the estimated $6 million dollars in debt owed from the tangle of legal bills he and his wife have accumulated.

Jimmy Carter is the ex-president he most respects. Carter's forays into international peacekeeping are deeply admired by Clinton. It is not hard to see a scenario in the near future where the ageing ex-president from Georgia could hand off his troubleshooting foreign policy portfolio to the youngest ex-president in history.

Clinton's credentials in that area will rest considerably on Ireland and his role in the peace process there. It has now become part of his legacy, as much as the Middle East and Bosnia and when the historians choose to write about his contribution it will feature prominently.

It is a legacy he embraces. The story of how a former Arkansas governor with no Irish constituency and a very distant Irish ancestry played a pivotal role in the peace process is one of the most extraordinary foreign policy stories of any American administration.

Clinton was, after all, overturning a 220-year-old policy of essential non-involvement in Irish affairs by American presidents. The previous policy was best enunciated by Ronald Reagan in his address to the Dail in 1984. Reagan offered America's "good will and support to Ireland" before stating pointedly: "The US must not and will not interfere in Irish matters."

Successive Irish governments were equally reluctant to have a US president deciding to play a strong hand in Irish affairs, one they could not control, until Albert Reynolds decided otherwise.

Thus, Clinton took on a very powerful establishment in the US Britain and Ireland and smashed over 200 years of historical precedent when he decided to get involved.

The internal opposition to Clinton's role within his own administration and within the Democratic Party was fierce and prolonged. In addition, the British in particular, at first made major efforts to discredit him for his efforts on peace in Ireland.

Given all that, as he reaches the end of his presidency, his deep involvement from the very beginning seems even more remarkable. He is keenly aware of that. Last week in a conversation after an Irish American fundraiser for his wife he alluded to those early obstacles he faced.

"I want to tell you how grateful I am that somehow, some way, when I first started running for president, the Irish found me," he said, referring to the early support of a core group of Irish Americans.

"When we started this odyssey people thought I was nuts when I said if I was elected president I would try to help the Irish peace process," he continued. "So I got elected and all these people who had helped me in other contexts who were steeped in foreign policy said `You can't do that' but I told them I would, that I gave my word so I've got to do this."

ONE of those people who most strongly opposed him was then House Speaker Tom Foley, who travelled to Little Rock during the transition period in 1992 when the new President needed all the help he could get. Foley told him that any attempt to interfere in Irish policy would "bring nothing but trouble and was just wrong-headed", as Conor O'Clery recounts in his book The Greening of the White House.

Equally, the vastly experienced Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was vehement in his opposition to any involvement by the US President in Ireland. When Clinton's staff told Christopher he was granting Gerry Adams a visa to enter the US in January 1994 there was an angry 30-minute conversation which left Clinton in no doubt where the Secretary of State stood.

Also opposed to the visa and his general Irish involvement were Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI chief Louis Freeh.

Normally such a phalanx of opposition would daunt any president. It is, indeed, surprising in retrospect that Clinton did not decide to sideline the issue. Clinton says now that thought never crossed his mind.

"They said it will be terrible. And I said it won't be terrible. I said, you know, I love Great Britain, I went to college there. I said we'll be shoulder to shoulder with Britain on a thousand other things, but I said you know, within six months, they'll be glad we did this, and sure enough they now are."

Cynics will say that Clinton was quite obviously driven by domestic political concerns and the fact that many of the 44 million Irish Americans would surely approve of his efforts on Ireland.

He does not deny that and addressed this in conversation last week. "It's been one of the greatest things about being president, to know that the US, the home of the largest Irish diaspora in the world, has played some positive role in bringing that tragic conflict to an end. I can't tell you how many time Irish Americans across this country have come up to me and thanked me for what we have tried to do."

On the night that Ken Starr delivered his impeachment document to Congress an Irish event was held on the South Lawn of the White House. The media gathered to film the scene, many reporters hoping for some signs of dissension. CNN beamed the event live. There were no naysayers, not one, only overwhelming support on what he later described as one of the toughest days of his life. Last week Clinton paid tribute to the Irish who stood with him at the time.

Speaking at his wife's fundraiser to a room full of assembled Irish Americans he said: "I want to thank you when 800 of you showed up at the White House during a rather difficult time for me, and said that the Irish American community still thought I should serve as president of the US."

There is no question that Bill Clinton feels deeply that his Irish legacy is an integral part of his presidency.

Niall O'Dowd is editor of the Irish Voice newspaper in New York