LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas, Nov 18 (AFP) - Bill Clinton put his scandal-tainted White House tenure on permanent display Thursday, opening his presidential library with a trademark mix of political pomp and showbiz glamour.
Presidents past and present mingled with a smattering of Hollywood royalty and 30,000 other guests to watch the formal dedication of the 165-million-dollar facility in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton's home state.
For Clinton, 58 and still recovering from open heart surgery two months ago, the ceremony was a nostalgic trip back into the national spotlight, as admirers and political opponents alike came to pay their respects to the 42nd president.
For Democrats in general, still devastated by their second straight presidential election defeat earlier this month, it provided an opportunity to gather and recall better days as they seek to rebuild their party for the future.
"Democrats need to think about what it was that Bill Clinton did to get elected president and re-elected president," said former chief of staff Leon Panetta.
Steady drizzle failed to dampen the celebratory atmosphere that had been tailored to fit the man known to his Secret Service detail by the nickname "Elvis."
Bono and The Edge from the Irish rock band U2 provided the headline entertainment to a celebrity-packed audience that included singer Barbra Streisand and actors Kevin Spacey, Robin Williams and Chevy Chase.
There was also a videotaped message from former South African President Nelson Mandela and an air force flyover to bring proceedings to a close.
All living US presidents were present, with the exception of Gerald Ford. Newly re-elected President George W. Bush, who succeeded Clinton in the White House, was among those who addressed the crowd.
Aside from Clinton himself, the focus of the day was his gleaming Presidential Center, housing the library and complete archive of his 1992-2000 presidency.
The glass and steel structure, cantilevered over the bank of the Arkansas River, is honeycombed with natural light, although Clinton critics say that the level of transparency stops there.
The interior exhibits, they charge, gloss over the murkier aspects of the Clinton presidency, especially the touchiest issue of all -- the impeachment triggered by his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
Center officials, however, bristle at such accusations.
"We believe we confronted the impeachment issue very openly and very fairly," said Clinton Foundation President Skip Rutherford. "It certainly isn't tucked away."
The impeachment gets its own alcove, but the title, "The Fight for Power," speaks to its focus on the struggle between the president and the Republican-controlled Congress rather than on the salacious details of his extramarital liaisons with Lewinsky.
The accompanying text has yellow highlights over such phrases as "character assassination," "politics of persecution" and "rumours and accusations," while Lewinsky's name, unhighlighted, appears only twice along with elliptical references to their affair.
"The president was deeply engaged in how it was to be interpreted, as he was with everything in the library," said exhibit designer Ralph Applebaum.
In an interview with ABC News, Clinton indicated that the Lewinsky saga had been put in its proper perspective.
"I made a terrible public/personal mistake, but I paid for it, many times over," Clinton said.
It is the nature of presidential libraries to present their subjects in a positive light, and Clinton's predecessors were no less careful in deciding the emphasis on their own legacies.
Clinton's stands apart in being by far the largest presidential archive to date, with 80 million pages of documents, two million photographs, 21 million e-mail messages and 79,000 gifts.
While the official spotlight was firmly on Clinton, much of the dinner-party talk among Democratic bigwigs gathered in Little Rock this week has focused on his wife, Hillary, and her own presidential ambitions.
If the Clinton library symbolises a happier past for Democrats, it is Hillary Clinton who, in the eyes of many, represents the party's best hope for a return to the White House in 2008.
"I'm not focused on that. ... That'll take care of itself," the freshman New York senator told CNN on Thursday in what has become a pat response to queries about a possible presidential bid.

11/18/2004 16:30 GMT - AFP