Clinton ‘Alert’ After Surgery

Former President Clinton was alert and talking Tuesday, a day after undergoing a heart operation to bypass four severely clogged arteries.

Clinton remained in intensive care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan and was “resting comfortably,” according to a statement by his office.

“He is awake and alert and talking with his family,” the statement said.

Doctors said the former president was taken off his respirator Monday night, a crucial step in his recovery.

“He’s sitting up, talking and he’s having a normal amount of discomfort, but he’s actually doing just fine,” said Dr. Craig R. Smith, the hospital’s chief of cardiothoracic surgery.

A hospital source who spoke to Associated Press on condition of anonymity also said Clinton was taking liquids. The source described the hospital as swarming with Secret Service and hospital security personnel.

Clinton’s doctors will decide when he can be moved out of the intensive care unit. He may go to the hospital’s McKeen Pavilion, where patients are treated to a piano player at a daily complimentary high tea. Other perks include meals prepared by a gourmet chef and concierge service.

Clinton was expected to leave the hospital in four or five days.

Doctors who performed the four-hour quadruple bypass operation Monday found that Clinton’s heart disease was extensive, with some arteries more than 90% blocked. Doctors said Clinton had been at grave risk of suffering a heart attack in the near future.

The 58-year-old former president entered the hospital last week after complaining of prolonged chest pain and shortness of breath, but doctors said those symptoms had been present for several months.

In bypass surgery, doctors remove one or more blood vessels from elsewhere in the body -- in Clinton’s case, two arteries from his chest and a vein from a leg -- and attach them to arteries serving the heart, detouring around blockages.

Clinton had planned to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry, but his recovery will take him off the trail with eight weeks left until the election.

It is “too soon to know what will be possible,” said Jim Kennedy, a Clinton spokesman. “As the doctors said, it will be two to three months before he is 100% recovered.”

Before the surgery, Clinton had been scheduled to attend a book signing for his new memoir in Baltimore and a book party in Washington on Tuesday.