With her father's magnetism and her mother's discipline, Chelsea Clinton is finally embracing her political birthright. In this exclusive interview, Jonathan Van Meter discovers a young woman ready to change the world.
Chelsea Clinton is representative of her generation in a surprising number of ways: She has a highly developed sense of irony; a late-bloomer aspect; a promiscuous career ambition; an unusually close relationship with her parents—and, above all, an obsession with elaborate coffee drinks. Indeed, I have been to coffee shops all over this great nation with Chelsea Clinton as I trailed her this spring and summer. Once, in Joplin, Missouri, we were hanging around a parking lot waiting for the camera crew she works with in her role as special correspondent for NBC, and her attention kept drifting across the street. “I am pretty intrigued by Joplin Avenue Coffee Company,” she said. A few moments later, her chief of staff, Bari Lurie, appeared to say the camera guys were an hour away. “I don’t know what we should do,” said Lurie. “When in doubt,” said Clinton, “coffee.”
I first meet Clinton in late March at her favorite coffee shop in New York City, a very grad-student kind of place called Birch in the Flatiron neighborhood, not far from the apartment on Madison Square Park that she shares with her husband, the hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky. The night before, I attended a panel Clinton moderated uptown, “Running in Heels,” about the inherent challenges facing women in elected office. She came onstage in a sleeveless leopard-print dress with an UGG on one foot and an orthopedic boot on the other and began, without ever looking at her notes, to reveal an inside-out mastery of the subject.
Clinton’s public-speaking manner is one of studied mellowness, with a measured tone and cadence that is like neither her mother’s nor her father’s. (“She definitely has her own style,” says Nicole Fox, her best friend, who gave a toast at her wedding. “It’s a little bit wonky, a little bit flirtatious, a little bit Southern.”) When Clinton introduced Sandra Fluke, the law student whom Rush Limbaugh had just a month earlier called a “slut,” she startled everyone by saying, “She and I actually have something in common. We’ve both been attacked by Rush Limbaugh. . . . She was 30, I was thirteen. In 1993 he said . . . ‘You may know that the Clintons have a cat, Socks, in the White House. They also have a dog.’ And then he put a picture of me on the screen.” If she hadn’t had everyone’s undivided attention before, she certainly did then.
When Chelsea walks into Birch, which is packed, people immediately notice her. Without missing a beat, she says, “Can I deputize you to go upstairs and look for a table, and in return I will stand in line and get us coffee?” Sure, I say. “What would you like?” A latte. “Whole, skim, 2 percent, or soy?” she asks, and we both laugh. Whole, I say. “Yum,” she says. “Good call.” I am instantly charmed.
By the time she joins me upstairs, Lurie is with her, as well as Matt McKenna, Bill Clinton’s press secretary, who also handles Chelsea’s press. Chelsea is meeting me, after all, to decide whether or not to do something she has been protected from or studiously avoided her entire life: be interviewed. The first thing that comes up is the orthopedic boot. “It’s a stress fracture,” she says. “My third metatarsal. All the fancy medical Latin terms I know are from my injuries. I broke my calcaneus a couple of years ago.” She smiles, clearly delighting in knowing the term. “I love the right words,” she says. “I think economy and precision of language are important.”
Both of these injuries come from running—it turns out she’s a New Yorker to the bone, literally. “I think I have run on every street in Manhattan,” she says. “Running is my prophylactic stress relief for the day. Or the segue so that I can go home and be with my husband in a kind of clearheaded way.” She runs early in the morning, sometimes at night, always alone. “Running is the one part of my life in which I fundamentally feel like the observer instead of the observed.”
I did not remember these details until I looked them up: Chelsea Clinton arrived at Stanford in a motorcade with her parents, Secret Service, and 250 journalists. Her dorm room was outfitted with bulletproof windows, and her security detail lived in her building and dressed like students. She majored in history. When she arrived at Oxford, where she went to study international relations, it was shortly after September 11, 2001. She was immediately brutalized by the British press for saying, “Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. . . . I thought I would seek out non-Americans as friends. . . . Now I find that I want to be around Americans—people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am.”
This begins to explain why Clinton was eager to make New York City her home, which she did the minute she graduated from Oxford, and why she feels so comfortable here. I ask her if she is surprised by how surprised people are by how so-called normal she is. “The word normal . . .” she says, and then ponders it. “I don’t know. I’ve always been aware of both how extraordinarily normal and how extraordinarily extraordinary my life has been. It’s always been important, first to my parents when I was younger, and now very much to me, to live in the world. I would never want to live in a cloister. It’s important to me to walk down the street and hear what people are talking about or go for a run on the West Side Highway. Marc and I go to a movie every Sunday. We ride the subway. It’s one of the great gifts of New York City. Why would I want to miss that?”
Once in New York, Clinton worked for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company for three years, then for another three on Wall Street, for a hedge fund—two career choices that, given her parents’ lifelong devotion to public service, seemed out of character, almost a rebellion. “I really wanted to work in the private sector,” she tells me. “I felt as if I had no inherited understanding of that from my parents. But I didn’t fundamentally care about denominating success through money. And I think it’s important to be in professions in which you care about the metric of success.”
After leaving Wall Street, Clinton returned to academia, first earning a master’s in public health from Columbia, then joining New York University as the assistant vice provost for the Global Network University, and currently pursuing a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford. She now teaches graduate classes at Columbia. One day in April, I sit in on one of her lectures, in a class called “Cross National Health Policy.” “I promise today to break before 4:00,” she says to the couple dozen students, most of them women, “and I see by your smiles that you ratify that decision.” When she finally looks at her notes after nearly an hour, I exhale: She is human. But more than that, she is engrossing. Partly, this has to do with the fact that she is a Clinton talking about health care, and, like her parents, she has a gift for taking complicated subject matter and making it come alive. But it also has to do with her lecture style: standing stock-still, speaking very slowly, her big blue eyes moving back and forth almost metronomically. “She has no filler like most of us,” says Lurie. “She waits for the right word, and until it comes, she’s silent. It’s one of the reasons why some people find her a little distant.”
She can also come across as the absent-minded professor. During our travels, she left her BlackBerry on the takeout window of a drive-through in Joplin; her book on a plane in Bentonville, Arkansas; and forgot to lock the door to the single-toilet unisex bathroom backstage at the Kennedy Center, which Diane von Furstenberg opened on her. (“Happens all the time,” says Lurie.) She can also get a little pedantic, using words like node, modality, and paradigm in casual conversation. Her digressions are frequent and lengthy, but for the most part, her mini-lectures, which might come up when you are, say, dining at an Applebee’s, are well worth the price of admission. As someone close to her says, “You ask her what time it is and she will build you a wristwatch.” And who would dream of interrupting? “This is my gracious challenge with her,” says Jay Kernis, one of Clinton’s segment producers at NBC. “People in television constantly interrupt each other. But when you are with Chelsea, you really need to allow her to finish. She’s not used to being interrupted that way.”
Unlike most nerdy academic types, however, Clinton is also a social creature, happy to put on a party dress and go out for a good cause. One night in Chicago, as she is heading to the House of Blues for a Clinton Foundation benefit concert with Ben Harper, she turns up in the hotel lobby wearing something you might expect to see on Beyoncé: black, skintight J Brand jeans, black Rag & Bone jacket, and platform stilettos. Wow, I say. Lurie—who has known Clinton since they were teenagers, when Lurie was a White House intern working for Hillary Clinton—shoots me a look: “Don’t encourage her.” Although Chelsea claims she is “not a naturally fashionable person,” I can’t help noticing that she always looks great. “Oh, she is sooo stylish, Chelsea,” says her friend Burberry designer Christopher Bailey.
One night in early May, she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg cohost a book party for Jim Steyer, a Stanford professor whom Chelsea worked closely with; she now sits on the board of his organization, Common Sense Media (she actually sits on seven different boards, from the School of American Ballet to Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp). The party begins to fill up with a very particular New York crowd—Diller, Tom Wolfe, Joel Klein, Arianna Huffington. When Clinton arrives, wearing a purple J.Crew cardigan over a floral-print Erdem dress, she plunges right into the power circle—a minefield of kisses and “relevant” small talk. As seems to happen often, a fair number of her old friends are here, too, including Fox and her husband, Michael; Zach Iscol, whom she met on the Vineyard; and a couple of Brits from her Oxford days. (“Friendship is very important to her,” says her good friend Simon Woods. “She has built a fortress of friends around her.”)
Bloomberg takes to the podium to introduce Clinton, but first he praises Steyer’s book, Talking Back to Facebook, calling it “a common-sense guide . . . on how to help our kids navigate the digital age.” But then he says this: “My daughters are 32 and 29, and I don’t think I can help guide them through anything. But it would be nice if they answered my phone calls.” It’s hard to imagine Bill or Hillary making a joke like this about Chelsea. When she gets on stage, she tells a story, as she often does, from her childhood: “I am incredibly grateful that my parents had as stringent rules for media consumption as they did for the consumption of sugar cereal.” Then she proceeds to put a fine point on the issue at hand: “How do we help cultivate curiosity about content . . . while also protecting kids so that every kid gets to be a kid and not have his or her dreams overly curated by Facebook or Twitter . . . ?”
Clinton is here tonight with Marc and his mother, former U.S. congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky. When I’m introduced to them, Marc says, “Did Chelsea tell you about my family?” His mom interrupts: “Eleven children!” Marc is talking to Zach about the Met Gala, which the couple attended the previous night. “It was glamorous and ridiculous and over-the-top and amazing,” says Marc. “Just like New York. It was surreal.”
“But you must have been to some pretty surreal events,” says Zach, “given the world you now travel in.”
“Yeah, but I’m just a nerdy Jewish boy from Philly,” says Marc, “so all of this is pretty surreal.” Then he backpedals slightly. “But you know, Bill Clinton grew up with a dirt floor in Arkansas, so it’s all relative.” Chelsea and Marc met in 1992 at Renaissance Weekend, the original “ideas” retreat the Clintons regularly attended during their White House years. She was twelve; he was fifteen. They remained friendly from afar. Then Chelsea went off to Stanford, where Marc was a sophomore. He was, as one friend tells me, “a total playboy,” and their relationship remained platonic until Chelsea and her longtime boyfriend from Oxford, Ian Klaus, broke up. “Chelsea really used Marc as a shoulder to lean on, and it just kind of happened,” says Lurie. “She always says that it’s like one of those bad after-school specials.”
Zach drifts away, and Marc and I talk about his wife. When I marvel at her ability to speak without any notes, he says, “I would say there is a ten-to-one ratio of preparation to performance. When I first saw her mother campaign for the Senate twelve years ago, I said, ‘Your mom speaks in fully formed paragraphs.’ It defies logic. And Chelsea has a similar gift. Not sentences. Paragraphs.” He laughs. “She’s very much the yin to my yang. I don’t want to say I’m aloof, but I definitely can exist in a cloud. I walk into parking meters. She’s the antithesis of that. She’s like: This is where the parking meters go!” A few minutes later, he tries to remember the name of a ryokan they stayed in together in Kyoto, and can’t, so he calls out to Chelsea. She not only remembers, she spells it for him.
Everyone in Chelsea’s world seems to adore Marc. “He’s a real mensch,” says Fox. “We were always rooting for them to get together, even when she was dating other people.” Says Lurie: “He’s this playful schoolboy stuck inside this wicked-smart, really astute adult body. He’s as happy goofing off as he is talking finance with world leaders. He’s the best of both worlds.”
Last year there were tabloid reports that the couple’s marriage was in trouble, seemingly based on the fact that Marc had rented a place out West to play the ski bum after he quit his job at 3G Capital. The paparazzi camped out in front of their building, and people kept asking Chelsea if she was getting divorced. “None of it was true,” says Lurie. “But what put a strain on them was that the stories were being written because none of us were paying attention to it. It was an eye-opening lesson. Chelsea realized, Maybe I need to get out there and demystify myself a little bit.”
Lately, Chelsea Clinton has been deadpanning jokes about how impatient her mother is for grandchildren. She lands the best one like a Vegas pro at the Vital Voices gala at the Kennedy Center in early June, the first event in fifteen years at which Hillary, the organization’s founder, couldn’t be present (Azerbaijan). “I am proud of my mom for many, many reasons,” says Chelsea, in sleeveless black Chanel, “but one of the reasons that I’m chiefly proud of her is the legacy that she will leave as secretary of State. That women’s voices won’t only be a vital part of how America is seen around the world, but a central part of how we . . . try to build a better world for—if she were here she would say—the grandchildren she hopes to have.” The comedy was all in the timing, and she brought down the house.
When I ask later if the joke is true, Chelsea says, “Yes, but in the most loving sense. She always tells me it was the greatest thing that ever happened to her. And as the subject of such an amazing compliment, I can’t do anything but be grateful and smile and say that I’m confident that I will feel the same way when I am so blessed. It’s certainly something that Marc and I talk a lot about. I always knew I was the center of my parents’ lives when I was growing up. And I am determined that our children feel the same way. Marc and I are both working really hard right now, but I think in a couple of years, hopefully . . . literally, God willing. And I hope my mom can wait that long.”
Hillary was 32, exactly the age Chelsea is now, when she gave birth to her only child in February 1980. In the year prior, she had become not only the first lady of Arkansas but also the first woman to be made full partner in the Rose Law Firm, where she was earning more money than her husband. It’s not hard to imagine that Chelsea might feel that she, too, needs to make a bigger mark on the world before becoming a mother.
What was it like being the only child of two such towering overachievers? “Well, we had dinner together every night,” she says. “Some of my earliest memories are trundling around in the back of the car with my parents while my father was campaigning. On Saturdays we would be in Bald Knob for the turkey hunt or in Toad Suck for Toad Suck Daze—yes, there is a Toad Suck, Arkansas. And Sundays were really sacred times. We would go to church, have lunch, and we always did something new, whether it was crack open coconuts or go on a new hike. We had these rituals that rooted us very much together.”
She is remarkably close to each of her parents. “There was a real effort from them,” she says. “They organized their lives so that we could have that time. Even during my father’s first campaign for president, there were only three nights when I wasn’t with one or both of them. Wherever they were, at least one of them would fly home to be with me while I was doing my homework and to tuck me in at night.” Simon Woods sums it up: “There was always a core of something quite normal and domestic and safe within the madness of their political careers.” A superhuman feat given how little separation there is between the public and private realms in American political life.
Very few people are born in a governor’s mansion. As Chelsea likes to remind people, “My father was governor when I was born—I was on the front page of the newspaper the next day.” It shaped her behavior from the outset. Chelsea’s best friend from Little Rock since the age of three, Elizabeth Weindruch, observes: “She’s always lived her life as if she’s being watched, by which I mean she was always very well behaved and very well spoken.”
Even fewer people spend their teenage years in the White House. “I was very aware of why we were there and that I was living among history,” she says. “One of the things that my parents did a good job of was talking with me about their work. So at the end of the day, over dinner, I would tell them what I learned in biology class and my mother would tell me about advocating for women’s health around the world, and my dad would talk about the budget fight or what was happening in advance of a trip he was planning to Russia. I knew that we were having a different type of conversation than most of my friends, but there were normal rhythms that we started in Arkansas that very much carried through.”
Her parents took her out of school just once, she says, “for the signing of the peace agreement between Rabin and Yasser Arafat.” She also always had summer jobs and internships, traveling with them only when school was out. “Again, I think my parents succeeded, thankfully, in bringing me along this journey in ways that were appropriate—and critical to ensuring that I still saw them as working parents.” Of course, most working parents don’t face professional crises of near-biblical proportions. And yet, despite everything we know about the roller-coaster scandals of the Clinton years, Chelsea refuses to dwell on the downside. “There were constant reminders of how blessed I really was, and the blessings always far outweighed the burdens.” (Chelsea speaks of “blessings” frequently; like her mother, she is an observant social-justice Methodist who gets to church on most Sundays.)
But the burden of so much unwanted scrutiny must have been painful for her at times. I bring up the fact that she repeated Rush Limbaugh’s odious words at that panel. Did you actually hear him say that then? “Oh, I heard it,” she says. “It was really important to my parents that I go to public school, and I loved it, but kids can be really cruel. If I hadn’t read about something in the newspaper that day that someone had said about my family or my dad or my mom or me, you could be sure that some snarky boy would tell me about it. They would shout things at me in the hallway.” She pauses. “Having thick skin is an important quality for anyone who wants to do something in the world, and thankfully that’s something I had to develop early on.” Spoken like a true politician’s daughter.
Nicole Fox met Chelsea in eighth-grade science class, shortly after the Clintons moved into the White House. “You could definitely see how someone could come out of that life feeling bitter,” she says, “like they’ve been beaten down in some sort of a battle. But she’s the total opposite of that. And if you look at her parents, the thing that defines them is resilience. I’m just continuously amazed by their stamina and optimism. They are always the ones leading the way out of the ditch. Chelsea really got that from them.”
Her friends all say that the key to understanding Chelsea Clinton is through her relationship with her grandmother Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, who died last November at the age of 92. Her death, says Fox, “was the hardest thing I’ve ever seen Chelsea go through. She was really destroyed by it.”
Dorothy was, by all reports, hilarious and fun: a real character who loved Glee and Dancing With the Stars; football and margaritas. “She always wanted to go to Cactus Cantina near the National Cathedral. I would drive Marc and my grandmother there, and they would get a large pitcher of frozen margaritas, and then I would drive them home, both slightly inebriated. Which gave me inordinate joy.” One afternoon, I admire a vintage Chanel chain necklace that Lurie has on, and Lurie says it belonged to her grandmother. “Isn’t it beautiful?” says Chelsea. “I try to wear something of my grandmother’s every day.” Her voice cracks. “Because I miss her every day. Every single day.”
They became especially close after Hillary’s father died in 1993. “My grandmother and I spent a lot of time in Washington together, and then she was diagnosed with colon cancer four days after I graduated from Stanford.” Chelsea changed her summer plans and moved into the hospital with her grandmother. “Although I clearly wish she hadn’t had to go through that, that was the first time where we really talked about everything.”
As mother of and daughter to Hillary, she and Dorothy shared a singular bond. They also shared a love of reading. One day in Joplin, Chelsea insists that we go to Books-A-Million. She pulls a book off the shelf called Lion in the Valley, by Elizabeth Peters, and hands it to me: It is one in a series written by Barbara Mertz under a pseudonym. Mertz, says Clinton, “was the first woman to get her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the Oriental Institute in Chicago. And her protagonist is a woman named Amelia Peabody, who is an amalgamation of different archaeologists’ wives from the Victorian era in Egypt, who were integral to many of the great discoveries there. I randomly picked up one of these books in a great used-book store during the 2008 campaign, and I fell in love with the story and the writing and gave it to my mom, and she loved it and then we gave it to my grandmom, and then all three of us read all eighteen or nineteen books.”
A woman who at eight was sent to live with unforgiving grand-parents, who ran away to become a housekeeper at fourteen, and who supported herself through high school, Dorothy apparently “pulled no punches” in talking to her grand-daughter. “She thought that I should be doing more with my life,” Clinton says. “She felt like we have a responsibility gene in our family. And while, thankfully, she thought I was a good daughter, a good wife, and a good friend, and that I worked hard, it was starting to become time to do something more. I think she saw it as her role to challenge me in that way.”
At almost the same moment, the media circus that surrounded Chelsea during her wedding made her realize that, for better or worse, she was a celebrity. “Either it was something I could continue to ignore or it was something I could try to use to highlight causes that I really cared about.” Something finally clicked. “Historically I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye,” she says. “And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life.”
Over the course of two months, I watched Chelsea Clinton switch hats so many times from one day to the next, it was dizzying: the academic work, the speeches, the book parties, the unglamorous travel, the getting dressed out of the trunk of a rental car, the wheeling her suitcase through tiny airports after getting off small planes where she had been jammed into coach with little sleep, the interviews with dozens of people for her “Making a Difference” segments for NBC, the mountains of reading and hours of preparation to teach a graduate seminar, the two-day swing through Chicago for her father’s Global Initiative conference, the standing in for her mother at Vital Voices. At one point I joke that there must also be a time-bending gene in her family for somehow finding extra hours in the day. “We work very hard. I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize me as their daughter if I didn’t work really hard.” She sees her three essentially full-time careers—journalism, academia, and philanthropy—as “mutually supporting and advancing of one another.” Also true to her generation, she’s interested in solving the world’s problems. “I’m sort of obsessed with what works. And why things work and how they work and who should be doing that work and whether it’s the government or the private sector. It’s part of what so strongly motivates me. It’s in our little family Zeitgeist.”
Also in the family Zeitgeist is an empathetic curiosity. “I don’t think I have ever had a day where someone hasn’t come up and said something to me: Oh, you’re Chelsea Clinton? I’m Albanian. Thank you to your father for stopping the genocide of the Kosovar Albanians,” she says. “Most people are respectful and nice, and thankfully the people who are not are generally so much not that it’s easy to realize that it’s about them, not about me. Like when people say that I am the seed of the Devil. Like, uh, no. I don’t agree.” Then she gets more serious. “I feel incredibly grateful that people feel so connected to my family, because those connections are part of what continue to motivate all of us to work as hard as we do.”
For some people, Clinton’s decision to work for NBC came out of left field. But, as her friend Fox says, “she has had a lifetime of accumulating these stories, and now she has an opportunity to tell the ones that have landed for her in an important way.” Having watched her engage with people everywhere we went, I was continually amazed by how patient she was. “That’s a lot to carry around with you,” says Fox, “having the personal hopes and dreams and struggles of all sorts of strangers in your mind all the time.”
Clinton got slammed in the press after her first segment aired, criticized on the one hand for having only gotten the job because of who she is, and on the other for doing stories that were “soft” and somehow beneath her. “In a way, I think we failed her,” says Lurie, “because we didn’t put out to the world that Chelsea Clinton didn’t wake up one day and say, I want to be a journalist. She woke up over a series of days, months, and years and said, I want to use my voice to tell other people’s stories.” But since that first segment, nine months ago, Clinton’s instincts have sharpened. A piece that aired in July about the Maya Angelou Academy was smart, moving, and celebrated a prison-education program that works.
Chelsea joined the board of the Clinton Foundation a few years ago and has since stepped up her role in several ways (in July, she went to Africa with her father on a foundation mission). She now plays a vital part in both the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She is no doubt learning from her father what works. But she is also teaching him a thing or two. One night, over dinner at Cheddar’s, Chelsea mentions that a lot of her male friends are gay. “It was something that I wasn’t even aware of until Marc pointed it out,” she says. Observing the strength of those friendships—many of Chelsea’s friends spend every Thanksgiving with the Clintons at Chappaqua—was one of the key factors in changing Bill Clinton’s position on gay marriage. “Those conversations often start in families and then billow out into the community. Change is hard. And I was really proud of my dad.”
People around Chelsea have noticed a change in her, too. “As she’s been exposed to the foundation and to what her father’s doing with his post-presidential life,” says Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, “I think a light switched on: This is the legacy I’m going to inherit. To say it is an incredible one is an understatement. She now knows that in 20, 30 years, everything about her father’s legacy is in her hands. It’s going to be Chelsea’s responsibility to carry that torch. This is the core of what her grandmother encouraged her to do: embrace her inheritance.”
In many ways, she already has. Even the way she agreed to be interviewed—having a writer embedded for weeks—is the way she’s watched her parents do it for years. Let’s face it, she has their pace, if not yet their global platform. I ask her, Could you ever imagine running for public office? “Before my mom’s campaign I would have said no. Not because it was something I had thought a lot about but because people have been asking me that my whole life. Even during my father’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, Do you want to grow up and be governor one day? No. I am four. And also because I believe that there are many ways for each of us to play our part. For a very long time that’s what my mom did. And then she went into elected public life. Her life is a testament to the principle that there are many ways to serve.” She pauses. “And now I don’t know. . . . I mean, I have voted in every election that I have been qualified to vote in since I turned eighteen. I believe that engaging in the political process is part of being a good person. And I certainly believe that part of helping to build a better world is ensuring that we have political leaders who are committed to that premise. So if there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn’t think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world? Then that would be a question I’d have to ask and answer.”
It’s old-home week in Little Rock: The Clintons are back in town. On a steamy Sunday in June, a full-scale friends-and-family reunion is about to get under way for the opening of an exhibition at the Presidential Library about Chelsea Clinton’s grandmothers, titled “Dorothy Howell Rodham & Virginia Clinton Kelley.” Naturally, it was her idea.
The William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum is a lot of things—a state-of-the-art archive, a tourist attraction with a restaurant and gift shop—but it is also a home. When the Clintons are here, they stay in the living quarters somewhere within the modernist slab of glass and granite that juts out over the Arkansas River. By noon, about 100 guests are beginning to pile up in the lobby, waiting for the private tour of the exhibition to begin. Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea suddenly appear, and every ion in the room gains a proton; the electrical charge is palpable. Chelsea is wearing a very tight, short presidential-blue Stella McCartney dress and nude Michael Kors platform pumps. When she spots Vic and Susan Fleming, the parents of Elizabeth, her childhood best friend, she runs at a full clip across the lobby and throws her arms around Mrs. Fleming, nearly knocking down the velvet rope.
The exhibition (which runs through November 25) is fascinating, offering up clues in miniature to what shaped the lives of the two women who shaped the lives of the two people who came together in the crazy-great political marriage of all time and forever changed the lives of everyone around them. As I wandered through, I thought of something that a Chelsea intimate said to me: “My perception is that her dad is a superhuman who is doing extraordinary things, and that her mom is like an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. He just feels like he’s operating on a different plane. And the thing that I have always loved so much about Hillary is that it doesn’t feel like she’s operating on a different plane, but you are just overwhelmed by how much she’s been able to accomplish walking the streets with the rest of us.” Just like her daughter.
There is a reception for about 500 people in the library’s Great Hall, during which the family comes out onstage. Hil
lary, ebullient in purple, and Bill, silvery and sleek, holding hands. There are Hil
lary’s brothers, looking a little uncomfortable: Tony Rodham, with his wife, Megan, their two young children, Fiona and Simon, and his older son, Zach; and Hugh Rodham and his wife, Maria. Chelsea steps up to the podium and works her magic. “This is a really emotional week for my family. Last week would have been both my grandmother Dorothy’s ninety-third birthday and my grandmother Virginia’s eighty-ninth birthday. . . . Both of my grandmothers faced adversity that I think is almost unimaginable in the twenty-first century, and yet both transcended adversity . . . by the choices that they made and not the choices that others made for them.” She lets drop another Mom’s-impatient-for-grandchildren joke. Hillary rolls her eyes while her husband wraps her up in a big Bill Clinton hug. When their daughter turns around, Hil
lary says, “Good job, Chels!” and embraces her—an affectionate bunch, this dynasty of three. Obviously these family moments have taken on even greater importance now that Chelsea’s grown. As Chelsea says, “We make a real effort to see each other and be together and talk on the phone.” (“I will tell you,” says Huma Abedin, “the moment in Hillary’s life when she is happiest is when there’s a call from Chelsea. Even if we are in the middle of a horrible,horrible meeting, she’ll answer the phone and say, ‘HIII, CHELSEA!’ It’s just the best sound.”)
The private reception in the library’s restaurant, Forty Two, spills out onto a big deck that overlooks the sun setting on the Arkansas River. There are margaritas and Mexican food, and the whole affair takes on the air of a big family barbecue, with children running around, folks getting tipsy, and everyone going back for seconds. Chelsea is holding court with her friends, among them interior designer Ryan Lawson and Dan Baer, a deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. Hillary is regaling them with stories. The conversation turns to the fact that Dorothy had a real knack for making a beautiful home, which then leads to the revelation that Hillary’s guilty pleasure, the thing she does when she really wants to take her mind off her work, is to sit with a big pile of interior-design magazines and flip through them. She also admits that she enjoys some of the reality shows on the subject. And then she says, “Chelsea, did I ever tell you about the first time I actually spoke to Lindsey Graham? He came up to me one day on the floor of the Senate and said, ‘Guess who called me?’ ‘Who?’ I said. ‘A producer from the television show Trading Spaces. They want you and I to trade places. What do you say?’ And I said, ‘I don’tthink so!’ ” At that, she puts her finger to her dimpled cheek and exaggeratedly twists it a couple of times and then dramatically turns on her heel and saunters away. Everyone laughs while Chelsea convulses in a silent paroxysm of laughter and disbelief, with a look on her face that says, my mom!
As the evening wears on, Chelsea’s five-year-old cousin Fiona has begun pulling flowers out of the centerpieces. “I am picking flowers!” she says, which gives Chelsea no end of joy. “Only a little girl who lives in Washington, D.C., would think that you ‘picked’ flowers from centerpieces.” Suddenly she notices that Fiona has been stuffing the flowers into the pockets of her uncle Bill’s suit. “Ohhhhh, my Goood,” says Chelsea, with her hands over her mouth, “look at my father. She’s made him a boutonniere!” At that, Bill ambles over and announces to the group that he is tired and is retiring upstairs. He waits for Hillary to finish her conversation, and the two of them disappear down a long hallway.
Chelsea, on the other hand, has decided to go out with her friends for a drink. A dozen or so head to the Capitol Hotel bar, about ten blocks away. In a giddy mood, Chelsea orders a scotch, and the group parties into the wee hours. “It’s just kind of her reality,” says Lurie when I ask about the juxtaposition of Chelsea’s life to that of her parents, with their staff and security and private jets. “She lives in the world. But because she has always grown up with her parents having staff around, it’s not strange for her. She transitions seamlessly out of those spaces. Let’s put it this way: When the motorcade pulls away, there is no air let out of her world.”
When the night comes to an end, everyone piles out into the street and says their goodbyes. A driver is waiting to take Chelsea Clinton back to the library—home to her parents in Little Rock.
August 13, 2012 12:18 a.m.
