Chelsea Clinton

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newscom.com

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Chelsea Clinton and her husband Marc Mezvinsky (R) sit in the audience at the Robin Hood Foundation Benefit at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center in New York May 14, 2012.


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[alicia753]

dailymail.co.uk

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[alicia753]

zimbio

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A few more

Chelsea Clinton speaks at "A Night Out With The Millennium Network," at the Old Vic Tunnels, presented by The Clinton Foundations and The Reuben Foundation. The evening, hosted by Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Gwyneth Paltrow and Will i Am took place on the 22nd May 2012 in London, England.

 

[alicia753]

just jared

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celebrity gossip

hq pics


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[alicia753]

dailymail.co.uk

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wenn

Chelsea Clinton Italian premiere of the documentary “Auf Wiedersehen: 'Til We Meet Again" followed by a conversation between Chelsea Clinton the daughter of former U.S. president and Linda G. Mills. Florence, Italy - 15.06.12



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[alicia753]

dailymail.co.uk

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Relaxed fit: Chelsea Clinton and husband Marc Mezvinsky arrived for a tribute gala for New York's Shakespeare in the Park tonight

 

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zimbio

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Chelsea Clinton and husband Marc Mezvinsky attend the Public Theater 50th Anniversary Gala at Delacorte Theater on June 18, 2012 in New York City.

 

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dailymail.co.uk

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More pictures

 

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newscom.com

June 19, 2012: Chelsea Clinton pictured this morning arriving at her Apartment from the Gym, minutes later she was heading out to work in New York City




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[alicia753]

newscom.com

June 19, 2012: Chelsea Clinton pictured this morning arriving at her apartment from the Gym, then minutes later heading out to work in New York City.



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newscom.com

Chelsea Clinton, board member of the Clinton Global Initiative and the William J. Clinton Foundation, takes a sip of water as she moderates a panel discussion during the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative America Meeting on June 8, 2012 in Chicago.



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[alicia753]

dailymail.co.uk

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Chelsea Clinton has spoken publicly for for the first time about her marriage - giving her mother the 'grandchildren she has always wanted', and following her parents into politics.
Famously protective of her private life, the 32-year-old daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton has long stayed silent on her relationship with husband Marc Mezvinsky, but in a new interview, the pair candidly discuss their future.
In the new September issue of Vogue, Marc calls Chelsea 'the yin to [his] yang', while she admits to wanting children 'in a couple of years, hopefully...God willing'.

Her words come after widespread reports last year that the couple’s marriage was in trouble.
For the past two years, people have continued to ask if the pair were getting divorced, and though they have maintained that there was no truth to the rumours, it did inspire Chelsea to reevaluate her approach to the public eye.

Her chief of staff, Bari Lurie said: '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."'

The article also reveals how the couple's romance evolved at Stanford University, where Marc was a sophomore and 'total playboy'.
Chelsea had just broken up with her boyfriend from Oxford University and 'used Marc [a longtime friend] as a shoulder to lean on,' according to Ms Lurie.
'Chelsea really used Marc as a shoulder to lean on, and it just kind of happened. She says that it’s like one of those bad after-school specials'
'It just kind of happened,' she added. 'She always says that it’s like one of those bad after-school specials.'
But though they have been married for over two years now, Chelsea and her husband are yet to have any children - another detail to fuel rumours of a rift.
And though her mother, Hillary is desperate for her daughter and son-in-law to hurry up on the grandchildren front, Chelsea is not to be rushed.
She admits: '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.'
Chelsea also admitted - for the first time - that she would not rule out running for office herself.
'Before my mom's campaign I would have said no. And now I don’t know,' she said.
'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.'

'She's the yin to my yang': Chelsea Clinton and husband Marc Mezvinsky break silence on their marriage, those 'break-up' rumours and children
By TAMARA ABRAHAM
PUBLISHED: 22:42 GMT, 14 August 2012 | UPDATED: 14:12 GMT, 15 August 2012
Comments (53)
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Chelsea Clinton has spoken publicly for for the first time about her marriage - giving her mother the 'grandchildren she has always wanted', and following her parents into politics.
Famously protective of her private life, the 32-year-old daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton has long stayed silent on her relationship with husband Marc Mezvinsky, but in a new interview, the pair candidly discuss their future.
In the new September issue of Vogue, Marc calls Chelsea 'the yin to [his] yang', while she admits to wanting children 'in a couple of years, hopefully...God willing'.

Breaking her silence: Chelsea Clinton strikes a pose in Vogue as she opens up about marriage and future motherhood
Her words come after widespread reports last year that the couple’s marriage was in trouble.
For the past two years, people have continued to ask if the pair were getting divorced, and though they have maintained that there was no truth to the rumours, it did inspire Chelsea to reevaluate her approach to the public eye.

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Hooked on antidepressants and boozing in the afternoon: Author on how yummy mummies in Brooklyn's Park Slope are the new Stepford Wives (and she should know - she is one)
Her chief of staff, Bari Lurie said: '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."'

Facing up to fame: Ms Clinton sparked a media storm when she married investment banker Mark Mezvinsky in 2010, in a lavish ceremony believed to have cost $3million
The article also reveals how the couple's romance evolved at Stanford University, where Marc was a sophomore and 'total playboy'.
Chelsea had just broken up with her boyfriend from Oxford University and 'used Marc [a longtime friend] as a shoulder to lean on,' according to Ms Lurie.
'Chelsea really used Marc as a shoulder to lean on, and it just kind of happened. She says that it’s like one of those bad after-school specials'
'It just kind of happened,' she added. 'She always says that it’s like one of those bad after-school specials.'
But though they have been married for over two years now, Chelsea and her husband are yet to have any children - another detail to fuel rumours of a rift.
And though her mother, Hillary is desperate for her daughter and son-in-law to hurry up on the grandchildren front, Chelsea is not to be rushed.
She admits: '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.

Like mother like daughter? Ms Clinton says it was after her mother's campaign, in 2008, that she reconsidered the idea of following in her footsteps
'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.'
Chelsea also admitted - for the first time - that she would not rule out running for office herself.
'Before my mom's campaign I would have said no. And now I don’t know,' she said.
'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.'

First daughter: Chelsea , in 1994 with her then-President father and mother Hillary, says she has long fielded questions about running for office herself
Ms Clinton also alludes to the Monica Lewinsky scandal that rocked her family, however she refuses to dwell on the downside.
'There were constant reminders of how blessed I really was, and the blessings always far outweighed the burdens,' she says of the Clinton's roller-coaster scandal during their time at the White House.

Opening up: The interview with the former First Daughter appears in the new September issue of Vogue
Ms Clinton, who sparked a media storm when she married Mr Mezvinsky in 2010, in a lavish ceremony believed to have cost $3million, admits it was only afterwards she decided fame was either 'something I could continue to ignore or it was something I could try to use to highlight causes that I really cared about.'
'Historically I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye,' she said. 'And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life.'
She added that the suggestion of her running for office has been a question she has fielded her 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,' she recalled.
She says she believes '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.'

 

[alicia753]

vogue.com

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[alicia753]

vogue.com

Waiting in the Wings: An Exclusive Interview with Chelsea Clinton
by Jonathan Van Meter | photographed by Mario Testino



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 “sl*t,” 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.”

 

[alicia753]

continuing

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.”

 

[alicia753]

continuing

“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.)

 

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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.