Chelsea

The Enigma of Chelsea

The former first daughter has influence in the family, but like everything else about her, it’s deeply guarded.

By Julia Ioffe and Annie Karni

In the lull between Christmas and New Years last December, Chelsea Clinton, three months pregnant, was perusing the Science section of the New York Times, where she came across a story on a surge of Brazilian babies born with a rare birth defect. “The increase in microcephaly—an incurable form of brain damage—has been blamed on an epidemic of the Zika virus, which was unknown in Latin America before this year,” the article said. Worried, Chelsea immediately got in touch with her mom to alert her, and pushed her to get the campaign to write develop a policy to address what was then a small outbreak of an obscure disease. Soon, the Clinton campaign was advocating the development of a rapid diagnostic test, a vaccine, and getting down to “mosquito abatement.”

Unlike her erstwhile friend Ivanka Trump, Chelsea Clinton doesn’t have a clear role on her mother’s campaign. On one hand, she had a full campaign schedule before she gave birth to her son Aiden in June, logging 100 campaign appearances, and was in the room with her parents and the campaign's top strategists on the morning of the New Hampshire primary. She piped up to encourage her mother to embrace the “Breaking Down Barriers” theme that she was about to reject. She is someone in the room—at least sometimes—whose voice Hillary listens to. “They seek her counsel regularly, at least as long as I’ve been around,” says someone who has worked with the Clintons.

This is certainly an image she and her parents promote: Chelsea Clinton, who introduces her mother as the presidential nominee tonight, is no longer the curly-haired daughter bouncing around Air Force One. She is a professional adult, a working mom, and a figure of equal stature to her parents. For a while, the Clinton Foundation was renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. At the Clinton Library in Little Rock, there are three oversized photographs of the Clintons hanging in the hallway, and “Chelsea Victoria Clinton” is featured as prominently as her mother and father. In one of her first public appearances after leaving her post as Secretary of State, Hillary and Chelsea held an event together in Washington about Chelsea’s great passion: elephants. “Elephants really are a national security issue, because the ivory trade funds terrorism,” says someone who worked with Chelsea. “She is not afraid to stick up for issues that people don’t want to for whatever reason. She is just fearless about stuff like that.”

When Ivanka Trump introduced her father last weekend, the role was clear: She was the polished young adult who could humanize her blustery dad; as a millennial(ish) woman with relatively liberal views, she offered a different lens on Trump himself. With Chelsea, the role is much less clear. Her father Bill has already stepped up as a character witness for Hillary's domestic side, and as a wealthy, Manhattan-based philanthropist, she doesn't exactly offer a new angle on a candidate knocked as a fully credentialed member of the global elite. She has also, despite her intense privacy and reserve, made some bad decisions. She took a $600,000-a-year job as an ill-defined NBC correspondent, making it look like greed runs in the Clinton genes. She took over the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation (though she purged it of the corrupt influence of Doug Band). Though married to a hedge fund manager, she is the daughter of two public servants and she raised eyebrows when she posed on the cover of Elle in Bulgari and Gucci. She lives in Manhattan in a $10 million apartment that is the length of an entire block.

In part because of an outsize role she seemed born into, she is not beloved by Clinton campaign staffers. Her reserve is interpreted by some on the staff as aloofness, her position and lifestyle as the entitled status of a high-maintenance heir to power. She has a chief of staff, because she also has a staff.

Campaign staffers have also had to clean up some of her mishaps on the trail. Back in January, when Clinton and Sanders were still holding to their pledge not to attack each other, Chelsea went after Sanders on his healthcare plan. Chelsea, who has a master’s degree in public health and teaches the subject at Columbia University, said Sanders’ plan would “dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance.”

“I don't want to empower Republican governors to take away Medicaid, to take away health insurance for low-income and middle-income working Americans,” she said in New Hampshire in January. “And I think very much that’s what Sen. Sanders' plan would do.” This was a mischaracterization of the plan, and the Clinton campaign was left trying to walk back the mistake, even as it was trying to beat Sanders in the New Hampshire’s primary.

Not surprisingly for a girl who went through her adolescence in the White House, -- and whose adolescence included one of the most salacious White House scandals in American history, as her father's dalliance with an intern was exposed - Chelsea Clinton took a long time to feel comfortable in the limelight. As a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and then an associate at Avenue Capital—a hedge fund managed by major Clinton donor Marc Lasry—she kept to herself and didn’t want to be seen as someone valuable for her last name only. It wasn't till the campaign trail with her mother in 2008 that she came to recognize—and embrace—the power of being a Clinton. “She realized she has a voice that people wanted to hear from,” said an associate of Chelsea's, of her first experience speaking in front of thousands of people. “It becomes a bit heady, and that’s when she realized it. I think Chelsea ended up really finding herself then.”

Even as she has taken up a more public role, both at the Foundation and the campaign, she was, according to the people who know her, profoundly uneasy about her mother’s decision to run again. She is deeply loyal to her mother, who told Ellen in June that Chelsea Hillary called Chelsea her "main support system" during an appearance on Ellen in June. But she's also worried about what it will mean for her very nice, and as-normal-as-possible life—“She loves coffee, she loves her dogs, she loves her kids,” says a former Clinton colleague. She knows she will have to give up a lot if her mother becomes President. As she told Vogue’s Jonathan Van Meter, “My father was governor when I was born—I was on the front page of the newspaper the next day.”

If Chelsea has remained a mystery, despite America's long exposure to her, this prolonged time in the public eye might have something to do with it. She hasn't dropped the protective behavior she has cultivated over the past two decades. “I would describe her as somebody who listens and is very thoughtful before she responds and speaks,” says the former Clinton colleague. It’s true: Her Twitter feed is so restrained it makes Hillary Clinton’s look raucous and rollicking. And from day one of Hillary’s campaign, Chelsea told her mother that she could not use the grandchildren she so desperately wanted for political aims. And despite the fact that Chelsea, in her campaign appearances, invokes her daughter Charlotte and son Aiden as the reasons she would rather entrust the nuclear codes and Obama’s legacy to her mother rather than Trump, we will not be seeing photos of her children on Instagram the way we see Ivanka’s progeny. Whatever her role now, we can expect it to be played with her guard up. As her best friend from Little Rock told Van Meter: “She’s always lived her life as if she’s being watched.”