In 2012, four years after sort-of-stumping-but-not-really for her mother’s presidential campaign, Chelsea Clinton sat down for a lengthy, laudatory profile for Vogue. “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.”
Last April, Clinton told Fast Company magazine much the same thing. As she also did with NBC’s Brian Williams, who interviewed Clinton after she was hired by the network as a “special correspondent” — albeit one with no journalism experience. Her starting salary: $600,000 a year.
“For most of my life I did deliberately lead a private life and inadvertently led a public life,” Clinton said. She was now ready to do us the favor of stepping into the spotlight, prodded by her late grandmother. “[She told me] that being Chelsea Clinton had happened to me, and that I had a responsibility to do something with that asset and opportunity,” she told Williams.
Yet for all this talk from a lifelong public person about her recent decision to become a public person, Chelsea Clinton, now 34, remains an enigma. She is the Derek Jeter of the political world, adept at talking coherently while saying nothing. Who she is, what drives her, what she believes in — aside from her family’s political primacy — is unknown.
Chelsea has held a series of jobs with sketchy descriptions, her accomplishments vague. She depicts herself as just another New Yorker, going to SoulCycle, taking the train, going to the movies every Sunday — yet she demands a level of obeisance any true New Yorker would find laughable.
“This is my gracious challenge with her,” NBC producer Jay Kernis told Vogue. “People in television constantly interrupt each other. But when you are with Chelsea, you really need to allow her to finish. She is not used to being interrupted that way.”
She is also, it turns out, not necessarily the future of the Democratic Party. As Daniel Halper reveals in a curiously overlooked chapter from his new book, “Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine” (Broadside Books), Chelsea is, for good and for ill, very much like her parents.
“The whole way she’s approached her emergence,” one Clinton aide told Halper, “has been very self-laudatory and kind of selfish.”
Another close observer put it more succinctly: “She’s weird.”
‘Nothing seems very authentic’
Chelsea Clinton was born on Feb. 27, 1980, the only child of then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. From a very early age, her parents trained her to survive the worst of politics.
When she was 6 years old, Bill and Hillary sat her down and tried to explain how campaigning worked: Mainly, lots of people would say awful things about her dad.
“Bill said terrible things about himself,” Hillary wrote in “It Takes a Village.” “Like how he was really mean to people and didn’t try to help them.”
Their daughter burst into tears, but the Clintons kept going, saying vile things about themselves — not stopping until Chelsea learned to stop crying.
She was an awkward adolescent when her father was inaugurated in 1993, and her parents insisted that the press leave Chelsea alone. “I really find it hilarious when they make fun of me,” Bill told People magazine weeks after winning the election. “But I think you gotta be pretty insensitive to make fun of an adolescent child . . . We really work hard on making sure that Chelsea doesn’t let other people define her sense of her own self-worth.”
According to Halper’s book, the Clintons overcompensated. She was known among staff as “the royal child,” because she often got whatever she wanted. “If she would ask for something and [her parents] said ‘no,’ she would go behind their backs and go to staff and ask staff to do stuff,” one associate told Halper. “How do you say no to her? She’s the boss’ kid.”
Chelsea, described by Halper as “tip-to-tail her daddy’s little girl,” was devastated by the Lewinsky scandal. When Bill finally confessed to Hillary, she punished him by forcing him to tell all to his teenage daughter. When he learned she read the Starr Report online, he wept.
Aides and associates told Halper that Chelsea’s guilt-ridden parents have since given her everything she asks for — including money for the four-bedroom, 61/2 bath apartment on East 26th Street that she and husband Marc Mezvinsky purchased in 2013 for $10.5 million.
“When you screw a young White House staffer,” a close Clinton source told Halper, “or whatever they did, you’re paying the price for the rest of your life. When your daughter wants to buy a $10 million apartment, the question isn’t, ‘Are you crazy?’ It’s, ‘Where do I wire the money?’”
Such an unusual life, in some ways insulated and in others grotesquely transparent, has contributed to Chelsea’s high-class aimlessness. In 2001, she graduated from Stanford with a degree in history, then got a master’s in international relations from Oxford, and then got a master’s in public health at Columbia. Yet she’s never worked in any of those fields, instead taking vague consulting jobs with six-figure salaries. She’s regarded by many in ClintonWorld as an over-educated dilettante with no practical life experience.
“It bothers the s— out of me that everyone thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,” one ex-Clinton associate told Halper. “She’s never had a [real] job. She’s been in college for 12 years.”
A friend of Paul Begala’s tells Halper that the longtime Clinton aide and defender actively dislikes Chelsea and thinks her vanilla, good-girl persona is an act.
“Nothing seems very authentic,” another source tells Halper. When Chelsea was campaigning with her mother in 2008, giving speeches and taking audience questions at various stops, she behaved as though she were still that insulated 13-year-old: No questions from the media were taken, not even from a 9-year-old girl reporting for Scholastic.
Her question: Would Bill be a good “First Man”?
“I’m sorry,” Chelsea told the girl. “I don’t talk to the press — and that applies to you, unfortunately — even though I think you’re cute.”
‘Stay here — you’re not a Clinton’
Cheslea’s distaste for the media did not stop her from looking for a job in the media. “She was basically shopping herself to networks, trying to get the best deal,” an ex-Clinton staffer told Halper. “It’s just kind of gross.”
In 2011, she was hired by NBC News, naively positioning herself as someone whose “Making a Difference” pieces would make a difference — as if that’s not the very definition of good journalism. Her fuzzy subjects and anodyne approach were savaged in the press.
“One of the most boring people of her era,” said the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever. After “interviewing” the GEICO Gecko, the Old Spice man and the team behind AT&T’s ads, New York magazine said Chelsea was doing a great job, “if you like fake interviews about advertising that really just serve as advertising.” She is currently month-to-month with the network while her mother mulls another presidential run, and pulls down $75,000 per speech.
Chelsea also sits on several boards, and in 2011 The Wall Street Journal reported her appointment to Barry Diller’s company: “She’s 31. She’s still a graduate student . . . but that didn’t stop Chelsea Clinton from landing a plum assignment” alongside such corporate titans as Michael Eisner and Edgar Bronfman Jr. Her salary: $50,000 a year, with $250,000 in restricted stock.
As she has cautiously raised her public profile, her personal life has come under scrutiny. In 2010, she married Mezvinsky — described by one of Chelsea’s friends as a former “total playboy” to Vogue — in Rhinebeck. The ceremony — high-profile guests, Vera Wang gown, lavish setting, town shut down — was very much Chelsea: a prominent affair she insisted was private.
Now expecting her first child, Chelsea’s loyalty has historically remained with her parents. According to Halper, in late 2011, when she and Marc attended the dedication of the Bill Clinton Presidential Park Bridge in Arkansas, Chelsea told her husband to get out of camera range. “Stay here,” she told him. “You’re not a Clinton.”
Chelsea takes over
There was one longtime aide that Bill considered an honorary Clinton: Doug Band, described by Halper as “the son Bill always wanted.”
Band was always at Bill’s side, anticipating his every need, and when he approached Clinton about forming a consulting firm called Teneo, Bill was supportive. The former president’s name was enough to bring in contracts with Bank of America, Dow Chemical, UBS Wealth Management and Coca-Cola — some of those companies reportedly paying $1 million per month.
All was well until an early meeting with Bill; when Band arrived, he was surprised to find Chelsea and her husband in the room. According to Halper, the couple wanted not just equity in Teneo but a salary for Chelsea. She saw Band — not inaccurately — as selling access to her father.
When Band refused her, the book notes, he was not long for ClintonWorld.
“A number of articles began to appear, in The New York Times and elsewhere, about financial improprieties at Clinton’s various foundations,” Halper writes. “All of them were one way or another overseen by Doug Band.”
As Halper notes, a particularly damaging piece on Band was written by Amy Chozick, one of the only journalists who was given access to do a profile of Chelsea.
Suddenly, the media-averse Chelsea was allowing her thoughts on the matter to leak: A September 2013 piece in The New Republic said that “Chelsea, who once felt only fondness for Band as a trusted member of her family’s circle, came to worry that the overlap between the foundation and Band’s business interests could backfire on the Clintons,” with another source saying, “I don’t think Chelsea was wrong.”
Bill cut ties with Teneo and Band, and Halper writes that the two now speak only a few times a year.
“Basically Chelsea came in and took over,” a Clinton associate told Halper. “And Marc wants to start his own hedge fund and he wants to use the president’s contacts to build that up.”
“People warned Doug that this was going to happen, and he didn’t listen,” a friend told Halper. “Doug’s a little naive when it comes to loyalty, which is funny because he works for the ultimate people who claim to care about it, but also don’t give a s— about it.”
Chelsea also decided to join the Clinton Foundation, hiring herself a chief of staff in 2011. The organization was renamed The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in February 2013, and Chelsea has attempted to explain exactly what she does in her executive role.
She told Fast Company that she was hoping to “democratize” the foundation’s works, to “measure almost everything through quantitative or qualitative means,” to “celebrate those who have the courage to be second.”
The magazine also noted how much Chelsea was coddled by handlers, who did everything from micromanaging her photo shoot to berating the writer for asking about Doug Band. She told Vogue that “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.”
Chelsea’s friends have gone on the record about her likely political ambitions, and even her father has said she should run for president someday. When asked directly about that by Fast Company, Chelsea gave a typically verbose, airy answer:
“I live in a city and a state and a country where I support my elected representatives,” she said. “If at some point that weren’t the case, and I didn’t support my mayor or my city councilwoman or my congresswoman or either of my senators — and I’m lucky to live in a state where I have lots of women representing me, you know — maybe then I’d have to ask and answer the question for myself, and come to a different answer.”
In a word: Possibly.