Asked which parent most resembles, friends tick through the mother-daughter similarities. There is the habit of pre-empting questions by asking lots of them. The passionate interest in health care. The tendency to sound a bit scripted when talking about policy, even in private. The way both borrowed on family contacts to establish post-White House careers, but won over skeptical colleagues with their diligence and enthusiasm.
And if her mother, Senator , manages to become the first female president of the United States, Chelsea Clinton could be in a historic, head-spinning position of her own: the first first child twice over.
She certainly brings experience to the job. At 12 years old, she appeared in ’s “Man From Hope” video, testifying to his fatherly virtues. (Mr. Clinton also told viewers of his daughter’s forgiving reaction to his admissions about marital transgressions.) During the scandal six years later, she was photographed hand in hand with her parents, seemingly holding them together.
When Mrs. Clinton ran for the Senate, her 20-year-old daughter crisscrossed New York State by her side. Now, at 27, Ms. Clinton is still clapping and beaming on her parents’ behalf. She accompanied them recently on trips to Aspen, Colo., Germany and Israel. Her fund-raising efforts helped bring in more than $20 million for her father’s foundation.
Along the way, she is playing a more glamorous version of her lifelong role: model daughter.
“It’s ‘The Truman Show,’ ” said Jill Kargman, a friend of Ms. Clinton’s, citing the movie about a character whose entire life is a reality television program.
But like Truman, who eventually breaks free, Ms. Clinton now has her own life: a hedge fund job, a serious boyfriend, a tight circle of friends, and a permanent place setting on the New York party circuit. Lately, Ms. Clinton has been able to have her celebrity and control it, too, enjoying the perks but fewer of the drawbacks she used to suffer, from jokes about her looks to tabloid speculation about a canceled wedding or secret honeymoon. She retains a publicist, but mainly to fend off publicity; she and her parents turned down interview requests for this article, as they have for countless others on the subject.
What's next?
Now Ms. Clinton must decide whether to surrender some of her privacy to help her mother, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. So far, Ms. Clinton is more a character than a presence in the campaign, which aims to portray Senator Clinton as a strong yet nurturing force, a friend to women and children and a symbol of progress from one generation to the next. Voters hear stories about Ms. Clinton’s childhood Christmas ornaments, fondness for “Goodnight Moon,” even her crib. The campaign’s “Sopranos” parody video included a joke about parallel parking that compared her to Meadow, that television family’s loyal daughter.
Campaign officials would not say when — or even if — Ms. Clinton would appear on the trail. “Even though President and Senator Clinton are public figures, their daughter is not,” Howard Wolfson, the campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “While Chelsea Clinton has attended events for her mom and will be supporting her parents in their political and philanthropic endeavors, she will continue to focus on her own professional and personal interests as a private person.”
Those familiar with the Clintons envision her as a strategic resource, not an ever-present voice. “She’ll talk about what she knows about, meaning her mother,” said , the former Clinton cabinet member who chaperoned Ms. Clinton’s Olympics trip in 2000.
John A. Catsimatidis, a businessman and loyal Clinton supporter, who says he has seen Ms. Clinton at too many fund-raisers to name, agreed. “She’s a very talented girl, she’s very smart,” he said, “and people would rather see a member of a Clinton family at a fund-raiser than a surrogate.”
Chelsea's college years
Ms. Clinton began college interested in medicine, which would have taken her away from her parents’ orbit, into long years of hospital training. Instead, after graduating with honors from in June 2001, Ms. Clinton enrolled at , which her father attended as a Rhodes scholar. She arrived just after Sept. 11, and quickly banded with other Americans traumatized by the attacks. Three decades earlier, Mr. Clinton and his Oxford friends had reckoned with America’s role in Vietnam; Ms. Clinton’s group struggled over what Sept. 11 meant for their generation.
Ms. Clinton shared her answer in an earnest essay a few months later in Talk magazine “For most young Americans I know, ‘serving’ in the broadest sense now seems like the only thing to do,” she wrote. “Is banking what’s important right now?”
Her words are reminiscent of a younger Hillary Clinton, who, as the campaign frequently reminds voters, chose children’s advocacy over corporate work after law school.
But after Oxford, Chelsea Clinton signed up with McKinsey, a consulting company known as an elite business training corps. She was the youngest in her class, hired at the same rank as those with M.B.A. degrees.
Her interview was more like a conversation, said D. Ronald Daniel, a senior partner. “That’s why she was a good consultant, because we are professional question askers and professional listeners,” he said.
Because clients often prefer McKinsey to remain invisible, the work was quiet, allowing Ms. Clinton and her peers to pretend that she was just another freshly hatched graduate. “When she was at parties with us, she was one of the group,” said Gautam Mukunda, whose office was a few doors down from hers. “From what I know of her father, he has never been in any room in which he was not the center of attention, starting from before he became president. Chelsea has a deeply admirable ability to yield focus.”
Last fall, Ms. Clinton moved on, taking a job analyzing investments at Avenue Capital, a hedge fund run by Marc Lasry, a loyal donor to Democratic causes generally, and Clinton-related ones specifically. The company invests its $18 billion in the debt of troubled businesses.
Friends say financial independence is important to Ms. Clinton; she may improve on her low-six-figure McKinsey salary by hundreds of thousands of dollars at Avenue because of potential bonuses, according to industry headhunters.
Colleagues from McKinsey and Avenue give a uniform account of Ms. Clinton, saying that she came early, stayed late, showed sound judgment and asked no special favors. At a benefit last month for the , on whose board she serves, Ms. Clinton seemed as hardworking as the other attendees did festive. Most of the women her age wore bright gowns and bare skin, but Ms. Clinton wore a dark pantsuit, her hair smoothed and fastened into a strawberry-blond sheet. She slipped out before the performance ended, telling friends she had to return to her computer.
The ballet is Ms. Clinton’s chief civic endeavor — she took lessons for years — and it is an impeccable choice: moneyed but low on the paparazzi factor, apolitical and yet evocative of one of New York’s most famous ballet patrons, . On benefit committees, Ms. Kargman said, Ms. Clinton is a down-to-earth presence, recently helping to win an argument to keep entry-level tickets to an event to $75.
A consensus portrait emerges
Many interviews with Ms. Clinton’s friends followed the same pattern: requests not to be identified in the article, followed by warm descriptions of Ms. Clinton, then moments of anxiety that she would find out about the praise. Still, in more than a dozen interviews, a consensus portrait emerged, that of a sincere, serious woman who, consciously or not, has picked up a few politicianlike habits.
Often taking positions similar to those of her parents, Ms. Clinton discusses policy more than politics, and easily summons statistics — the number of uninsured in this category, the cost of expanding coverage in that one — to support her arguments.
Ms. Clinton seems acutely aware that others are always observing her; classmates at Stanford noticed that she was always in full makeup, as if she expected to be photographed at any moment. (More recently, she exercised with a personal trainer who specializes in pageant contestants.) At dinner parties and weddings, she seems wary of eavesdroppers and gawkers. But when Ms. Clinton is introduced, she often comes across as an inquisitive student.
Daniela Amini, a friend, recently watched her navigate a dinner table full of strangers by asking well-informed questions about subjects from Iranian history to antique carpets to Russian literature.
Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the , has watched the deliberate way Ms. Clinton navigates the award-and-cocktail-party circuit. “She’s more than aware that she could be a week’s worth of headlines or a month’s worth of rumors,” he said.
Ms. Clinton also appears patient with the strangers who constantly insert themselves into her day. “Way more than any actor, she would be entitled to the eye roll,” said Ms. Kargman, who recently tried to carry on a conversation with Ms. Clinton at a party as fan after fan interrupted to talk about her parents.
In her mother’s 2000 Senate race, Ms. Clinton took to voters “like a duck to water,” said William Dal Col, who managed the campaign of , the Republican opponent. Still, she bridled at interview or public-speaking requests.
In “The Girls in the Van,” her book about covering the campaign for The Associated Press, Beth J. Harpaz described how, at one event at a home for seniors, a moderator asked Ms. Clinton to let the audience hear her voice. She said one word — hello — and then backed away from the microphone, without so much as a glad-to-be-here.
Since then, Ms. Clinton has become a more assured speaker, appearing at a ballet benefit or a ceremony. She rarely says anything surprising. She doesn’t have to; people seem delighted just to watch her lips move and hear sound emerge. In 2004, Ms. Clinton joined a last-minute blitz through Florida, campaigning with four other Democratic daughters and using lines like, “I knew I had to be here today because the stakes are too high.”
Ms. Clinton has also become an active participant in her family’s activities. Last fall, she co-chaired a fund-raising weekend for her father’s foundation, billed as a post-60th-birthday celebration for him. Attending would “advance the work he has done throughout his life — solving problems, empowering people and even saving lives,” she told prospective donors, asking them for five- and six-figure contributions.
, her co-chair, stressed Ms. Clinton’s role in an interview at the time. “She and I have been very involved since Day 1,” he told a New York Times reporter.
Ms. Clinton’s friends call her devoted to her mother and her presidential run, if a bit leery of the accompanying madness of the race. Vanessa Kerry, whose father lost the 2004 election, explained the painful dilemma an adult child of a candidate faces: stay far from the campaign and maintain normalcy, or support the parent you love at the cost of your own privacy.
She still feels bruised by the scrutiny she endured, the false rumors — one involved a fling with the actor Ben Affleck — and the attacks on her father, Senator , the Massachusetts Democrat.
“My skin never thickened,” Vanessa Kerry said.
As for Ms. Clinton, who is far more a focus of public fascination, she said, “I can’t have any conception of what she goes through.”
The cuddly and affectionate couple
This time around, Ms. Clinton, who never had a sibling to share or dilute the pressures on her, has a partner whose life is an uncanny mirror of her own. Marc Mezvinsky, who works at Goldman Sachs in New York, is also the child of two politician parents, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and Edward M. Mezvinsky, both former members of Congress. And Marc Mezvinsky survived a humiliating parental scandal, when his father pleaded guilty in 2002 to swindling dozens of investors out of $10 million.
As a confidence man, Mr. Mezvinsky was the name-dropping type. “When he thought it would help, he would call and say, ‘I’m spending the weekend with the Clintons,’ ” said Robert A. Zauzmer, the prosecutor in the case in Pennsylvania. According to court documents, Mr. Mezvinsky bragged to his targets about an earlier friendship between his son and Ms. Clinton, and used his son’s bank account to transfer money undetected. The younger Mr. Mezvinsky, a bespectacled, mop-headed Stanford graduate known for his confidence and teasing sense of humor, “had no clue,” Mr. Zauzmer said.
Mr. Mezvinsky and his father, whose prison term is scheduled to end in November 2008, declined to comment.
Ms. Clinton and Mr. Mezvinsky seem serious about a future together, according to friends, some of whom wonder about a White House wedding in the event of a victory by Mrs. Clinton.
Ms. Clinton recently attended Sabbath dinner at the home of Ms. Amini’s parents with the hope of learning more about Judaism, Mr. Mezvinsky’s faith. (Ms. Clinton is a Christmas-cookie-baking, churchgoing Methodist.)
Their bond is apparent; friends say at parties and other events, the couple are cuddly and affectionate.
Now that she is grown up “at least she won’t have to live in the White House” if her mother becomes president, Ms. Shalala said. However, Ms. Clinton may simply be too close with her parents, their lives too intertwined, to stay away.
During her father’s administration, Ms. Clinton was allowed, in classic only-child fashion, into some decidedly adult situations. According to her mother’s memoirs, Ms. Clinton was present when her father and his advisers debated how to acknowledge his affair with Ms. Lewinsky to the nation. During the marathon Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Ms. Clinton helped break the tension by chatting with the delegations during breaks.
, then the lead American negotiator, said “it was not uncommon” to see Ms. Clinton or her mother in briefings during the administration. The two women “could be great sounding boards for the president.”
More recently, Senator Clinton has called her daughter one of her two “greatest advisers,” along with her husband.
If Chelsea Clinton returns to the White House, her role, or lack thereof, could be a clue to her own ambitions. She is biding her time, say friends, who toss out possibilities: A life in finance? The Clinton Foundation, which could pass from one generation to the next? Or, would Ms. Clinton run for office herself?
It is a topic of constant speculation in Ms. Clinton’s circles. When Ms. Kargman first heard her deliver a speech at a ballet benefit, a few years ago, she wondered if she was watching the future first female president. “She is going to go all the way,” she thought to herself.
To the public, Ms. Clinton has given just the barest hint of that sort of impulse. In her essay about Sept. 11, she wrote that she felt “a new urgency to play a part in America’s future.” She did not know where life would take her, she said, but one thing was certain. “I will somehow serve my country,” she promised.
Eric Konigsberg contributed reporting.