Chelsea Clinton interview: 'I will always work harder than anyone'

It was almost inevitable that Bill and Hillary’s daughter would join the Clinton machine – try as she might to resist. But can she ever emerge from their shadows?

Chelsea Clinton
Chelsea Clinton Credit: Photo: PETER HAPAK

Once upon a time, Chelsea Clinton was a little girl from Arkansas. And deep down, she still is. Despite her White House-Stanford-Oxford-Columbia-McKinsey-hedge-fund grooming, she’s still got a thing for poultry. “Fried chicken is my husband’s favourite food,” she divulges in her office at the Clinton Foundation in Manhattan, where she lives in a $10 million (£6 million) apartment.

The first time her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Marc Mezvinsky visited Little Rock, she whisked him off to her favourite childhood fried-chicken hole. In New York, she explains, he’ll now “gorge himself on fried chicken”. Chelsea insists she would too, were it not for an allergy to gluten. “I was a vegetarian for 10 years, a pescatarian for eight. Then I woke up one day when I was 29 and craved red meat,” says Chelsea, now 34, who recently announced she is expecting her first child. “I’m a big believer in listening to my body’s cravings.”

Of course, there was another Clinton who believed in listening to his body’s cravings – and the sad fact that such a harmless statement could call to mind a national embarrassment illustrates the dilemma facing the scion of one former president and one potential contender. For years, the world has been wondering what Chelsea would do.

“One of my earliest childhood memories is being three years old and on the campaign trail with my dad,” says Chelsea, who was born when her father was governor of Arkansas. That day, a woman approached her and asked, “‘Do you want to grow up and be governor one day too?’ And I looked at her and said, ‘No, I’m three. I’m just waving the flag. That is my job right now.’ Flag-waving extraordinaire.”

For a decade after graduating from Stanford in 2001, Chelsea experimented with the world beyond the Clinton machine. In peripatetic bursts, she tried out international relations, then management consulting, then Wall Street, then a PhD. She even signed on as an NBC News “special correspondent”. She rationalises this career promiscuity as a hallmark of being just another Millennial, experimenting until she figures out her professional purpose.

Chelsea Clinton with her father in 1991 in Arkansas

Chelsea Clinton with her father in 1991 in Arkansas (GETTY)

But, of course, she’s not just another Millennial. She’s political royalty. And now, finally, she has decided to join the Clinton family business. As vice chair of the recently rebranded Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, she is helping one of the world’s most notable philanthropies grow up. She’s been there three years and has a solid record. And her plans for its future are ambitious.

“It is frustrating, because who wants to grow up and follow their parents?” admits Chelsea. “I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success I wanted in my life. I’ve talked about this to my friends who are doctors and whose parents are doctors, or who are lawyers and their parents are lawyers. It’s a funny thing to realise I feel called to this work both as a daughter and also as someone who believes I have contributions to make.”

Enrolling in Stanford University in 1997 was Chelsea’s first attempt to cut the umbilical cord. Far from Washington, she found herself surrounded by people who used technology rather than politics to solve problems. It was the height of the first tech boom, and friends were dropping out to launch or join startups (including Mezvinsky, who was also at Stanford, also the child of politicians and then just a good friend: he now runs his own hedge fund). Chelsea wasn’t drawn to the entrepreneurial life, but she did discover that she was “a person who wanted to fix, improve, expand things”.

After graduating in 2001, she had no clear plan for how she could apply that inclination. She attended Oxford University, where she took a Masters in international relations. She spent three years at the management-consulting firm McKinsey, working in its public-health practice before becoming a manager in its financial services and technology practice. Then the doubts encroached again. “Was I going to continue to work 100 hours a week and invest time there and energy?” she says. “Or was I going to go do something else?”

“Something else” was working as an industry analyst at a hedge fund. As with every new job during these years, Chelsea had to make people forget her heritage. “I will just always work harder [than anybody else] and hopefully perform better. And hopefully, over time, I pre-empt and erase whatever expectations people have of me not having a good work ethic, or not being smart, or not being motivated.”

But ultimately, she was becoming more frayed than focused. She took a leave of absence to work on Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. After returning to Wall Street, she decided to take a Masters in public health at Columbia. It was a gruelling schedule. While she enjoyed being in the same industry as Mezvinsky – “We both built lots of Excel models. We geek out a lot” – the couple had little downtime. Chelsea left the hedge fund to finish her Masters and took a job at NYU.

Chelsea Clinton at her 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky

Chelsea Clinton at her 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky, with Hillary in the background (REX)

Her wedding in 2010 put an end to the meandering. According to Bari Lurie, her chief of staff, the previously private Chelsea was caught off guard by the attention paid to the event. When she campaigned for her mother in 2008 – 400 events in 40 states – she first experienced the impact her voice could have. “She quickly realised, ‘There is nothing I’m doing now that’s satiating this interest,’” says Lurie. “‘This doing-nothing thing: I’ve tried it, and it didn’t work.’”

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation focuses philanthropy on a range of causes, including global warming, food and healthcare for poverty-stricken Africans, sustainable small businesses and infant and toddler health. The glue holding this together is Bill, who created the charity in 1997 and presides over the annual gathering of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).

When Chelsea arrived in 2011 she knew her primary role was to apply the data-driven skills she had developed in her other jobs. “My father has always been such a doer. He’d never focused on ensuring that we had the functions that not only enabled [other] doers to focus on doing, but also to help us keep systematic track of all the work,” she says. The foundation had more than 2,000 employees in 36 countries, but there was little collaboration between initiatives. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, there was internal strife. When I ask Chelsea the state of the foundation when she arrived, she fails to mention these problems, and doesn’t bring up the audit she and her father commissioned until I ask. She is her parents’ daughter, after all: her crystal-clear thinking is accompanied by stonewalling.

But of the three Clintons, she is the most hands-on. Bill spends much of his time travelling, collecting cheques from speeches. Hillary, who has used it as a refuge since her resignation as Secretary of State, will presumably be on the road again, working to get into the White House. So the onus is on Chelsea.

She especially wants the foundation to address concerns that have “existed too long in the shadows, that historically have made people uncomfortable”. This is where her fame and political heritage are strategic weapons. In 2011 Chelsea pushed the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which had historically focused on driving down the prices of HIV and Aids drugs, to do the same for Zinc/ORS, the leading treatment for diarrhoea, which is the second-leading killer of children under five in the developing world.

One of the first countries it targeted was Nigeria, but negotiating with the government, NGOs, public-sector organisations and pharma companies threatened to delay the effort endlessly. After a couple of weeks of intense preparation, says her colleague Julie Guariglia, Chelsea travelled to Nigeria and “went to every partner, knew exactly what we needed from them, pledged her support and belief in this programme, and got them to commit. Without her, it would have taken months.” Prices of Zinc/ORS have been cut by 40 to 60 per cent in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda.

Speaking about HIV and malaria with Bill Clinton in Pretoria in 2013

Speaking about HIV and malaria with Bill Clinton in Pretoria in 2013 (GETTY)

On a February morning, earlier this year, Chelsea takes the stage of a packed NYU auditorium. Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton – along with Chelsea – are there to announce No Ceilings, a collaboration between the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation that will analyse the progress of women and girls globally. Chelsea tees up questions for the two and melts into the backdrop when her mother cuts her off.

It’s a sharp contrast to her appearance a week later at CGI’s annual meeting. In front of several hundred people, she displays all the hallmarks of a natural leader: command of the subject matter, passion that feels authentic and off-the-cuff comments. This day is clearly Chelsea’s – until halfway through a discussion she’s leading, when the doors open, two Secret Service men appear and Chelsea’s father attempts to slip in quietly. By the time he sits down, the gravity in the room has shifted.

There was a time when Hillary was defined by her husband. Chelsea’s challenge is to work within a Clinton enterprise without being solely defined by her parents. The Clinton machine makes this a particularly daunting task. Chelsea is as forward-thinking and open-minded as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but surrounded by the suffocating retinue that envelops her public life. One of her handlers urges Chelsea not to change her facial expression during the shoot for this interview; another sits in on our interview, whisks her away when she’s in the middle of answering a question and scolds me.

It’s an odd, occasionally funny blend of control and confusion. The press release on Chelsea’s impact at the foundation obfuscates her true accomplishments by mentioning such ephemera as visiting Myanmar, “where she delivered the six-billionth litre of clean water to a family”. And the more they try to ensure a narrative that Chelsea is her own person, the more they remind you that she is also part of a machine. “The foundation, CGI, running for office, Hillary’s book, these trips,” says a Democratic consultant, “it’s all one thing. It’s all The Family. Capital T, capital F.”

The Family will almost surely call on Chelsea in 2016, assuming Hillary again runs for the presidency. In the 2008 campaign Chelsea’s smart and engaged appearances helped younger voters feel connected to her then-60-year-old mother. Amie Parnes, the co-author of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton, is convinced Chelsea will take a more formal role in her mother’s next run. “I can see her being a senior adviser,” she says. “Chelsea will give her the truth.”

Later this year she will become a mother. It was at a No Ceilings event in April where she announced her pregnancy, saying, “I just hope that I will be as good a mom to my child and, hopefully, children as my mom was to me.” And where it all might lead after 2016 is already a matter of much anticipation. The Burberry CEO Christopher Bailey, a close friend of Chelsea’s, says, “I’m sure the foundation will always be part of her life, but I don’t know if it will be the only part of her life. I certainly do not think she’s come to the conclusion that this is it.”

“People [were] always asking me [since I was a child], ‘Do you want to go into politics?’” she tells me. “And for so long the answer was just a visceral no. Not because I had made any conscientious, deliberate decision, but since people had been asking for as long as I could remember, it was no.”

She’s now willing to leave the door open a crack. “I live in a city and a state and a country where I support my elected representatives. If at some point that weren’t the case, maybe then I’d have to ask and answer the question for myself, and come to a different answer.”

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