She didn’t exactly set the stage on fire, but she was still, it seemed, the highlight of everyone’s day. In June, in Manhattan, 35-year-old Chelsea Clinton, vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation, looking understated-chic in a silk blouse, held court at the United Nations about the global problem of fathers’ being disengaged from their children. She used no notes and moved her gaze back and forth across a room full of rapt nonprofit leaders and policymakers as she shared her passion for numbers and data. “We often say at the foundation that data helps measure progress, but it also helps drive progress. And that’s why I think this report [State of the World’s Fathers] is so tremendously important.” She rattled off facts about the benefits of engaged fathers and introduced the audience to “Abenomics,” a recent Japanese theory for stimulating economic growth. In what has become customary in her public addresses, she brought the issue around to the personal, mentioning her then eight-month-old daughter, Charlotte, and her husband, 37-year-old hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky: “I’m so grateful for his dedication, his support, his love, and the investments that he makes in our daughter every single day.”
The U.N. speech was no big deal for Chelsea, mind you. In the past few months she has accompanied her father and 20 wealthy foundation donors to Africa, capped off by a Clinton Global Initiative conference in Marrakech; visited Haiti; and hit the TV talk shows to tout the foundation’s “No Ceilings” project, an online report that gathered more than “a million data points” about the state of girls and women in the world. With Jimmy Kimmel she demonstrated not only her impressive grasp of the issue but also her new breezy rapport with friendly interviewers.
In addition, she spoke at a June tribute to the late fashion great Oscar de la Renta, referring to him “as my friend and as the man I would have chosen for my grandfather had God granted me such a gift.” In 2014 she received *Glamour’*s Woman of the Year award. During an interview with her following the ceremony, a beaming Katie Couric concluded that Chelsea was also, “I think it’s safe to say, probably a Mom of the Year.”
Gone is the Chelsea who tried to blend in as just another Stanford-educated grind. She has fully embraced being a Clinton and is now deliberately, willfully, on the road to greatness. She recently admitted that running for office one day is “absolutely” a possibility. Like every aspiring political-office holder, she found time in the busiest possible moment in life (in her case the first year of motherhood) to write a book: It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! And, most important, two and a half years ago she put her name alongside those of her parents at their foundation, which has raised some $2 billion since its inception and is now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
This was no vanity move. Those who work with her at the foundation attest to her almost daunting intelligence, her diligence, and her genuine dedication to the job. But the question of whether Chelsea can lead remains to be seen, and if ever there were a moment to show some creative vision, it would be now. Never before has the Clinton Foundation come under such scrutiny—for the donations from foreign governments it received while Hillary was secretary of state; for those it continues to receive as she runs for president; and for the extremely large speaking fees that both Bill (up to $1 million) and Hillary (up to $500,000) have been collecting from foreign governments, corporations, colleges, and even small charities. Whether or not our global policies have been shaped by who gave what to the Clinton Foundation is nearly impossible to prove, but nevertheless there’s a perception problem, and scrutiny of the foundation’s fund-raising practices will grow only more intense should Hillary become president.
The problem is now Chelsea’s too. And yet, despite her vaunted position, she has been shielded from having to answer. Her spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz, guided Vanity Fair to sources for this article, but Chelsea declined to be interviewed. Questions put to the foundation about her position on the fund-raising issue were redirected. Her television appearances have been strictly in friendly venues. Interviews with print media have been limited to discreet, non-controversial topics, such as her initiative to stop elephant poaching. Recently, when ABC News anchor Juju Chang found a moment to ask her about the fund-raising allegations, she did so apologetically (“I would be remiss if I didn’t ask … ”) and allowed Chelsea to sidestep the question.
Except among members of right-wing media, the idea of making Chelsea Clinton uncomfortable feels wrong. Our national instinct is to protect and revere her—to treat her more like royal progeny than an adult who has taken on a position of global consequence. The coddling is not simply because she’s the daughter of two political superstars who are loved and feared and protected by their own omertà—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because we witnessed the public humiliation she went through as a teenager by virtue of being President Clinton’s daughter, and because, in spite of all that, she appears to have emerged as a decent, serious young woman. The resilience was moving. As Anne Hubert, a friend from Stanford and now a Viacom executive, puts it, “People are rooting for Chelsea. They want her to be doing well.”
Our national sympathy for Chelsea is rooted in our image of her as a kid who exuded natural decency and earnestness. She was inculcated at an early age with the importance of world engagement. Before she could read, her parents read to her from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. At the age of five, she wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan questioning his planned, much-disputed visit to a German military cemetery that contained some Nazi graves. Todd S. Purdum, who then covered President Clinton for The New York Times (and is now a Vanity Fair contributing editor), recalls Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, showing Chelsea’s letter to him. “Dear President Reagan, I have seen The Sound of Music. The Nazis don’t look very nice to me. Please don’t go to their cemetary [sic].”
Despite the Clintons’ wish for their daughter to have a normal childhood, their will to change the world superseded everything. They sought to prepare her for the ugly realities that would come with that. As Hillary revealed in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, when Bill was running for his second term as governor of Arkansas, the family did role-playing exercises at dinner. Six-year-old Chelsea played Bill, and he hurled insults in her face about what a terrible person he was. She ended up in tears the first night, but “she gradually gained mastery over her emotions,” recalled Hillary. She would need that skill. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he requested that Chelsea remain off limits to the media. Most respected his wish, but she endured cruel barbs from Rush Limbaugh, Saturday Night Live, and John McCain that targeted her awkward teenage looks. Throughout, she remained a model of perfect manners. Purdum recalls a dinner in 1995 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to celebrate the birthday of one of Hillary’s aides. “Someone from the Park Service gave Chelsea a commemorative Smokey Bear doll, and she was not going to leave that restaurant until she got the name and address of the person to whom she should send a thank-you note,” he recalls. “She also asked me what she owed for the pizza.”
But who could ever have imagined a more daunting challenge to filial steadfastness than her father’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky? Rumors about the president’s affair were brewing at the tail end of 1997, during Chelsea’s freshman year at Stanford. An observer recalls that Chelsea’s demeanor drastically changed—“from that friendly girl to being shut down and frozen.” After learning the truth, Chelsea was “confused and hurt,” wrote Hillary in Living History, and froze her father out for a time. Bill was tortured by the effect it had on her, and cried when he learned that she had read the Starr Report, which included sexual details of his dalliance. She relied on family friends and those at Stanford for support. Among them was her future husband, Marc Mezvinsky, a popular self-described “nerdy Jewish boy from Philly.” He, too, understood something about personal sacrifice for the Clintons’ greater good: His mother, Marjorie Margolies, had been a congresswoman when President Clinton’s controversial 1993 tax bill came up for a vote. The president made a personal plea to her, and she voted yes—going against promises made to her constituents and knowing it would likely cause her to lose her seat. Marc “was always someone Chelsea really turned to and leaned on,” recalls Hubert.
In the wake of the scandal, Chelsea did exactly what her parents had conditioned her to do: swallow the pain and soldier on. “She’s one of the strongest people I know,” says Elsa Collins, another Stanford friend, who is married to former N.B.A. player Jarron Collins. In the summer of that year, when the world wondered whether Bill and Hillary were headed for divorce, Chelsea played a key role in showing they would pull through. As they crossed the lawn to Marine One for the cameras, Bill walked with his head bowed; Hillary, wearing sunglasses, was erect and expressionless; Chelsea was in the middle holding their hands. She was the glue holding the family together and keeping the higher purpose alive. Her father’s gratitude was boundless. As a longtime Clinton associate puts it, “When you have an affair with the intern, you end up paying for it for the rest of your life.”
The first thing Chelsea wanted to do, understandably, was to get as far away from her parents’ psychodrama as possible. She “deliberately tried to lead a private life,” she recalled in a 2012 interview with Vogue. She headed to Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations. When her father first tried to get her involved in his fledgling foundation, even in small ways—to put her name on invitations or show up at events—she rebuffed him, according to foundation sources. After graduating, in what she has described as an act of “rebellion,” she chose the least do-gooder job possible: management consultant at McKinsey & Company, infamous for advising corporations to fire large numbers of people. When that didn’t satisfy her, she tried out Wall Street, getting a job as an analyst at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund owned by Marc Lasry, who is worth $1.9 billion and has been a major financial backer of both President Clinton’s and Hillary’s. Ultimately, she left that too, explaining later that “[money] wasn’t the metric I wanted to judge my life by in a professional sense.” She went back to school—this time to get a master’s degree in public health from Columbia. Unlike most twentysomethings, she seemed not to be hamstrung by indecisiveness or self-doubt. “She never had any real angst about it,” says Elsa Collins. “I think she wanted to make sure that she explored all the avenues that were of interest to her.” At Columbia, she impressed Michael Sparer, the head of the department, who made her an adjunct professor. “She was extremely available to the students,” he says, “very unpretentious, very low-key.”
In late 2007, when Hillary was preparing for the primaries, 27-year-old Chelsea stepped into the national spotlight, speaking at campuses and town halls as a surrogate for her mother. Though she could hold her own onstage, those inside Clintonworld were insistent on protecting her, as if she were still a teenager in the White House: her mother’s campaign sent out the message to the press that they were not to talk to her. Those who defied it learned there were consequences.
In early 2008, David Shuster, then an MSNBC reporter, found himself near her at an event and tried to ask a few questions. He wasn’t surprised that she declined to speak with him—that was her prerogative. What did surprise him was getting warning calls 24 hours later from the campaign telling him Chelsea was off limits. Shuster recalls saying, “Look, she handled herself just fine. I respected her desire not to talk. But what’s wrong with you guys, feeling like you need to protect her or beat me up for asking questions?” The campaign responded that she was still the daughter of the president, and that was that.
But soon Shuster would find his job in peril. A few nights later he engaged in a typical breezy on-air exchange about Chelsea’s role in the campaign, and remarked that it seemed she’d been “pimped out” by the campaign. It was a terrible choice of words, to be sure. The campaign called for his head, making calls to Steve Capus, the head of NBC News, and to executives at General Electric (then NBC’s parent company), accusing Shuster of having called Chelsea a prostitute. Hillary issued a statement essentially demanding that Shuster be fired, and the campaign threatened to boycott an upcoming debate that was to air live on NBC. Under pressure from his bosses, Shuster wrote an e-mail apology and sent it to Howard Wolfson, Hillary’s communications director, to pass on to Chelsea. Shuster says he followed up with a call, in which Wolfson informed him that he had received the apology, but wouldn’t be forwarding it to Chelsea—no reason given. (Wolfson says he has no recollection of the call.) NBC suspended Shuster for two weeks and denied him any future Clinton stories. It was a warning to journalists: Chelsea needed to be handled with kid gloves.
More special privileges were in store—courtesy of a father who, some say, was still trying to make up for his sins. Her 2010 wedding to Mezvinsky (since graduation he had worked at Goldman Sachs and then at 3G Capital hedge fund) took place in upstate New York, in front of some 400 guests in a ceremony that reportedly cost $3 million. The next year Mezvinsky, along with two of his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, raised $400 million for their own hedge fund, Eaglevale, with significant investments coming from several longtime Clinton friends and supporters, including Lasry, British investment banker Jacob Rothschild, and Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein. According to a longtime Clinton associate, Mezvinsky has made the most of the events sponsored by the family’s foundation, such as “celebrity poker nights,” which are prime hunting ground for potential clients. In 2013, Bill and Hillary helped the couple buy a 5,000-square-foot apartment for $9.25 million in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, says a Clinton associate. (Chelsea Clinton’s publicist denies this.)
Under the circumstances it must have been easy not to care about money, as Chelsea claims not to. According to Anne Hubert, Chelsea and Marc’s social circle is “as broad and diverse as New York is a place” in that it includes people in finance, tech, media, law, the arts, and global health. Among the boldfaced names are Burberry designer Christopher Bailey, chef David Chang, and Ivanka Trump and her husband, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. When Hubert is asked if the couple is friends with anyone poor or unemployed, she laughs as if the question must be a joke. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
In the view of the family matriarch—Chelsea’s late grandmother Dorothy Rodham, a spitfire from hardscrabble beginnings, whom Chelsea adored—having the last name and the perks weren’t enough, however. The family had a “responsibility gene” and it was time for Chelsea to take a seat at the table. Chelsea got to work, methodically trying to figure out how to become a public person with a purpose. She consulted with Hubert, whose Viacom division is aimed at millennials, about potential “platforms.”
Chelsea set her sights on two jobs that seemed totally at odds with what she’d wanted fresh out of college: board member of one of the Clinton Foundation’s initiatives, and network news correspondent. For the latter she landed, of all places, at NBC, where she was hired to do segments for NBC News and Brian Williams’s new television newsmagazine show, Rock Center. She would enter this public arena armed with personnel: a chief of staff, an assistant, and an outside P.R. team to craft her image and manage her social media. “She’s the most deliberate human being I know,” says a former colleague at the foundation. “Nothing is by accident”—not surprising, perhaps, when one recalls her family did polling about the name of their new dog. Those tasked with managing her public persona would face an uphill battle in making her sound less programmed and more authentic.
Her stint at NBC was a disaster, perhaps because it ran so contrary to her instincts. “Most of us were baffled [by the hire], because she never even spoke to the press,” says an NBC veteran. “She’d walk by with the imperial stare, looking forward, and interacted not at all.” The feeling inside NBC was that she had been hired to maintain access to and curry favor with the Clintons. When news broke that she had been getting paid $600,000—for a part-time job—NBC staffers were appalled. Most full-time correspondents were being paid far less. The big salary was predicated on the idea that she was already a star, and according to an insider, she started acting like one. Colleagues felt they couldn’t communicate with her directly. Instead, they had to go through her people. And she was hardly present in the office. “There was a joke inside the building that she was the ‘highest-paid ghost’ at NBC,” says a network source. It all might have been excused had she been any good. In the span of nearly three years, however, she filed only a handful of segments—all painfully stiff reports on global do-gooders, plus an attempted comic interview with the Geico Gecko. As the insider puts it, “NBC has made a lot of bad decisions in the last few years, but hiring Chelsea has to be very near the top.”
Getting the big title at the Clinton Foundation was viewed by many, naturally, as yet another unearned opportunity handed to Chelsea by virtue of her last name. But it was also a place where she could prove her grit. When she arrived, in 2011, her father’s prayers were answered. It was a sign, perhaps, that all was forgiven and that his legacy would be secured through his daughter. Says a former foundation employee, “People were very excited to see a succession plan take hold.” Like all things involving Bill Clinton, the foundation was both awe-inspiring and messy. What began at the end of his presidency as a modest nonprofit founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, was now a fund-raising juggernaut, thanks to the Clintons’ star power and ability to get heads of state, C.E.O.’s, leaders in philanthropy, and rock and movie stars to donate large sums to his foundation. Today there are nine initiatives (plus two associated projects) that target some of the most difficult problems around the globe. Among its most important has been providing affordable H.I.V. drugs to 9.9 million people in Africa.
But its very success created problems. The foundation grew so quickly it could hardly contain itself. By the time Chelsea arrived, there were more than 2,000 employees. There was no working infrastructure, no endowment or investment plan. Despite the large sums coming in, the foundation had reported an on-paper deficit of $40 million for 2007 and 2008, which Clinton later explained was a misleading accounting illusion. It was still being run by Clinton’s chief advisers from the White House days: Bruce Lindsey (the C.E.O.) and Ira Magaziner, and to some it still felt like the White House, with egos running amok and, according to a former colleague of Chelsea’s, “regular staffers who were not in the habit of challenging them.” There was intense concern about Doug Band, Clinton’s longtime “body man” and surrogate son, who’d come up with the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative (C.G.I.), the glamorous conference that became the centerpiece of the foundation. While still running C.G.I., Band co-founded Teneo, a corporate-consulting business, which came to be seen as too intertwined with and reliant on the president and his connections. The foundation was tarnished by some of the less attractive characters Band was bringing into its orbit, such as Raffaello Follieri—the Italian con man who was then dating Anne Hathaway.
Some control was clearly needed. And Chelsea started off with a McKinsey-esque bang—by helping to initiate an outside audit. “It was a very authoritarian action for someone who came in at day one,” says the former foundation employee. “The feeling was: we’re being audited—never a good word—because we’re doing something wrong. We wondered, Are our jobs at risk? That’s not a comfortable feeling for many people who’ve been dedicating their lives to the foundation.” The audit called for better management and budgeting policies. Lindsey was replaced as C.E.O. by Chelsea’s pick—Eric Braverman, with whom she had worked at McKinsey, and Magaziner’s job was greatly reduced. (Braverman left the foundation in January of this year over reported power struggles within the organization; Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, is now C.E.O.) Of the 13 financial-advisory firms that applied, the job of investing the foundation’s money went to Summit Rock, where Chelsea’s close friend Nicole Davison Fox is a managing director. (Her husband works with Mezvinsky.) It was felt in some quarters that Chelsea, who hadn’t paid her dues—by, say, spending real time in Africa, or cutting her teeth at one of the programs—was coming in and throwing her weight around. Lindsey and others complained to President Clinton but to no avail. “He has no ability to say no to her,” says a source familiar with the shake-ups.
For all the grumblings about nepotism, others believe that Chelsea is just the enforcer the foundation needed. Under her leadership, the various branches, once physically separated, were consolidated under one roof, and systems were put in place for the once disparate initiatives to communicate more effectively. The foundation rebuilt the board and started using data for measuring success. “We are now very conscientious about ensuring that we incorporate data, [that] we’re measuring, and that we’re actually making course adjustments based on that,” says Maura Pally, senior V.P. of programs. “The ethos that Chelsea has really helped instill here is that, as you evaluate, if the answer isn’t ‘This is a perfect program’ that’s not a failure but rather a learning opportunity.” Around the office, teeming with people in their 20s and 30s, Chelsea’s mastery of information spurs people to keep on their toes. Pally says, “I would spend tons of time trying to get myself up to speed on certain things, and Chelsea’s doing so many different things and yet would blow me out of the water with what she had read about somewhere and analyzed and synthesized and spit back out in a completely compelling, accessible way.” Julianne Guariglia, who works across all of the initiatives, attests to Chelsea’s compassion when she talks with victims and survivors.
While the reports about her leadership are mixed, the more pertinent questions, as her mother runs for president, concern the foundation’s fund-raising practices, which have come under intense scrutiny in the past few months. In 2008, when Hillary was offered the position of secretary of state, an agreement was reached between the Clintons and the Obama transition team that C.G.I. would cease accepting new donations from foreign governments and that the Clinton Foundation would report all donors on an annual basis. We now know that the latter term was not honored: for example, the Health Access Initiative failed to disclose its contributors. Making things murkier, the foundation continued accepting donations from foreign individuals, their foundations, and companies, including a member of the Saudi royal family and a Ukrainian oligarch—more than a dozen in total, which added up to between $34 million and $68 million during the years when Hillary was secretary of state, according to The Wall Street Journal. After Hillary stepped down, the board, which includes Chelsea, voted to resume accepting all foreign-government donations. (Now that Hillary has announced her candidacy, the foundation has limited the number of foreign governments from which it will accept money to six: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the U.K., though all governments can participate in C.G.I.)
While these donations raise questions about foreign influence, the Clintons’ lucrative speaking careers have raised questions of simple good taste. Since 2001 the family has made more than $130 million in speaking engagements. Bill puts roughly a tenth of his fees into the foundation; Hillary, somewhat more. More than $11 million in speaking and appearance engagements have come from relatively small charities—the Happy Hearts Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, among others—which have discovered that having a Clinton in the house comes at a hefty price. Consider the case of model Petra Nemcova’s Happy Hearts Foundation, which rebuilds schools hit by natural disasters. Sue Veres Royal, the former executive director, recalls trying, at Nemcova’s behest, to book the president for the annual gala—it took more than a year. “Petra was told by the foundation that they don’t look at anything unless there’s money involved,” recalls Royal. The cost was $500,000 in the form of a donation to the Clinton Foundation for use in Haiti—a big chunk of Happy Hearts’ overall net assets of $3.9 million. But in this case the bet didn’t pay off—in part, says Royal, because “no attempt was made from anyone at the Clinton Foundation to invite anyone,” and she was asked to comp Clinton friends, such as billionaire Marc Lasry, who, according to Royal, never made a donation. (Lasry declined to comment.)
Fund-raising, Clinton-style, has always been a seamy subject, and it seems Chelsea’s team has tried to keep her out of dirty waters. When it comes to her speaking fees—which have spiked to the low six figures—she’s taken the high road and arranges for 100 percent to go to the foundation. (Neither she nor her father receives a salary from the foundation.) The larger question concerns the future: What happens if Hillary wins the presidency? Would the potential for conflicts of interest simply be too great for the foundation to sustain itself? According to foundation spokesman Craig Minassian, “We’re very focused on what we’re doing today and implementing the work.” In the opinion of Fred Wertheimer, a prominent activist for government integrity and head of the watchdog group Democracy 21, “If Hillary Clinton is elected president, all three Clintons should cut their ties with the foundation for as long as she’s president.”
It sounds Draconian. Then again, it’s almost impossible to imagine Chelsea forgoing the chance to have a major hand in her mother’s administration. As a source close to the Clintons points out, “The ultimate foundation is the U.S. government, so why would you toil with a foundation on the side?”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated what degree Chelsea Clinton received from Oxford. It was a master’s degree in international relations, not philosophy. Ira Magaziner was identified as a vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation. He was not. While the Clinton Foundation did not honor the terms of an ethics agreement made with the Obama transition team in 2008, the Clinton Global Initiative did honor the terms.
