Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (30 page)

That night, they’d be serenaded at the Smithsonian by Arturo Sandoval. Bill Clinton would sit next to baseball great Ernie Banks, but would break to partake in his favorite pastime: schmoozing the press. “They told me I had to wear it,” he told the press about the heavy ornate medal he had hanging around his neck, which Obama himself had draped over him. Hillary, accompanied by Huma Abedin, would give a warm hug to Jesse Jackson Sr.
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Through all this, Joe Biden was hardly a thought. Which was kind of the point—and must have been what upset him. The vice president, along with his wife, Jill Biden, would be introduced at the first event of the day, the medal ceremony. But their very presence was perfunctory at best.

Two weeks later, it would happen again. This occasion would be the death of Nelson Mandela.

After news broke of Mandela’s death, President Obama, who had visited the South African nation the summer before, took to the airwaves to express his heartfelt sympathy. And the next week, he’d travel to the memorial service to pay his respects. He had invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to ride with him aboard Air Force One, as well as President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. Bill was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, convening the Clinton Global Initiative Latin America. But Hillary was stateside and had the honor of riding aboard the presidential aircraft.
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In the Air Force One conference room, Dubya would pull out his iPad to show Hillary and Barack, and Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama, the paintings he had created in his postpresidential life.

The White House would do them all the favor of releasing a couple of photos of the activities on board. It would, most important for them, be beneficial to the White House, too. Obama’s a man who does not play well with others. Especially those who are his equals, or, worse, those around whom he feels self-conscious. By releasing photos of the Obamas ably hanging out with Hillary Clinton and George W. and Laura Bush, the White House was taking a page out of the Clinton playbook: rehabilitating the president’s image by showing him spending time with past rivals.

The events all made one thing very clear—for whatever reason, the Clintons have Obama in their corner.

One longtime Clinton aide expressed amazement at the maneuverings to me, given his knowledge of recent history. “I think there’s probably more animosity there than people will care to report,” he says of Obama and Hillary Clinton. However, their alliance is clearly not one of warmth, but rather of necessity. Which is why Chelsea Clinton, who according to sources actively detested Obama all throughout the 2008 campaign, offered fulsome praise for him in 2014.

In ClintonWorld these days, nothing counts more than the opinion of the former first daughter.

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Daddy’s Little Girl

“The whole way she’s approached her emergence has been very self-laudatory and kind of selfish.”

—a Clinton aide on Chelsea

Sitting onstage in June 2013, Bill Clinton looked downward, studiously avoiding the stunning former Miss America contestant in her tight pinkish orange dress and her dangling crossed legs. His hands were clenched together and resting between his legs.

She tried to get his attention. “President Clinton, before I let you go,” the woman, TV personality Trish Regan, said as Clinton’s gaze remained transfixed on a random piece of the stage floor. A mischievous grin crept across her face. “Any chance we might see another Clinton in the White House in 2016?”
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As she asked the question that everyone wanted answered, she turned to the audience as its members collectively let out a spirited chuckle.

“Last question, I promise,” Regan said, as her interlocutor considered how to respond.

Bill Clinton’s hair was completely white and his skin, too, showed signs of age, at sixty-six. He looked skinnier than in his presidential days, and while he was far from frail, his body looked a little droopy, as if it were failing its fight with gravity and a life lived hard.

He and Regan were seated before a filled hotel ballroom in Chicago, packed with thousands of guests of one of his pet projects, the do-gooder-sounding Clinton Global Initiative. This was why he was working so hard to be on his best behavior, working so hard to avoid gaping at the buxom woman before him. He wanted to show potential donors—to the foundation and of course to Hillary—that he was a reformed man.

So the former president smirked, nodded, and turned his head even farther away from Regan’s as he delivered a well-practiced line. “Chelsea’s still too young.” He smiled as he quickly moistened his lower lip before lightly biting it.
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(In fact, Clinton was wrong—Chelsea will be thirty-six in 2016.)

Finally he released his hands, letting them fall to the side of his chair, where they quickly grabbed the sides and were used to move his body around for a second as if he were struggling to break free from some invisible restraint.

The very mention of Chelsea as a politician might have come as a surprise for some who hadn’t been following the Clintons’ repositioning over the last years. Yes, it was a clever way to deflect the real question, which of course centered on Hillary. And yes, he said, she’s too young to be president. But the thought
had
crossed his mind. And there’s at least one person who was surely not surprised at all at the mention of Chelsea as a future politician: Chelsea herself, who had long been repositioning herself in her family’s power structure to be something of a coequal with her parents.

The Chicago event was in its way a coming-out party for Chelsea. Her name, too, after all, was being added to the Clinton Foundation—her new place, directly alongside her parents, finally secured. That was her idea, to add her name alongside her parents’, finally getting into the family business.

Bill Clinton has always been a believer in the Third Way. In politics, the term refers to the effort to reconcile left-wing social positions with right-wing economic policies. Indeed, Clinton prided himself as president as governing as something of a moderate or centrist Democrat friendly to business interests whose record won praise even from senior economists under Ronald Reagan.
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In a larger sense, Clinton is constantly seeking a third way, another alternative, a third possibility. In the Clintons’ family dynamic, that third way is Chelsea Clinton. For most of her life, the Clintons’ only child has been the bridge holding them together. She’s also the former president’s backup plan, groomed to be a political force in her own right if Hillary blows it again.

Considering that she’s been in the public eye most of her life, it is surprising how few people really know anything about Chelsea Clinton. This is true even of those who know Bill and Hillary Clinton very well. To their credit, the senior Clintons have done an excellent job sheltering their daughter from examination or discussion in the popular press—just as they vowed to do since entering the White House in 1993. So in the absence of information about the past (and future?) first daughter, most people revert to their default memory: of that seemingly sweet, awkward, and shy girl with raspberry blond curls and braces whom they first encountered when she was twelve years old.

But that is not the Chelsea Clinton of today, at least as described by those who’ve worked closely with her. Bill, who by all accounts is devoted to his daughter, has trained her well. In fact, Chelsea seems to have quietly emerged as a political power player with many of her parents’ best and worst qualities. She is also perhaps the biggest victim of the decades-long turbulence and scandal that often have marked the Bill and Hillary partnership.

When Bill Clinton decided to run for reelection as governor of Arkansas in 1986, he and Hillary sat with their daughter at the dinner table to prepare her for what was to come.

“We explained that in election campaigns, people might even tell lies about her father in order to win, and we wanted her to be ready for that,” Hillary recalled in her book
It Takes a Village
. “Like most parents, we had taught her it was wrong to lie, and she struggled with the idea.”

Then Bill rose from his chair and pretended to be one of his election opponents. “Bill said terrible things about himself,” Hillary wrote. “Like how he was really mean to people and didn’t try to help them.”

Chelsea started to cry. According to Hillary, Chelsea’s parents acted out the mock attacks on her father over and over again, until Chelsea could listen to them without sobbing. She was six years old.
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It is hard not to feel sorry for Chelsea Clinton. She has had one of the oddest lives in the history of American politics. Not only as the daughter of a president, but the child of a father accused of philandering, sexual assault—and, among the more inflammatory (and unproven) charges flung by opponents, even rape. And a mother routinely called a liar, a cheat, and a crook. She had to endure Gennifer Flowers telling the world that Chelsea was the reason her parents didn’t divorce. Without Chelsea, said Flowers improbably, she, Flowers, and Bill would be together today. Such a strange, invaded life would take a toll on even the strongest of personalities, and almost certainly changed the trajectory of the shy and awkward thirteen-year-old with the curly strawberry blond hair and braces who grew up in the controversy-filled Clinton White House.

For eight entire years, her voice was rarely heard, her face rarely seen. In the White House there was a long-standing and strictly enforced rule: Leave Chelsea Clinton alone. “It was pretty much an ironclad rule, even when Chelsea was having semi-public moments like her high school graduation, or when she went on trips with her mom, it was kind of understood that she was off-limits,” former White House press secretary Mike McCurry once told
New York
magazine.
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It didn’t mean folks like radio host Rush Limbaugh didn’t criticize her—because he did. And it didn’t mean that shock jock radio DJs didn’t call up the White House to offer Chelsea a car when she turned sixteen—because that happened, too. What it meant was, Chelsea might appear with her parents in public, but she was not to be written about and not to be questioned.

“I’ve always been in the public eye,” Chelsea told a reporter in an interview.
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“My father was governor of Arkansas when I was born. I was on the front page of the newspapers the next day. I don’t remember that. I do remember—I guess a better way to say it is, I don’t remember a time in my life where people haven’t recognized me or come over and talked to me about something they’ve loved that my parents have done or something that they’ve hated that my parents have done.”
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To be sure, her lot in life came with some benefits. Few young women get to dance with a Beatle (Paul McCartney) or have been sung to by a pop star (Barbra Streisand) or have received a personal escort to the restroom by a sitting vice president and future president (George H. W. Bush). As Bill Clinton has told the latter story, “My daughter was 3 years old, and I introduced her to George Bush. I said, ‘Chelsea, this is Vice President Bush, and this is his wonderful home.’ She looked at him and she said, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ He took her by the hand and took her to the bathroom.”
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But with Chelsea Victoria Clinton’s good fortune came this hard truth: All her life she’d been used. By her parents when they wanted to dismiss rumors of womanizing or an open marriage or a sham family structure. And especially by her father after the Lewinsky scandal, when she was trotted out as the person, literally, holding her parents together.

A very public nonperson, Chelsea has had a difficult time forming an identity of her own. The general refrain from people who’ve met her is a simple one. “She’s weird,” says a Washington journalist who, like all of them, knows well the lesson of David Shuster and will never discuss her on the record.

Chelsea’s experiences, quite understandably, must have caused her to have a deep mistrust of reporters and the larger group of the public known as outsiders. Not many young women in junior high school would reach an understanding, such as Chelsea did, “that it was important to understand a given media report’s intent, message, and interests, whether political, profit, or something else altogether.” She said, “Sometimes my parents would start the conversations; sometimes I would, prompted by something I had read in the morning paper or something someone had said to me at school. What was true in a given story? What wasn’t true? Why did the truth sometimes not seem to matter? Those conversations helped me develop a broad and healthy skepticism about the media, as well as a respect for its ability—in a news story, song, computer game, or movie—to empower or disempower people.”
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The off-limits rule followed her from the hoity Sidwell Friends School, a top private school in the nation’s capital, to Stanford University, also a top private school—but on the other side of the nation, in Palo Alto, California. Only when she was graduating, in June 2001, when Bill Clinton was no longer president but Hillary Clinton was a senator from New York, did the
New York Times
recognize that despite her familiarity, America knew hardly a thing about her. She had grown up, the newspaper put it, “in wordless pantomime.”
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“She may be the ultimate anomaly of the multimedia age, a household face whose voice has so seldom been heard that she could be a silent movie star,” the
Times
wrote. “She was not yet 13 when she first slipped onto the national stage in her parents’ shadow, and at 21, having traveled the world at her parents’ side, she is barely better known.”
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How could Chelsea Clinton be anything but “weird” when her father is the president of the United States and is forced to tell her, to her face, that he had oral sex—in the Oval Office—with a woman not much older than she was? (Chelsea would later cause her father to break into tears by reading the Starr Report online.) Acting out of hurt and shortsightedness, one of Hillary’s punishments for Bill after he confessed his role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal was to have him confess his sins directly to the daughter who idolized him and had defended him. Chelsea was then at Stanford.
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Clinton felt worse for Chelsea than for anyone else caught up in the scandal, he told associates. The president has prided himself on the attention he paid his daughter. Fiercely protective, open with his affection, and generous with his time, Clinton once cited his daughter’s midterm exams as a reason for refusing his vice president’s plea that Bill and Hillary travel quickly to Japan to make amends for an unintentional snub of the Japanese. “Al,” he said, “I am not going to Japan and leave Chelsea by herself to take these exams.”
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After the scandal, as Clinton confided to biographer Taylor Branch, “[Chelsea] had to endure the searing exposure of her father’s sex life at an age when peers meant the whole world. His presence at Stanford has been unbearable for her.”
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Days after Clinton told Chelsea about the Lewinsky affair, she received a call from the only adult outside her family who had her cell phone number.
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He said he knew she was going through a terrible time and wanted her to be sure to remember that both her parents loved her, that it was important to stay loyal to your family, and that if she ever wanted to vent or ask for advice or pray with someone, she should call him—the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
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Bill Clinton and Jackson long had had a “checkered” past, as Bill once described it, but he never forgot that outreach to his beloved daughter when his own relationship with Chelsea was all but shattered.
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The Lewinsky scandal, by the accounts of close associates of Bill and Chelsea, reshaped the father-daughter relationship just as profoundly as it did for Bill and his wife. A source very close to the Clinton family put it to me this way when discussing “what people are missing” about the Clintons: “When you screw a young White House staffer, or whatever they did, you’re paying the price for the rest of your life. When your daughter wants to buy a ten-million-dollar apartment, the question isn’t ‘Are you crazy?’ It’s ‘Where do I wire the money?’” The guilt over Chelsea, according to the source, is not confined to her father. Hillary similarly feels tremendous responsibility toward Chelsea for “being gone all those years.” Chelsea’s evolution into adulthood also calls into question what long had been a point of pride for the Clintons—their parenting skills.

Since those days, Chelsea has seemed largely adrift, trying one thing and then another in a quest to form an identity. With a history degree in hand from Stanford, she set off in her father’s footsteps, going to Oxford to pursue a master’s, and then to Columbia, where she studied public health.