Chelsea, Lately

some shouting, “I love you!” As the last remaining stalwarts of Hillaryland (Huma!) headed backstage, everyone looked a little stunned, even emotional.

Chelsea’s staff was making arrangements to whisk her back to Manhattan to her son Jasper, now 14 weeks old. Meanwhile, in a hallway amid the backstage hubbub, Hillary was telling King the story about “the only time I ever won a trophy” as a not very good tennis player. It was a mixed-doubles match at a tournament at a Fayetteville, Arkansas, country club. When she and her partner were presented with one trophy (“No, no, no!,” says BJK), Hillary was struck by the fact that the little golden plastic male tennis player on top of the trophy was several inches larger than the female player. “Of course, I have that trophy!,” said Hillary, laughing that deep, gusty laugh of hers. “I said to my partner, the guy, ‘You have to let me have this trophy, because this is such a statement.’”

Eventually, I found Chelsea in a dressing room and we sat and talked for a few minutes. She was running late. “I have to go take this picture with my mom, and then I have to go home and pump.” I asked Chelsea—the pro, an expert in answering nosy questions with a long, thoughtful answer that sometimes doesn’t actually answer the question—what it’s like doing interviews with her mother. This was the first time I had ever seen her screen freeze up. She stared at me with her big blue eyes and blinked a couple of times. “It’s fun.” There were a few more awkward seconds. “I love working with my mom.” Blink, blink. “It’s fun.”

Maybe she was just rushed and tired, but it’s hard not to think that maybe it isn’t so, you know, fun. Chelsea and Hillary had begun their media blitz for Gutsy Women just a few days before, right after Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was, at long last, launching an impeachment inquiry. Which meant that every interview (CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, The View, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) was frontloaded with Important Questions for Hillary—arguably the world’s foremost living expert on the subject, having been on the Nixon impeachment-inquiry staff in 1974 and married to the only president to have been impeached in the past 150 years. Their joint interviews about the book they co-authored were hijacked by the news, and here was Chelsea, cast once again as the dutiful daughter, listening respectfully.

The ford foundation on East 43rd Street is a deeply familiar yet utterly obscure structure that is easy to walk right past, because from almost every angle it looks like an impenetrable fortress. It is just a block from the United Nations, and I can’t help but think about the time, ten years ago, when I spent a couple of days following then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton through her appointments during the U.N. General Assembly—the first and last time I had a reason to go to the U.N. It felt both rarefied and prosaic, teeming with people who spend their days trying to redraw the blueprint for how life could—should—be lived, if only everyone else would wake up and cooperate. Unlike the rest of us, these folks, Hillary especially, seemed to have an extra strand in their DNA, another gear the rest of us lack, that allows them to tolerate the drudgery and sacrifice, not to mention the endless disappointment and thanklessness, of trying to make the world a better place.

I was always mystified by the fact that so many of my friends had so many misgivings about Hillary. But on that long spring book tour, I came up with a theory: Chelsea, like her mother, makes people feel guilty, almost ashamed, that they’re not doing enough. That unless you are pitching in and helping and doing good— almost constantly—you are not measuring up. It’s not that these people necessarily dislike Hillary, I realized; at least for some of them, it’s that they don’t like the way Hillary makes them feel about themselves. I caught a whiff of this in Brooklyn at the Kings Theatre, when, toward the end, Hillary said, “We hope that these stories don’t just end with admiring those we profile but lead people to think about what each of you can do in some area that’s important to you. And only you can know what that might be.” In other words: Don’t just enjoy this! It must lead you to discover a sense of purpose! Now imagine if you were that person’s only child.

I was meeting Chelsea Clinton this morning at the Ford Foundation for a gathering of Girl Scouts young and old. As it happens—and this will probably come as no surprise—Chelsea was a Girl Scout. So was her mother. So was Condoleezza Rice. Indeed, 72 percent of all female senators were Girl Scouts, and about 60 percent of the women in the House were once part of a troop.

The Clinton Foundation had partnered with the Girl Scouts to host an event on the importance of civics education: Chelsea was running a panel that included New York Attorney General Letitia James; Laura Dove, the Republican secretary of the U.S. Senate; Dr. Emma Humphries, chief education officer for iCivics; and Lauren Hoagland, a Gold Award Girl Scout from Birmingham, Alabama, who had just turned 18.

As the discussion was winding down, Chelsea turned to questions written on note cards from the Girl Scouts in the audience. “There’s a question I feel obligated to ask because it’s come up quite frequently, and I think this is a very succinct expression of it: ‘How can we ask our girls to be brave and engaged when they see women candidates or other women who are in powerful positions treated badly or unfairly?’” The resonance of Hillary Clinton’s daughter reading this question is lost on no one. James gave a great little speech about why these young girls must run for office. Humphries told a sharp, funny mean-girls story about a friend saying horrible things about her when she was their age and the invaluable three-word piece of advice she got from a teacher: “Consider the source.” Then Hoagland, the 18-yearold, who had been getting the biggest applause lines all morning, said, “Powerful women have always turned heads. They’ve always made people a little bit confused. All of you will turn some heads. You’re going to get people confused as to why you care … It’s a choice to be brave.”

“Amen!,” said Chelsea.

Afterward, Lurie and I worked our way through the packed reception room—filled with women and girls laughing and talking, a sound so distinct it ought to be a ringtone—and headed back into the greenroom and found Chelsea, then still hugely pregnant, sitting on a sofa, eating a muffin. The room was decorated with beautifully framed photographs of those who had appeared at the Ford Foundation for one reason or another. Above Chelsea’s head was a giant photograph of her father. Her other staffers, Joy and Sara, turned up, and there was a lot of animated chitchat about how moving the program was, how well-organized the event was. “The Girl Scouts are on it,” said Lurie. “Right?,” said Clinton. “It’s not just a metaphor!” And then, as she absentmindedly gathered her things to head off, she said to no one in particular, “Was anyone sitting near Lauren’s mom? She must be beaming. She must be so proud of her.”