Chelsea Clinton was named after a Joni Mitchell song and a London neighbourhood
Bill and Hillary Clinton, on a Christmas trip to London in 1978, wandered through Chelsea. Hearing Judy Collins sing Joni Mitchell's Chelsea Morning, Bill declared any future daughter should carry that name. Their only child arrived in February 1980 and grew up to be among the most closely watched presidential children in American history.
She was born in Little Rock on February 27, 1980, during her father's first term as governor of Arkansas. By her own account she was reading newspapers at three, and at five she wrote to Ronald Reagan asking him not to visit a German military cemetery containing graves of Nazi soldiers. She skipped third grade, attended public schools in Little Rock and danced in the city's Nutcracker. When the family moved into the White House in January 1993, the Secret Service gave her the codename Energy.
Her parents fought to keep her out of the spotlight. Following Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's advice, Hillary asked the press to cover her daughter only at official events, and Margaret Truman, herself a president's daughter, wrote to The New York Times backing the plea. Most outlets agreed, though some comedians mocked her. She enrolled at the private Sidwell Friends School, then at Stanford, arriving in 1997 accompanied by nearly 250 journalists.
Her studies ran long and wide. At Stanford she wrote a senior thesis on Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement and graduated in history with highest honours in 2001. She then studied at University College, Oxford, where her father had been a Rhodes Scholar, completing a master's thesis on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in 2003. A public health master's from Columbia followed in 2010 and an Oxford doctorate in international relations in 2014.
Her working life has spanned the consultancy McKinsey, the investment firm Avenue Capital, university posts at NYU and Columbia, and a stint as an NBC correspondent from 2011 that drew charges of nepotism. She sits on the Clinton Foundation board, writes best-selling nonfiction for children, and campaigned for her mother in 2008 and 2016.
Source: Chelsea Clinton
