Silent One in the White House

Chelsea, we hardly knew you.

For eight years, tucked inside a protective cocoon spun by her parents, Chelsea Clinton has been often seen but hardly ever heard. She’s been known to speak out publicly only once--in Tanzania in 1997, to teen-age girls, at her mother’s suggestion.

The first daughter, who grew from a 12-year-old in braces to a poised young woman while on the sidelines of history, will head back to Stanford University in the next several weeks to finish her degree after her father leaves the White House.

“She’s the young Greta Garbo of American politics. There is a mystery--a power--in her silence,” said Gil Troy, history professor at McGill University in Montreal and author of a book on first families.

“I’m sure she does talk--just not to us.”

Asked to greet a crowd in Queens during her mother’s Senate campaign in New York, Chelsea stepped up to the microphone and said, in a whispery voice, “Hel-low.”

Two syllables. That’s it.

For the most part, the media have honored the Clintons’ request to stay away from their daughter, the first child to live at the White House since President Carter’s daughter, Amy.

Chelsea, who once talked of becoming a pediatric cardiologist, took the fall semester off to be with her father in the final months of his presidency and help first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successful campaign for a Senate seat.

She is expected to graduate in June with a degree in history. After that, it’s anybody’s guess.

Chelsea hinted at a campaign stop in New York that she might want to study abroad. Ray Blesser, owner of Northeastern Fine Jewelry in Schenectady, said Chelsea told him she had a “few ideas,” including the possibility of studying economics at Oxford University in England, where her father was a Rhodes Scholar.

That comment was unusual. Most days on the campaign trail she was a silent cheerleader. Sitting erect and smiling wide, she often bounced to her feet to lead ovations for her mother.

Silence and her parents’ ability to keep the media at arms-length have been key to Chelsea’s survival of the turbulent Clinton presidency, Troy said. President-elect George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, have expressed their hope that their 19-year-old twin daughters will be off-limits to the press too.

“Everybody praises the Clintons for insulating Chelsea,” Troy said.

But while they sheltered their daughter, Troy said they also “used her effectively when it was convenient.”

In the heat of the 1992 campaign, when the Clintons were viewed as a power couple, the threesome hugged in a hammock for a People magazine photographer. Last February, the Clintons chastised the same magazine for running a cover story on Chelsea.

In August 1998, after the president’s mea culpa about his affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, the Clintons walked, hand-in-hand-in-hand, to a helicopter on the South Lawn. Chelsea was in the middle--a visual bridge.

“She has an amazing ease about her, almost an ability to put people at ease,” author Carl Sferrazza Anthony said. “There is no princess complex there whatsoever.”