Dutiful Chelsea blossoms in the shade

Home, for Chelsea Clinton, has for eight years been a place she reportedly refers to as the Great White Prison

Home, for Chelsea Clinton, has for eight years been a place she reportedly refers to as the Great White Prison. It must be with mixed feelings that the 20-year-old considers her imminent escape from the Pennsylvania Avenue pad to make way for America's newest inmates. Among her White House memories will be the jolly slumber parties she held, the movie screenings for friends in her very own cinema - they swept up their own popcorn debris - and evenings spent playing with the First Pet, Socks the cat.

Oh. And who could forget Dad's antics in the Oval Office? Some childhood memories she will prefer to leave behind.

Chelsea has done an awful lot of growing up since she first moved in, aged 12 and sporting an unruly shock of frizzy, auburn hair. But thanks to studiously protective parents as much as possible of this journey has been undertaken behind closed doors. Friends say Bill 'n' Hill made a conscious decision early on to ensure the fishbowl-type existence she would inevitably lead as their daughter would have minimum impact on her development. The result is an intelligent young woman at ease with herself and increasingly with her status as All-American role model.

We have seen more of her than ever before in recent months as she joined the campaign trail with Mom, and spent as much time as possible with Dad in the dying days of his presidency. She was US goodwill ambassador to the Sydney Olympics in September but still managed to avoid interacting with the press, even side-stepping questions as inane as what she thought of the Opera House.

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Her inaccessibility has been largely accepted by the US media but her appearance in Sydney led the Washington Post to gripe: "Her role here is largely ceremonial, yet it is financed with taxpayer dollars, and comes with a personal aide, so couldn't she do more than stand there and smile?"

For the most part, though, this "Chelsea must be treated like any normal kid" strategy has worked. The only sign of rebellion from her came when she left home last year, to study medicine at Stanford University in California, a college about as far away from Washington as she could get. But even with a distance of 3,000 miles, she was never going to escape the trappings of being the daughter of a US President. Security men accompanied her to lectures and on dates. The life of the First Boyfriend, Jeremy Kane, whom she has been seeing for two years, has since been thoroughly unpicked by the tabloids.

Chelsea Victoria Clinton was born in Arkansas in February 1980 after the Clintons had been trying for some time to conceive.

Growing up, the game of pleasing Mom and Dad wasn't about looking pretty or acting cute. The Little Girl from Little Rock realised quickly that gaining parental approval meant achieving, learning, impressing. Shoes with velcro fastenings, apparently, were not allowed to be worn by young Chelsea until she had learnt to tie her shoelaces.

"I loved the look of accomplishment on her face when she showed us all what she could do for herself," her mother later wrote. By all accounts she was a precocious child but not spoilt. At school she was good at maths and science. She began ballet at the age of four, appearing in numerous shows in Washington including several appearances in The Nutcracker.

Her ballet teacher described her as very determined. "She could make her body do what she wanted it to do. Mind over matter, we call it," she said.

Bill Clinton made a speech at her graduation from Sidwell Friends High School before which her daughter asked him to "be wise, briefly". Clinton told the students: "Indulge your folks if we seem a little sad or act a little weird." The subsequent behaviour of Dad with a certain White House intern was sadder and certainly weirder than anything most parents get up to and Chelsea Clinton has had to be more indulgent than most.

She dealt with the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal with incredible maturity. For a while there it seemed the parent-daughter role had been reversed. The photograph showing her holding both parents' hands at a time when reportedly the couple could barely hold a conversation with each other spoke volumes for her ability to exude grace under fire. It was this kind of strength of character which led the New York Times to describe her as a "quiet political force". A force that was with her and her mother on the hustings in New York in recent months.

"She wants to be able to help her mother. She also wants to be able to keep company with her father, which is always a surprising thing, when your children grow up and want to spend time with you," Clinton said when asked about his daughter's decision to skip the first part of her senior year to go on the campaign trail with Mrs Clinton. "It's been a great comfort to Hillary and me to have her around more. It is just a family decision that she wanted to make."

According to Clinton's biographer, David Maraniss, Chelsea is crucial to the family's balance. "She is the one person her father could love unconditionally and she is the centre of Hillary's emotional life," he has said.

Once cruelly teased by some sections of the nation's media for the crime of looking as awkward as most shy teenagers, Chelsea has since discovered anti-frizz hair-styling products and been sporting chic clothes in varying shades of charcoal. Lacking anything more substantial to go on, much of the interest in this vegetarian has been in her transformation from gawky adolescent to politely poised young-woman-about-campus.

Her toothy looks inspired one commentator to conclude she had inherited her mother's hamster cheeks and her father's adventurous nose. She was once famously referred to as the White House dog by one US radio presenter. Mike Myers dressed up as her on Saturday Night Live to drive the message home to America: "Chelsea Clinton - Not a Babe".

It was after these comments that the wall around Chelsea, protecting her from prying media, was built even higher. Amazingly, the ban has been largely respected but that didn't stop the obsession with her appearance. Writing about one of Chelsea's boyfriends in Salon magazine a couple of years ago, Camille Paglia spat: "Does anyone seriously believe that a freshman with Chelsea's looks could really have snagged a campus dreamboat of this rank?"

How damaging these barbs were to Chelsea is impossible to gauge. Since the age of six, Mom and Dad have been steeling her against the inevitable attacks that come when your parents are politicians. This role-playing around the dinner table, with Bill anticipating some of the hurtful things the media might say, reduced her to tears at the time but must have prepared her for the personal attacks and more turbulent years of Clinton's presidency.

Even those most opposed to the Clintons politically concede that as parents they have excelled. But their desire to inject normality into their daughter's life - advice given to Hillary by none other than Jackie Kennedy Onassis - hasn't prevented them using her as handy collateral when the political need was great enough.

Hillary may say Chelsea was just along to keep her mother company during the Senate race but there is no doubting her daughter's warmth and charm made a positive impact on voters. Bill's image as doting Dad was regularly boosted when over the years he boasted to reporters that the number of times he had let her down by not attending a school function or ballet performance could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Still, it is to their credit that Chelsea has blossomed into a self-assured young woman, whom those American teenagers uninspired by the likes of Britney Spears can look to as an icon of academic and personal achievement. They are to be congratulated for the strict code of silence enforced among employees and friends in relation to her extracurricular activities. We only know she is considering going to Oxford like her father when she graduates next year, for example, because of a comment made to a curious member of the public on the campaign trail.

Now that she is no longer the daughter of the leader of the Free World, it is likely media organisations will be clamouring to get her to open up about the impact of the extraordinary life she has led so far.

She is one of the world's most well-informed and well-travelled 20-year-olds, having listened in on the Middle East peace talks and visited everywhere from India to Bosnia with her mother. Whoever secures the first interview with the formidable First Daughter (retd.) can expect the acres of coverage which followed the exclusive televised chats with Princess Diana and Monica Lewinsky.

The smart money, though, is on Chelsea Clinton maintaining a strong, sophisticated silence for a few years more. At least until the day her newly elected Senator Mom needs help breaking back into the Great White Prison.