Hillary and I were busy and happy at work, but even as we changed our day jobs, we remained devoted to our family as Chelsea began her own career, married, and had children of her own. In 2001, we went to California for Chelsea’s graduation from Stanford. Hillary and I had loved our visits to Palo Alto, meeting Chelsea’s friends and their families and a couple of her favorite professors. We also spent time with Steve and Laurene Jobs, who, during Chelsea’s Stanford years, had been kind enough to let us use a house they had in the woods a few miles out of town so that we could have some private time when we visited her. It was a wonderful gift, as was his newest product, an iPod. I made heavy use of it for years. I loved the iPod because I could cluster my music. I had six versions of “My Funny Valentine” and eight versions of “Summertime.” It’s fascinating to see how gifted artists interpret great music so differently.
There’s an old saying that seeing things differently makes politics and horse races. The challenge comes when there are changes in the rules, or one set of rules for the in-crowd and another for everyone else, or no rules at all. Navigating big challenges is also part of watching your children make their way into adulthood and start their own careers.
Chelsea was able to take a semester off during her senior year to help Hillary in her New York Senate campaign and fill in for her at the White House, including going with me on foreign trips. She did a good job in both roles, still graduated on time, and it was great having her with me those last few months.
In late January, after our White House years came to an end, almost three weeks after we watched Hillary being sworn in as New York’s junior senator, Chelsea went back to Stanford to finish up. She only had to take one required course, but if she wanted to graduate with highest honors, she also had to write a thesis, and had just three or four months to do it. Most of her classmates had been working on theirs much longer. But she made the deadline, pulling a lot of all-nighters in the library, laying her head down on her worktable to get a little sleep.
The thesis was on the Irish peace process and my role in it: A Convergence of History, Politics, and Possibility: The Story of How and Why an American President Intervened in Northern Ireland. She wrote that I’d been interested in the Irish Troubles since 1969 when they broke out while I was studying at Oxford. But I made a big commitment to trying to solve the problem during the 1992 primary campaign in New York, which has our country’s largest Irish American population, including many who were deeply involved in Irish issues. I needed their support to win New York and fend off the last serious chance to derail my nomination. As for my commitment to Ireland and peace, Chelsea didn’t gild the lily; she wrote that it was rooted in both personal conviction and the hope of political gain. Thankfully, she added that the more I got into it, the more committed I became. “Dad, you took some real risks, had a good plan, and forged real relationships. You did a good job.”
I just reread it. I know I’m biased, but it’s well researched, well written, and balanced. After twenty years, it’s aged well, still interesting and informative. Her advisor, the eminent historian Jack Rakove, must have agreed. She graduated with highest honors.
The graduation ceremony on the Stanford football field was on a perfect sunny day. In true Stanford tradition, most of her class didn’t march straight to their seats, but jumped around, did somersaults, handstands, and other stunts, entertaining the families and friends in the stands. The ceremony was brief, with a speech from Carly Fiorina, a Stanford grad who had become CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Hillary and I were so proud of our daughter, who had gone far from home, made lifelong friends, learned a lot, and was eager for the next chapter of her life.
Chelsea had told us for years that she wanted to go to Oxford after she finished at Stanford. One night she called and said she had good news and news I might not like. She said Stanford had asked if she wanted to attend a meeting about a possible Rhodes Scholarship. She told them she was honored but thought she shouldn’t be considered.
I asked her why. “Don’t you want to go to Oxford anymore?”
“Yes, I do. Can you afford to send me?”
I said, “Yes, I’ll be able to by the time you enroll.”
“Dad, that’s how I’d like to go. Winning a Rhodes Scholarship would be a great honor, but if I won, it would be because of the life I’ve already had, the places I’ve been, and the people I’ve met. It wouldn’t change my life. The scholarship should go to a young person like you were, someone whose life it will change.”
I had never been more proud of her. Chelsea enrolled as a Master’s candidate in the fall of 2001, accepted by University College, Oxford, thirty-three years after I became a student there. In November 2002, in her second year, Hillary and I flew to England to celebrate Thanksgiving with her. She and her roommate, Jen Lee, a Harvard graduate and Juilliard-trained cellist, had moved into a small house in North Oxford for their final year and invited us to share a meal with more than twenty of their fellow students, including Americans who couldn’t go home and British and other students who’d never celebrated the holiday.
We liked our daughter’s eclectic collection of friends, including two U.S. Army officers soon to go on active duty, who invited me to join in a game of touch football the afternoon before dinner. One of them, Wes Moore, won the Maryland governor’s race in 2022 and is one of our most promising young political leaders. The other, Seth Bodnar, is now the president of the University of Montana. A typical rainy Oxford fall morning had left the playing field slippery and muddy, but they were used to it. The conditions didn’t hamper their enthusiasm or their efforts. I still had a pretty good throwing arm back then but the other team cut me no slack. I left the field covered in mud and a few bruises, glad to have survived.
The dinner was a great success, as we devoured the traditional Thanksgiving meal, tightly packed around tables in two small rooms, all the while carrying on vigorous conversations. I remembered how intimidated I was when I was a student at Oxford more than thirty years earlier whenever I was invited to tea at a women’s college. Sitting through their conversations was like being the ballboy at a fast-paced tennis match as the verbal serves and volleys flew across the net. It was hard to keep up and not get hit. The women and the men were impressive this night, too, so I tried to draw them out and speak only to answer the questions they asked. Chelsea has had good judgment and good fortune in her friends, from her early years to today. I’ve always enjoyed spending time with and learning from them.
After Chelsea finished at Oxford, we moved Thanksgiving to our home in Chappaqua, where Chelsea began inviting longtime friends from New York and England to join us. They soon brought their spouses, significant others, and visiting parents. Before long, there were kids, too. We couldn’t do it at all in 2020 because of Covid, had only a small gathering in 2021, but in 2019, we had forty-three people. About that many came to the restart in 2022.
Since that first celebration, everyone has been invited to say what he or she was grateful for. Some came just after or still in the midst of steep personal or professional challenges. Yet everybody always found something to be grateful for. In our family, the toughest task fell to Hillary after the 2016 election. She found her voice when most of us, me included, were still searching for ours.
In 2003, Chelsea finished her two-year stint at Oxford by completing the thesis required for her Master’s in International Relations on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria—how it started in 2001, what it was supposed to do, and where it fit into the world’s response to big global health challenges. She invited me back to Oxford to watch the last step toward getting her degree: a session in which she would answer questions about her thesis posed by academics and others in the room. She answered all the questions well, and afterward we spent some time with her principal advisor, Dr. Ngaire Woods, an impressive New Zealander who’d first come to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She clearly liked Chelsea, believed in her promise, and would soon be encouraging her to get her doctorate.
In May 2014, Hillary and I went back to Oxford for the formal ceremony awarding Chelsea her doctorate of philosophy in International Relations, held in the university’s old Sheldonian Theatre. She earned it with a thesis analyzing the impact of the first ten years of the Global Fund. It became part of a book she wrote in 2017, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?, with her Oxford friend Devi Sridhar, a Florida native who is now chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The eleven years between her two Oxford degrees were eventful for Chelsea personally and professionally. She worked at McKinsey and Company for three years, gaining experience in a wide variety of businesses. After McKinsey, she worked at Avenue Capital, analyzing possible investments in chemical companies, renewable energy, and new technologies. Then she went on to New York University, helping to set up its international programs and cochairing Of Many, a student multifaith group led by an American rabbi and an imam from Indonesia. She has been deeply committed to interfaith work for a long time. She read the Quran from start to finish in high school. I was always proud of her for her accomplishments and grateful and a little awestruck by the way she threw herself into things and kept going in the face of all the negative press and endless innuendo about our family. She determined early on not to let the daily news define her, to learn something from every good and bad thing that happened, and maintain her sense of poise, grace, and dignity.
After helping her mother in the 2008 campaign, she got a Master’s in Public Health from Columbia, then she taught for a decade at the Mailman School of Public Health there. Over the last thirteen years, Chelsea has served as vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, and led several other important initiatives, all while teaching her course in public health in New York, taking care of her family, keeping up with friends working in innovative companies, and doing other things important to her, including writing a series of children’s books and running in two New York City Marathons. She’s been invaluable to our foundation work in more ways than I can count. A few years ago, I told her, “You know, for a short period in high school you thought you knew more than your parents did about everything. Alas, it’s finally true.”
Our biggest Chelsea day was July 31, 2010, when she married Marc Mezvinsky. She and Marc had been friends since they met at Renaissance Weekend in South Carolina when she was thirteen and he was sixteen. They stayed in constant touch, even after Marc later enrolled at Stanford. When Chelsea went there, too, their friendship thrived but they didn’t date until 2005. How that morphed into marriage is a story for them to tell.
They had an interfaith wedding, attended by four hundred family and friends at the famous Astor Courts estate on the Hudson River near Rhinebeck, New York, a historic town where the oldest inn had hosted George Washington and other revolutionary leaders.
As I walked her down the aisle, I was nervous and choked up, reliving all the years that led to this day. I was afraid I’d lose it before the handoff, but it was her special day and I managed to do my part. She and Marc exchanged vows under a chuppah in a moving ceremony officiated by Rabbi James Ponet and Reverend Bill Shillady, a Methodist minister who is a close friend of ours. Chelsea, her mother, her grandmother, and her bridesmaids all looked beautiful. Marc’s mother, father, and his ten brothers and sisters were there, all of them beaming. Afterward, we had a dinner full of toasts and dancing. I was so glad Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, at ninety-one, had lived to see this day. Chelsea adored her, as did many of her young friends. I did, too. She had survived a rough childhood to become a wise, tenderhearted but tough-minded woman. I was so glad Hillary and Chelsea had her as a confidante for so long.
Just a little over a year later, Dorothy died after falling and hitting her head while climbing the stairs at our home. There’s a small elevator that Hillary kept in working order for her, but she wouldn’t use it, saying she had to keep moving. Hillary was devastated; her mother had been a rock. And Chelsea had lost her last grandparent, the one who had played by far the largest role in her life (my mother and Hillary’s dad died when she was twelve and thirteen).
When we had a memorial service for Dorothy in the backyard of our home for family and friends, what struck me most were the wonderful things several of Chelsea’s friends said about her. Dorothy Howell Rodham had been abandoned, cold-shouldered, and ignored by two generations of her family. She spent her life making sure her kids, grandchildren, and their friends knew she cared about them. And she kept growing. She forced herself to watch an hour of Fox News every day, saying, “Nobody’s wrong all the time, and when they are, I want to have an answer.” The day she died, she was reading Oliver Sacks’s latest book. Hillary and I read the book in her honor, but it’s still in the room where she was reading it, with the bookmark where she left it.
Hillary would suffer two more losses in the next decade. Her brothers Tony and Hugh have had lives full of adventures and misadventures. Hugh served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, and the tales he told about it would have made a great Gabriel García Márquez novella. In 1974, they both came to Arkansas to campaign for me when I ran for Congress. One night, four guys picked a fight with them over politics in a local bar and the police were called to pick the four tough guys up off the floor. They took two to the hospital and let Hugh and Tony go when the whole bar said they didn’t start the fight. When they were in Arkansas, Hugh got a law degree and a doctorate in education. Tony went back to Chicago to work, and Hugh became one of the public defenders in Janet Reno’s successful drug court in Florida, which kept first offenders out of prison. Tony soon joined him.
Tony wound up in Washington, and we hosted his 1994 wedding to Nicole Boxer at the White House, which produced our nephew Zach. Their marriage ended in 2001. Four years later, Tony married Megan Madden, a champion rugby player. They had two children, Fiona and Simon. They’re in high school now, both good students, good athletes, and good people. After graduating from USC, Zach became a gifted writer, video producer, and content creator who now works for the Democratic National Committee. We’ve loved watching them grow up, going to their events, and cheering them on.
In 2012, at fifty-six, Tony’s clogged arteries required bypass surgery. Then he had prostate surgery, which was successful, followed by hip surgery, which had to be redone. They all took a toll. In early spring 2019, he contracted a severe respiratory disorder, was hospitalized, and put on a ventilator and a cardio ECMO machine that cleaned and oxygenated his blood. His medical staff had all but given up hope he would recover, but miraculously he did, and was breathing normally after almost three months on the machine.
Then, on his way out the hospital door, he had a final checkup that revealed cancerous lesions in his liver. He couldn’t mount another comeback, but he didn’t waste energy complaining. Instead, he made the most of his remaining time, going to his kids’ games and enjoying his family and friends. Tony died on June 7, 2019, facing the end with courage and grace, and a week later, in a local park on a beautiful sunny June day, his wife Megan, his three children, his brother Hugh, big sister Hillary and I, along with a lot of friends who still miss him gave him a loving send-off.
Sometimes family is more than blood. A month after Tony died, Hillary lost her best friend from childhood, Betsy Ebeling, after a ten-year bout with cancer. Betsy was the sister she never had. We often visited with her and her music-loving husband, Tom, as our kids were growing up. She cast the Illinois delegation’s vote for Hillary at the 2016 Democratic convention and gave Hillary a wonderful parting gift, introducing us to the famed Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny. We had a wonderful trip with Betsy and Tom to Louise’s home in eastern Quebec in 2017. We stayed in Hovey Manoir, the site of one of her murder mysteries, visited four more of them, and met friends who were models for her characters. We liked it so much we all went back three more times, and in the process became real friends with Louise, a terrific writer with endless imagination.
Betsy would have loved her own memorial service: a joyous, laughter-filled celebration of a fine woman, family matriarch, and gifted public servant, much loved and admired, brave and upbeat to the end. Hillary spoke tenderly about what a unique and wonderful woman Betsy was, saying she would miss her in irreplaceable ways. She still does.
Hillary and I both try to keep our family flames burning. Hugh has been semiretired for several years in Coral Gables while his Cuban American wife, Maria, keeps up her busy law practice. He was an early litigant in the tobacco cases, representing injured clients in the long-running case, which ended with most of the money going to state governments and their lawyers but earned him more than enough to retire, make profitable investments, and play golf with his friends. Then he developed complicated painful back problems, but he kept going, including refurbishing and improving the tiny house on Lake Winola in rural Pennsylvania, where he, Tony, and Hillary spent many summer days as kids. It’s just south of Scranton, home of the Rodham clan. The little house is more than a hundred years old, with pictures and local landscape art that are as old or older.
In May 2023, Hillary and I went with Hugh and Maria back to the place I had first seen more than forty years ago, then without a bath or a shower, where the kids got clean by standing outside below the porch while a grown-up dumped a washtub of water on their heads. When you have more yesterdays than tomorrows, living in the present and for the future requires nurturing good memories and making peace with the less happy ones. But forgetting some things is also important. A couple of years ago, I read Scott Small’s brilliant short book, Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering, which explains why as we age, we need to free space in our minds to make better decisions. Like many older people, I forget where I put things I need and still remember things clearly that I need to let go of. But I’m working on it.
My family, besides Hillary, Chelsea, Marc, and my grandchildren, is my brother, Roger, and his son, Tyler, plus a raft of cousins in Arkansas and a few in Texas who’ve been a big part of my life for a long time. Roger’s had a tough life, struggling with substance use disorder for decades, in and out of rehab with a brief stint in federal prison that saved his life. Thirty years ago, he moved to California and put together a house band that played for the audience during the filming of Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s TV shows Designing Women, Evening Shade, and Hearts Afire. Afterward, he worked intermittently, but he could never maintain sobriety. He kept using through his lost marriage, until he almost died on his birthday in 2017. He finally decided he wanted to live, went back to rehab, and stuck with it. As I write this, he’s been sober for seven years. If you ask him, he can tell you the exact number of days.
In 2022, Roger moved back to Arkansas and bought some land outside Hot Springs, where he was born and raised. The five-acre lot in the woods has a big log cabin he’s almost finished turning into a home, another log building he’s turned into a guest/rental home, and about fifty yards away, a smaller building where he makes the healthy vitamin soap he’s sold for a few years, mostly at farmers’ markets and online. Now that he can produce sufficient quantities, he hopes to market it to hotels and other big buyers.
I think he’s finally settled, grateful to be able to support himself, live in a place he loves, see his old friends, and know that the one thing he always tried to do right—to be a good father—resulted in Tyler growing into a fine man who loves his dad and his mother. I’m very proud of him and believe he will live out his life free to put his good heart and strong body to work on things beyond survival.
I’m proud of Tyler, too. After finishing high school and college at Loyola Marymount University in California, he moved to New York, got a job, and finished two years of acting classes at the Actors Studio. When Covid closed theaters and reduced TV and movie opportunities, he got another job managing the East Coast properties of a successful lawyer and continued to explore acting. He’s made small films shown at movie festivals, and recently was nominated for best actor at one of them. We talk often, text more, and enjoy meals in New York and his visits to Chappaqua, where he plays with our grandchildren, which they all love.
We all have victories and setbacks in our personal lives and within our families, and we all experience good times and grief. Thankfully, for me there have been far more of the former than the latter.