While he was president of the United States, Bill Clinton kept his only child Chelsea well-shielded from the media. So well, in fact, that she has never given a formal interview. The 21-year-old has made a rare exception, breaking her silence to write an intimate account of her experiences at Oxford University, and her feelings about living far from home during such turbulent times.
“It's hard to be abroad right now,” she writes in the Talk magazine article. “Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Sometimes its from other students, sometimes it’s from a newspaper columnist, sometimes its from ‘peace’ demonstrators. Over the summer I thought that I would seek out non-Americans as friends, just for diversity’s sake. Now I find that I want to be around Americans – people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am.”
Chelsea says it is “very difficult” to hear America criticised, but she is “grateful for all the British support” that she has received. She writes that as she sits in England “wrestling with these ideas and feelings”, she thinks about the Queen’s message at the memorial service in New York for the Britons who died on September 11. She quotes the last words of the statement, read by the British ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer: “Grief is the price we pay for love.”
For the Stanford graduate, the emotional scars from that infamous day in New York will not soon disappear. “I woke up that Tuesday morning feeling good about where I was in my life and happy about where I was going,” she writes. “Now, that sense of security is gone, and since the 11th, for some moment every day, I have been scared.”
The day of the tragedy, Chelsea was visiting New York, staying just 12 blocks away from the World Trade Center. In the article, she recounts how, in Manhattan’s Union Square, she desperately searched for a pay phone to call her parents after cellular phone service was disrupted moments after planes hit the WTC. Frantically heading away from the towers with friends, she says, “We were all crying. We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us. That we were the next target. For a brief moment, I truly thought I was going to die.”
In a personal glimpse, Chelsea writes that, in her grief during the days following the incident, she sought comfort with a boyfriend – who she does not identify by name – with whom she split when she left for Oxford. “I wanted the ease of being truly comfortable with someone, and I craved some good, long hugs,” she confides. Though she considers herself “incredibly self-reliant”, she confesses she called her ex-beau from her family home in Chappaqua, just outside of New York City, and asked him to come and see her. He was at her side soon afterward. “That weekend I laughed for the first time since the 11th,” she says. “That was the greatest gift he has ever given me.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
