WASHINGTON - The first daughter Chelsea Clinton will take a term out from Stanford University to help her mother campaign for the Senate and her father to savour his last months in office.
She may also go to Australia in September as the President's official representative at the Sydney Olympics.
The announcement, issued by Hillary Clinton's office at the White House, marks Chelsea's formal passage into public life after the teenage years in which her privacy has been carefully guarded.
As she approaches her 21st birthday next February, the unwritten pact between the Clintons and the media over their daughter's privacy will become harder to sustain. Perhaps for this reason, she and her parents have apparently decided she should become a minor public figure in her own right, for the remainder of her father's presidential term.
Hillary Clinton's office said Chelsea would return to Stanford in time for the winter semester in January, by which time the new President will be on the verge of inauguration.
It also said she would graduate from her four-year course on time, because of the extra credits she has gained in the past two years.
No details of her progress or her grades either at school or college have ever been divulged, but no special dispensations are thought to have been made for her admission to the undergraduate medical course at Stanford - one of the most competitive courses at one of the most prestigious (and expensive) universities in the country.
It is not even certain that she is still on the medical course: there was talk that she was switching to history, but this was never confirmed.
The lack of information about her Stanford studies is just one example of how carefully controlled Chelsea's emergence into public life has been. While still at school, she accompanied her parents - separately or together - on official foreign trips, but was rarely photographed. The individual public programme she followed when she accompanied her father to India marked a watershed of a kind, although she was closely chaperoned by her grandmother.
She has rarely spoken in public: almost the only time was when she was asked - and answered - a question about life in America during a visit with her mother to Africa. Her answer, which included her view that America had big social problems, is almost her only on-the-record statement.
Perhaps in preparation for her new role, Chelsea has been more visible in the past two weeks, accompanying her father on his trip to the G8 summit in Japan and returning with him to Camp David.
- INDEPENDENT
Chelsea graduates to first lady role
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