Family Ties: The Other Bill Clinton

[Are_grits_groceries]

A daughter seeking her father's attention faces steep competition when he's also the leader of the free world. Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice smoked on the White House roof, buried a voodoo doll of the incoming First Lady under the White House lawn, jumped fully clothed into a cruise-ship pool — and persuaded a Congressman to follow. "I can either run the country or I can control Alice," Roosevelt once said. "I cannot possibly do both."

Alice was considered the first female celebrity of the 20th century, but her ordeal occurred well before 24-hour news and carnivores with cameras. Chelsea Clinton's did not. Which explains why Chelsea appeared to be the Garbo of presidential children; after some snide remarks in the press about her awkward adolescence, Chelsea was shielded in the élite Quaker fortress of Sidwell Friends School and fiercely protected by her parents. When Rush Limbaugh called her "the White House dog," T-shirts appeared saying LEAVE CHELSEA ALONE. Which, remarkably, most people did.

One person who did not leave Chelsea alone was her father. In acclaimed historian Taylor Branch's new book The Clinton Tapes — woven from Branch's recorded conversations with the President from 1993 to 2001 — the portrait of the relationship between Bill Clinton, a man who never knew his own father, and his daughter reveals a side we rarely saw on the public stage. Bill Clinton, it turns out, raised a daughter and ran the free world, sometimes in that order.
(con't)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1925982,00.html

Big Dog....Big Dad.......

[Taverner]

1. The way she fiercly defends her parents shows love

The kind of love that isn't just painted on, but earned.