Spiked Chelsea Clinton Column Revealed 13 Years Later

In the fall of 1997, Jesse Oxfeld was a senior at Stanford University, serving as a columnist at the prestigious Stanford Daily.

But when he wrote a column about a new freshman named Chelsea Clinton, he got much greater fame. And lost his column.

Although the column never ran -- having been spiked by top editors who objected to his writing about the new famous student -- top editors chose to use it to dismiss him.

And national media noted the incident as part of their own coverage of the junior Clinton's schooling and to discuss how a famous daughter should be covered.

"It was a crazy experience as I recall," Oxfeld told me today. "I was the first guest on the first show of The Big Show (Keith Olbermann's first MSNBC program) and I got favorable attention from both Rush Limbaugh and Nat Hentoff."

Fast forward 13 years, Oxfeld has built quite a resume in the news biz as a veteran of Gawker.com, ABC News, Mediabistro, New York magazine and now a theater critic for the New York Observer and executive editor of Tablet magazine. (Full disclosure: we also worked together at Editor & Publisher where he was a top notch web editor and an expert at online writing and editing.)

With Chelsea Clinton's wedding approaching this weekend, and drawing overcoverage of its own, Oxfeld decided to finally release the famed column. He posted it on Facebook earlier today.

(See it below)

"I had talked to a friend at The Daily Beast about writing something about it with the wedding coming up, but it never came about," he said. "But I had dug it up and decide that this is what Facebook is for so I posted it there."

Oxfeld said after reading it for the first time in many years, the column's point still resonated.

"The substance of it was saying they want their privacy, but they were creating a whole production (on move-in day) while demanding that you ignore them," he said. "That is sort of what is happening now (with the wedding)."

The column, as it turns out, was not even entirely about Ms. Clinton, giving her space as one of three subjects that Oxfeld chose to wrote about in the piece.

Below is the alleged offensive portion of that column, which would have run in The Stanford Daily on September 26, 1997.

The president and his progeny

As all but the comatose know, Chelsea Clinton arrived at Stanford with the other incoming freshman a week ago. She was accompanied by her mom and dad, their Secret Service details, assorted White House aides and somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 credentialed members of the press.

Since day one (that is, since April 30, when it was revealed that Chelsea would be attending Stanford), everyone at this university has gone to great pains assuring the world that she'll have a typical college experience. "As much as possible," goes the official line, crafted with precision by the University's spokespeople, "we plan to treat her like any other Stanford student." The Daily, famously, has gone just as far as Terry Shepard and friends, issuing its profoundly Clintonian policy of don't ask (anything about her life), don't tell (anyone outside the campus what you might happen to discover about her life), don't pursue (her, at all).

And yet, amid all this, there are two key points that, it seems to me, are being overlooked.

First, why, precisely, is it that we're all expected to bend over backward to give Chelsea and her family a "normal" Stanford experience while the first family itself is under no similar obligation? It's a point well made by Daily alumnus Philip Taubman on the editorial page of Sunday's New York Times: "If the long-term goal is to discourage a preoccupation with Chelsea Clinton, the White House should have considered a less flamboyant way of getting her to school." The president traveled to Stanford with his daughter, and with the president traveled the usual phalanx of aides and a sizable press corps. If Hillary wants to dedicate her syndicated column to pleading for her daughter's privacy, if Stanford wants us all to forget the Chelsea is the daughter of the most powerful man in the world, the University and the White House must also make an effort to play along.

But apparently they won't. Which brings me to the second point. The Clintons will accept no limitations on their parental prerogatives, and, at the same time, the University nonetheless strives valiantly to give Chelsea this much-vaunted "normal experience." We've seen that in order for those two impulses to coexist, regulations must be imposed for things like required name badges on all students, parents and staff on move-in day. Dozens of police officers spent that day patrolling Wilbur Hall and its environs, eyeing non-badge-wearing pedestrians warily, all in the name of protecting Chelsea's "normal" first day.

And that raises the frightening possibility that the efforts necessary to protect Chelsea's "normal experience" will ensure that no one else has one.

Did that seem offensive enough to result in it being spiked and its author dismissed from the student paper? You be the judge.