Chelsea Clinton to walk down the aisle

Her father was once the world's most powerful politician, her mother is now its top diplomat, and both are immediately recognised around the globe. So it is remarkable that Chelsea Clinton has done such a good job of avoiding the spotlight for much of her life.

But that is about to change. This weekend the former US "first daughter" is to marry her long-time boyfriend, Marc Mezvinsky an event that will put her unavoidably in the spotlight. What is more, The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Clinton is also being groomed to take on her parents' formidable legacy on the international stage. Armed with a master's degree in public health from New York's Columbia University, she is being lined up for a top role at the philanthropic foundation set up by her father, former president Bill Clinton, 63.

The expectation among friends and family is that she will eventually take over its running.

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For now, however, Clinton, 30, clearly has other priorities. On Saturday, she will marry Mezvinsky, 32, an investment banker whose parents both served in Congress and whose father recently completed a different sort of term five years in prison for fraud.

The 400 guests have so far only been told that they should make sure they are within driving distance of New York this weekend. But it will come as no surprise when they are informed that their destination is a country mansion just outside Rhinebeck, 145 kilometres north of the city.

Star-studded guest list

More specifically, unless the family has deployed huge resources and scores of Secret Service agents in one of the great bluffs of all time, they will be directed to Astor Courts, a mansion built by tycoon John Jacob Astor IV who later died on the Titanic. A partial guest list has also emerged and is as glittering as might be expected for the only child of American political royalty.

Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, singer Barbra Streisand, Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg and media baron Ted Turner have reportedly been invited. So too have the two British prime ministers who were Bill Clinton's counterparts during his presidency Tony Blair and John Major. There may be one notable absentee US President Barack Obama is thought to have politely declined in the hope of preventing the event becoming even more of a media scrum.

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What Clinton does next is, of course, shrouded in the secrecy she so desires. She avoids media attention, gives no interviews and has shown no interest in following her parents into politics despite her appearances on the campaign trail for her mother during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary race.

Rather than return to her job at Avenue Capital, a New York hedge fund run by a prominent Clinton donor, she went back to college to study health policy and management at Columbia. She took courses that focused on international health initiatives and programmes to tackle Aids just the sort of work conducted by the Clinton Foundation, set up by her father in New York after he left the White House in 2001.

Clinton's interest in global health issues is long-standing. As a student, she interned one summer at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, working on a United Nations initiative on healthy environments for children.

"If you look at what Chelsea has studied and what she specialised in, it all points to her being groomed to take over the Clinton Foundation," said an insider at Columbia.

A political acquaintance of the Clintons said that the prospect that she would eventually replace her father at the head of the foundation was also often discussed among family confidantes.

David McDowell, a leading New York psychiatrist who has studied the Clinton family dynamic, said: "Legacy is clearly very important to the Clintons and they are also by all accounts great parents. So as Chelsea has clearly made a decision to stay out of politics, what better way to carry on the legacy than for her to end up running the foundation?"

Clinton has remained fiercely loyal to her parents. That devotion was captured in an iconic image at the height of the impeachment controversy over her father's affair with Monica Lewinsky when the 18 year-old was pictured between her parents, holding their hands as they walked across the White House lawns unable to look at each other.

That was a part of the transformation she underwent after she moved into the White House as a gawky 12 year-old with braces and frizzy hair. The Clintons did an impressive job of shielding their daughter from the media during her teenage years.

After school, she studied first at Stanford in California and then followed her father's footsteps to Oxford, where she met her first serious boyfriend — Ian Klaus, a Rhodes scholar like her father. But they split after her return to America where she worked first as a management consultant for McKinsey and then for the hedge fund. She also started dating Mezvinsky, a decade after they first met as teenagers in the 1990s. They have both since endured the experience of scandals engulfing their fathers. It is not known if Ed Mezvinsky, 73, a former Democratic congressman convicted of $10 million (Dh37.6 million) fraudulent business deals and released from prison in 2008, will join the party on Saturday.

Another uncertainty is the religious make-up of the ceremony: Clinton is the daughter of a Methodist mother and a Southern Baptist father, while the Mezvinsky family is Jewish.

Clinton has returned to her preferred low profile since her mother's failed presidential run. But she is sighted out and about in Manhattan where the couple live in an apartment they bought for $3.8 million in the Flatiron district. And she has twice accompanied her father on his foreign trips — on a tour across Africa focused on his foundation's work on poverty and Aids, as well as to Haiti after the January earthquake.

Mother of the bride

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was herself globe-trotting last week, visiting Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Korea and Vietnam even as she fired off e-mails calling herself MOTB (mother of the bride). One issue on which she offered long-distance maternal advice on a previous trip was the choice of wedding dress. When Clinton is given away by her father she will be wearing a gown by the designer Oscar de la Renta, a favourite of her mother.

But it was her husband's ability to get through the day that seemed to give Mrs Clinton most concern. "You should assume that if he makes it down the aisle in one piece it's a major accomplishment," she said last week.

"He is going to be so emotional, as am I."