Over a series of casual dinners at neighborhood restaurants near her Manhattan apartment in the spring, Chelsea Clinton began talking to a couple of longtime friends about something she'd been mulling for a while.

She wanted to stop pretending she was not Chelsea Clinton.

It was quite an assertion from someone who, despite the very public profile of her two parents — one a former president, the other the current secretary of state — had lived most of her 31 years removed from the spotlight. Yes, there had been sightings of Chelsea over the years, as she grew from a gangly, curly-haired teenager into the confident, stylishly dressed woman making the social scene in her adopted home, New York. And, yes, her marriage to Marc Mezvinsky landed the happy couple on the cover of People magazine — and then later on Page Six when rumors circulated that there might be marital problems.

But for the most part, Clinton seemed determined to keep her private life strictly private, refusing to speak to the news media and requesting the same from her loyal inner circle. Now, however, talk turned to the notion that, if she was going to face the downside of being the daughter of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, under the constant scrutiny of the news media, why not also take advantage of the upside?

Thus, in the past 12 months, she has joined the board of Barry Diller's Internet media holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp, spoken at fundraisers for organizations like amfAR, taken an increasingly public role with the Clinton Global Initiative, presented an award to her mother at Diane Von Furstenberg's International Women's Day event and hosted her father's 65th birthday at a Hollywood benefit for the Clinton Foundation with fellow guests Lady Gaga and Bono. She's even started a Facebook page.

And in her most high-profile move so far, she has taken a job with NBC News as a special correspondent, contributing to the network's "Making a Difference" franchise. On Dec. 12, Clinton will make her first appearance on the prime-time newsmagazine "Rock Center With Brian Williams," with a segment she developed on a nonprofit organization in Pine Bluff, Ark.

It was a career move she initiated, having her close advisers arrange interviews with top network executives and at one point working with the powerful Creative Artists Agency.

"For a multitude of reasons, she decided the time was right to more publicly own a responsibility she feels to serve in the public good," said Bari Lurie, a former intern in the East Wing of the White House during the Clinton years, whom Clinton brought on as her chief of staff in September.

"I hope to make a positive, productive contribution, as cheesy as that may sound," Clinton wrote in an email Friday. "For most of my life, I deliberately led a private life in the public eye."

But after campaigning for her mother's presidential bid in 2008, Clinton realized she liked speaking publicly about issues she felt strongly about. Her grandmother, Dorothy Rodham, gave her some advice. "She told me being Chelsea Clinton had happened to me, and outside of my advocacy work and campaigning for my Mom, I wasn't doing enough in the world."

Those conversations continued over the next couple of years — often coming up "when Marc and I were being hounded by the paparazzi for the silly reason du jour" — until Rodham died in November. "I took what she said seriously — that I had led an inadvertently public life for a long time and maybe it was time to start leading a purposefully public life."

On a chilly February night, Clinton headed to Cipriani Wall Street to attend the annual gala of the AIDS research foundation amfAR, a benefit that kicked off New York Fashion Week. There, she greeted Elton John and Richard Gere. She kissed Harvey Weinstein, a family friend, on the cheek as she took the podium to present her father with an award.

"I grew up in a house where I heard Mathilde Krim's name more frequently than I heard the people that Harvey puts in his movies," Clinton said, referring to the doctor and AIDS activist who founded amfAR.

Also presenting an award that night was Diller. Not long after the gala, Diller recommended Clinton to the nominating committee of the board of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IAC), along with Michael Eisner and Edgar Bronfman Jr., among others. She attended her first board meeting last week.

As always, the downside of being the Clinton daughter was not far behind. Her IAC board position, which pays an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock, prompted critics to say that Clinton got the position solely because of her famous parents, painting her as the thinking man's socialite, with a seat on the IAC board and a stint on NBC News being the meritocratic equivalent of a designer handbag line. (Similar criticisms were lobbed when Jenna Bush Hager, the daughter of President George W. Bush, was hired as a correspondent for the "Today" show in 2009.)

As unlikely as it may seem for someone who had aggressively shunned the news media — in 2007, when campaigning for her mother in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Clinton told a 9-year-old "kid reporter" for Scholastic News that she wouldn't talk to the news media "even though I think you're cute" — the job at NBC does not surprise the aides who watched Clinton closely on the campaign trail back then.

They described her as someone who, in a matter of weeks, went from speaking to a dozen people at a coffee shop to fielding questions from crowds of thousands.

"People were interested in coming to hear and see her because they watched her grow up, and then they'd realize how substantive she was," said Howard Wolfson, a senior strategist on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign who now works for Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

That experience persuaded Clinton to take on a larger public role and, in particular, the TV job, said Steve Capus, president of NBC News.

"She talked about the stories she heard on the campaign trail that she found inspiring and said she'd like to go back and visit some of the people she'd met," he said.

In June, Alan Berger, an agent at Creative Artists Agency who represents Katie Couric, arranged for Clinton to meet with Capus in a conference room at a Midtown Manhattan hotel to discuss the "Making a Difference" series. Before that meeting, Clinton's team also arranged sessions with other networks.

"She's a 31-year-old woman who has had a couple career changes and was taking stock in the next phase of her career," Capus said.

For weeks, NBC News used a pseudonym on planning schedules so no one would find out Clinton had joined the team. Brian Williams described his first exceedingly discreet meeting with Clinton at a quiet table in the back of an Italian restaurant in Midtown, as " 'The Godfather' without a gun hidden in the bathroom."

One morning last week, Clinton shook hands as she made her way through the halls of NBC News at Rockefeller Center, where she now has a temporary office. "Hi, I'm Chelsea," she repeated, with flashes of her father's charm and her mother's wide smile. At one point, she greeted Howard Dean, who waited in the green room.

At a media advocacy discussion Tuesday hosted by Common Sense Media, I asked Clinton if misrepresentation in the media had motivated her to join NBC News. She answered with one word: "Unequivocally."

That Chelsea Clinton even existed might have come as a surprise to many voters 20 years ago. During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, the 12-year-old Chelsea was so shielded from the routine photo-ops that polls showed many voters didn't know the Clintons had a child. The family promptly sat down for a spread in People magazine.

Six years later, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton was photographed walking hand-in-hand with her parents, the dutiful teenager keeping her family together as they strode sadly across the White House lawn.

"The No. 1 thing Bill and Hillary accomplished is raising Chelsea Clinton," said James Steyer, of Common Sense Media, who has stayed close with Chelsea Clinton since she was his student at Stanford University.

But being the Clintons' greatest accomplishment also comes with uniquely weighty responsibilities. As an only child, she spent most of her life shrinking from the crowds that seem to give her father political strength. The drumbeat of the White House reminding the news media that Chelsea was off-limits, made lighthearted public appearances — a cheer at a convention, a dance at an inaugural ball — appear staged. Even Clinton's Parisian makeover in 2002 (with help from Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow) felt forced.

In public, she has always seemed like her mother — dutiful and restrained, as if politics were the high price to pay for public service. In private, friends say, Clinton is much more Bill Clinton's daughter — voluble and argumentative, warm with a biting sense of humor and a knack for remembering arcane facts.

On Tuesday night, during the heated question-and-answer session about responsible media, Clinton grabbed the microphone out of Steyer's hand. She rattled off statistics on childhood obesity and the impact of violent video games, and like her father, knew just when to sprinkle in some humanizing personal details.

"I'm really grateful I grew up in a house in which media literacy was a survival skill," she said, drawing careful giggles from the small crowd at New York's Core Club.

Though Clinton is undeniably close to her father, and seems to share his love of public debate, she has also forged her own way on some crucial issues, particularly gay marriage.

In May, Clinton was at the Manhattan nightclub Lavo to attend a benefit for Friendfactor, a gay-rights group. There she greeted Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive behind the "Real Housewives" franchise, and the actress Kristen Bell before hugging Brian Elliot, the founder and executive director of the organization.

"I certainly believe that all of my friends, as Marc and I did, should have the right to marry their best friends," Clinton later told the crowd. "I certainly believe that those of us who are straight cannot expect our gay friends to do this on their own."

Elliot said he first met Clinton a year ago when a mutual friend suggested she become involved in the organization. "She made it clear marriage equality isn't a political issue. It's about your friends," he said.

When her father was president, he signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that while he "strenuously opposed discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans," he also had "long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages."

But recently (and with an acknowledgment that he'd been influenced by his daughter's views), he shifted, announcing in May that he supported passage of a gay-marriage bill then being debated by the New York Legislature.

"For more than a century, our Statue of Liberty has welcomed all kinds of people from all over the world yearning to be free," he said before it passed. "In the 21st century, I believe New York's welcome must include marriage equality."

One member of the family remains a holdout, however: Hillary Clinton, who opposed same-sex marriage during her presidential campaign, recently said her position had not changed.

Part of the fascination with Clinton's life is that, unlike other famous offspring, she has never been photographed drunkenly stumbling out of a club or been caught using a fake ID. It's not that she carefully avoided those kinds of situations, it's that that's just not her, said Nicole Davison Fox, a close friend.

"If you knew us in high school, you would've thought we were so nerdy," she said over Pellegrino at Brasserie 8 1/2. The two first met in an eighth-grade science class at Sidwell Friends School and still live in the same apartment building. Fox was Clinton's matron of honor at her wedding to Mezvinsky in summer 2010.

Mezvinsky, a former Goldman Sachs banker, will soon start a hedge fund with a friend. Their apartment, shared with a miniature Yorkshire terrier named Soren, after the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, is said to be overflowing with books.

Last winter, the couple rented a house in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Clinton shuffled back and forth between wobbly (but fearless) skiing and work in New York, according to several people close to the Clintons. Still, the trip provided tabloid fodder.

"We live in a culture of gossip and entertainment, and Chelsea Clinton seems to be neither a great gossip or a great entertainer," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant who worked for Bill Clinton. "She's a very serious person."

In 2009, Chelsea Clinton left her job at a hedge fund and dived into her academic work, earning a master's degree in public health at Columbia. A year later, she took a job as an assistant vice provost at the Global Network University at New York University, a program that aims to establish interconnected campuses worldwide. At NYU, Clinton has also led campus interfaith initiatives to bring Muslim and Jewish students together, a side job, friends say, was motivated by her marriage to Mezvinsky, who is Jewish. Clinton is a churchgoing Methodist.

But she itched to add a public component to her academic work. "As with every decision, I talked to my grandmother about it, and she told me what she had always told me — that life is not about what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you," Clinton said.

"I talked to lots of people over the summer and into the autumn asking for their advice and ideas," before signing with NBC, Clinton said. "I hope to make her proud in my work at NBC, in my academic work, and in all I do," she said of her grandmother.

As President Obama's re-election campaign heats up, Clinton will likely need to step back from news gathering to help raise money. An adviser said she would "100 percent" help him with his campaign. Capus said NBC News would discuss in advance any of Clinton's political activity, as it does with all of its contributors. Clinton has a three-month trial contract with NBC, after which both parties will decide whether to continue.

Another looming factor in Clinton's choices is her father's health. Bill Clinton has had a history of heart trouble, including a quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery in 2004 and related complications. With no siblings, Chelsea Clinton must think about the morose act of carrying on her father's legacy. "No one wants to think about it, but she's the third principal in the family and with that comes responsibility," a longtime Clinton adviser said.

Next year, when Hillary Clinton leaves her post, it will be the first time in Chelsea Clinton's life that neither of her parents is in public office. The thought has some Democrats lusting at the thought of candidate Chelsea Clinton.

In October, Talk of the Sound, a New Rochelle, N.Y., blog, reported that Clinton sought to run for New York Rep. Nita Lowey's congressional seat. A spokesman said she had no interest in running for office, but that's a denial that people balance against her family history. (Lowey has indicated she plans to run in 2012.)

"Could the Democratic Party use someone like Chelsea Clinton?" Sheinkopf, the Democratic consultant, said. "She's smart, she's charming and she's got the last name Clinton."