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Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author and attorney. She is a member of the influential Kennedy family and the only surviving child of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

At the time of her father's presidency she was a young child; after his assassination in 1963, her family settled in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she attended school. Kennedy graduated from Radcliffe College and worked at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. She went on to receive a law degree from Columbia Law School. Kennedy's professional life has spanned law and politics as well as education and charitable work. She has also acted as a spokesperson for her family's legacy and co-authored two books on civil liberties with Ellen Alderman.

In 2008, Kennedy endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for President early in the primary race; she later stumped for him in Orlando, Indiana, and Ohio, served as co-chair of his Vice Presidential Search Committee, and addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. After Obama's victory and selection of Hillary Clinton as his choice for Secretary of State, Kennedy's name surfaced as a possible appointment choice for the vacant Senate seat from New York, but on January 22, 2009, Kennedy withdrew from consideration for the seat, citing personal reasons.

Early life and education

A year after her parents had a stillborn daughter, Caroline Kennedy was born in New York City. She is named after her maternal aunt Caroline Lee Radziwill and a maternal great-grandmother. Her younger brother John Jr. was born on November 25, 1960. A second brother, Patrick, died of a lung ailment two days after his birth, in August 1963. John, Jr. and Caroline lived with their parents in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown until a few months after her third birthday, when her family moved into the White House after her father's inauguration as President of the United States in 1961. At the White House, she attended kindergarten in classes organized by her mother and was often photographed riding her pony Macaroni around the grounds of the White House. A photo of a young Caroline with Macaroni in a news article inspired singer-songwriter Neil Diamond to write his hit song "Sweet Caroline," a fact he revealed only when performing it for her 50th birthday in November 2007. As a small child in the White House, she was the recipient of numerous gifts from dignitaries including a puppy from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and a Yucatan pony from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Historians described Caroline's personality as a child as "a trifle remote and a bit shy at times" yet "remarkably unspoiled." "She's too young to realize all these luxuries", Rose Kennedy said of Caroline. "She probably thinks it's natural for children to go off in their own airplanes. But she is with her cousins, and some of them dance and swim better than she. They do not allow her to take special precedence. Little children accept things."

On the day of their father's death, nanny Maud Shaw took Caroline and John Jr. away from the White House to the home of their maternal grandmother, Janet Auchincloss, who insisted that Shaw be the one to tell Caroline about her father's death. That evening, the children were brought back to the White House, and with Caroline in bed, Shaw broke the news to her. Shaw subsequently found out that their mother had wanted to be the one to tell the children, which caused a rift between the nanny and Mrs. Kennedy.

In late November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy and her children moved from the White House back to Georgetown. Their home soon became a popular tourist attraction in Washington and they moved in mid-1964 to a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There Caroline attended school at Brearley and Convent of the Sacred Heart.

In May 1967, she and her mother christened the United States Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in a widely publicized ceremony in Newport News, Virginia. In 1975, she was visiting London to complete a nine-month art course at the Sotheby's auction house. On October 23, a car bomb, placed by the IRA under the car of her host, Conservative MP Hugh Fraser, exploded shortly before Kennedy and Fraser were due to leave for their daily drive to Sotheby's. Caroline was running late and had not yet left the house, but a passerby, oncologist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, was killed.

She graduated from Concord Academy in Massachusetts in 1975, and received her A.B. from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1979. She earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1988, graduating in the top ten percent of her class, several weeks before giving birth to her first child.

Personal life

During college, Kennedy "considered becoming a photojournalist (her mother's original career) but soon realized she could never make her living observing other people because they were too busy watching her." She worked as a photographer's assistant at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. In 1977, she became a summer intern at the New York Daily News; Kennedy reportedly "sat on a bench alone for two hours the first day before other employees even said hello to her"; according to Richard Licata, a former News reporter, "Everyone was too scared." Her work at the internship earned her $156 a week, wherein her responsibilities were "fetching coffee for harried editors and reporters, changing typewriter ribbons and delivering messages." In addition, she wrote for Rolling Stone about visiting Graceland following Elvis Presley's death that summer.

After graduating from college, Kennedy began work as a research assistant in the film and TV department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1980 and later became a "liaison officer between the museum staff and outside producers and directors shooting footage at the museum", helping coordinate the Sesame Street special Don't Eat the Pictures.

While at her museum job, she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. Kennedy and Schlossberg were married on July 19, 1986 at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. Kennedy's matron of honor was her cousin Maria Shriver, and her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy walked her down the aisle. Although she is often incorrectly referred to as "Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg", she did not change her name when she married.

Kennedy and her family live on Park Avenue in Manhattan's Upper East Side. She and her husband have two daughters and one son: Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, born June 25, 1988 in New York City, is named after Caroline's grandmother; Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, born May 5, 1990 in New York City, is named after Edwin Schlossberg's former colleague, lithographer Tatiana Grossman, and his grandmother; and John "Jack" Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, born January 19, 1993 in New York City, is named after his maternal great grandfather John Vernou Bouvier III. She owns her mother's 375-acre (1.52 km²) estate known as Red Gate Farm in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head) on the island of Martha's Vineyard. The New York Daily News estimated Kennedy's net worth in 2008 at over $100 million.

Caroline and her brother John Jr. were raised in New York, somewhat apart from their Hyannisport cousins, and were very close to one another, especially after their mother's death. John died in a plane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law in July 1999, leaving Caroline as the sole survivor of the President's immediate family.

Public career

Kennedy is an attorney, writer, and editor and serves on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations.

From 2002 through 2004, Kennedy worked as director of the Office of Strategic Partnerships for the New York City Department of Education. The three-day-a-week job paid her a salary of $1 and had the goal of raising private money for the New York City public schools. In that capacity, she helped raise more than $65 million for the city’s public schools. She currently serves as one of two vice chairs of the board of directors of The Fund for Public Schools, a public-private partnership founded in 2002 to attract private funding for public schools in New York City. She has also served on the board of trustees of Concord Academy, which she attended as a child.

Kennedy and other members of her family created the Profile in Courage Award in 1989. The award is given to a public official or officials whose actions demonstrate politically courageous leadership in the spirit of John F. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage. In addition, Kennedy is president of the Kennedy Library Foundation and an adviser to the Harvard Institute of Politics, a living memorial to her father.

She is a member of the New York and Washington, D.C. bar associations. She is also a member of the boards of directors of the Commission on Presidential Debates and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and is an honorary chair of the American Ballet Theatre.

Kennedy has represented her family at the funeral services of former presidents Ronald Reagan in 2004 and Gerald Ford in 2007, and at the funeral service of former First Lady

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