Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author and attorney. She is the daughter and only surviving child of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Early life

Kennedy was born in New York City and is named after her maternal aunt Caroline Lee Radziwill and a maternal great-grandmother. An older sister was stillborn in 1956. Her brother John Jr. was born in November 1960 and died in a plane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law in July 1999. Another brother, Patrick, died two days after his birth of a lung ailment in August of 1963. She lived in the Washington, DC neighborhood of Georgetown until a few months after her third birthday, when her family moved to the White House upon her father's inauguration as President of the United States in 1961. Following her father's assassination in November 1963, she moved back to Georgetown with her mother and brother. However, their home soon became a popular tourist attraction in Washington, and they moved back to New York City in mid-1964 where they lived in the penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In 1967, she christened the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, which was in active service until March 23, 2007. A photo of a young Caroline with her pony 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.^[1] She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, after attending the Brearley School, and Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan, and Concord Academy in Massachusetts.

Personal life

After interning with her uncle U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, and at The New York Daily News, Caroline Kennedy began work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1980, where she met her future husband, the exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg.^[2]

Kennedy and Schlossberg were married on July 19, 1986 at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. Caroline's maid of honor was her cousin Maria Shriver. Caroline was walked down the aisle by her uncle Ted. Although she is often referred to as Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, she actually kept her birth name after her marriage.

Kennedy and her family live on Park Avenue in Manhattan. She and her husband have two daughters and one son: Rose Kennedy Schlossberg (born on June 25, 1988 in New York City; she is named after Caroline's grandmother, Rose Kennedy); Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg (born on May 5, 1990 in New York City; she is named after her father's former colleague, the lithographer Tatiana Grossman, and her father's grandmother); and John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg (born on January 19, 1993 in New York City). She also owns her mother's estate in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head) on the Island of Martha's Vineyard known as Red Gate Farm.

Professional life

Kennedy is an attorney, editor, writer and member of the New York and Washington, D.C. bars. She is one of the founders of the Profiles in Courage Award, given annually to a person who exemplifies the type of courage examined in her father's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name. The award is generally given to elected officials who, acting in accord with their conscience, risk their careers by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state or local interest in opposition to popular opinion or powerful pressures from their constituents. In May 2002, she presented an unprecedented Profiles in Courage Award to representatives of the NYPD, the New York City Fire Department, and the military as representatives of all of the people who acted to save the lives of others during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.^[3]

Kennedy is currently President of the Kennedy Library Foundation,^[4] a director of both the Commission on Presidential Debates and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Honorary Chairman of the American Ballet Theatre. She is also an adviser to the Harvard Institute of Politics, a living memorial to her father.

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 Lady Bird Johnson in 2007. She also represented her family at the dedication of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock, Arkansas in November 2004.

Works published

Kennedy and Ellen Alderman have written two books together on civil liberties:

• In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights In Action (1990) and
• The Right to Privacy (1995)

On her own, she has edited these New York Times best-selling volumes:

• A Patriot?s Handbook
• The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children
• Profiles in Courage for Our Time

She is also the author of "A Family Christmas" a collection of poems, prose and personal notes from her family history.

2008 presidential election

Kennedy speaks during the first night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, in introduction of her uncle Ted Kennedy.

Caroline Kennedy (second from left, rear) with Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, and part of the Connecticut Congressional delegation at a rally in Hartford, Connecticut, February 4, 2008

On Sunday, January 27, 2008, Kennedy announced in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled, "A President Like My Father," that she would endorse Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.^[5] Her concluding lines were: "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president ? not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." This was the first time she had endorsed a presidential candidate other than when she endorsed her uncle, Ted Kennedy, in 1980.^[6][7]

Federal Election Commission records show that Kennedy contributed $2300 to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign committee on June 29, 2007. She had previously contributed a total of $5000 to Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2006. On September 18, 2007, she contributed $2300 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign committee.^[8]

On June 4, 2008, the day after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama named Caroline Kennedy, along with former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, and Eric Holder, to co-chair his Vice Presidential Search Committee.^[9] On August 19, 2008, filmmaker Michael Moore called on Caroline Kennedy to "Pull a Cheney" (as in Dick Cheney who headed President George W. Bush's vice presidential vetting committee in 2000), and name herself as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate.^[10] On August 23, 2008, Obama announced that Senator Joe Biden of Delaware would be his running mate.

On August 25, 2008 Kennedy addressed the Democratic National Convention in Denver, introducing a tribute film about her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, who himself spoke.

Her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy was once the ambassador to Britain^[11].

References

External links

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