Caroline Kennedy Biography and Photos

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 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.

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 in November 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.[5] 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

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. 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.

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

On June 4, 2008, Obama named Caroline Kennedy, along with Jim Johnson and Eric Holder, to co-chair his Vice Presidential Search Committee.(Johnson withdrew one week later.) Filmmaker Michael Moore called on Kennedy to "Pull a Cheney",[34] and name herself as Obama's vice presidential running mate (Dick Cheney headed George W. Bush's vice presidential vetting committee in 2000 — Cheney himself was chosen for for the job [35]). On August 23, Obama announced that Senator Joe Biden of Delaware would be his running mate. Kennedy addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, introducing a tribute film about her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy.