Caroline Kennedy Bio

(courtesy of wikipedia.org)

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.

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, 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. 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 to New York City in mid-1964 where they lived in a penthouse apartment on 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.

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 Fairley, was killed.

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.

After interning with her uncle, U.S. Senator Ted 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, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg.[2]

Kennedy and Schlossberg were married on July 19, 1986[3] at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. Kennedy's matron of honor was her cousin Maria Shriver. She was walked down the aisle by her Uncle Ted. 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. She and her husband have two daughters and one son: Rose Kennedy Schlossberg (born June 25, 1988 in New York City, she is named after Caroline's grandmother); Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg (born May 5, 1990 in New York City, she is named after Edwin Schlossberg's former colleague, the lithographer Tatiana Grossman, and his grandmother); and John "Jack" Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg (born January 19, 1993 in New York City, he is named after President Kennedy). She also owns her mother's 375-acre (1.52 km2) estate in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head) on the island of Martha's Vineyard known as Red Gate Farm.

Kennedy is an attorney, editor, writer and member of the New York and Washington, D.C. bar associations. She is one of the founders of the Profiles in Courage Award, given annually since 1990 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.

From 2002 to 2004, Kennedy worked as chief executive for the Office of Strategic Partnerships for the New York City Department of Education. During this time, she helped raise more than $65 million for the city’s public schools. She currently serves as the Vice Chair of The Fund for Public Schools, a public-private partnership founded in 2002 to attract private funding for public schools in New York City.

In addition, Kennedy is currently President of the Kennedy Library Foundation, 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.

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 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.

On June 4, 2008, Obama named Caroline Kennedy, along with Jim Johnson and Eric Holder, to co-chair his Vice Presidential Search Committee. 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. On August 23, 2008, 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.

It was reported on December 5, 2008 that New York Governor David Paterson has discussed with Kennedy the possibility of her filling the Senate seat currently occupied by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton. She would fill the seat once held by her uncle Robert F. Kennedy from 1965 until his assassination in 1968.

On December 15, 2008, the New York Times reported that Kennedy will seek Clinton's vacant seat.