Caroline Kennedy Socialites Information

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author, attorney, and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Japan from 2013 to 2017. She is a prominent member of the Kennedy family and the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Kennedy was five days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Caroline, her mother, and brother John F. Kennedy Jr. settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she attended school. Kennedy graduated from Radcliffe College and worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. She went on to receive a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. Most of Kennedy's professional life has spanned law and politics, as well as education reform and charitable work. She has also acted as a spokesperson for her family's legacy and co-authored two books with Ellen Aldermanon on civil liberties.

Early in the primary race for the 2008 presidential election, Kennedy and her uncle Ted endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama; she later stumped for him in Florida, Indiana, and Ohio, served as co-chair of his Vice Presidential Search Committee, and addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

After Obama selected United States Senator Hillary Clinton to serve as Secretary of State, Kennedy expressed interest in being appointed to Clinton's vacant Senate seat from New York, but she later withdrew from consideration, citing "personal reasons." Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand ultimately replaced Clinton as the junior New York Senator. In 2013, President Obama appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to Japan.

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born on November 27, 1957, at Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan to John Fitzgerald Kennedy (United States Senator from Massachusetts) and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy. Caroline is named after her maternal aunt, Lee Radziwill. A year before Caroline's birth, her parents had a stillborn daughter named Arabella. Caroline had a younger brother, John Jr., who was born just before her third birthday in 1960. Her infant brother, Patrick, died two days after his premature birth in 1963. Caroline lived with her parents in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. during the first three years of her life. When Caroline was three years old, the family moved to the White House after her father was sworn in as President of the United States.

Caroline frequently attended kindergarten in classes that were organized by her mother, and she was often photographed riding her pony "Macaroni" around the White House grounds. One such photo in a news article inspired singer-songwriter Neil Diamond to write his Top Ten hit song, "Sweet Caroline", which he revealed when he performed it for Caroline's 50th birthday. As a small child, Caroline received numerous gifts from dignitaries, including a puppy from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and a Yucatán pony from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Historians described Caroline's childhood personality as "a trifle remote and a bit shy at times" yet "remarkably unspoiled." "She's too young to realize all these luxuries", her paternal grandmother, Rose Kennedy, said of her. "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 JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963, nanny Maud Shaw took Caroline and John Jr. away from the White House to the home of their maternal grandmother, Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, who insisted that Shaw would be the one to tell Caroline about her father's assassination. That evening, Caroline and John Jr. returned to the White House, and while Caroline was sleeping in her bed, Shaw broke the news to her. Shaw soon found out that Jacqueline had wanted to be the one to tell the two children; this caused a rift between the nanny and Jacqueline. On December 6, two weeks after the assassination, Jacqueline, Caroline, and John Jr. moved out of the White House and returned to Georgetown. However, their new home soon became a popular tourist attraction. They left Georgetown the following year and later moved to a penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.

In 1967, Caroline christened the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in a widely publicized ceremony in Newport News, Virginia.

Over that summer, Jacqueline took the children on a six-week "sentimental journey"[This quote needs a citation] to Ireland, where they met President Éamon de Valera and visited the Kennedy ancestral home at Dunganstown. In the midst of the trip, Caroline and John were surrounded by a large number of press photographers while playing in a pond. The incident caused their mother to telephone Ireland's Department of External Affairs and request the issuing of a statement that she and the children wanted to be left in peace. As a result of the request, further attempts by press photographers to photograph the threesome ended with arrests by local police and the photographers being jailed.

Uncle Robert F. Kennedy became a major presence in the lives of Caroline and John following their father's assassination, and Caroline saw him as a surrogate father. When Bobby was assassinated in June 1968, Jacqueline sought a means of protecting them, stating: "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets ... I want to get out of this country". Jacqueline Kennedy married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis several months later and she and the children moved to Skorpios, his Greek island. The next year, 11-year-old Caroline attended the funeral of her grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Her cousin, David, asked her about her feelings towards her mother's new husband and she replied, "I don't like him".

In 1970, Jacqueline wrote her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy a letter stating that Caroline had been without a godfather since Bobby's death and would like him to assume the role. Ted began making regular trips from Washington to New York to see Caroline, where she was in school. In 1971, Caroline returned to the White House for the first time since her father's assassination when she was invited by President Richard Nixon to view the official portrait of her father.

Onassis died in March 1975, and Caroline returned to Skorpios for his funeral. A few days later she and her mother and brother attended the presentation by French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of the Legion of Honor award to her aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Later that year, Caroline was visiting London to complete a year-long art course at the Sotheby's auction house, when an IRA car bomb placed under the car of her hosts, Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser and his wife, Antonia, exploded shortly before she and the Frasers were due to leave for their daily drive to Sotheby's. Caroline had not yet left the house, but a neighbor, oncologist Professor Gordon Hamilton Fairley, was passing by when he was walking his dog and was killed by the explosion.

Kennedy attended The Brearley School and Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City and graduated from Concord Academy in Massachusetts in 1975. She was a photographer's assistant at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. In 1977, she worked as a summer intern at the New York Daily News, earning $156 a week ($673.41 in 2019 dollars), "fetching coffee for harried editors and reporters, changing typewriter ribbons and delivering messages." Kennedy reportedly "sat on a bench alone for two hours the first day before other employees even said hello to her"; and, according to Richard Licata, a former News reporter, "Everyone was too scared." Kennedy also wrote for Rolling Stone about visiting Graceland shortly after the death of Elvis Presley.

In 1980, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College at Harvard University. During college, Kennedy had "considered becoming a photojournalist, but soon realized she could never make her living observing other people because they were too busy watching her." After graduating, Kennedy was hired as a research assistant in the Film and Television Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She 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. On December 4, 1984, Caroline was threatened when a man telephoned the museum and stated his name and address while reporting that a bomb had been planted there. Three days later, he was arrested for the threat. In 1988, she earned a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, graduating in the top ten percent of her class.

While working at the Met, Kennedy met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. They married in 1986 at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. Kennedy's first cousin Maria Shriver served as the bride's matron of honor, and Ted later walked her down the aisle. Kennedy is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg", but she did not change her name at the time she married. Kennedy has three children: Rose Kennedy Schlossberg (born 1988), Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg (born 1990), and John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, known as Jack (born 1993).

Raised in Manhattan and somewhat separated from their Hyannisport cousins, Caroline and John Jr. were very close, and especially so following their mother's death in 1994. After John Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999, Caroline was the only remaining survivor of the former President's immediate family, and she preferred not to have a public memorial service for her brother. She decided that his remains would be cremated and his ashes scattered into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, where he met his fate. John Jr. bequeathed Caroline his half ownership of George magazine, but Caroline believed that her brother would not have wanted the magazine to continue following his death, and the magazine ceased publication two years later.

Kennedy owns her mother's 375-acre (152 ha) estate known as Red Gate Farm in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head) on Martha's Vineyard. The New York Daily News estimated Kennedy's net worth in 2008 at over $100 million. During her 2013 nomination to serve as Ambassador to Japan, financial disclosure reports showed her net worth to be between $67 million and $278 million, including family trusts, government and public authority bonds, commercial property in New York, Chicago and Washington, and holdings in the Cayman Islands.

Kennedy is an attorney, writer, and editor who has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations. She wrote the book, "In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights In Action" in collaboration with Ellen Alderman, which was published in 1991. During an interview regarding the volume, Caroline explained that the two wanted to show why the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution was written. She attended the Robin Hood Foundation annual breakfast on December 7, 1999. Her brother John had been committed to the organization, which Caroline spoke of at the event. In 2000, she supported Al Gore for the presidency and mentioned feeling a kinship with him since their fathers served together in the Senate. Kennedy spoke at the 2000 Democratic National Convention which was held in Los Angeles, California, the first time since the 1960 Democratic National Convention, where her father had been nominated by the Democratic Party for the presidency.

From 2002 through 2004, she worked as director of the Office of Strategic Partnerships for the New York City Department of Education, appointed by School Chancellor Joel Klein. 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; she helped raise more than $65 million. She served as one of two vice chairs of the board of directors of The Fund for Public Schools and is currently Honorary Director of the Fund. She has also served on the board of trustees of Concord Academy, which she attended as a teen.

Complete article available at this page.