Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author, diplomat, and attorney. She served as the United States ambassador to Japan from 2013 to 2017 and ambassador to Australia from 2022 to 2024. Most of Kennedy's professional life has been in literature, law, politics, education reform, and charity. She is a member of the Kennedy family and the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Born in New York City, Kennedy was two years old when her father won the 1960 presidential election and spent her early childhood years in the White House during his presidency. She was only five years old when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Kennedy moved with her younger brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., and their mother Jacqueline to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and continued her education there. She graduated from Radcliffe College and later attended Columbia Law School, earning a Juris Doctor degree in 1988. Kennedy passed the New York State bar exam the following year. She worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, designer Edwin Schlossberg. They married in 1986, and had three children: Rose, Tatiana, and Jack.

Early in the primary race for the 2008 presidential election, Kennedy and her uncle, Ted Kennedy, 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 later withdrew for personal reasons. In 2013, Obama appointed Kennedy as the United States ambassador to Japan, making her the first woman to hold the position. Eight years later, Joe Biden appointed Kennedy as ambassador to Australia and she took office following her confirmation on June 10, 2022.

Early life

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born on November 27, 1957, at New York Hospital to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. She is named after her maternal aunt, Lee Radziwill, and maternal great-great-grandmother, Caroline Ewing Bouvier. A year before Kennedy's birth, her parents had a stillborn daughter, Arabella. Kennedy had a younger brother, John Jr., who was born two days before her third birthday in 1960. Another brother, Patrick, died two days after his premature birth in 1963. Kennedy lived with her parents in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. during the first three years of her life.

White House years

When Kennedy was three years old, the family moved to the White House after her father was sworn in as president of the United States. Kennedy 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 song, "Sweet Caroline", which he revealed when performing it for Caroline's 50th birthday. As a small child, Kennedy received numerous gifts from dignitaries, including a puppy from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and a Yucatán pony from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. A short-lived comic strip was created about her, and she was the namesake of the British pirate radio station Radio Caroline, founded in 1964.

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".

When Kennedy's father was assassinated in 1963, nanny Maud Shaw took her and John Jr. from the White House to the home of their maternal grandmother, Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, who insisted that Shaw be the one to tell Kennedy about her father's assassination. That evening, Kennedy and John Jr. returned to the White House, and while Kennedy was in bed, Shaw broke the news to her. Shaw soon found out that Jacqueline had wanted to be the one to tell the two children, which caused a rift between Shaw 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. Their new home became a tourist attraction, and the family left Georgetown the following year. They later moved to a penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.

Later childhood years

In 1967, Kennedy 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" 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.

Caroline and John Jr.'s uncle Robert F. Kennedy became a major presence in both children's lives following their father's assassination, and Kennedy saw Robert as a surrogate father. However, when Robert was assassinated in 1968, Jacqueline sought a means of protecting her children, stating: "I hate this country. I despise America and I don't want my children to live here anymore. If they're killing Kennedys, my kids are the number one targets. I have the two main 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 Caroline about her feelings towards her stepfather, and Caroline 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 Robert Kennedy's death and would like Ted 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, Kennedy 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. Kennedy 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.

Education and personal life

Kennedy began her education with kindergarten classes in the White House organized by her mother. Before the family's move to New York, Kennedy was registered at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. She attended the Brearley School and Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan, and later graduated in 1975 from Concord Academy in Massachusetts. Kennedy 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 ($829 in 2025 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.