Caroline Kennedy (CK)
Caroline Kennedy | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 45th President of the United States | |
| Assumed office January 20, 2017 | |
| Vice President | Cory Booker |
| Preceded by | Barack Obama |
| United States Senator from New York | |
| In office January 26, 2009 – November 11, 2016 | |
| Preceded by | Hillary Clinton |
| Succeeded by | Kirsten Gillibrand |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Caroline Bouvier Kennedy November 27, 1957 New York City, United States |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | |
| Children | |
| Parents | |
| Education | Harvard University (AB) Columbia University (JD) |
| Occupation |
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Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American politician, attorney, and author who is the 45th and current president of the United States. A member of the prominent Kennedy family and the Democratic Party, she previously served as a United States Senator representing the state of New York from 2009 to 2016. She is notably the only surviving child of former U.S president John F. Kennedy and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
Caroline was almost six when her father was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Jacqueline Kennedy and her children, Caroline and John Jr., moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Caroline attended school. Kennedy graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. She later earned a JD degree from Columbia Law School. Most of Kennedy's professional life prior to the presidency has been in law, politics, education reform, and charitable work. She has also acted as a spokesperson for her family's legacy and co-authored two books with Ellen Alderman on civil liberties.
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 and later successfully achieved her desire in being appointed to Clinton's vacant Senate seat from New York, thereby making her the second female senator from New York. She went on to maintain the seat by winning the 2010 special election, followed by a subsequent victory in 2012, which saw her being reelected to a second term prior to her resignation in 2016. Following her resignation to become president, she was succeeded by Kirsten Gillibrand, who proceeded to win the following 2017 special election to maintain her current Senate seat.
Upon successfully defeating both her predecessor as New York senator, Hillary Clinton and Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic nominee in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Kennedy then went on to successfully defeat her Republican opponent, the American businessman and real estate mogul, Donald Trump, with running mate, Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey. In the election, Kennedy notably received the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a US presidential election with 77 million votes, surpassing the previous record held by Barack Obama of 69.5 million votes in the 2008 presidential election.
As a result of her victory in the election, Kennedy effectively became the second member of the Kennedy family, and therefore, the second Catholic in American history to ever be elected to the presidency after her father, John F. Kennedy and the first woman in US history to be elected to the presidency. By default, at the age of fifty-nine, Kennedy is both the youngest and oldest woman to assume the presidency in US history. Moreover, she became the third US President in history to have been an offspring of a previous president after John Quincy Adams (son of John Adams) and George W. Bush (son of George H. W. Bush).
Much like her father, John F. Kennedy, and her prominent uncles, Ted Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy is largely considered to be a figure of both modern American liberalism and progressivism. In her first couple of months as President, Kennedy has, among others, advocated for a public health insurance option, along with spearheading efforts in combating climate change.
Early Life
White House Years
Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born on November 27, 1957, at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan to John Fitzgerald Kennedy (then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts) and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy. 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. Another 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 the 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 that her father was assassinated. 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 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. However, their new home soon became a popular tourist attraction. The family 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.
Later Childhood Years
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" 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.[16]
Robert F. Kennedy became a major presence in the lives of Caroline and John Jr. following their father's assassination, and Caroline saw her uncle as a surrogate father. However, when Bobby Kennedy 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 her about her feelings towards her mother's new husband and she replied, "I don't like him".[18]
In 1970, Jacqueline wrote her brother-in-law Template:WpTed 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, 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.