BEHIND THE HEADLINES
Kennedy proves to be a woman of contrasts
Caroline Kennedy’s foray into politics draws her from her relatively private Manhattan lifestyle.
She’s private or she’s making a big splash. She’s a socialite or a committed social activist. She’s shy or tough and aggressive. She’s demure and refined, yet boasts a butterfly tattoo on her arm.
She holds public service to high regard, but she’s skipped lots of chances to vote the past decade.
She’s an elite, but she helps improve public schools.
So go the characterizations — mixed depending if coming from friend or potential foe — of Caroline Kennedy over the past week since she announced her interest in the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That there are so many seemingly conflicting thoughts on just who this woman is may not be surprising for someone who has guarded her privacy for so long, a lesson she learned well from her late mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
That is now changing, as Kennedy morphs from her relatively quiet lifestyle on the Upper East Side of Manhattan into something different: a New York politician.
Still, in one of the more peculiar political campaigns, hers is surrounded by high walls.
Kennedy took only the most cursory of questions from reporters in her few public appearances last week and declined interview requests, including for this story. Her friends, now talking after being given a green light by Kennedy associates, are effusive but still guard her privacy when questions turn to even such mundane things like where she likes to travel or food she likes to eat.
Those friends say there is a public image of Kennedy, and a private reality.
“Some say she’s a pretty face and other things. I listen and smile and say they don’t know her,” said Elaine Jones, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a board Kennedy has served on.
“Pushing for an issue, really engaged. That’s the Caroline I know,” Jones added.
For more than 40 years, America has glimpsed Caroline Kennedy through the occasional gossip column item or photograph of her at some charity event or handing out a public service award at the Boston library built to honor her father.
People may recall the thousands who turned out for her 1986 wedding, when she was given away by her uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, at a Cape Cod church not far from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis, and many recall the images of her at another family tragedy: the 1999 funeral for her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash.
They may have heard that she’s the “Caroline” in Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” Or maybe read her full-of-gaudiness, inside-the-mansion account in Rolling Stone magazine on Elvis Presley’s funeral, written about the time she was wrapping up an internship at the New York Daily News when she was exploring becoming a journalist.
Or recall when she was almost killed by an IRA bomb in 1975 in London while studying art at Sotheby’s.
An author and editor of several books — from her thoughts on the Bill of Rights to a collection of poems — Kennedy serves on several boards, including the Commission on Presidential Debates and the American Ballet Theatre.
She has not held a full-time job in years. In recent years, she worked part time helping to raise both the profile and money for the New York City public schools.
For some New Yorkers, her sudden appearance on the political stage harkens back to a golden era of politics. There she was, not quite 4 years old, bouncing around the White House lawn on Macaroni, the calico pony given to her by Lyndon B. Johnson.
Two years later, she was standing alongside her mother and brother at her father’s funeral.
Within a year after her father’s assassination in 1963, the family retreated from their house in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood not to the Kennedy confines in Massachusetts, but to a private, new life in Manhattan, where she was raised on Fifth Avenue. She attended an exclusive all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts, received a fine arts degree from Radcliffe and graduated from Columbia Law School, though she does not practice law.
Today, Kennedy, 51, lives on Park Avenue in a prewar cooperative apartment building where a neighbor’s five-bedroom residence was recently listed on the market for $13 million.
She met her husband, museum exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg, who is 13 years her senior, while the two both worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have three children, Rose, 20, named for her grandmother, Tatiana Celia, 18, and John, 15, named for his grandfather.
Electronic records show the trappings of wealth: a 366-acre waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard that she inherited from her mother, boats and well-heeled neighbors on New York’s tony Upper East Side.
One child is at Harvard, another at Yale and the youngest in an all-boys collegiate school. Her two daughters attended the same private school in Manhattan — the Brearley School, tuition is $33,000 a year — where Jackie sent young Caroline.
She hobnobs with the rich-and- famous, and counts among those backing her political efforts New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and newspaper publisher Rupert Murdoch, both billionaires.
Before getting married, she hung out with the likes of Andy Warhol and British royalty. She and her husband owned a house on the Hamptons. And she’s taken family vacations to an Idaho ranch owned by Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner.
Just how rich she is can’t be determined. The Kennedy family wealth is wrapped into private trusts.
But wealth and her family name have become an issue for her critics. Should such an important position at such a crucial moment in the state’s history, they say, be given away to someone based on her name and membership in the state’s elite class?
Her friends bristle when the word “elite” is used in the same sentence as Kennedy.
“You might say she has been blessed with resources, but her life has not been devoted to helping the elite, that’s for damn sure, but to help the powerless and those with no voice,” said Paul Kirk, a former head of the National Democratic Committee and friend of Kennedy for more than 20 years.
Her friends describe Kennedy as someone just as comfortable in a New York subway car as a limousine.
“She lives as normal a life as someone in her position could. She’s very down to earth,” said Heather Campion, a Boston communications executive who has been close friends with Kennedy for 25 years.
She does not wrap herself around with helpers, they say.
“She’s very much her own person. She’s not someone who is handled,” Campion said.
And yet there are inconsistencies about Kennedy that take on a new life for someone now wanting to be a senator. Each year, the Kennedy library gives Profiles in Courage awards to individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to public service. Past winners include peacemakers in Northern Ireland and John McCain.
This year, Kennedy was adamant in pushing for two women, secretaries of state from California and Ohio, who increased access to the ballot box for voters. Jones, the former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lawyer who also serves on the Kennedy library foundation board, said Kennedy led the effort because of her insistence that people who push to expand voting opportunities should be recognized.
And yet, over the past decade or so Kennedy often did not go to the ballot box in mayoral and gubernatorial elections and even skipped the 1994 U. S. Senate election in New York — the post she now wants.
“Caroline Kennedy recognizes just how important it is to vote and has a very strong record of going to the polls. She has not voted on a handful of occasions over the last two decades,” said a spokesman, Stefan Friedman.
Why does she want the job?
Friends say she has always been interested in public service, but that raising her children came first. They say she was inspired by President-elect Barack Obama, whose campaign she worked on, stumping around the country.
Others have speculated that Kennedy, with her uncle now fighting terminal brain cancer, wants to continue her family’s long service in the Senate.
“I come at this as a mother, as a lawyer, as an author, as an education advocate and from a family that really has spent generations in public service,” Kennedy said in Manhattan last week. “I feel this commitment, and this is a time when nobody can afford to sit out. And I hope that I have something to offer.”
“These are issues that I care so much about and I understand that, really, I have been trying to work on them as a private citizen and in the position that I have,” she said. “But really, to solve our problems, I think government is the place where people need to come together.”
Kennedy has been lauded for her work on behalf of New York City public schools. She began in 2002 in the city Department of Education office responsible for raising money for the schools. She took just $1 a year for the part-time job — an amount that avoided her having to reveal personal financial information required of public employees. She then joined the board of the Fund for Public Schools, a private/public partnership that raises awareness and cash for the school system.
Federal tax filings show her working about two hours a week for the group, and reports have varied wildly as to how much she personally raised for the organization.
Stephanie Dua, chief executive officer of the fund, said $240 million has been raised since Kennedy joined the group. It had been raising about $3 million a year before Kennedy arrived. Dua did not attribute all the money directly to Kennedy’s personal efforts, but said she created the awareness of the fund’s existence and today is still very involved.
“I must e-mail and talk to her every day or every other day and on the weekends. She works really hard,” Dua said.
Friends talk of her dry sense of humor, much like her father’s. She is competitive, a bit of an exercise addict, and likes a good debate. And they say she is ready for this more public phase.
“It will come quite naturally to her. She knows this is not someone who has sought the limelight, but has been in the limelight her whole life,” Campion said of Kennedy’s possible transition to public office.
“I think both Barack Obama and the condition of this country inspired her, as it has so many other people, to step forward and want to do more,” she said.
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