How Caroline Kennedy Has Quietly Controlled Her Family's Legacy

The Daily Beast, Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 11:13pm (PST)

By George Rush

Trained by her mother to flee the evil paparazzi, Caroline Kennedy has always been the shyest of her clan. Limelight gives her sunburn. But since bowing out of her ill-fated Senate bid two years ago, the 52-year-old Caroline has been hovering even lower under the radar – shaping her family's legacy from behind the scenes.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of her father's administration, the world was reminded of 52-year-old Caroline's quiet influence. Insiders say that Caroline personally lobbied to have the miniseries about her family yanked from the History Channel. The eight-part project, starring Katie Holmes and Greg Kinnear, was supposed to have aired in the spring.

Something about the series just didn't sit well with Caroline, who has spent much of the past two years carefully planning how to honor her father's administration. She's slated to host a series of events and promote no fewer than three books about her family over the coming months.

Never mind that over 70 percent of Americans weren't alive when John F. Kennedy took office. Caroline, who was three at the time, wants us all to remember that exactly 50 years ago he ruled a spot called Camelot. And more importantly, she wants us to remember it a certain way. Given that 2011 marks the first time in 64 years that no Kennedy holds public office, one might say it's only logical that she's taking a more assertive role as the leader of her clan.

Had the History Channel not bowed to her influence, their mother company would have likely lost out on an another Kennedy venture; a volume containing six and a half hours of hitherto-secret interviews that her mother, Jacqueline, did with worshipful historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1964. The audio book, due out in September, will let you hear Jackie speak in her breathy, Vassar voice about her husband's early campaigns, the Cuban Missile Crisis and “married life in the White House,” according to Hyperion Books.

Considering that Jackie once forbade hagiographer William Manchester from even revealing that she smoked, you have to wonder how much she'll spill. “I seriously doubt that she would open her heart,” says Kennedy biographer Edward Klein. “And, if there's anything remotely embarrassing, I think Caroline would expunge it.”

Hyperion vouches that the interviews will be “revealing” and “unedited.” But if they don't satisfy your Kennedy craving, Caroline is also working on an album of her father's family photos and a book for young adults that will commemorate her dad's call to “ask what you can do for your country.”

Her Flirtation With the Spotlight

For most of her life, Caroline has been her family's most guarded member. Stalked by the world's paparazzi from childhood, she learned from her mother how to duck and cover. But gradually, she's grown bolder. She's written and edited seven bestselling books on constitutional law, history and poetry. She once told a friend, though, that she found the writer's life too solitary. So she became a hands-on board member of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the JFK Library Foundation. In 2002, she accepted a three-day-a-week job raising money for New York's public schools. Taking one dollar a year, she helped raise more than $65 million.

In 2008, she broke with her Hillary-backing cousins Bobby, Kerry, and Kathleen by endorsing Barack Obama in a New York Times editorial titled "A President Like My Father." For the first time, her family's campaign DNA kicked in. She traveled the country on Obama's behalf.

"I'm lucky to have her as a friend," said then-senator Obama, who spoke of her "extraordinary humility and sense of humor.” He asked her to help him pick his running mate. At at the Democratic National Convention, it fell to Caroline to introduce her Uncle Ted, who had been battling brain cancer. Handed a speech, the once-bashful Caroline completely rewrote it and delivered it with what her father would call vigah.

The Downfall of a Political Career

A bigger surprise was still to come. When Obama picked Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, Caroline nominated herself as Clinton's replacement in the Senate. The sphinx quickly tried to shed some of her mystery. The undressing didn't go well. The press called her positions fuzzy and redacted each of the 200 or so "you knows" she muttered in a 40-minute interview. Forty-four percent of those questioned in one poll said they liked her better before she opened her mouth. Some Democrats resented her sense of entitlement, as though the Senate seat was her birthright, like her White House pony, Macaroni. Though Gov. David Paterson at first encouraged her Senate bid, some of his aides were running a smear campaign against her.

Before taking her name out of contention, Caroline showed that, if she didn't have her father's eloquence, she did have his barbed wit. When two reporters from her friend Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s New York Times asked if she recalled the moment when she that decided to seek the seat, she said, "I thought you were the crack political team… Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman's magazine or something?"

Though her children – Rose, 22, Tatiana, 20, and Jack, 17 – are older now, insiders doubt she'll ever take another run at public office. Her first flirtation with politics “was too brutal on her,” says Laurence Leamer, author of The Kennedy Women. “She'll find other things to do.”

“Her kids were very upset with her behavior,” says another source. “She became impossible to live with. Nobody had ever treated her that way before.”

Up till then, she'd been a model mom, taking after her own vigilant mother. (Weight-conscious Jackie is said to have once taken Caroline's credit card away after discovering she'd charged two pounds of spare ribs at Mr. Chow's.)

“Caroline was always very hands-on with her kids,” says a source. “She volunteered for Parents Day and came dressed in jeans and sneakers.” (Though her worth has been estimated at $400 million, she often rides the subway.)

Caroline's Privacy Code

The fact that her children, unlike some of their Kennedy cousins, have stayed out of the tabloids owes to Caroline's fierce code of privacy.

“It's funny that Neil Diamond wrote ‘Sweet Caroline' about her,” chuckles another source. “Because she's not sweet. She's a very suspicious woman, and rightfully so. If you see someone quoted in an article as a ‘friend' of hers, you know they're not. Because her real friends know she would cut them off in a minute if they talked to the press.”

Also enforcing the oath of omerta has been her husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg, with whom she'll celebrate a 25th anniversary in July. “I think Ed performed a real service as Caroline's protector from the world,” says one source. “He was the gatekeeper. He had a lot of power because he made her believe she couldn't function without him. But I think she's gained enormous self-confidence. I don't think she needs him as much.”

Besides her three JFK books, Caroline has three more volumes on deck: She Walks in Beauty (an anthology of women's poetry, due in April), another poetry anthology for children, and a memoir of the trips she and her cousins took with their Uncle Ted. Not a bad output for someone who's supposedly tongue-tied, you know?