Caroline Kennedy

Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP/Getty Images

Updated April 27, 2009

Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has continued the Kennedy family tradition of public service. She served as director of strategic partnerships for the New York City school for nearly two years on a part-time basis. Her commitments also involve nonprofit boards: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., the American Ballet Theater, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Ms. Kennedy’s work with the city’s public schools has won much attention, but has not been widely understood. Hired in October 2002 (her $1 salary precluded the need to fill out financial disclosure forms) to overhaul the schools’ private fund-raising, she took on a haphazard operation and gave it a new mission: privately raising seed money to test new reforms, while trying to persuade New Yorkers to get involved in the schools in meaningful ways.

A rock concert in Central Park raised $2 million; a tag sale there drew tens of thousands of bargain hunters. (Some of them, unwittingly, walked off with evening bags that had belonged to her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, according to Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., which sponsored the event.) By the time she left in August 2004, Ms. Kennedy had raised more than $70 million for an academy to train reform-minded principals. Nearly 200 city school principals are graduates, the majority in high-poverty schools.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein credited her with bringing in a $51 million gift from Bill Gates’s foundation despite lingering ill will over Mr. Klein’s battles with Microsoft while he was at the Justice Department.

In December 2008 she declared herself a candidate to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In late January, however, she withdrew her name. Her interest in the seat had been a sharp break from decades in which she had closely guarded her privacy. Ms. Kennedy had never held or sought public office before.

In April 2009 the Commission on Public Integrity began reviewing a request from three government watchdog groups to investigate the Paterson administration's leaks of confidential information provided by Ms. Kennedy when she was seeking appointment to the Senate.

Ms. Kennedy's withdrawal embarrassed the governor and ignited fears inside his administration that anyone else he picked would look like a second choice. Hours after Ms. Kennedy's withdrawal, members of the administration called reporters and, insisting on anonymity, claimed that tax problems and issues with a domestic worker had emerged and had derailed her candidacy.

Those claims were highly exaggerated, all sides later acknowledged; no serious or disqualifying issues had arisen.

Before her run at the Senate seat, Ms. Kennedy joined her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, in endorsing Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, despite beseeching by Ms. Clinton's camp. That boost was rewarded with a role for Ms. Kennedy as co-coordinator of Mr. Obama's vice presidential search, joining Eric Holder, who later became United States attorney general.

Mr. Kennedy has brain cancer, which has forced members of his extended family to contemplate the possibility that the Senate could be without a Kennedy for the first time in a half century. Friends of Ms. Kennedy said that another reason she had contemplated a run was that her children are older now — her two daughters are in college and her son is in high school.

Ms. Kennedy is married to Edwin A. Schlossberg, a designer. Ms. Kennedy was born in New York and grew up in the city. She graduated from Columbia Law School.