Caroline Kennedy - Early Life and Childhood

Early Life and Childhood

A year after her parents had a stillborn daughter named Arabella, Kennedy was born at Cornell Medical Center in New York City. She was named after both her maternal aunt, Caroline Lee Bouvier Radziwill, and her maternal great-grandmother, Caroline Ewing Bouvier. Her younger brother, John, Jr., was born three years later. A second brother, Patrick, died of a lung ailment two days after his premature birth on August 9, 1963. Caroline and John, Jr. lived with their parents in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown. On January 20, 1961, when Caroline was three, her father was inaugurated as President of the United States and the family moved into the White House. Caroline attended kindergarten in classes organized by her mother and was often photographed riding her pony Macaroni around the White House grounds. A photo of a young Caroline with Macaroni in a news article inspired singer-songwriter Neil Diamond to write his hit song "Sweet Caroline," a fact he revealed only when performing it for her 50th birthday in November 2007. As a small child in the White House, she was the recipient of 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 personality as a child as "a trifle remote and a bit shy at times" yet "remarkably unspoiled." "She's too young to realize all these luxuries", Rose Kennedy said of her granddaughter. "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 their father'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 Auchincloss, who insisted that Shaw be the one to tell Caroline about her father's assassination. That evening, Caroline and John, Jr., were brought back to the White House, and with Caroline in bed, Shaw broke the news to her. However, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had already written letters to Caroline and John, Jr., telling them about the assassination and that they could "always be proud" of their father. Shaw subsequently found out that their mother had wanted to be the one to tell the children, which caused a rift between the nanny and Mrs. Kennedy. In December 1963, Jackie, Caroline, and John, Jr. moved from the White House back to Georgetown. Their home soon became a popular tourist attraction in Washington and they moved to a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in mid-1964. In May 1967, Kennedy christened the United States Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in a widely publicized ceremony in Newport News, Virginia.

In 1975, Kennedy was visiting London to complete a nine-month art course at the Sotheby's auction house. On October 23, a car bomb placed by the IRA under the car of her host, Conservative MP Hugh Fraser, exploded shortly before Kennedy and Fraser were due to leave for their daily drive to Sotheby's. Caroline was running late and had not yet left the house, but a passerby, oncologist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, was killed.