The Right Job for Caroline Kennedy
Writing about her withdrawal from seeking Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, I committed a journalistic sin–burying the lead.
The last sentence was: “The Obama Administration should ask her to serve as ambassador to Great Britain (as her grandfather did) or France or Ireland, where her intelligence and instincts, along with her Kennedy and Bouvier background, could be an important American asset.”
This self-rebuke arises after reading the new New Yorker piece about Caroline Kennedy, which sheds no light on the reasons for her decision but is a reminder of how much she is like her mother:
“It was, evidently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s intention to raise children who were as unaffected as possible by the extraordinary circumstances of their lives, and it seems that she succeeded: Caroline Kennedy’s life has in many ways been indistinguishable from that of any other smart and reasonably diligent child raised on Fifth Avenue in the nineteen-sixties.”
Back then, Caroline’s widowed mother was taking her children to the playgrounds of Central Park herself and, on one occasion, warning her brother John not to ram into one of mine while careening down a slide.
The year after JFK’s death, I asked Jacqueline Kennedy to become a contributing editor of McCalls.
One Response to “The Right Job for Caroline Kennedy”
my direct knowledge of ambassadors is that the most wealthy, not the most skilled, are given ambassadorships. Esp those who give the most money to a presidental campaign. The ambassadors, traditionally, have been society men and women who social climb with the wealthy. Speaking with several ambassadors in my lifetime, I have to say, that though they are often educated and nice enough, they have little grasp of the 'dirt issues' of the country they're in, no awareness of the poor and despised, the downtrodden. And they are part of a huge and long afternoon that goes on for years :cocktail parties, lukewarm pronouncments, and back patting.
Along with lobbying by appointees, ambassadorships ought be up for scrutiny about who is chosen and why. And the system ought be changed to not one of 'societal seniority' … and not even time served in Congress, but who has excellent arbitration skills, who is proven.
Just my two cent's worth about this slick on the surface governmental culture that still survives but has its roots in upholding the colonization of other countries, by allies. Viz Britain, India, for instance.
dr.e