Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg

In 1960, on the night John F. Kennedy returned from the Democratic National Convention as the party's nominee for President, his two-year-old daughter Caroline toddled out of the family's Hyannis Port home to greet her father. Immediately a fusillade of photographers' camera bulbs went off, and the frightened Caroline turned away. "Don't be afraid," J.F.K. told her. "They won't hurt you." In the 39 years since, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has rarely run willingly into the glare of public attention. Instead she has allowed her cousins to inherit the Kennedy legacy of political ambition and her younger brother to assume the role of family icon. Meanwhile, she has tended to her three children, walked anonymously through New York City's streets and granted few extended interviews, except during publicity rushes for her two books. "She is first and foremost a wife and mother," says Paul Kirk Jr., chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and a family confidant. "That's a key priority for her. She saw how important it was to her as a child."

And yet if her life has been more guarded than her brother's was, it is far from cloistered. Her mother was more glamorous and socially adroit, but Caroline shares Jackie's cultivated charm and has steadily expanded her own profile as a patron of culture and the arts. And though not driven to politics as were J.F.K. and his brothers, she has nonetheless compiled a ledger of quiet but diligent service to the public, and to her father's legacy, that reflects a commitment to civic life and a belief in the value of rigorous, reflective debate. "She has a strong sense of personal responsibility," says historian David McCullough, who sits with Caroline on the panel that hands out the Kennedy Library's annual Profile in Courage Awards. "She knows she has serious work to do. And in that sense, I've always felt she is very much a Kennedy."

Her political education came early. During Caroline's summers as a Harvard undergraduate, her uncle Ted insisted that she work in his Senate office as an intern. "He wanted her to understand how the Senate operated and what her father's place was in it," says a longtime Kennedy friend. "He made sure...she would meet the players." After college, she worked for five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and met her husband, the interactive-media designer Edwin Schlossberg. In 1988 she graduated from Columbia Law School and gave birth to their first child, Rose. Soon after, she began researching a book on the Bill of Rights, In Our Defense, with her friend and law-school classmate Ellen Alderman. The two canvassed the country, interviewing professors, attorneys and prison inmates. "She was very, very serious," says Richard Burr, a death-penalty expert who advised the authors. "She had done a lot of homework on specific cases already, which is rare." Rarer still was her gentility. Both times she interviewed Jack Boger, then a lawyer with the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, Caroline sent him a handwritten thank-you note.