T here are plenty of Kennedys still roaming the corridors of power in America, but there is only one who could have passed the mantle of Camelot to Barack Obama: Caroline Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg.
By writing an article in yesterday's New York Times under the headline 'A President Like My Father', Caroline bestowed on him the mystical aura of her father JFK - the aura of optimism and rebirth in America never yet repeated. She might as well have plucked the sword from the stone and handed it over.
Caroline, 50 last November, has special power. She has always been the Kennedy who most closely guarded her legacy and kept the shrouds drawn on the family's last shreds of privacy and dignity.
It was Caroline who made the decision to veto the public funeral planned for JFK's widow Jackie |
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Only one person was able to give Barack Obama the ultimate endorsement, says charles laurence |
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Kennedy Onassis, her mother. Then she did the same for her younger brother John, little John John of Camelot, salvaging him from the ruins of his tabloid reputation after he crashed his private plane and died in 1999.
She is the only survivor of the young First Family which transfixed the nation between JFK's inauguration between 1961 and the assassination in 1963. She alone can draw a straight line from this year's ballot to hallowed images of children playing in the Oval Office, of Caroline with John John as he saluted his father's coffin in the most mournful of all images of America's political violence.
This is powerful juju, made more so by Caroline's own scandal-free life. She followed her mother as America's style-icon, breezing through Harvard and Columbia Law School to work for New York's 
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American Election 2008
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