The calls for Kennedy to release her financial information, required of many public officials including her uncle Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, come after a lifetime of carefully cultivated privacy.
By all accounts a very wealthy woman who could be worth as much as $400 million, Kennedy has said she will not release details of her finances unless Democratic Gov. David Paterson picks her for the Senate seat that will open up if Clinton is confirmed as secretary of state.
Before she announced her interest in Clinton's Senate seat, the 51-year-old lawyer, author, wife and mother had been largely invisible to most Americans, who knew her better as the precocious preschooler from John F. Kennedy's administration.
Kennedy, who has spent most of her life in New York since her father's 1963 assassination, has had a varied professional life.
A graduate of Harvard and Columbia University Law School, she does not practice law but has co-authored books on the Bill of Rights and the right to privacy. Her other books are on non-controversial topics like Christmas, patriotism and the favorite poems of her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Most of the books were best-sellers, though it is not known how much she earned from them.
Estimates of Kennedy's wealth vary. The Daily News of New York added up assets in the public record and came up with a net worth that tops $100 million. But in his 2007 book "American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy," author C. David Heymann estimated that Kennedy is worth more than $400 million.
When her mother died in 1994, executors valued the Onassis estate at $43.7 million, a figure that has risen after auctions of various assets. Kennedy and her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., also inherited their father's share of the large, undisclosed fortune founded by their grandfather, Joseph Kennedy. John F. Kennedy Jr. died in 1999 and left an estimated $50 million estate, with his sister and her children as beneficiaries.
Kennedy and her husband, museum designer Edwin Schlossberg, live on Park Avenue in a prewar co-op building where a neighbor's five-bedroom apartment was recently listed for $13 million. Kennedy also owns a 366-acre estate on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts that she inherited from her mother. The property's worth is estimated at $50 million or more.
Kennedy met Schlossberg, 63, when she worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art between college and law school. They married in 1986 and have three children, ages 20, 18 and 15.
Kennedy has served on boards including the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, earning no compensation from those commitments.
She worked part-time as chief fundraiser for New York City's public schools from 2002 to 2004 and drew a salary of $1 a year. She wasn't required to file disclosure forms required of some city employees in policy-making positions.
