Caroline Kennedy Harbors a Daughter's Hope

My mother always liked to remind me that I am three months older than Caroline Kennedy.

"You were a summer baby, and she was born in the fall," Mom would say, as if this three-month gap in age gave me the upper hand should Caroline ever make it over to our house for a play date.

Caroline and I shared more than a birth year, as far as my mother was concerned. We both lived in houses that didn't belong to us, our mothers were keen on matching outfits for their children, and our fathers were born to lead. Her dad was president of the United States. My dad was entertainment director for his local union. Smaller constituencies, but equally contentious, and if you don't think so, you never have planned a Christmas dance for organized labor.

These may sound like silly comparisons to make, but there were a lot of working-class parents like mine in the early '60s who saw a better version of themselves and their children's futures through the lens of John F. Kennedy.

Like other families in the neighborhood, we had a Jack-and-Jesus wall: a photo of Kennedy right next to a painting of Christ, in picture frames not even close to matching. Mom said we should look at Jesus first; Dad hoped Jesus was watching but put his faith in the young president, who insisted that even Chuck Schultz had something to offer his country.

Ultimately, what Caroline and I most have in common is the impact of her father's legacy, albeit in dramatically different ways. Her every move is measured against the standard set by the father she barely knew. She has lived with utmost grace under what most of us would find to be unbearable scrutiny.

For me, Kennedy evokes memories of my father and men like him, who dared to think their only obstacle was a belief in their own smallness. After Kennedy was killed, my hometown erected a monument in front of city hall that quoted the late president's call to ask the right question of ourselves and our country.

My father often took me to look at that monument, that quote. I'd stand there, silent and still, as my dad read aloud. He always would turn to me and say, "He means you, too."

All of these memories rushed over me like a fever earlier this week when Caroline Kennedy announced her endorsement for Barack Obama. She and I could have quite the spirited discussion about our respective choices for president, but I hung on her every word when she explained, in an op-ed for The New York Times, why she had stepped forward:

"All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children."

I am one of those children because of her father and because of mine. Like her, I, too, yearn for my father's life to matter beyond the time in which he lived it.

This week, I opened the old steamer trunk my father gave me about a year before he died. It is full of newspaper and magazine clippings, most of them about John F. Kennedy.

Many of the magazines are worn and frayed, and strips of parched and yellow tape fall from the pages. I imagine my young father, not yet 30 but already raising four children, sitting at the dining room table late at night. I picture him poring over the glossy photos of Look and Life, his burly hands carefully reattaching torn covers and mending tiny tears.

When I asked my father about the collection in the trunk, he shrugged his shoulders. "I couldn't throw them out," he said, "but I had to put those memories away."

For a moment, however fleeting, Caroline Kennedy pulled them out again, these memories of a different time, a different leader. She is a daughter, now 50, reminding us of her father's faith in a better America.

And I am a daughter, three months older, who hears the hope of my own father's heart whispering in my ear.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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