Caroline Kennedy: ambassador, author, mother, keeper of family flame

She is the little girl riding her pony Macaroni around the White House lawn, the big sister hiding under the Oval Office desk with her little brother John. And in a heartbreaking childhood photo, she is the white-gloved daughter kneeling with her mother at the coffin of her slain father, the president.

Flash forward 50 years and here is Caroline Kennedy again: author, lawyer and mother of three, tending to the Kennedy flame as her family's sole survivor. And, finally, after decades protecting her privacy, she has stepped into a more public role as U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Kennedy, 55, was five days short of her sixth birthday when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

The family's nanny gently informed Caroline that her father had been shot "and they couldn't make him better." With that, Caroline's world was shaken, not for the first time or the last.

Three months earlier, a little brother, Patrick, had died shortly after birth. Then Robert F. Kennedy, the uncle who served as a sort of surrogate father after JFK's assassination, was himself shot and killed while running for president in 1968. Her mother, Jacqueline. died of cancer in 1994, and Caroline lost her brother John in a 1999 plane crash. He was 38.

Through it all, levelheaded Caroline soldiered on, lending her support to family causes. She's served as president of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and chaired the senior advisory committee of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, set up as a memorial to Kennedy.

Trey Grayson, director of the institute, describes Kennedy as quiet and down to earth, willing to be blunt when needed, and gracious at managing the daily challenges that come with nurturing her father's legacy.

"Every day, people walk up to her and say, 'I'm such a big fan of your father, he inspired me to do this,' and she's handled that so well," Grayson said.

Asked in 2012 if she ever felt overwhelmed by the legacy of the Kennedy years, Kennedy said simply, "I can't imagine having better parents and a more wonderful brother. So I feel really fortunate that those are my family, and I wish they were here. But my own family, my children, my husband, are really my real family and so . . . we're just us."

Raised in privilege on New York's Upper East Side, Kennedy earned a Columbia law degree, but rather than practice law, she chose to write and edit books about the right to privacy, poetry and other subjects. She limited her public appearances and, after marrying exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg, tried to be just another parent shepherding her kids to adulthood.

In recent years she has edged back into the spotlight. Early in 2008, she endorsed Barack Obama in the presidential primary race against Hillary Clinton and served on the team that helped Obama select his running mate. She tested the waters of seeking appointment to the Senate seat vacated when Clinton became secretary of state, but withdrew.

Through the years, there have been moments when recollections of the trials of her life come crashing through.

"You don't think about it all the time," Kennedy once said, in a comment cited in Christopher Andersen's biography "Sweet Caroline." "Sometimes you're just walking down the street and it just hits you . . ."