Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author, diplomat, and attorney who served as the United States ambassador to Australia from 2022 to 2024. She previously served in the Obama administration as the United States ambassador to Japan from 2013 to 2017. Most of Kennedy's professional life has been in literature, law, politics, education reform, and charity. She is a member of the Kennedy family and the only surviving child of US president John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Born in New York City, Kennedy was two years old when her father won the 1960 presidential election and spent her early childhood years in the White House during his presidency. She was only five years old when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Kennedy moved with her younger brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., and their mother Jacqueline to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and continued her education there. She graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and later attended Columbia Law School, earning a Juris Doctor degree from the lattermost in 1988. Kennedy passed the New York State bar exam the following year. She worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, designer Edwin Schlossberg. They have three children: Rose, Tatiana, and Jack.

Early in the primary race for the 2008 presidential election, Kennedy and her uncle, Ted Kennedy, endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama. She later stumped for him in Florida, Indiana, and Ohio, served as co-chair of his Vice Presidential Search Committee, and addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. After Obama selected United States senator Hillary Clinton to serve as secretary of state, Kennedy expressed interest in being appointed to Clinton's vacant Senate seat from New York, but later withdrew citing personal reasons. In 2013, President Obama appointed Kennedy as the United States ambassador to Japan making her the first female ambassador to serve in the country. Eight years later, Joe Biden appointed Kennedy as United States ambassador to Australia and she took office following her confirmation on June 10, 2022.

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born on November 27, 1957, at New York Hospital to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. She is named after her maternal aunt, Lee Radziwill, and maternal great-great-grandmother, Caroline Ewing Bouvier. A year before Kennedy's birth, her parents had a stillborn daughter, Arabella. Kennedy had a younger brother, John Jr., who was born two days before her third birthday in 1960. Another brother, Patrick, died two days after his premature birth in 1963. Kennedy lived with her parents in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. during the first three years of her life.

When Kennedy was three years old, the family moved to the White House after her father was sworn in as president of the United States. Kennedy was often photographed riding her pony "Macaroni" around the White House grounds. One such photo in a news article inspired singer-songwriter Neil Diamond to write his song, "Sweet Caroline", which he revealed when performing it for Caroline's 50th birthday. As a small child, Kennedy received numerous gifts from dignitaries, including a puppy from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and a Yucatán pony from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. A short-lived comic strip was created about her, and she was the namesake of the British pirate radio station Radio Caroline, founded in 1964.

Historians described Caroline's childhood personality as "a trifle remote and a bit shy at times" yet "remarkably unspoiled." "She's too young to realize all these luxuries", her paternal grandmother, Rose Kennedy, said of her. "She probably thinks it's natural for children to go off in their own airplanes. But she is with her cousins, and some of them dance and swim better than she. They do not allow her to take special precedence. Little children accept things".

When Kennedy's father was assassinated in 1963, nanny Maud Shaw took her and John Jr. from the White House to the home of their maternal grandmother, Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, who insisted that Shaw be the one to tell Kennedy about her father's assassination. That evening, Kennedy and John Jr. returned to the White House, and while Kennedy was in bed, Shaw broke the news to her. Shaw soon found out that Jacqueline had wanted to be the one to tell the two children, which caused a rift between Shaw and Jacqueline. On December 6, two weeks after the assassination, Jacqueline, Caroline, and John Jr. moved out of the White House and returned to Georgetown. Their new home became a tourist attraction, and the family left Georgetown the following year. They later moved to a penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.

In 1967, Kennedy christened the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in a widely publicized ceremony in Newport News, Virginia. Over that summer, Jacqueline took the children on a six-week "sentimental journey" to Ireland, where they met President Éamon de Valera and visited the Kennedy ancestral home at Dunganstown. In the midst of the trip, Caroline and John were surrounded by a large number of press photographers while playing in a pond. The incident caused their mother to telephone Ireland's Department of External Affairs and request the issuing of a statement that she and the children wanted to be left in peace. As a result of the request, further attempts by press photographers to photograph the threesome ended with arrests by local police and the photographers being jailed.