Caroline Kennedy Fortune Revealed in Filings

Aug. 19, 2013 -- Caroline Kennedy has for the first time revealed details of a personal fortune estimated to be between $250 million and $500 million, with income of between $12 million and $30 million a year.

Kennedy, President Obama's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Japan, must by law make public her financial holdings, in order to prove she would have no conflict of interest in that post. In 2008, during a bid for the Senate that she ultimately dropped, she declined to release her personal financial data.

In a July 15 cover letter to her financial filing she promises that, if confirmed as ambassador, she will not participate in "any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect on my financial interests or those of any person whose interests are imputed to me," including, she goes on to say, her spouse, Edwin Schlossberg or his companies.

Schlossberg, a polymath protégé of the late, coke bottle-bespectacled Buckminster Fuller, was once the subject of a Spy Magazine profile that described him as being a "Renaissance man without a renaissance." His Manhattan firm, ESI Design, specializes in interactivity.

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Kennedy's letter goes on to say that she already has divested herself of investments that might have posed a conflict, including her holdings with Goldman Sachs West Street Portfolios, LLC, the manager of which, she says in her letter, declined to provide her with enough specific information about the fund's underlying assets for her to be sure the investment was permissible.

Her remaining holdings are listed in Schedule A to her disclosure, which runs to 51 pages. It lists positions with JP Morgan, Blackstone, Vornado Realty Trust, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, as well as real estate and her holdings in a variety of Kennedy family trusts. Among the highlights:

Separate trusts established in her name in 1959, 1963, and 1982 that pay combined income of up to $3 million a year. Commercial property in Chicago pays millions more. A trust in the name of her late brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., pays additional income of up to $1 million. She received $75,000 per speech for three speeches in 2013, plus royalties from books (including several on poetry) totaling more than $400,000.

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The New York Post quotes a legal expert who reviewed the filings as saying, "She's very rich, probably worth bet6ween $250 million and $500 million. From the figures it looks like she earns between $12 million and $30 million a year from her trust[s] and from her investments."

Caroline, 55, inherited the estate of her late mother, Jackie Kennedy, which included a family estate on Martha's Vineyard. Jackie, following her divorce from Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, received a settlement reported to be $26 million. Caroline is the sole surviving member of the immediate family of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the nation's first female ambassador to Japan.