ALBANY (New York): Ms Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of slain president John F. Kennedy, plans to seek the Senate seat that Mrs Hillary Clinton is vacating to become secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Ms Kennedy, 51, called New York Governor David Paterson yesterday to 'express her interest in the job', a spokesman for the governor said, making her the highest-profile candidate in the running for the office.

Her uncle Robert F. Kennedy once held the seat that she is now eyeing. Both he and president Kennedy were assassinated in the 1960s.

Ms Kennedy herself has never held public office. An author and lawyer who sits on several charitable and cultural boards, she has not relished the limelight.

In fact she avoided it until she took to the campaign trail for President-elect Barack Obama this year.

Sources said Mr Paterson has come to see her as a strong potential candidate whose appointment would keep a woman in the seat and whose personal ties would allow her to raise the roughly US$70 million (S$103 million) required to run for election and hold it in the coming years.

For Ms Kennedy, an appointment to the Senate will come at a poignant time.

With her other uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, battling brain cancer, her entry into the Senate would ensure the storied family continues to exert an influence at the acme of national politics as a glamorous new president takes office.

'I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,' Ms Kennedy wrote in January, in The New York Times, as Mr Barack Obama's bid to wrench the Democratic nomination from Mrs Clinton took off.

'But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president - not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans,' she declared.

Unlike Mrs Clinton, Ms Kennedy actually comes from New York, and has already been in touch with prominent state politicians to raise her candidacy, according to reports.

She was a prime mover behind a multimillion-dollar fund-raising drive for New York City schools before stepping down from the position in 2004.

This year, Ms Kennedy was a co-chair of Mr Obama's vice-presidential selection panel.

During the presidential primaries, she was instrumental in persuading Sen Kennedy to back Mr Obama - much to the ire of the Clinton camp.

Indeed, some Clinton associates were reportedly unhappy at the prospect of her Senate seat being taken over by a Kennedy.

Gov Paterson, who has sole discretion in appointing the person who will fill that seat until the next election in 2010, says he will not announce a decision until the seat is vacated, once Mr Obama takes office on Jan 20.

Ms Kennedy was six days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.

Another assassin cut down her uncle Robert Kennedy when he was running for the presidency in 1968.

A photo of a young Caroline with her pony in a news article inspired singer- songwriter Neil Diamond to write his hit song Sweet Caroline, a fact he revealed only when performing it for her 50th birthday in November last year.

A Harvard graduate, Ms Kennedy met her husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg, while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1980. They live on Park Avenue in Manhattan with their three children, aged 20, 18 and 16.

Tragedy struck again in 1999 when her brother, John Kennedy Jr, died when a plane he was piloting crashed.

Ms Kennedy narrowly escaped tragedy herself when an IRA bomb was placed underneath the car of her London host - Conservative MP Hugh Fraser - during a nine-month stay in England in 1975. She was running late and was not around when the bomb exploded, killing passerby Gordon Hamilton-Fairley.

If appointed, Ms Kennedy would become the first woman to lead the Kennedy dynasty, whose most successful and visible members have been men.

Already, some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress have begun asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname.

Representative Gary Ackerman, a Queens Democrat, told a radio host recently that he did not know what Ms Kennedy's qualifications were, 'except that she has name recognition - but so does J. Lo'.

NEW YORK TIMES, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE