Kids convinced Caroline Kennedy to call off her Senate bid

New York, May 6 (ANI): Caroline Kennedy, daughter of assassinated US President John F Kennedy, was convinced by her teenage children to get out of the running for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, a new exposé on America's most storied political family reveals

"Mom, you are above this," older daughter Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, 19, reportedly told her mom last January 21, hours before Kennedy called Governor Paterson to end her bid for New York Senate seat.

The report in Vanity Fair magazine details for the first time what became a pivotal family meeting during which all three of Kennedy's children expressed worry over her sudden detour into electoral politics.

Citing an unnamed family adviser with deep roots in the clan, Kennedy author Edward Klein wrote that daughters Rose and Tatiana, 18, and son John, 15, confronted their mom with concerns over how the Senate bid had changed her usually placid demeanour.

"Her children felt like she was becoming a different person - one they didn't like much," the adviser is quoted as saying in an excerpt of Klein's new book "Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died".

"They had never heard her talk so tough. They told her that, if she was getting this worked up getting the job, they didn't want to see what she would be like in the trenches of a political campaign," the adviser said.

The sobering sitdown was a "wakeup call" for Kennedy, 51, who within hours would call Paterson to end her already rocky, quasi-campaign for Clinton's seat.

"If Paterson had called and offered her the job an hour earlier, she would have accepted," the adviser said. "But after that conversation [with her kids], she wouldn't have taken the job if Paterson had come begging."

Kennedy was already furious with Paterson - whose staff later trashed her by claiming her bid was upended by tax problems - for not "automatically" handing her the Senate seat, Klein reported. (ANI)