The president was involved about what a windblown journey in a motorcade would do to his spouse’s hair. He requested her press secretary, Pamela Turnure Timmins, for recommendation. She proposed that the couple not journey in a convertible.
“We did discuss it, and I suggested the bubble top,” Ms. Timmins mentioned in a 1964 oral historical past, “and just immediately he said, ‘No, that’s semi-satisfactory; if you’re going out to see the people, then they should be able to see you.’”
The president in query was John F. Kennedy, and the motorcade they have been discussing was the fateful one by Dallas in November 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1961, at 23, Ms. Timmins had change into the primary individual ever to carry the title of press secretary to an American first girl when she joined the workers of Jacqueline Kennedy. It was a put up that made her a witness to appreciable glamour and appreciable tragedy.
Ms. Timmins died on April 25 at her dwelling in Edwards, Colo. She was 85. Her half brother, O. Burtch Winters Drake, mentioned the trigger was lung most cancers.
Ms. Timmins had been a receptionist on the Belgian Embassy and, starting in 1957, a secretary to Timothy Reardon, a prime aide to John Kennedy, earlier than she was chosen to be the primary girl’s press secretary. The new first couple have been made for the age of tv and shiny magazines, and Mrs. Kennedy was going to be a magnet for media protection the best way few first women had been earlier than.
The selection of Ms. Timmins (who was Ms. Turnure on the time) was unconventional, since she had virtually no journalism expertise or observe file of working with the news media. According to “Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage” (1996), by the journalist Christopher Andersen, it was Mr. Kennedy who informed Pierre Salinger, his White House press secretary, to rent Ms. Timmins.
In any case, she settled into that fast-paced job, fielding dozens of telephone calls and writing 20 or 30 letters a day; accompanying the primary girl on journeys and public appearances; and answering reporters’ questions on what Mrs. Kennedy was carrying, for instance, and who had designed it.
“I can’t imagine anything more exciting,” she informed the Washington newspaper The Evening Star in August 1961, when she was seven months into the job. “The whole aura of being here is wonderful.”
Mr. Anderson’s e-book described “a flowery welcome-aboard letter” to Ms. Timmins from Mrs. Kennedy, who wrote, “You have sense and good taste enough not to panic, and to say the right thing.”
The news media wrote about Ms. Timmins in profiles that have been, by as we speak’s requirements, cloying and sexist; she was “a trim and pretty young lady,” a “comely brunette,” the “pretty press secretary.”
What these articles didn’t say, however what Kennedy biographers have mentioned, was that Ms. Timmins might have been among the many many ladies with whom the president had affairs. The relationship was mentioned to have begun within the late Nineteen Fifties, when Ms. Timmins was on then-Senator Kennedy’s workers. Mr. Anderson, in his e-book, wrote that Ms. Timmins had been Kennedy’s “on again, off again mistress” when she was appointed press secretary.
Mr. Drake mentioned by e mail that Ms. Timmins had seldom talked concerning the topic and had maintained that the connection was platonic.
Pamela Harrison Turnure was born on Nov. 20, 1937, in Manhattan to Lawrence and Louise (Gwynne) Turnure. Her dad and mom divorced when she was younger, and he or she was raised by her mom and stepfather, Frederic Drake, {a magazine} writer.
She attended the Bolton School for ladies in Westport, Conn., then Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College) in New Hampshire. She additionally studied at Mount Vernon Junior College in Washington earlier than working for an inside decorator after which taking the Belgian Embassy job.
As Mrs. Kennedy’s press aide, “forbidden subjects for Pam to discuss with the press are Caroline’s kindergarten class, the first lady’s fox hunting, and nonofficial doings,” Helen Thomas, the longtime White House correspondent for United Press International, wrote in March 1963, referring to the Kennedys’ daughter. But her duties grew extra severe that August, when the Kennedys’ toddler son, Patrick, died; she was instrumental in dealing with the crush of media consideration.
Then got here the assassination. Ms. Timmins assisted Mrs. Kennedy by all of it, together with coping with an avalanche of mail — tens of hundreds of letters a day.
“There was no place to process it,” she recalled within the oral historical past, which was recorded for the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. “It was just being stacked in enormous cardboard cartons, one on top of another, from floor to ceiling.”
She continued to work in Mrs. Kennedy’s workplace till 1966, the yr she married Robert Timmins, an funding banker. She then labored for a time in inside adorning. After Mr. Timmins’s demise in 1990, Mr. Drake mentioned, she finally settled in Colorado, the place she loved mountaineering along with her associate, Steve Boyd, who died in 2018.
In addition to Mr. Drake, she is survived by one other half brother, Willie Drake, and a half sister, Deedee Drake Howard.
Source: www.nytimes.com