Pamela Turnure Timmins, who served Jacqueline Kennedy as the first press secretary ever hired by a first lady, died at her home in Edwards, Colo. She was 85.
Mrs. Timmins, then known as Pam Turnure, was only 23 when she began working for the Kennedy White House in January 1961, days before the president’s inauguration. Unlike her colleague, the debonair press secretary to the president himself, she had no experience in journalism, aside from a summer spent working at a magazine put out by her stepfather, the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar.
Mrs. Timmins never commented on those allegations, according to her half brother and half sister, Deedee Howard. In interviews, they said that Mrs. Timmins had only a platonic relationship with the man“the most selfless person I have ever known,” and added that she was genuinely devoted to Jacqueline Kennedy, continuing to work as her press secretary for several years after the president’s assassination in 1963.
“As modern communications took off, there was a need for the first lady to have a media presence,” said, a Jacqueline Kennedy biographer and presidential scholar at the University of Virginia. In a phone interview, she added that the first lady relied on Mrs. Timmins both “to feed the beast,” by promoting her husband’s presidency to reporters, and to “keep the beast at arm’s length,” maintaining privacy around her marriage and young children.
At times she fielded 50 calls a day from reporters asking about the presidential family, along with answering letters asking for the first lady’s picture, autograph or favorite recipe. She pleaded with photographers to stop taking pictures of the couple’s children playing outside the White House; traveled to Europe with the first lady and president; and once introduced the media to the family’s new pet, a gray cat known as Tom Kitten.
In a 1964 oral history released by the JFK Library after Mrs. Timmins’s death, Mrs. Timmins said that she made her way to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where she joined the first lady outside the operating room. During a period of “agonizing waiting,” she saw someone carrying a paper bag, apparently bearing the president’s personal effects. Someone else carried the pink pillbox hat that the first lady had torn off her head after her husband was shot.
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