Served as first press secretary to a first lady
Pamela Turnure Timmins, who served Jacqueline Kennedy as the first press secretary ever hired by a first lady, burnishing the Camelot image of sophistication and glamour while helping to usher in a media-savvy new era for the East Wing of the White House, died April 25 at her home in Edwards, Colo. She was 85.
The cause was lung cancer, said her half brother O. Burtch Drake.
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 Pierre Salinger, 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. But she did have the faith and trust of the Kennedy family, whom she had known since 1957, when she met thensen. John F. Kennedy at the wedding of Jacqueline Kennedy’s stepsister.
Timmins was hired as an assistant in the senator’s office and went on to work on his presidential campaign, helping type speeches, set up state campaign headquarters in Wisconsin and West Virginia, and organize an ox roast for supporters. The night of the election, she was working the phones at the Kennedy family compound on Cape Cod, gathering information on the results.
By some accounts, her relationship with John F. Kennedy extended beyond politics. Presidential chroniclers including Robert Dallek, Seymour Hersh and Barbara Leaming reported that Timmins was one of a number of women with whom Kennedy had affairs, an assertion her family rejected.
Timmins never commented on those allegations, according to her half brother and her half sister, Deedee Howard. In interviews, they said that Timmins had only a platonic relationship with the man she described as “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.
“She answers every question exactly as I would,” the first lady wrote in a 1962 letter to a friend. “I know she will do it correctly,” she added, “so we don’t even communicate for weeks on end.”
Timmins was the first person to formally serve in the press secretary role.