Pamela Harrison Turnure was born on Nov. 20, 1937, in Manhattan to Lawrence and Louise (Gwynne) Turnure. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and stepfather, Frederic Drake, a magazine publisher.
She attended the Bolton School in Westport, Conn., then Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College) in New Hampshire. She also studied at Mount Vernon Junior College in Washington before working for an interior decorator and then 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 responsibilities grew more serious that August, when the Kennedys’ infant son, Patrick, died; she was instrumental in handling the crush of media attention.
Then came the assassination. Ms. Timmins assisted Mrs. Kennedy through all of it, including dealing with an avalanche of mail — tens of thousands of letters a day.
“There was no place to process it,” she recalled in the oral history, 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 office until 1966, the year she married Robert Timmins, an investment banker. She then worked for a time in interior decorating. After Mr. Timmins’s death in 1990, Mr. Drake said, she eventually settled in Colorado, where she enjoyed hiking with her partner, Steve Boyd, who died in 2018.
In addition to Mr. Drake, she is survived by another half brother, Willie Drake, and a half sister, Deedee Drake Howard.
