Don't forget Patricia Bowman.
Then.
Now
Posted on 11/22/2020 5:47:05 AM PST by billorites
Pam Kelley was 18 years old in the summer of 1973 when she accepted a fateful ride in a Jeep from a male member of the Kennedy family on Nantucket.
Joseph P. Kennedy II flipped the Jeep on a sandy cutoff and Pam Kelley was thrown out and paralyzed from the waist down.
She would never walk again. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
Pam Kelley Burkley died Friday at the age of 65. She lived 25 years longer than the doctors had predicted back in 1973.
She is survived by, among others, a 31-year-old daughter and two grandsons.
The accident had no adverse impact on Joe Kennedy’s life and career, of course. For crippling Pam Kelley, he had to appear before a local judge who had graduated from Harvard with his uncle and namesake Joseph Kennedy Jr., a judge who like Joe’s father Bobby had once worked in Washington for Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
In between sporadic attendance at a string of second- and third-tier colleges, Joe was accompanied to court by his mother Ethel and his uncle Ted.
The senator was making his own first appearance in a state courtroom since pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after killing Mary Jo Kopechne in his own motor-vehicle accident four years earlier on Martha’s Vineyard.
For putting Pam Kelley in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, the family-retainer judge fined Joe Kennedy $100.
That’s the Kennedy M.O. They all live their lives like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.”
“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “They smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
The other people cleaned up this mess by cutting Pam Kelley a check for $848,684.01, after which the Kennedys expected her to go away and not bother them again.
Like Marilyn Monroe and Mary Jo Kopechne, Pam was just more collateral damage in the family’s Hundred Years War against women.
Joe the Jeep Man went on to serve six forgettable terms in Congress in the seat his uncle Jack had once held.
He’s since made millions from his “nonprofit,” put his second wife on the payroll and this year spent millions more futilely trying to get his son and namesake, Joseph III, who himself served four lackluster terms in Congress, elected to the Senate over the even more lackluster septuagenarian incumbent, Sen. Ed Markey.
It was not to be. This January, for the first time since 1962, and only the second time since 1946, no member of the wretched Kennedy family will be serving in Congress. (Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana doesn’t count. He has a brain, and is unrelated.)
Meanwhile, Pam Kelley was living out her life in a wheelchair. She married, had a daughter, battled assorted demons and eventually became an executive with a nonprofit agency that promoted the rights of the disabled.
“What happened to me stinks,” she told one interviewer. “But I made something decent out of it.”
I got a call from Pam around the time Joe decided to run for governor of Massachusetts in 1998. There was a problem, though — the family’s War on Women had flared up yet again, with Joe’s brother Michael and his under-aged babysitter and assorted other related scandals.
Pam was getting older, more frail, and she needed some work done on her house so she could still get around in her wheelchair. She’d called multi-millionaire Joe and, well, you know how concerned the Kennedys are with the needs of their victims …
Anyway, I began making inquiries, and things got straightened out pretty fast.
Speaking of the Kennedys, today is the 57th anniversary of the day that changed America forever — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.
JFK wasn’t much of a president, and he was by most accounts a rather unpleasant human being.
Despite all that, though, when he was murdered something snapped in the American psyche, and nothing has ever been the same since.
Politics disintegrated into the disaster we have today — a situation in which modern Democrats are closer, ideologically, to Lee Harvey Oswald, his Communist assassin, than they are to the tax-cutting cold warrior JFK.
The family has suffered through a lot more tragedy in these 57 years. But the fact is, the people closest to the Kennedys have suffered even more, as Pam Kelley Burkley, among so many others, could have told you.
I remember November 22, 1963. I was in a science class and the head nun came on the intercom with the news. I can still remember her exact opening words: “Your prayers are requested for the repose of the soul of President John F. Kennedy, who has been assassinated in Dallas, Texas.” There was an audible gasp from the class, and the nun who was teaching our class left the room and we saw her in the hall talking with another nun.
My first reaction was, “The Russians!” Remember, this was just over a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was still great distrust, if not outright hatred, of the Soviets.
We had the same thought a few months before Dallas, when in April, 1963 the US submarine Thresher sank. Again, our immediate reaction was, “It was the Russians!”
My first reaction was, “The Russians!” Remember, this was just over a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was still great distrust, if not outright hatred, of the Soviets.
We had the same thought a few months before Dallas, when in April, 1963 the US submarine Thresher sank. Again, our immediate reaction was, “It was the Russians!”
nothing new under the sun.
re the “space thing”.....actually it was Eisenhower who made the first steps to establishing NASA...
I still am dumbfounded when thinking back at all the crap the Kennedys got away with.
Have all Irish people disowned this wretched clan yet, or are there still some holdouts in County Kerry?
Memories...
Great one Howie who knows where all the bodies are buried in Massachusetts. And Howie did a very nice deed here by inquiring within the useless Kennedy Klan for this woman they disabled into a wheelchair...So she could get more out and about. To get this (to threaten to shame them via Boston Herald exposure) useless Kennedy arse Klan to pay out more for her so that she can get around.
Well done Howie!
I never heard of this poor lady. RIP.
At least she was able to marry and have a kid and decent life despite having her legs stolen.
Before Vanity Fair became a mouthpiece of the DNC:
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1992/03/dunne199203
RE Never heard:
Me neither. The circled wagons around the Kennedys evidently kept it fairly quiet.
“Camelot”, indeed... pffft.
Him and my mom (who was 12 going on 13). Although in defense of my mom she does remember a lot of her female neighbors crying that day.
Kennedys - Fighting a War on Women for over 80 years.
Happy Lee Harvey Oswald Day.
If only Marilyn Monroe had gone public with her ménage a trois in 1962 and exposed that degenerate family for what they were, just imagine how much better off things would’ve been in the long run. Instead, we get these two brothers canonized (and Teddy the turd, too).
Should be a federal holiday! Hard to celebrate LBJ getting in though.
Hey...I’ll support an “Oswald/Sirhan Day”.
Monroe: Yup. And the runt if the litter (Ted) probably did the most damage.
LBJ = Satanic.
They double-teamed her?
This week on my www.wildworldofhistory.com weekly shorts, I’m going to send out “100 years: Shocking similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy.”
It’s a fun list. If you aren’t on the email list, visit and sign up at www.wildworldofhistory.com.
This week’s webcast, at 9:00 EST on Wednesday, is free like all. Register here: https://go.wildworldofhistory.com/the-transformation-of-the-american-economy
The topic is the transformation of America’s economy in the 1800s with stories about Vanderbilt, Drew, Carnegie, and more!
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