Pam Kelley Burkley died last Friday at age 65. Back in 73 when she was 18 she made the mistake of accepting a ride from Robert Kennedy’s son, Joe Kennedy, which left her in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr gives us the details:
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.
Go here to read the rest. It would have been much better for America if none of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children had ever gong into politics.
Today is the anniversary of my naming.
Minor correction: it was Robert Kennedy’s son, not Ted Kennedy’s son that left her in a wheelchair. Ted Kennedy’s older son is by all appearances a decent chap and one of the more capable of the Kennedy grandchildren. His younger son is a mess but hasn’t injured anyone in any abiding way. (About 1/3 of Joseph Kennedy’s grandchildren have been problem people in ways that make the papers. ‘Fraid that’s not too far off the average of families in this country).
You have to wonder about the lawyer Pam Kelley had working for her. Her representative settled for a sum so modest that the assets were liquidated within a few years.
Thanks for catching that Art. Correction made. My guess is that her attorney was likely a family fixer for the Kennedys, or hired, under the table, by a family fixer. The Kopechne’s got around 150K for their dead daughter. The Kennedys used their wallet to get out of scrapes and they usually did so at bargain basement rates.
The Kopechne’s got around 150K for their dead daughter. The Kennedys used their wallet to get out of scrapes and they usually did so at bargain basement rates.
In that case, people in the Massachusetts political establishment leaned on the prosecutor in Barnstable County, Massachusetts to not bring charges. The Republicans in Massachusetts were supine. Kennedy’s opponent in the 1970 election campaign spoke and behaved as if it was cruel to make a note of the fact that Kennedy had gotten off almost scot free consequent to an incident of vehicular manslaughter
The fixers indubitably wanted the Kopechnes to refrain from commissioning an autopsy. IIRC, the Kopechnes later stated they’d wish they had. The diver’s account of the position her body was in in the car suggested she’d died of lack of oxygen hours after the accident, not drowning minutes after the accident.
The Kopechnes had no other children.
Sounds like the Biden family. Joe’s brother? killed a father and skimped out of the payments while making millions of dollars while Joe was US Senator and VP. Joe falsely accuses a driver of drunk driving that led to the death of his family members, when in fact the family members incorrectly drove into incoming traffic. His son’s lucrative and obviously corrupt deals with countries such as Ukraine, Russia and China. His son securing a $100,000/yr job straight out of college for a credit card lobbying firm while Joe crafted credit card laws. Oh yea he’s Catholic too!
As it is said: Sleep with dogs, get up with fleas. When you associate with persons that you know you wouldn’t if you gave it some thought, then don’t. It will save you a lot of grief later and avoid the price you would eventually pay.