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.
