Chappaquiddick Power Privilege and the Ted Kennedy Cover-up Review

'Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-up' Foreword Excerpt

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Posted: Mar 18, 2018 i:40 PM

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This excerpted foreword by Howie Carr has been republished with permission fromChappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-upward by the late Leo Damore (Regnery Publishing, 2018).

If anyone ever truly deserved a Profiles in Backbone Award, it was the tardily Leo Damore, the writer of this book.

Of form, the awards are handed out by the Kennedy family, and they are all about, not courage, but Political Correctness. But no one can dispute the fact that Damore put himself and his career on the line to write this book, and that one way or another, he paid the ultimate price—as a suicide, in 1995, at the historic period of 65.

Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up was a New York Times all-time seller in 1988. It sold more than than a million copies. Damore's book established a previously obscure publishing house, Regnery, as a major strength in the volume trade. Its success as well disproved what New York publishers had long believed, or perhaps simply hoped, that in that location was no existent market out there for books that spoke, really spoke, truth to liberal ability.

If you are merely now discovering Senatorial Privilege, y'all may not be enlightened of the controversy that surrounded its initial publication. Damore seemed a nearly unlikely person to blow the lid off the Chappaquiddick cover up. Built-in in Ontario, he was a reporter for the Cape Cod Times. His outset book, in 1967, had been a standard mail service-JFK assassination hagiography, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

In the concluding scene of Cape Cod Years, JFK returns to Boston for the final time, in October 1963, for a major blackness-necktie fundraiser with the Democrat governors of New England. As Damore told the story, afterward the dinner a Hyannis housepainter named Fred Caouette approached the president and was "brusquely challenged" by a Cloak-and-dagger Service agent.

Then JFK spots his apprehensive Greatcoat neighbor and yells to the agent, "Let the lilliputian guy through!" Shaking Cauouette'due south hand, the president says, "Freddy, information technology's awfully nice to see you," and finally tells him, "I'll see yous next twelvemonth."

That's the way all Kennedy books were written back and then, even past Leo Damore. Little did Damore or anyone else know that earlier that evening, the tuxedoed president had summoned Mimi Alford, the intern he had deflowered in the White Firm a twelvemonth earlier at the age of 19, to his suite at the Sheraton Plaza, where he ordered her to fellate his younger blood brother Teddy.

"You've got to be kidding, Mr. President," she recalled herself replying in her 2012 memoir.

Damore got a $150,000 advance from Random House, and he spent years digging up the truth. His most important source would be Joe Gargan, Teddy's showtime cousin who rented the cottage that evening. Like Michael Skakel, the convicted murderer in the adjacent generation, Gargan was a kinsman, simply non really a Kennedy. And like Skakel, in his fury against his mistreatment by the family, Gargan would eventually spill the beans.

The nigh explosive charge in Senatorial Privilege came from Gargan. After the accident, and the repeated rescue attempts of Mary Jo by Kennedy, Gargan and one-time U.s. attorney Paul Markham, Teddy asked them, in then many words:

"Why couldn't Mary Jo have been driving the auto? Why couldn't she have left me off, and driven to the ferry herself and fabricated a incorrect plough?"

To which Gargan somewhen responded: "You lot told me yous were driving."

When Damore handed in his manuscript to Random House, all hell bankrupt loose. This was the habitation, afterward all, of William Faulkner, Andre Malraux and Robert Penn Warren, not to mention Babar the Elephant. Imagine the reaction of the Random Firm editors as they read Damore'southward business relationship of the court hearing in Pennsylvania on the exhumation of Kopechne's torso, as the state medical examiner of Maryland blurted out a very inconvenient truth:

"It was apparent to me from the record that she lived for a certain time underwater... So she breathed, that daughter. She breathed!"

Yous just couldn't write things similar that about the Kennedys back so. Seldom was heard a discouraging give-and-take about America's Offset Family unit. Even the biggest names in journalism were muzzled, similar James "Scotty" Reston, the columnist for the New York Times who owned a little paper on Martha's Vineyard. Reston was at that place at the constabulary station in Edgartown that Saturday morning as Teddy shakily wrote out the accident report. Damore quoted Scotty in his manuscript:

"I'd dear to tell the story simply they won't let me."

If it came downwards to a fight with the Kennedys, Random House couldn't win. In 1967, Jackie Kennedy had tried to end publication of another, much more than innocuous book, The Death of a President.

Jackie famously told the writer, "Anybody who is confronting me will look similar a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher."

In retrospect, Damore was lucky to take found any publisher willing to stand to the wrath of the Kennedys. When it was finally published by Regnery, Senatorial Privilege was ignored by the critics, only Damore's betrayal was then thorough and then damning that even with no publicity, it still skyrocketed to the top of the best-seller lists.

Just then, Chappaquiddick was a scandal for the ages, fifty-fifty by Kennedy standards.

Mary Jo Kopechne, for case—everything near her screamed Kennedy girlfriend. She wasn't wearing underwear when she died, and she was drunk—her blood-alcohol level was .09. Her showtime boss in Washington was Sen. George Smathers of Florida, JFK'south best friend in Congress, who used to travel with the future president to Havana in those pre-Castro days, where they were treated to the finest prostitutes in Cuba, compliments of gangsters Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr.

In Washington, Kopechne's landlord was Bobby Baker, the longtime bagman for, among others, Lyndon Johnson. Baker also ran a private DC "club" which offered the services of high-priced hookers, amid them Ellen Rometsch, a suspected East German spy who was being investigated by a Senate committee for her human relationship with JFK when she was all of a sudden deported in 1963.

The Kennedys may not have been able to terminate publication of Senatorial Privilege, but revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. And later on those start few big royalty checks, cypher was ever the same for Damore. As his wife divorced him, he cruel into a deep depression and began threatening suicide. At the same fourth dimension, Damore also started research on a new book about Mary Pinchot Meyer, one of JFK'southward concluding blue-blooded girlfriends.

Meyer was the drop-dead gorgeous sister-in-constabulary of Ben Bradlee, later of the Washington Mail service. Bradlee was then close to JFK that in 1962 he was given the assignment of using his magazine, Newsweek, to fasten the scandalous true story of Kennedy's outset wedlock, to a twice-divorced Protestant socialite in Palm Beach in 1947.

Meyer was another fascinating field of study—during her affair with JFK, she got into drugs, and had begun visiting LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary but before the bump-off. Less than a year after Dallas, she was mysteriously shot to death while jogging on a culvert path in Georgetown.

An plain innocent young blackness homo was arrested and charged, and then acquitted. The evening of her murder, Meyer's blood brother-in-police force Bradlee went to her house to think her undercover diary virtually the affair with JFK. Inside, in the night, Bradlee discovered that some other intruder had gotten there showtime—James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA spook, who had his own sneaky eyes-just reasons for wanting the diary of the late president's paramour.

In short, Leo Damore had emerged from ane Kennedy rabbit pigsty merely to tumble into another, mayhap fifty-fifty deeper ane. One of Meyer'southward biographers quoted Damore as telling him:

"What do you lot think it would practice to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court.'"

I met Damore in 1994, on the 25th ceremony of Chappaquiddick. I was doing my radio bear witness from the cottage on Chappaquiddick, and I booked some of the surviving principals. Merely Damore asked for money—$100. Every time I spoke to him, he seemed nervous, agitated. The day after the show he telephoned again, begging me to send him the money ASAP, which I did.

Fifteen months later, Damore was depressed and broke, most to be evicted from his rented house in Essex CT. As a visiting nurse and a lawman (who was there to serve the eviction notice) looked on in horror, Damore pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.

Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer in 2009, at the age of 77. In his afterwards years, it was considered bad class to fifty-fifty mention Chappaquiddick in polite company. Teddy himself seemed oblivious to the scandal—he named his last canis familiaris Splash.

The Kennedys' official fanzine has always been the Boston Globe. Every sixth year, when he was running for reelection, the Globe would run stories well-nigh how Teddy was "turning his life around," and how in an amazing feat of self-subject field, he had totally sworn off alcohol until his altogether—Feb. 22. On the day after Chappaquiddick, the Globe ran a front-page headline saying "Senator Wandered in Stupor for Hours."

In 2003 the World perfectly summed upward the mainstream media'south revisionist take on Chappaquiddick:

"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."

In 2015, the Edward Grand. Kennedy Institute for the Senate opened in Dorchester. I of its exhibits is entitled "the Senate Immersion Module." Immersion—y'all can't make this stuff upward.

Almost the cease of his life, in 2009, Teddy wrote a sorrowful letter to Pope Benedict Sixteen:

"I take e'er tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, though I have fallen short through human failings... I know that I accept been an imperfect human being merely with the help of my faith, I accept tried to correct my path."

So he added, in a somewhat incongruous attempt at penance, "I have worked to welcome the immigrant."

Somehow I don't call back Teddy was referring to Leo Damore.

Few of the principals e'er talked nearly what happened. The prosecutor, Walter Steele, was apace appointed to a state judgeship—some other nationwide search, equally nosotros say in Massachusetts. As a gauge, his nearly famous case involved allowing a convicted child predator to leave the country without restrictions, after which the offender moved to Montana and then murdered and cannibalized a 7-year erstwhile boy.

When Steele reached the mandatory retirement historic period of seventy in 1996, the local New Bedford paper ran a story near him without a single mention of Chappaquiddick. But Guess Steele did obliquely mention the difficulty of explaining to victims and their survivors how sometimes an obviously guilty political party gets off scot-free:

"It's awful difficult to explain to them that y'all retrieve you're doing justice."

Do yous think the Kopechnes would have understood what Gauge Steele was getting at?

As for Gargan, Damore paid him $15,000 for "legal and editing work" on Senatorial Privilege. Gargan eventually ended up with a hack job in Boston every bit chairman of a land board that substantially returned licenses to bedevilled drunk drivers.

Ironically, despite his intimate noesis of what happened at Chappaquiddick, Gargan became the leading proponent on the board for assuasive convicted drunkards dorsum on the route. When Republicans regained control of country authorities in 1991, Gargan was summarily fired.

Gargan died in Virginia at age 87 in December 2017. Past then he was such a forgotten figure that when his paid death notice appeared in the Globe, no Boston reporters even noticed information technology for three weeks.

According to the paid obituary, "Joe was defended to helping those who endure from alcohol addiction."

The boiler-room girls you volition soon exist reading most take maintained omerta—silence—for about half a century. Merely as Damore notes in Affiliate 54, on the fifth anniversary of Mary Jo's death in 1974, Rosemary "Cricket" Keough did issue the following terse statement:

"My friend Mary Jo simply happened to exist in the wrong motorcar at the wrong time with the wrong people."

In a strange way, Damore'southward life turned out like Mary Jo's—Senatorial Privilege, now retitled as Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Camouflage is an unforgettable book, muckraking in the best sense of the word. Merely for Damore personally, it was the incorrect volume at the wrong fourth dimension most the wrong people, and it toll him his life.

But at least nosotros still take his book—and the truth.

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Source: https://townhall.com/columnists/howiecarr/2018/03/18/draft-n2462169

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