Leo Damore

[Kathleen Collins]

The author, Leo Damore, wrote a bestselling book called Senatorial Privelige about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Seven years later he shot himself as another book of his about President Kennedy was nearly finished. Is this a suspicious death?

**************************************************************

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.ph...suicid?blog=161

October 4, 1995: Leo Damore commits suicide

10/04/08 · 6:00 am :: posted by CCToday

Leo J. Damore, 66, author of a book on Chappaquiddick

Also wrote "The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy"

On this day in 1995 it was reported in the New York Times that Leo J. Damore, who uncovered previously unreported information for his 1988 book, "Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Coverup," had taken his own life on Monday at his home in Essex, Conn. He was 66. The police said that Mr. Damore fatally shot himself. His former wife, June Davison, said Mr. Damore had been despondent over their divorce last December.

Mr. Damore was working for a weekly newspaper, The Cape Cod News, in July 1969 when Senator Edward M. Kennedy's Oldsmobile plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old Senate aide who had been attending a party with the Senator and other staff members nearby.

The incident, which is widely believed to have ended any possibility that Senator Kennedy might be elected president, has been repeatedly investigated by the national press. Mr. Damore, who knew many of the local law enforcement officials, managed to persuade several figures to give extensive interviews for the first time. For Mr. Damore, who had a reputation as a dogged, thorough investigator, obtaining the interviews was easier than having the book published.

Random House refused to publish, became best seller anyway

Random House, which gave him a $150,000 advance in 1982, rejected his manuscript in 1987, describing it as libelous and demanding the return of the advance. Mr. Damore, arguing that the book was sound and that the publisher was bowing to the Kennedy family, went to court. After a judge ruled against him, he reached a settlement with Random House and sought another publisher. Regnery Gateway, a small, conservative house, brought the book out the next year, and although it received few reviews, it immediately became a big seller.

Mr. Damore's other works include "The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," published in 1967. At his death, Ms. Davison said, he was almost finished with another Kennedy book, about the President's affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer. Is this a suspicious death?

Kathy C

[Guest Tom Scully]

....Random House refused to publish, became best seller anyway

Random House, which gave him a $150,000 advance in 1982, rejected his manuscript in 1987, describing it as libelous and demanding the return of the advance. Mr. Damore, arguing that the book was sound and that the publisher was bowing to the Kennedy family, went to court. After a judge ruled against him, he reached a settlement with Random House and sought another publisher. Regnery Gateway, a small, conservative house, brought the book out the next year, and although it received few reviews, it immediately became a big seller.

Mr. Damore's other works include "The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," published in 1967. At his death, Ms. Davison said, he was almost finished with another Kennedy book, about the President's affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer. Is this a suspicious death?

Kathy C

I am a used book store addict. Over the last few years, in book store after book store, I have seen dozens of copies of of a special pressing of Leo Damore's Senatorial Privilege. In this pressing, the book is only about 80 pages long. I have seen similar special pressings of books by former Treasury Secretary William Simon, and of the speeches of Ronald Reagan. It seems clear the Republican Party was behind the circulation of these special pressings. Does anyone know if Damore was witting to this act, and if he'd received funds from any right wing "think tank" to write his book in the first place?

Kathy, by choosing to be published by, in 1988, Alfred S. Regnery. there is now no way to tell if Damore's book on Ted Kennedy is worth a read, or is reliable, because the stamp of Regnery is enough not to make it worth the bother to go through it to determine its reliability, at least IMO....

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp...ce1e9964e2c0f9a

Council for National Policy (CNP) - Pe-Q - Member Biographies

Thomas L. Phillips- CNP 1996, 1998; President ,CEO, Phillips Publishing International, Inc, 11 the largest newsletter publishing firm in the United States, ...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=4351

...Regnery Publishing's right-leaning corporate philosophy actually goes back to 1947, when the late Henry Regnery, Sr., set out to publish "good books," as he wrote in the company's first catalogue, "wherever we find them." Works by Regnery's friends among the nascent conservative intelligentsia soon followed, including Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale, Whittaker Chambers's Witness, and Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Henry Regnery's son, Alfred Regnery, who took over in 1986 and moved the company to Washington, D.C., has likewise been both a friend to and publisher of conservative authors. After stints in law school (where he roomed with American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene) and as college director of Young Americans for Freedom, Alfred Regnery was appointed head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by Ronald Reagan in 1983. While there, as reported by Murray Waas in The New Republic, he helped run Edwin Meese's ill-fated President's Commission on Pornography; disbursed generous grants to Jerry Falwell's Liberty College, Meese pal George Nicholson, and professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly; authored, with then-Assistant Secretary of Education Gary Bauer, a much-ridiculed report called "Chaos in the Public Schools"; and in general cultivated an updated version of his father's network of friends.

But by the time Alfred Regnery took over the family business, the firm had slipped into semi-dormancy. Regnery Publishing's 1993 purchase by newsletter magnate Tom Phillips woke it up. Phillips, one of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100" and a board member of the Claremont Institute, lavished both money and attention on his new acquisition. Leaving Alfred Regnery at the helm, Phillips folded the company into his Eagle Publishing division, an overtly political enterprise with a distinguished stable of conservative media: Human Events, a 56-year-old,ultra-right weekly newspaper; the Evans-Novak Political Report; the 75,000-member Conservative Book Club (founded in 1964 as "America was walking down Lyndon Johnson's path to a socialist 'Great Society'"); and a similar operation called the Christian Family Book Club. But perhaps most significant--given the central role direct mail has played in the conservative resurgence of recent decades--is Eagle's list brokerage operation, which rents out Eagle's own customer lists and those of organizations like Newt Gingrich's GOPAC, Empower America, the Western Journalism Center, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, not to mention Pat Buchanan's American Cause and the Steve Forbes for President campaign.

By the time Phillips Publishing spun off Eagle last July, an entirely new entity had emerged: a company that treats publishing less as a media enterprise than as a form of political activism. With a new, almost Gingrichian sensibility, Regnery's titles have begun to reflect the particular ideological and policy concerns of foundation-funded, third-wave conservative thinkers. Believe that the American family is in its death throes? Read Maggie Gallagher's The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love. Worried that American higher education is overrun by radical feminists and licentious left-wingers? Pick up the late George Roche's The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding, Corruption, and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education, or David Horowitz's The Heterodoxy Handbook: How to Survive the PC Campus. Believe that corrupt teachers' unions are the bane of the American education system? Read G. Gregory Moo's Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children. If you suspect that the Walt Disney Corporation is out to lead children astray with Miramax films and "Gay Day" at Disney World, have a look at Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. And if you wonder whether more assault rifles equals less crime, imbibe the pithy wisdom of Wayne LaPierre's Guns, Crime, and Freedom.

Most of these authors hail from the tight-knit world of conservative think tanks and advocacy groups--the ideological heirs of Kirk, Buckley, and Goldwater. LaPierre, for instance, is vice president of the National Rifle Association, and Peter Schweizer is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. Horowitz, whose career lately consists of writing one book every two years about his personal transformation from left-wing radical to right-wing reactionary, runs the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

But the Phillips publishing family does not shy away from more direct forms of political engagement: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Phillips International (then called Phillips Publishing International) gave $125,150 in soft money to the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1997-1998, while Eagle Publishing gave the RNC another $19,500. (The RNC, notincidentally, was chaired by Regnery author Haley Barbour until January 1997.) The Phillips Publishing PAC has contributed $64,450 to various Republican officeholders and seekers during the same period, while Phillips himself gave $1,000 in contributions to 15 different Republican candidates in 1998. Eagle/Regnery, in other words, is more than just a conservative press--it is a partisan press, with close personal, organizational, and even fundraising ties to the Republican Party. It should thus come as no surprise that a frequent topic in the Regnery catalogue is one William Jefferson Clinton.

Since 1996, Regnery has published no less than eight presidential exposés: Roger Morris's Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Bill Gertz's Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett's Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash, Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, and R. Emmett Tyrrell's The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton: A Political Docu-Drama and Boy Clinton: The Political Biography. To date, five of these books have made various best-seller lists.

For all intents and purposes, the eight are interchangeable--with each other and, stylistically, with most of the other political books in Regnery's catalogue. Each posits a nebulous conspiracy centered around the Clinton White House, a murky stew that typically blends one or more of the following ingredients: shady banking and land deals loosely grouped under the "Whitewater" rubric; the murder--or induced suicide--of Vince Foster; Filegate and Travelgate; dalliances with prostitutes and nymphets; rampant drug use; treason via Chinese spies; and an Arkansas-based, Clinton-masterminded drug-smuggling outfit.

Thus constructed, Regnery's Clinton books run from the racy to the absurd. Tyrrell's Boy Clinton follows the future president from alleged cocaine benders with Little Rock entrepreneur Dan Lasater to his sojourn with communists in Prague during the late 1960s. ("Inquiries I had made about his trip to Moscow turned up little that was new," Tyrrell writes breathlessly...

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=W5MUA...uiddick-coverup

Book Says Ted Had Wanted To Blame Mary Jo .

Deseret News - Google News Archive - May 15, 1988

...A statement issued by Kennedy spokesman Jeff Smith said: "As the record shows, no reputable publiaher would touch the book."....

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:pMp_Ll...=clnk&gl=us

Al Regnery's Secret Life by Murray Waas

The pathetic career of Reagan's juvenile justice chief.

Post Date June 23, 1986

...Regnery abruptly resigned on May 21, saying he wants to return to his family's publishing business. The resignation was treated by both the administration and the press as part of the usual comings and goings of administration personnel. Yet his decision caught his personal secretary, his press secretary, and his immediate superior in the Justice department by surprise. He had speaking engagements lined up through June, and had spoken to me about his plans for the coming year, including developing programs for chronic juvenile offenders and funding more research on pornography. Regnery has been a controversial figure ever since he was appointed to the job in 1983....

http://web.archive.org/web/20000819003614/...may/regnery.htm

...Regnery's son Alfred once served in the Reagan Justice Department where he helped produce Attorney General Edwin Meese's notorious report on pornography. He resigned from government shortly before it was revealed that police in the 70s, while investigating a rape claim in his house, uncovered a cache of hardcore porn. Alfred returned to his father's firm, apparently to pursue conservative philosophical consistency, including bringing out Aldrich's book. ...

Edited September 1, 2009 by Tom Scully

[John Simkin]

The author, Leo Damore, wrote a bestselling book called Senatorial Privelige about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Seven years later he shot himself as another book of his about President Kennedy was nearly finished. Is this a suspicious death?

Apparently, Damore was with a nurse when he killed himself. He was definitely under a lot of pressure at the time. However, this was not because of Ted Kennedy as his book on him had already been published. At the time of his death he was investigating the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. In an article that appeared in the New York Post Damore claimed that he believed that the Central Intelligence Agency had something to do with the death of Meyer. He pointed out that on the night of the murder James Angleton and Ben Bradlee were in Mary's home looking for her diary. He added: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that a figure close to the CIA had told him that Mary's death had been a professional "hit".

Damore's book on Meyer was never published. However, a good friend of mine has the manuscript. He is using this material to help him write a book on Meyer.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdamore.htm