Of course, 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 age of 65.
Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up was a New York Times best seller in 1988. It sold more than a million copies. Damore’s volume established a previously obscure publishing house, Regnery, as a major force in the book trade. Its success also disproved what New York publishers had long believed, or perhaps just hoped, that there was no real market out there for books that spoke, really spoke, truth to liberal power.
If you are just now discovering Senatorial Privilege, you may not be aware of the controversy that surrounded its initial publication. Damore seemed a most unlikely person to blow the lid off the Chappaquiddick cover up. Born in Ontario, he was a reporter for the Cape Cod Times. His first book, in 1967, had been a standard post-JFK assassination hagiography, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.