Ted Kennedy and the KGB

Editors’ note: In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged "collusion" with the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election, which now involves Trump Jr. daring to talk to a Russian woman, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin -- by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy's outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan.

Ted Kennedy and the KGB.
Frontpage Magazine, May 15, 2008.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, the author of the New York Times extended-list bestseller God and Ronald Reagan as well as God and George W. Bush and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. He is also the author of the first spiritual biography of the former first lady, God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life. He is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

FP: We’re here today to revisit Ted Kennedy’s reaching out to the KGB during the Reagan period. Refresh our readers’ memories a bit.

Kengor: The episode is based on a document produced 25 years ago this week. I discussed it with you in our earlier interview back in November 2006. In my book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I presented a rather eye-opening May 14, 1983 KGB document on Ted Kennedy. The entire document, unedited, unabridged, is printed in the book, as well as all the documentation affirming its authenticity. Even with that, today, almost 25 years later, it seems to have largely remained a secret.

Kengor: It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president---Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.

The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”

Even more interesting than Kennedy’s diagnosis was the prescription: According to Chebrikov, Kennedy suggested a number of PR moves to help the Soviets in terms of their public image with the American public. He reportedly believed that the Soviet problem was a communication problem, resulting from an inability to counter Reagan’s (not the USSR’s) “propaganda.” If only Americans could get through Reagan’s smokescreen and hear the Soviets’ peaceful intentions.

So, there was a plan, or at least a suggested plan, to hook up Andropov and other senior apparatchiks with the American media, where they could better present their message and make their case. Specifically, the names of Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters are mentioned in the document. Also, Kennedy himself would travel to Moscow to meet with the dictator.

Time was of the essence, since Reagan, as the document privately acknowledged, was flying high en route to easy re-election in 1984.

Kengor: Of course. It comes from the Central Committee archives of the former USSR. Once Boris Yeltsin took over Russia in 1991, he immediately began opening the Soviet archives, which led to a rush on the archives by Western researchers. One of them, Tim Sebastian of the London Times and BBC, found the Kennedy document and reported it in the February 2, 1992 edition of the Times, in an article titled, “Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file.”

But this electrifying revelation stopped there; it went no further. Never made it across the Atlantic. Not a single American news organization, from what I can tell, picked up the story. Apparently, it just wasn’t interesting enough, nor newsworthy.

Western scholars, however, had more integrity, and responded: they went to the archives to procure their own copy. So, several copies have circulated for a decade and a half.

I got my copy when a reader of Frontpage Magazine, named Marko Suprun, whose father survived Stalin’s 1930s genocide in the Ukraine, alerted me to the document. He apparently had spent years trying to get the American media to take a look at the document, but, again, our journalists simply weren’t intrigued. He knew I was researching Reagan and the Cold War. He sent me a copy. I first authenticated it through Herb Romerstein, the Venona researcher and widely respected expert who knows more about the Communist Party and archival research beyond the former Iron Curtain than anyone. I also had a number of scholars read the original and the translation, including Harvard’s Richard Pipes.

Of course, all of those steps were extra, extra, extra precautions, since the reporter for the London Times had done all that work in the first place. He went into the archive, pulled it off the shelf, and the Times ran with the story. This wasn’t rocket science. I simply wanted to be extra careful, especially since our media did not cover it at all. I now understand that that blackout by the American media was the result of liberal bias. At first I didn’t think our media could be that bad, even though I knew from studies and anecdotal experience that our press is largely liberal, but now I’ve learned firsthand that the bias is truly breathtaking.

FP: So what shockwaves did your exposure of this document set off in the media?

Kengor: Well, I thought it would be a bombshell, which it was, but only within the conservative media.

I prepared myself to be pilloried by the liberal mainstream media, figuring I’d be badgered with all kinds of hostile questions from defenders of Ted Kennedy. I still, at this very moment, carry photocopies and the documentation with me in my briefcase, ready for access at a moment’s notice. I’ve done that for two years now. The pages may soon begin to yellow.

I need not have bothered with any of this prep, since the media entirely ignored the revelation. In fact, the major reviewers didn’t even review the book. It was the most remarkable case of media bias I’ve ever personally experienced.

I couldn’t get a single major news source to do a story on it. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC. Not one covered it.

The only cable source was FoxNews, Brit Hume’s “Grapevine,” and even then it was only a snippet in the round-up. In fact, I was frustrated by the occasional conservative who didn’t run with it. I did a taping with Hannity & Colmes but they never used it, apparently because they were so focused on the mid-term elections, to the exclusion of almost any other story or issue. The Hannity & Colmes thing was a major blow; it could’ve propelled this onto the national scene, forcing the larger media to take note. That was the single greatest disappointment. I think Sean Hannity might have felt that I wasn’t hard enough on Senator Kennedy during the interview. He asked me, for instance, if what Kennedy did could be classified as treason. I told him honestly, as a scholar, that I really couldn’t answer that question. I honestly don’t know the answer to that; I’m not a constitutional scholar. I don’t have the legal background to accuse someone of being a traitor. I was trying to be as fair as possible.

Rush Limbaugh, God bless him, appreciated it. He talked about it at least twice. So did blogs like Michelle Malkin’s HotAir. Web sources like FrontPage hit it hard. But without the mainstream news coverage, the story never made the dent I expected it would.

I should note that Ed Klein of Parade magazine recently contacted me. He himself got a rude awakening on the media’s liberal bias when he wrote a negative book on Hillary Clinton. I’ve not heard back from him. But he’s a rare case of journalistic objectivity.

If I may vent just a little more on the mainstream press, Jamie: There’s a bias there that really is incredibly troubling. Over and over again, I’ve written and submitted the most careful op-eds, trying to remove any partisan edge, on issues like Reagan and Gorbachev privately debating the removal of the Berlin Wall (I have de-classified documents on this in The Crusader as well), on Reagan’s fascinating relationship with RFK, on various aspects of the Cold War that are completely new, based on entirely new evidence from interviews and archives. When I submit these op-ed to the major newspapers, they almost always turn them down. The first conservative source that I send them to always jump at them. The liberals, however, are very close-minded. Nothing is allowed to alter the template. You can construct the most fair, iron-tight case, and they turn it down. This is not true for everything I write on the Cold War era, but no doubt for most of it. And certainly for the case of Senator Kennedy and this KGB document.

Kengor: Here again, all the mainstream sources turned me down. I had no alternative but to place the op-eds in the conservative outlets. Liberal editors blacklisted the piece. I began by sending a piece to the New York Times, where the editor is David Shipley, who’s extremely fair, and in fact has published me before, including a defense I wrote on the faith of George W. Bush. This one, however, he turned down. He liked it. It certainly had his intention. But he said he wouldn’t be able to get it into the page.

I sent it to the Boston Globe, three or four times, actually. I got no response or even the courtesy of an acknowledgment. It was as if the piece was dispatched to the howling wilderness of Siberia—right into the gulag—airbrushed from history.

The most interesting response I got was from the editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, another very fair liberal, a great guy, who since then has retired. He published me several times. We went back and forth on this one. Finally, he said something to the effect, “I just can’t believe that Ted Kennedy would do something this stupid.” My reply was, “Well, he apparently did.” I told the editor that if he was that incredulous, then he or someone on his staff should simply call Kennedy’s office and get a response. Hey, let’s do journalism and make news! It never happened.

For the record, one news source, a regional cable outlet in the Philadelphia area, called CN8, took the time to call Kennedy’s office. The official response from his office was not to deny the document but to argue with the interpretation. Which interpretation? Mine or Chebrikov’s? Kennedy’s office wasn’t clear on that. My interpretation was not an interpretation. I simply tried to report what Chebrikov reported to Andropov. So, I guess Kennedy’s office was disputing Chebrikov’s interpretation, which is quite convenient, since Chebrikov is dead, as is Andropov. Alas, the perfect defense—made more perfect by an American media that will not ask the senator from Massachusetts a single question (hard or soft) on this remarkable incident.

Kengor: That’s correct. They have not denied it. That’s important. Because if none of this had ever happened, and if the document was a fraud, Kennedy’s office would simply say so, and that would be the end of it.

FP: Tell us about the success the book has had in the recent past and the coverage it has received outside of the U.S.

Kengor: The paperback rights were picked up by the prestigious HarperPerennial in 2007, which I’m touting not to pat myself on the back but to affirm my point on why our mainstream press should take the book and the document seriously. The book has also been or is in the process of being translated into several foreign-language editions, including Poland, where it was released last November. It is literally true that more Polish journalists have paid attention to the Kennedy revelation than American journalists. I’ve probably sold about 20 times more copies of the book in Poland, where they understand communism and moral equivalency, than in Massachusetts.

FP: One can just imagine finding a document like this on an American Republican senator having made a similar offer to the Nazis. Kennedy has gotten away with this. What do you think this says about our culture, the parameters of debate and who controls the boundaries of discourse?

Kengor: History is determined by those who write it. There are the gatekeepers: editors, journalists, publishers. The left’s ideologues are guarding the gate, swords brandished, crusaders, not open to other points of view. The result is a total distortion of “history,” as the faithful and the chosen trumpet their belief in tolerance and diversity, awarding prizes to one another, disdainful and dismissive of the unwashed barbarians outside the gate.

You can produce a 550-page manuscript with 150-pages of single-space, 9-point footnotes, and it won’t matter. They could care less.

Kengor: That’s right, because it is not impacting history—because gatekeepers are ignoring it.

Another reason why the mainstream media may be ignoring this: as I make clear in the book, this KGB document could be the tip of the iceberg, not just with Kennedy but other Democrats. John Tunney himself alluded to this in an interview with the London Times reporter. That article reported that Tunney had made many such trips to Moscow, with additional overtures, and on behalf of yet more Democratic senators. Given that reality, I suppose we should expect liberal journalists to flee this story like the plague—at least those too biased to do their jobs.

For the record, I’ve been hard on liberal journalists in this article, and rightly so. But there are many good liberal journalists who do real research and real reporting. And it’s those that need to follow up on this. I’m a conservative, and so I’m not allowed into the club. Someone from inside the boys’ club needs to step up to the plate.

FP: All of this is in sync with David Horowitz’s and Ben Johnson’s new book, Party of Defeat, isn’t it? As the book demonstrates, many Democrats are engaging in willful sabotage in terms of our security vis-à-vis Islamo-Fascism today. And as the Kennedy-KGB romance indicates, a good portion of Democrats have always had a problem in reaching out to our enemies, rather than protecting our national security. Your thoughts?

Kengor: Obviously, as you know and suggest, this does not apply to all Democrats, needless to say. But there are many liberal Democrats who were dupes during the Cold War and now are assuming that role once again in the War on Terror. President Carter comes to mind, as does John Kerry, as does Ted Kennedy, to name only a few. When I read President Carter’s recent thoughts on Hamas, it transported me back to 1977 and his stunning statements on the Iranian revolution, or to 1979 and his remarks on the Soviets and Afghanistan. Many of these liberals and their supporters on the left literally see the conservative Republican in the Oval Office as a greater threat to the world than the insane dictators overseas that the likes of Reagan and George W. Bush were/are trying to stop. That’s not an exaggeration. Just ask them.

History is repeating itself, which can happen easily when those tasked to report and record it fail to do so because of their political biases.

A reflection on the late Democratic Senator's outreach to the Kremlin to undermine President Reagan.

Accurate.

Kerry (Vietnam and Nicaragua) AND Bill Clinton (Russia and Red China and Indonesia and India) AND Hillary Cliton (Russia and all of the Muslim oil lands and Muslim north African countries) AND Gore (South American family money and international oil and enviromental money and intrests) were the democrat candidates for President.

Their actual power and money and support were from overseas. Each has been negotiating FOR the enemies of the United States AGAINST the interests of the US. Add Podesta’s international funding links.....

Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it tends to destroy society itself?

I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes — can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society.

/Bastiat - “The Law”

Enemies within. National socialists colluding with socialists.

Law and order BUMP!

The entanglement of the Democrat party as a whole, and the more liberal members in particular, with the former Soviet Union goes back DECADES, to the time of the New Deal and FDR. FDR was a willing dupe when it came to allowing Communists full access to the seats of power in the US all during the Depression and through the Second World War, resulting in the division of Europe in the aftermath of the war into zones of Soviet hegemony, and the zones which were subject to further expansion of that hegemony.

The rise and relative popularity of Eisenhower, then later Nixon, was largely because of the anti-Communist stance, and the Kennedy-Johnson years were a lulling of the senses of the American people in regards to the “Soviet menace”. It is interesting that during the years of Democrat majority rule and administrations, the US got engaged in wars that seemed interminable at the time (Korea under Truman, Viet Nam under the Kennedy-Johnson years) and only during Republican administrations did the hostilities and open warfare cease (Eisenhower in Korea, Nixon in Viet Nam).

History has changed things somewhat, in that the “Soviet menace” no longer exists, and its ideology, Communism is in the shadows, replaced by another ideology that is disguised as a religion, Islam and Sharia Law. The similarities between Communism, in fact, all kinds of socialist ideology, and Islam are striking, in that the concept of individual liberty and initiative are stifled and there is a strict hierarchy supported by force of threat of death for non-compliance. Even the economics of both ideologies is similar, in that capitalism is thwarted, or the flow of capital is strictly limited to the “reliable” people, the only ones allowed to prosper under this sort of regime. Everybody else is just one of a vast number of pawns, to be pushed any direction the ruling elite chooses to further the consolidation of the immense power they already have.

This is just the kind of power that the Democrats are attracted to, as it gives some meaning to their own strategies and tactics. Except that the Democrats, knowingly or otherwise, become just another army of pawns to be pushed about as the even more powerful elites thrust them into compromising positions.

Putin, the successor head of government that itself displaced the old Soviet Union, is in large part also resistant to the spread of Islam and Sharia Law, and for this, the Democrats are in the odd position of opposing Putin in theory, but supportive of him and the objectives of the Russian Federation in practice. While the Russians are no longer Communist, they are still Russians, and as such, have great affinity for gaming theory based on the keen appreciation of various forms of chess.

And the Democrats have not advanced much beyond playing checkers. So the Russians, whether Communistic or the newer form of crony capitalism as practiced in the Russian Federation today, are still running circles around the poor benighted liberals throughout the world.

I agree that this goes back to FDR, and some even say, to Woodrow Wilson’s administration.

I believe it is true though, that the total degradation and degeneration of the American Left we see today is due to the leftist radicals of the Sixties who fully came to control the levers of power, beginning with the Clintons, resulting in a Ayers-terrorist loving, Marxist, socialist, racist scumbag like Obama and all those like him who held power for eight years.

The last real American liberal Democrat I recall was Zell Miller. People like to say Scoop Jackson, but I am fairly well read on the McCarthy era, and Scoop Jackson, while very junior at the time, fully, willingly, deliberately, and knowingly participated in outright lies to protect people McCarthy was trying to nail.

Even Truman, who was a supposed “Cold Warrior” that I used to respect, but his behavior towards communists in the US Government during the 1945-1952 time frame has made me lose nearly all respect for him. He chose, in the most partisan of ways, Party over Country and national security, and I cannot forgive him for that.

I don’t see the government itself as our intrinsic enemy. In the wrong hands (as it was during the last eight years specifically) and due to the simple inherent mass and oppressive weight of government, it is. But I think that can be modified or changed.

I view the Left (and implicitly, the Media since it is ideologically hand-in-hand with them, part and parcel) as our greatest enemy and biggest threat. Even bigger than a Chinese economy, an overbearing, headless, and oppressive bureaucratic government, or even terrorists taking out skyscrapers.

We can make a robust economy that works, change government, and rebuild skyscrapers.

Like concrete that is eaten from within by fractures that break it up and moisture that eats at rebar, the Left is corroding our country in ways that are far more difficult to resolve.

-- I don't see the government itself as our intrinsic enemy. --

Neither do I, per se. My point was that our government has more to lose, and hence a greater interest in managing the messaging to "its populace."

I do see the government as akin to a parasite, and parasites tend to grow and feed on their hosts. The prime directive of any government is to grow and protect itself.

The left and the right might be an artificial conflict, because conflict is necessary. Follow the money. The so-called "right" side of our government is not honest either.

In case you are interested, one of the best books about the McCarthy Era was written by a man named M. Stanton Evans called "Blacklisted by History:The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America's enemies", where I first became aware of the absolute perfidy of Democrat politicians that included some regarded as stalwarts of America like Scoop Jackson.

McCarthy Part 4--Annie Lee Moss, VOA, and history insulted...

Here is a reprint of that account of the Annie Lee Moss episode:

Markward testified that she knew of Moss's Communist Party membership because of her dues records — to which Markward had had access — and she added Annie Lee Moss was on the list of subscribers to the Communist Party's Daily Worker. Markward added that for a time, Mrs. Moss had been dropped from the formal party rolls when she went to work for the General Accounting office (GAO) — the investigating arm of Congress. This was in line with party policy to treat members holding official jobs on a separate, more confidential basis.

When Moss testified, she seemed distracted and frail "not fitting the usual picture of a party apparatchik," says Evans. The Democrat senators at the hearing were totally condescending to Moss, who suggested her new notoriety was the result of mistaken identity — that other Annie Lee Mosses were in the D.C. phone book.

Again, bear in mind that before the hearing, these same three Democrat senators — John McClellan (Ark.), Stuart Symington (Mo.), and Henry "Scoop" Jackson (Wash.) — had been fully briefed by the FBI, which had thorough documentation that the Annie Lee Moss subpoenaed to testify was the person in question and that she was a Communist. Nonetheless committee Dems treated her case as mistaken identity, strongly hinting that McCarthy was bullying a poor black woman. At the end of the hearing, Symington offered to find her a job — a knee-jerk histrionic for which the Missourian would later privately — and sheepishly — express regret.

They knew...McClellan, Symington (who was a full snake anyway) and...the poster boy of the leftist "anti-communists"...Scoop Jackson. They saw the evidence in private, incontrovertible evidence that this woman was a communist, and all agreed with it. Then, when they went in front of the audience and the cameras...they all became very sympathetic to her as described above, to cement the meme they were presenting of McCarthy as an ignorant bully.

The left likes to portray Scoop Jackson as a staunch cold warrior and anti-communist, as if to say "See? We care about our country too!"

But they don't, at least not the way real Americans do.

I think we are in full agreement. We aren’t anarchists, we believe in having a government, not just a bloated, giant, headless one that crushes through its weight all it is supposed to help, and grows ever fatter by eating out more and more of “our substance” (to use Jefferson’s phrase in his grievances against The Crown in The Declaration of Independence…

If you read the opening paragraphs of Common Sense
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
enough times (I’m thick, and didn’t grasp it at first) it becomes clear that skepticism toward government varies inversely with skepticism toward society. And naïveté toward government corresponds to cynicism toward society, and the institutions which promote civil society.

"...that skepticism toward government varies inversely with skepticism toward society. And naïveté toward government corresponds to cynicism toward society, and the institutions which promote civil society..."

I have never thought about it that way. I am skeptical about government, but am also skeptical the society will work together harmoniously to be a blessing...and liberals are not skeptical about government, but are also not skeptical that society will work together harmoniously to be a blessing.

Doesn't seem inversely related, but I might be thinking or interpreting wrongly.

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