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Edward Kennedy’s Soviet Proposal
by American Phoenix | August 29, 2009
This is an amazing story, which has for obvious reasons, has gone little noticed in the main stream media. I’m both surprised at how baldly traitorous this is, but at the same time, I’m not surprised at all. Senator Edward Kennedy was a liberal Democrat in the style of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (but with far less elegance). We should not be surprised that, like Roosevelt, he cozied up to Soviets or that he would feel they were a natural ally.
Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
….
Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”
Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.
Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”
Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.
Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.
“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”
Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.
In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”
Robinson, Peter, Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit, Forbes, August 28, 2009
If this had been anyone else, it would have been called treason and would have received serious attention from the main stream media.
Update (August 29, 2000): This information was first discovered and published in February 2, 1992 in the Times by Tim Sebastian of the London Times and BBC. The document was verified by the Venona researcher Herb Romerstein. ABC, MSNBC, NBC, CBS and CNN all refused to run the story. The story was given a small amount of attention on Fox News. Not a single media outlet reviewed Kengor’s book. Frontpage Magazine did a story on this on May 15, 2008. But the document has been out there in the public domain for over a decade.
Topics: Culture of Death, Politics |
September 8th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
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