Ted Kennedy's secret overtures to Soviet Union to prevent

Posted: Jun 11, 2017

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy had “selfish political and ideological motives” when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union’s spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. When they came to light years later, Kennedy’s secret contacts with the Russians through their KGB spy agency in the early 1980s didn’t cause nearly the tizzy that Russia’s alleged interference with this year’s election has for President-elect Donald Trump among liberal activists and reporters. Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump has said he hopes to “get along,” is a former foreign intelligence officer and lieutenant colonel in the KGB. In the 1980s, Kennedy was “terribly misguided” and “a fool” for seeing Reagan as a greater threat than either the leader of the Soviet Union or the head of its brutal secret police and intelligence agency, political science professor and writer Paul Kengor told The Daily Signal. The presidential hopeful’s secret correspondence with the Soviet spy service was first reported Feb. 2, 1992, by the London Times in an article headlined “Teddy, the KGB and the Top Secret File.” As this reporter wrote in 2010, the story focused on a 1983 document from the spy agency detailing Kennedy’s overtures to top officials in the former Soviet Union. The Massachusetts Democrat had challenged President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries and was considering the possibility of running again for president. In a letter addressed to then-Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, dated May 14, 1983, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov explained that Kennedy was eager to “counter the militaristic policies” of Reagan, who defeated Carter as the Republican nominee, and to undermine his prospects for re-election in 1984. Here is how the KGB’s Chebrikov described Kennedy’s proposal, in a published English translation: Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year, televised interviews with Y.V. Andropov in the USA. A direct appeal by the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. The senator is convinced this would receive the maximum resonance in so far as television is the most effective method of mass media and information. Going a step further, according to the letter, Kennedy then offered up the possibility of having top media personalities such as Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, and Elton Raul, president of the board of the ABC television network, travel to Moscow to do television interviews with Andropov. “The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side,” the letter to Andropov says. Kennedy’s proposal also called for “lower level Soviet officials, particularly from the military,” to travel to the United States for a “series of television interviews” where they could “appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR.” Former Sen. John Tunney, D-Calif., who was Kennedy’s law school roommate at the University of Virginia, traveled to Moscow on May 9 and 10, 1983, to meet with KGB officials and inform them of Kennedy’s proposal. (Tunney, also a former congressman, served one Senate term from 1971 to 1977.) It was not Tunney’s first trip to Moscow on behalf of Kennedy. He also visited the KGB in Moscow three years earlier, on March 5, 1980...;