Thursday, August 27, 2009

Teddy Kennedy Flirted With Treason

Thanks to Rich Johns' for the following reminder of how Teddy Kennedy favorted the Soviet Union over the US in the 1980s:


Unlikely to be much recalled this week is the fact that, in 1983, Senator Edward Kennedy offered advice to the USSR on how to defeat U.S. efforts to build up the Western nuclear deterrent in Europe; sought the assistance of the USSR in Democratic Party efforts to defeat Ronald Reagan in the election campaign of 1984; and proposed the staging of a public Kennedy visit with Yuri Andropov in Moscow to help attain these ends. Senator Kennedy's intermediary in his communications with the KGB and Yuri Andropov was John Tunney [Kennedy friend and former Senator from California].

An internal Soviet memorandum detailing Kennedy's offer of assistance to the USSR was unearthed by a Times of London reporter in the 1990s when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were opened.

The memorandum was written by Victor Chebrikov, who succeeded Yuri Andropov as head of the KGB when Andropov became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Chebrikov directed the KGB from 1982 to 1988.

The full text of the Chebrikov memorandum was published in the appendix (pp. 317-320) of Paul Kengor's book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

In his book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, (pp. 197-198), John O'Sullivan also discussed the 1983 Kennedy overture to Andropov, noting that "Kennedy made several subsequent attempts to advise the Soviets on the best way to outwit Reagan", adding that "The only mystery is why Andropov turned down Kennedy's offer. The answer seems to be that, when it came to left-wing Western politicians hoping to assist the Kremlin's foreign policy, the Soviets were suffering from an embarrassment of riches."
Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=EnMVq0jcIUEC&pg=PA198&lpg=PA197&ots=w2uxfRTTzM&dq=Edward+Kennedy+Andropov&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html

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