Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit
Considering
the late senator's complete record requires digging into the
Forbes
Peter
Robinson, 08.28.09, 12:01 AM EDT
This act of Ted Kennedy was nothing less than
treason. Giving aid and comfort to the
then enemy of the United States the Soviet Union.
Picking his way
through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991
Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the
"On 9-10 May of
this year," the May 14 memorandum explained, "Sen. Edward Kennedy's
close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in
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
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
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
"The
document," Kengor continues, "has stood the test of time. I
scrutinized it more carefully than anything I've ever dealt with as a scholar.
I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival
material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery.
Kennedy's office did not deny it."
Why bring all this
up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum--within
eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead--and now that Kennedy himself has
died even many of the former senator's opponents find themselves grieving. Yet
precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure--perhaps the
most compelling liberal of our day--we need to consider his record in full.
Doing so, it turns
out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.
When President
Reagan chose to confront the
Peter Robinson, a
research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
and a former White House speechwriter, writes a weekly
column for Forbes.