FBI's Ted Kennedy files reinforce KGB's Ted Kennedy files

Judicial Watch is doing vital work in bringing the Ted Kennedy FBI files to light. The man was a real piece of work. At my old stomping grounds I chased a story about him that still hasn’t quite resolved completely, the question of what the KGB had on him in its files. The KGB had in its files a plan in which Kennedy hoped to use US journalists and Soviet help to defeat President Reagan in 1984.

That document is a memo regarding an offer made by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts via former Senator John Tunney, both Democrats, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, USSR, Yuri Andropov, in 1983. The offer was to help the Soviet leadership, military and civilian, conduct a PR campaign in the United States as President Ronald Reagan sought re-election. The goal of the PR campaign would be to cast President Reagan as a warmonger, the Soviets as willing to peacefully co-exist, and thereby turn the electorate away from Reagan. It was a plan to enlist Soviet help, and use the American press, in unseating an American president.

The intriguing thing to me now, after reading Clarice’s post over the weekend, is how well the KGB file fits in terms of character with what the FBI had come up with. The FBI files depict Kennedy as always being eager to meet with the hard leftists of whatever country he happened to be visiting.

“[I]n each country Kennedy insisted on interviewing ‘the angry young men’ of the country. He wanted to meet with communists and others who had left-wing views. …Ambassador Freeman, Bogota, said the first person whom Kennedy wanted to meet was Lauchlin Currie.” (The document subsequently identifies Currie as a person who “had been mentioned in Washington investigations of Soviet spy rings.”)

That information is from a 1961 State Department memo. The KGB file depicts Kennedy as being eager to work with the hard leftists of the USSR to unseat Reagan two decades later. Together, the FBI and KGB files paint a picture that’s hard to ignore (though the MSM will undoubtedly ignore it fully), of a man who chose a side in the Cold War, and the side he chose was the Soviet side. His entire career in and out of the Senate needs to be re-evaluated in light of what both the FBI and KGB have to say about the late Ted Kennedy.