Ted Kennedy Made Secret Overtures to Russia to Prevent Ronald Reagan’s Re-Election
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 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 …read more