This is a fascinating article regarding the history of former U.S. Presidents when they met with Russian leaders. They make Trump look like a true statesman !!! Nancy
Senator John McCain described the Trump-Putin press conference in Helsinki as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” “No prior president,” insisted McCain, “has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
Easy there, senator. Your knowledge of meetings between American presidents and Moscow tyrants is apparently quite limited. Plenty of examples would suffice, but let’s start with the very first: FDR and Stalin.
In fact, where to begin with that case example? My colleague Daniel Flynn yesterday raised the specter of FDR at Yalta — a perfect illustration, but we can go earlier. I could expend thousands of words laying out FDR’s jaw-droppingly awful assessments of Stalin across multiple meetings, conferences, and correspondence. Some of these were spouted directly by FDR to the man he fondly called “Uncle Joe,” whereas others were shared by FDR advisers who begged the president not to trust Stalin.
One such adviser was William Bullitt, FDR’s first ambassador to the USSR, who once had been gushingly pro-Bolshevik — until he spent a few years in the Soviet Union, where he was awakened by the death stench that was Stalinism. As he did with so many advisers, FDR rejected Bullitt’s warnings: “Bill, I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man…. I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
Editors’ note: In light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election, which now involvesTrump Jr. daring to talk to a Russian woman, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin — by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy’s outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan.
Ted Kennedy and the KGB.
Frontpage Magazine,May 15, 2008.
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, the author of the New York Times extended-list bestsellerGod and Ronald Reaganas well asGod and George W. BushandThe Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.He is also the author of the first spiritual biography of the former first lady,God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life.He is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.
FP:Paul Kengor, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.
Kengor:Always great to be back, Jamie.
FP:We’re here today to revisit Ted Kennedy’s reaching out to the KGB during the Reagan period. Refresh our readers’ memories a bit.
Kengor:The episode is based on a document produced 25 years ago this week. I discussed it with you inour earlier interviewback in November 2006. In my book,The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I presented a rather eye-opening May 14, 1983 KGB document on Ted Kennedy. The entire document, unedited, unabridged, is printed in the book, as well as all the documentation affirming its authenticity. Even with that, today, almost 25 years later, it seems to have largely remained a secret.
FP:Tell us about this document.
Kengor:It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president—Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.
The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”
Robert Joseph was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security from 2005-2007; Eric Edelman was undersecretary of defense for policy, 2005-2009.
Of President-elect Trump’s tweets since winning the election, the one drawing the greatest criticism may well be his comment last week that the United States “must strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” The next day, his critics went downright ballistic when the president-elect reportedly made the off-camera statement: “Let it be an arms race. . . . We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” The partisans at the Ploughshares Fund and their paid-for “echo-chamber” colleagues across the disarmament community were seething that Trump’s comments could touch off an arms race and undercut strategic stability, lowering the threshold for nuclear use, possibly leading to a global holocaust. But beyond the obvious hyperbole, what are the relevant facts?
Fact one:The nuclear arms race has been going on for more than a decade, but it has been primarily a one-nation race, by Russia—unless you count China, which has been aggressively modernizing its nuclear arsenal as well. Moscow has strengthened and expanded its nuclear capability across the board. It has maintained a broad array of warfighting systems, from nuclear-armed torpedoes to short- and medium-range missiles, including the development of new capabilities that violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. At the strategic level, Russia has modernized all three legs of its triad. It has deployed, or soon will, new mobile and heavy ICBMs as well as a new class of strategic ballistic missile submarines. It has begun testing a rail-mobile ICBM, raising the prospect that it will bring back an operational concept most thought had been abandoned with the end of the Cold War. It is modernizing the air-breathing force with new cruise missiles (already tested over Syria multiple times) and an advanced heavy bomber. Moreover, Russia is developing, and may have tested, an unprecedented new nuclear weapon—a nuclear-powered torpedo with an enormously large warhead, perhaps as large as 100 megatons, whose sole purpose would be to inflict massive civilian casualties and long-term ecological damage.
So many are now asking, what is happening to our country? The coarsening of our society is now evident – divorce rates are soaring, families are crumbling and Christianity is being attacked.
Home schooling of children is increasing because many parents are dissatisfied with the public schools as they feel they are providing inferior education. The feminist agenda is pushing abortion on demand, parents are no longer informed when their underage child is having an abortion, schools are passing out condoms to children, there are gay pride parades as if homosexuality is something to be celebrated.
The number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high. Social Justice (also better known as Socialism is the taking from one group to give to another) is the new buzz word. Dependency on government is taking the place of American self reliance. The fibre of our country and its people is being ground down. We are decaying from within !
What is happening to us ? The answer to these and many more questions is in the following documentary film. Please share with your email lists. Nancy
The new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam focuses on oppression, group identity and Reagan the warmonger
President Reagan speaking in West Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate, June 12, 1987. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
By
Lynne V. CheneyMrs. Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes about history. Her most recent book is “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered” (Viking, 2014).
If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
—President Ronald Reagan, speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1987
President Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev remains one of the most dramatic calls for freedom in our time. Thus I was heartened to find a passage from Reagan’s speech on the sample of the new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam that students will take for the first time in May. It seemed for a moment that students would be encouraged to learn about positive aspects of our past rather than be directed to focus on the negative, as happens all too often.
But when I looked closer to see the purpose for which the quotation was used, I found that it is held up as an example of “increased assertiveness and bellicosity” on the part of the U.S. in the 1980s. That’s the answer to a multiple-choice question about what Reagan’s speech reflects.
No notice is taken of the connection the president made between freedom and human flourishing, no attention to the fact that within 2½ years of the speech, people were chipping off pieces of the Berlin Wall as souvenirs. Instead of acknowledging important ideas and historical context, test makers have reduced President Reagan’s most eloquent moment to warmongering.
The AP U.S. history exam matters. Half a million of the nation’s best and brightest high-school students will take it this year, hoping to use it to earn college credit and to polish their applications to competitive colleges. To score well on the exam, students have to learn what the College Board, a private organization that creates the exam, wants them to know. (more…)
