This is the second in a weekly series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, who has just released a major book revealing how the far Left–most notably, communists–has long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more, and is being hailed as groundbreaking. Herb Meyer, special assistant to the CIA director from 1981-87, says that Dupes “alters our understanding of the 20th century.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Each week at Big Peace, Professor Kengor will profile one of his book’s Big Dupes. Today, we look at the late, longtime senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy. This is the first of two interviews on Senator Kennedy.
Big Peace: You have dozens of dupes in your book. Where does Ted Kennedy rank?
Kengor: Ted Kennedy is certainly one of the biggest. For Kennedy, the dupery stretched over a long period and across varied enemies, from Cold War to post-Cold War, from communists to Islamists, from the 1960s to just recently. With some dupes, like John Dewey, father of modern public education, the duping lasted several years; for Ted Kennedy, it lasted several decades.
Big Peace: Let’s start at the beginning. Where do we first find examples of this sort of behavior from Kennedy?
Kengor: It begins with his first foreign-policy trips in the 1960s, after replacing his brother in the Senate. By the way, John F. Kennedy was no dupe. He was a staunch anti-communist Democrat, as had been the entire Kennedy clan. It’s impossible to picture Ted echoing his late brother, who had warned America of its “atheistic foe” and the “godless” “communist conspiracy.” Instead, when presidents like Ronald Reagan talked liked that, Ted Kennedy and his liberal friends torched him, scoffed at him, dismissing him as a reincarnation of Joe McCarthy. In fact, Ted’s brother, Bobby, had worked for McCarthy.
Big Peace: What did Kennedy do in the 1960s that brought him on your radar?
Kengor: I was reading a screed against the Vietnam War by Dr. Benjamin Spock. Spock was co-opted by American communists–a very impressive manipulation. Spock’s book was so damaging to the American side that it was literally used by the Vietcong to indoctrinate our POWs. I didn’t know that until I read congressional testimonies from two former POWs who were asked, “Did your captives give you anything to read?” Both immediately named Spock’s book. For that, the great pediatrician deserved a good spanking.
Anyway, in that book, Spock marshaled several sources to make his case in undermining our troops. By far, his preferred source was the New York Times, but Spock also cited certain politicians. One was a young Senator Kennedy, who just returned from a fact-finding trip to South Vietnam. Kennedy alleged that half of our millions of dollars in refugee aid were being stolen by corrupt officials on our side. It was a rampant corruption; the kind ostensibly absent (or at least unmentioned) among North Vietnamese officials.
Of the South Vietnamese refugees, Kennedy claimed that “the vast majority–I would say over 80 percent,” were either deposited in camps by the Americans or fled to camps in fear of American airplanes and artillery. Only a “handful,” presumably maybe a half-dozen or so, “were driven from their homes by the Viet Cong.” This ludicrous charge was highlighted in a section of Spock’s book titled, “Their Terror and Ours.” According to this portrayal, all of South Vietnam was virtually one enlarged terror/concentration camp, thanks to America and its soldiers–and not because of anything done by the communists of North Vietnam. As usual, everything was our fault.
Big Peace: That was the late 1960s. You have Kennedy examples from every decade, right up to the Iraq War, correct?
Kengor: Senator Kennedy made similar claims 40 years later against our troops in Iraq. Recall May 2004, when he claimed that “Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management–U.S. management.”
Ted Kennedy made these kinds of outrageous claims for decades, against our troops, our country, our presidents, Republican and Democrat alike.
Next week, I’ll get to what Kennedy did, or offered to do, to presidents Carter and Reagan, not to mention his statements about George W. Bush.
Big Peace: Tell us about the statements on Kennedy by the KGB defector.
Kengor: Sure. Yuri Bezmenov was a journalist and editor for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Of course, that means he also worked for the KGB and wasn’t truly a journalist. He defected to the West in the 1970s.
Among Bezmenov’s chief duties was to handle Western visitors through propaganda and misinformation. This entailed some unique skills. “One of my functions,” explained Bezmenov, “was to keep foreign guests permanently intoxicated from the moment they landed at Moscow airport.” He managed “groups of so-called ‘progressive intellectuals’–writers, journalists, publishers, teachers, professors of colleges…. For us, they were just a bunch of political prostitutes to be taken advantage of.”
To his credit, Bezmenov smelled the stench of the Soviet system, and was deeply troubled that these progressives, who prided themselves on intellectual superiority, couldn’t detect the same rot. It ate at his conscience. “I did my job,” he lamented, but “deep inside I still hoped that at least some of these useful idiots [would catch on].”
Among the worst of them, said Bezmenov, was Senator Ted Kennedy. Bezmenov had an actual photo of Kennedy dancing at a wedding at Moscow’s Palace of Marriages, but it wasn’t a real wedding; it was staged. We publish the photo in the book. Pointing to the photo, Bezmenov commented: “Another greatest example of monumental idiocy [among] American politicians: Edward Kennedy was in Moscow, and he … was being taken for a ride.” This was a “staged wedding used to impress foreign media–or useful idiots like Ed Kennedy. Most of the guests there [had] security clearance and were instructed what to say to foreigners.”
I know this seems absurd to modern eyes and ears, but such were the wretched lengths to which the Soviets descended. They were outstanding liars, constructing (as Vaclav Havel put it), the vast “communist culture of the lie.”
They built phony factories, schools, even villages to hoodwink Western visitors, beginning back in the 1920s, when they suckered John Dewey and all his progressive friends. I call them “Potemkin Progressives.” Why wouldn’t they stage weddings? Actually, the New York Times, in 1958, published an article on how they staged weddings. So, this was old hat to the Kremlin.
Bezmenov said that Kennedy “thinks he’s very smart,” but, “from the viewpoint of Russian citizens who observed this idiocy,” he was “an idiot,” a “useful idiot.”
Big Peace: In the book, you say that “Ted Kennedy’s Russian Romance” went deeper?
Kengor: Yes, for the senator from Massachusetts, the Russian romance was a long-term affair. In March 1980 and March 1983, he reciprocated whatever wedding prize Soviet handlers gave him with gifts of his own. He made offers against Jimmy Carter, his own political flesh and blood, in the middle of the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, and against Ronald Reagan as the 1984 election approached.
Big Peace: These are shown in declassified Soviet materials. In one case, the documents you present in your book have been resealed in Russian archives. Next week, you’ll discuss those, correct?
Kengor: I’ll discuss those documents related to Carter and Reagan, as well as Kennedy’s more recent zingers aimed at a third president, George W. Bush, continuing the utterly outrageous, completely irresponsible statements from the Cold War into the War on Terror.