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

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
“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 Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”
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 Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.
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 USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”
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 London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”
“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 Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire

On Aug. 3, 378, a battle was fought in Adrianople, in what was then Thrace and is now the province of Edirne, in Turkey. It was a battle that Saint Ambrose referred to as “the end of all humanity, the end of the world.”

The Eastern Roman emperor Flavius Julius Valens Augustus—simply known as Valens, and nicknamed Ultimus Romanorum (the last true Roman)—led his troops against the Goths, a Germanic people that Romans considered “barbarians,” commanded by Fritigern. Valens, who had not waited for the military help of his nephew, Western Roman emperor Gratian, got into the battle with 40,000 soldiers. Fritigern could count on 100,000.

It was a massacre: 30,000 Roman soldiers died and the empire was defeated. It was the first of many to come, and it’s considered as the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. At the time of the battle, Rome ruled a territory of nearly 600 million hectares (2.3 million square miles, nearly two-thirds the area of the present-day US), with a population of over 55 million.

The defeat of Adrianople didn’t happen because of Valens’s stubborn thirst for power or because he grossly underestimated his adversary’s belligerence. What was arguably the most important defeat in the history of the Roman empire had roots in something else: a refugee crisis.

Two years earlier the Goths had descended toward Roman territory looking for shelter. The mismanagement of Goth refugees started a chain of events that led to the collapse of one of the biggest political and military powers humankind has ever known.

It’s a story shockingly similar to what’s happening in Europe right now—and it should serve as a cautionary tale.

Make a national emergency on the wall, President Trump!

A declining birthrate means the college-going population could decline by more than 15 percent.

What does the declining birthrate mean for colleges and universities and the students who hope to get a college degree a decade from now? The answer depends on where you live in the United States and how selective the college is. For most colleges and universities, the outlook is grim. But that could be a good thing for their future students.

Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College in Minnesota, predicts that the college-going population will drop by 15 percent between 2025 and 2029 and continue to decline by another percentage point or two thereafter.

"When the financial crisis hit in 2008, young people viewed that economic uncertainty as a cause for reducing fertility," says Grawe. "The number of kids born from 2008 to 2011 fell precipitously. Fast forward 18 years to 2026 and we see that there are fewer kids reaching college-going age."

Birthrates failed to rebound with the economic recovery. The latest 2017 birthrate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posts new lows, marking almost a decade of reduced fertility.

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But not all colleges will feel the pain equally. Demand for elite institutions – the top 50 colleges and 50 universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report – is projected to drop by much less during the 2025 to 2029 period (18 years following the birth dearth). And student demand for elite institutions may be 14 percent higher in 2029 than it was in 2012. Meanwhile, regional four-year institutions which serve local students are expected to lose more than 11 percent of their students, from 1.43 million in 2012 to 1.27 million in 2029.

The Northeast, where a disproportionate share of the nation's colleges and universities are located, is expected to be the hardest hit. By contrast, mountain states where there are fewer students and fewer colleges, such as Utah and Montana, may see slight increases in student demand.

Grawe's forecasts for the number of students at two-year community colleges and four-year institutions are published in his book, "Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education," with updates on his website. He breaks the numbers down not only by type of school, and how selective it is, but also by geographic region and race/ethnicity.

Why do the forecasts sometimes move in opposite directions? Grawe explains that elite colleges are less affected by the birth dearth because they're a small niche market of fewer than 200,000 students that has benefited from the explosion in college education since the 1980s.

"The people who went to college 20-30 years ago and got a degree, they're now the parents of kids who are looking at going to college in the next 10 years or so," says Grawe. "If your parents went to college, your probability of going to college is much higher and your probability of going to a highly selective four-year college is a lot higher."

Meanwhile, less selective institutions are not as likely to buck the powerful demographic trend of declining birthrates.

Northeastern schools, especially those who cater to students who live nearby, are feeling more pain because of demographic shifts that began well before the Great Recession hit. Americans are continuing to move away from the Northeast to the South, to places like Texas. In addition, birthrates are lower in the Northeast where there is a smaller Latino population. Latinos have historically had the highest fertility rates among U.S. racial and ethnic groups.

This may be good news for students who are currently in fifth grade and younger. Grawe predicts they'll have an easier time getting admitted to schools as colleges fight more fiercely for the available students.

"Students are going to be a hot commodity, a scarce resource," says Grawe. "It's going to be harder during this period for institutions to aggressively increase tuition. It may be a time period when it's a little easier on parents and students who are negotiating over the financial aid package."

For the colleges themselves, declining student enrollments will likely translate into leaner budgets. Regional colleges will be under pressure to cut liberal arts courses and expand professional programs, such as law enforcement, that students feel will translate into a good-paying job. "As a liberal arts professor, it's heartbreaking," says Grawe. "But you can understand. The institution's existence is dependent on meeting the expectations of the student."

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Some colleges won't make it. Moody's Investors Service is predicting an uptick in closures of private colleges. And public colleges may have trouble convincing state legislatures to fund them amid declining enrollments.

Grawe argues that colleges might be able to avoid closures and budget shortfalls if they can reduce their dropout rates and focus on keeping students – and their tuition dollars – on campus. Grawe cites the example of the University of Southern Maine, which is coping with fewer students but operating with a larger budget because of its efforts to keep students through to graduation. Expect more colleges to launch student retention and student success initiatives.

Of course, Grawe's predictions may turn out to be wrong. Economists predicted a similar drop in college enrollments in the 1980s following the baby boom generation. Instead, the college-going rate skyrocketed. Women started going to college in larger numbers. More young Americans wanted a college degree as it became more difficult to get a good job with only a high school diploma. Even older Americans went back to school.

Could something like that happen again? It's possible that the Latino college-going rate could surge. It has already increased to more than 70 percent from 60 percent since Grawe first calculated his forecasts using data from 2011 and earlier. But Grawe says it would be a "very risky" strategy for college administrators to cross their fingers and hope this demographic slump goes away.

This story was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. 

Do it for me, Mr. President

The high income or.middle class people can’t afford kids, but the poor can pipe out a lot of kids since the poor don’t pay much taxes. Their poor offspring are funded by taxes. The border security is very important in keeping the illegal aliens outside our borders. 85% of the government isn’t even shut down today. Trump isn’t bad. Democrats just lie, because keywiki.org just exposes them all anyhow.
J
im Acosta was surrounded by police officers who are seen walking behind when he made that Texas border video. Of course illegal aliens weren’t around him. He probably wasn’t in the right area either.


President Trump, declare national emergency over the wall. I’d do it too. You’re probably the only president who would have the balls to make that happen. Mr. President, you’re really ballsy!

I Met Richard Stallman in Chatroom

Met GPL creator Richard Stallman on Daniel Chat this week!