Paul Kengor on whether Sen. Ted Kennedy approached the Russia government ahead of Ronald Reagan's reelection bid
Professor of political science at Grove City College Paul Kengor cites a document found in the Central Committee archives of the Soviet Union.
This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," January 13, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello America, I'm Mark Levin, this is "Life, Liberty & Levin." I have a great guest, Dr. Paul Kengor.
PAUL KENGOR, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR VISION AND VALUES: Good to be with you. Great, great. Thank you.
LEVIN: We are going to discuss Russia collusion, really Soviet collusion.
KENGKOR: Yes.
LEVIN: Democrat style, which is never discussed.
KENGOR: No.
LEVIN: You are professor of Political Science at Grove City College. You are the Executive Director of the Center for Vision and Values. You've been at Grove City for 20 years, which is one of our finest colleges.
KENGOR: Yes, thank you.
LEVIN: You've written a lot about the Cold War. You have gone through some of the original documents that have become available since the end of the Cold War. I consider you if not the expert, one of the top experts on what took place during the Cold War. Why do I want to discuss this tonight? I will tell you why because one of the things you address and you focus on is the extent to which Ted Kennedy, the lion of the Senate, the Kennedy family - that Ted Kennedy was colluding with, conspiring with, working with the Kremlin to defeat the reelection of President Ronald Reagan.
This is never discussed on national television.
KENGOR: Never discussed.
LEVIN: Russia keeps coming up. There is no context for what is taking place today. What exactly happened with Ted Kennedy and Russia and the Kremlin?
KENGOR: Well, the date was - the date of the document is May 14th, 1983.
LEVIN: What document?
KENGOR: It is a document that was found in the Central Committee archives of the Soviet Union and that would have been when they first started opening the archives when Boris Yeltsin became President after Gorbachev resigned in late 1991, and a document was found. It was - it says "Committee on State Security of the USSR" across the top, which is KGB.
And the author is Viktor Chebrikov who was the head of the KGB and he is writing to Yuri Andropov who is the head of the Soviet Union, so right here, okay, you've got a document with the two top people in the USSR. Chebrikov, head of the KGB to the head of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov.
And the subject head says, "Of special importance regarding Senator Kennedy's request to General Secretary Andropov." So right there, if that doesn't grab your attention, I don't know what does. And it says in the first paragraph that on 09/10 of this year, this would have been May 1983 that a Kennedy confidante, John Tunney, who had been the California Democratic Senator and he wasn't senator at that point, but he had been the --
LEVIN: Best friends with Kennedy.
KENGOR: Yes, old law school classmates and they said that he was there on behalf of Senator Kennedy making a request to the Soviets.
LEVIN: So he went to the Kremlin.
KENGOR: I don't think he went to the Kremlin, but he was in Moscow. He was definitely in Moscow on behalf of Ted Kennedy. Now, before I continue to say what is in the document, this was found in the archives, 1991-1992, it was first reported by the "London Times" in February 2nd, 1992.
LEVIN: And I assume the American media picked up on it, the news networks ran with it, the budding cable networks ran with it. Am I right?
KENGOR: Absolutely, they did not. They didn't do it.
LEVIN: They didn't. They didn't do it.
KENGOR: They didn't do a single thing with it. So first of all, it's Tim Sebastian who was the reporter for the "London Times" also worked for the BBC, no right-winger, right? BBC and "London Times" and he reported on it and in the "London Times," just a little bit, tiny bit, didn't report the - didn't show the whole document or anything.
There was a kind of a rush on the archives by different researchers who were there at the time to try to get a copy of the document. It was finally given to me when I was doing research on a book on Ronald Reagan.
LEVIN: What year would that be?
KENGOR: Well, that book was "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism," which was published in 2006 and by the way, it was published by Harper Collins, so it's again - this is a mainstream highly respected press.
And when I was told about the documents in 2004-2005, for the person who sent it to me, I said, "Does it really say this? What you're saying ..." He says, "Oh, yes, yes. It's worse. Wait until you read it." I got it. I put it - I published it in the appendix of the book.
LEVIN: And what does it say?
KENGOR: Okay, so the document said that Senator Kennedy, like other rational people -- it uses the word rational people -- is very troubled by the state of the U.S.-Soviet relations, the deterioration in U.S. Soviet relations and it blames this deterioration not on Yuri Andropov, not on the Kremlin, but on Reagan's belligerence. It actually used the words "Reagan's belligerence." And it says that this is due to Reagan's refusal to engage in any modification to his politics or policies.
So Kennedy and the document and the document, at least its framing of Kennedy's offer, they are blaming this deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations on Ronald Reagan.
LEVIN: So the Soviets are blaming him or Kennedy is blaming them or all of them are blaming him?
KENGOR: Well, this would be the defense later of the Kennedy people is you know, well, that's their interpretation of this, but according to Chebrikov, his is couching this in the language of this is Kennedy's interpretation.
LEVIN: And Kennedy approached them. They didn't approach Kennedy.
KENGOR: Yes, Kennedy approached them through John Tunney and Tunney who would later comment on this in the original "London Times" article in February 1992, dismissed it. He was like, "Ah, it's not what people are trying to make of it." And when the book - when my first report on this and "The Crusader" was published in 2006, the only media source in the country that touched it was - you're from Philadelphia - the CN8, which was like a regional cable news outlet.
I did that show and they actually called Kennedy's office and said, "What is your response to this? With this Professor's reporting and this book?" And they argued with the interpretation. Of the document.
LEVIN: But what did Kennedy want to do?
KENGOR: Well, it was couched within the context of the 1984 Presidential Election which was just around the corner. This was 1983 - spring of 1983.
LEVIN: So they are communicating, Kennedy is through Tunney in 1983.
KENGOR: That's right.
LEVIN: Right before Reagan is up for reelection?
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: The campaign is ginning up, the Democrats are ginning up. Kennedy makes contact with the Kremlin through Tunney. What does Kennedy want to do with the kremlin?
KENGOR: Well, so he offers to - he believes, according to the document, right, Kennedy believes that this deterioration is the fault of Reagan's and not apparently the fault of the Soviet Union. In fact, it even uses the words that Kennedy is quote unquote "very impressed with Andropov." Very impressed with Andropov, of all people, right? The Soviet dictator.
So with the election coming up, and it's fascinating, Mark, there is actually a paragraph in here where you've got basically Kennedy and the soviets agreeing that Reaganomics is working. Inflation is down. Unemployment is great and so the only time you will ever see them acknowledge that Reaganomics is actually working.
And that being the case - is there any vulnerability for Reagan in 1984? And yes, it is these questions of war and peace. The Pershing II missiles, the nuclear freeze movement, so Kennedy offers to the Soviets to help them communicate to the American voters and the American public their peaceful intentions as he pursues them.
LEVIN: So Kennedy is prepared to be a PR surrogate.
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: For Moscow.
KENGOR: Yes, I think that's a fair way to put it, yes, in order to help them communicate better with the United States and it says, Kennedy recommends that the following steps be taken. And I would encourage people to actually read the document from the book ...
LEVIN: What are they if you could summarize it?
KENGOR: ... so they could read it word for word, but the steps would be that first of all, Kennedy would go to Moscow and meet with Andropov. He would help arrange for Soviet political military officials to come to the United States to directly talk to the American public.
Even offers to help set up interviews between Soviet officials and American journalists and specifically named in the document are Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters, so they are specifically mentioned in there.
So they would come to the United States and that way, they could go unfiltered directly to the American public, you know, communicate their beliefs. Kennedy would go over there and he would meet with Andropov, and the document ends with Chebrikov say, "I shall await instructions." This is the offer that is being made and the final paragraph ends by talking about Kennedy's own presidential prospects and whether or not he would run in 1984 and definitely looking to run in 1988. So it is all couched within the context of the Presidential Election.
LEVIN: All right, let's unravel some of this. We have contact, we have offer from Kennedy. We have an effort to affect the upcoming reelection of Ronald Reagan, in other words, really to defeat Reagan, an offer to get the Kremlin and their propagandists, their generals and so forth on American television, raid in other words, in American media by a top Democratic senator --
KENGOR: Very top.
LEVIN: Ted Kennedy.
KENGOR: I mean, 1980 he was challenging Jimmy Carter for the Democratic primary.
LEVIN: So let's bring this to today. Can you imagine if Donald Trump or Donald Trump's camp had done one tenth of one percent of this?
KENGOR: Oh, and the smoking gun, there's an actual document.
LEVIN: It's more than a smoking gun, there's a nuclear blast here.
KENGOR: And the document is couched within policies -- foreign policy, nuclear policies, military, national security, the 1984 Presidential Election -- and it is written by the head of the KGB --
LEVIN: To the head of the government.
KENGOR: To the head of the Soviet Union, and so this will be like having a document by the current head of the Russian FSB, I think it is now, or GRU, directly to Putin and it would say, "Here is an offer that is being made by Senator so-and-so on behalf of Donald Trump," or whoever. All laid out right there, and it ...
LEVIN: Instead, Professor, we are left with, there was a meeting with Donald, Junior and some others where nothing actually took place, or now, we read in the newspaper that perhaps Manafort shared polling information with somebody or something like that.
We have calls for impeachment. We have calls for indictment. We have all kinds of calls -- this is the same media, the same media that have completely ignored what you have discovered, what you have written about, what others have discovered, original documentation and if we had a prosecutor at that time, a special prosecutor at that time, who is of a mindset to prosecute a case like this, look what they would have?
KENGOR: Oh, yes, and so - and it gets even worse, so we reported it first in 2006 where we published in the appendix of the book the actual translation which comes out to about two and a half pages. In 2010, I did a book called, "Dupes." I said, "Okay, we will do this. We publish the entire document in Russian, which is about five pages in Russian and then followed with the English translation hoping maybe this time they would pay attention.
LEVIN: I want to pick it up right there, right there when we return.
KENGOR: Sure.
LEVIN: Because this is too important to speed through. Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget, most week nights, you can watch me on LevinTV on her brand-new network, Blaze TV. Here is what you do, you go to blazetv.com/mark to sign up, blazetv.com/mark or you can give us a call on our toll-free number, 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV. We'd love to have you. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Professor Kengor, so there is this communication with Kennedy, it's written up by the head of the KGB sent to the head of the Communist Party, the head of the USSR. It is interesting that Democrats talk about the Logan Act, this would be a clear violation of Logan Act, some people would even say this is treason. Whatever. What happened?
KENGOR: Well, that is the real scandal is we don't even know what happened because no one even asked Kennedy about it. No one reported on it. There weren't any articles in the "New York Times" or "Washington Post" or "Boston Globe" or any of them. No one reported on it.
LEVIN: So this first is revealed in 1992.
KENGOR: Ninety two and then - and so the chronology, now think about this. Kennedy died in 2009, so you have 17 years between 1992 and 2009. My book came out in 2006 and it was there, and as I said, a CN8 - not CNN, but CN8 reporter asked Kennedy's office about it and they just issued a very tight little one or two sentences arguing with the interpretation of the document.
LEVIN: But this document that is in your book and this document that is mentioned by the "London Times" and the BBC, there are document out there.
KENGOR: It's out there.
LEVIN: It's in your book.
KENGOR: For a lot of years.
LEVIN: Published by a major publisher.
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: Congress doesn't hold a single hearing?
KENGOR: Right, right.
LEVIN: Congress is not interested.
KENGOR: By the way, imagine my relief, too when the Kennedy people, the CN8 reporter said we contacted the Kennedy, and I thought, "Oh, here it comes. Here it comes. They are going to say, it's a forgery, doesn't he know? The stupid professor." They didn't say that. They didn't deny it. They didn't deny it. The document is real, so the document is real, but it begs the question - okay, what happened next? Did Kennedy go to Moscow? What was the next step?
And frankly here is really what happened. Andropov got very sick. In fact, Andropov that Kennedy was very impressed with, KAL007, the 269 people who died in the Korean Airliner that was shot down by the Soviets in September 1983, Reagan even wrote in his diary, "Word is that Andropov is very sick."
So Andropov would be dead within a year of this offer, so maybe that happened, maybe because Andropov got sick, they dropped the ball on it. They did not follow up, but somebody - you think, just having a general interest in the media would have at least call Kennedy, at least by 1992 to follow up on the "London Times" piece to find out what happened.
LEVIN: Chuck Schumer was elected to Congress, I believe in 1981. He was a born a member of Congress. Nancy Pelosi is elected to Congress, I am doing this by memory, I believe 1987. Well, they were alive.
KENGOR: Right.
LEVIN: They are still alive. You have the House Intelligence Committee. You have the Senate Intelligence Committee. You have these Foreign Affairs Committees. They didn't want to investigate one of their own people, did they? They didn't want to know about Ted Kennedy, did they?
KENGOR: No, they didn't, and I had one Liberal who said to me, "Well, but look, Kennedy is doing this in the interest of peace. He is worried about the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon. He's trying to do what he can. He is worried about Reagan. This is justified." And I said, "Well, I don't know if that's his motivations or not, no one has asked him about it." Right? Are there any political motivations in this? Just at least, ask and find out, and maybe at some point, they would have went --
LEVIN: But even if there are no political ...
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: ... aspects to this.
KENGOR: Right.
LEVIN: What he did is an abomination. He went around a sitting President of the United States. He conspired with the KGB and the Soviet government at the time, people need to understand, we had a Cold War going on. We were confronting the Soviets all over the world.
KENGOR: I will tell you how hot it was. May 1983, March of 1983, Reagan had done the evil empire speech. He did the SDI speech, NSDD 75 went public about that time.
LEVIN: What is that?
KENGOR: That was National Security Decision Directive 75, which was one of the most important documents aimed at taking down and defeating Soviet communism and winning the Cold War.
Now, Reagan's closest National Security advisor ran the NSC, Bill Clark. You knew Bill Clark, and --
LEVIN: One of Reagan's closest friends and confidantes.
KENGOR: Yes, exactly, and Clark was like a grandfather to me. I became his biographer. I asked him about this. I said, "Were you aware of what Kennedy was doing at the time?" He said, "You know, Paul, we had heard - I had heard things about this. But I did not know any information," and at this point, Mark, that would have been probably 2005 I would have been having that conversation with Clark. He said, "I cannot help you. I cannot remember."
But the point here is, Clark who was Reagan's right-hand man, he did not know what Kennedy was doing. It's not like they cleared it with the Reagan White House or with the NSC and said, "Look, we just want to let you know that Senator Kennedy is going to be reaching out to the Soviets. He wants to make contact."
LEVIN: But this is to me, Professor Kengor, why I wanted to do this program with you and why I consider this so important. It's called context. You have overwhelming evidence of a senior senator who wants to be President of the United States at some point or may have won it, too; of a very important political family, has enormous influence in the United States Senate and with the media and with other organizations.
He is up to his eyeballs including not with the Russians, with the Soviets. Here, we have a President of the United States today. We've had an investigation for two years. We've got thousands of so-called journalists and others trying to pin on him some collusion with the Russians - something. Which was a sort of propaganda started by Hillary Clinton, pushed by Schumer. We have a criminal investigation, constant talk about impeachment, constant talk about indictments, with nothing.
Sitting back waiting for a special prosecutor to tell us, now, if I could prosecute the President, these are the things I would do, and then they want to you know, put the "I" word on his forehead, impeachment, and still today, when it comes to Kennedy - absolute self-censorship in the media and Congress doesn't want to know anything.
KENGOR: Yes, we pitched everybody in the media. I mean, you know how publicist work for books, right? And I am not making this up. I still carry that document around with me in my briefcase and I even had a couple of friends grill me and play the role of who is the "60 Minutes" reporter, Leslie Stahl.
I pictured myself just getting nailed, right, asking me all of these questions. I didn't have to worry about it. They just never called.
LEVIN: No, no. They're busy with Ocasio-Cortez. When we come back, I want to explore Alger Hiss. Who is he? Why is he important? And his role in American history. We will be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LAUREN GREEN, CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: Live from "America's News Headquarters," I am Lauren Green. At least two people are injured after a gunman opened fire near a mall in Utah, and police tonight are still searching for the gunman. Police say the suspect opened fire outside the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, a suburb just south of Salt Lake City. The victims are reportedly a man and woman in their twenties. The man is in critical condition and the woman is in serious condition, and we will keep you updated as we learn more.
Police still investigating what they call a mass overdose at a home in Chico, California. One person is dead and 12 others hospitalized. Investigators say the victims may have ingested the powerful opioid, fentanyl. Officers performed CPR on several people and administered six doses of naloxone which can reverse the effects of an overdose. Four of those hospitalized are in critical condition. I'm Lauren Green, now back to "Life, Liberty & Levin."
LEVIN: Professor Paul Kengor, who is Alger Hiss?
KENGOR: Well, Alger Hiss was at the center probably of the greatest espionage trial of the 20th Century. He was born around the turn of the century, early 1900s, live through almost the entirety of the 20th Century and he was accused by Whittaker Chambers of helping the Soviets ...
LEVIN: A former communist.
KENGOR: A former communist.
LEVIN: Who was close to the Soviets.
KENGOR: Close to the Soviets. He actually ended up spying, working for the GRU, the Soviet GRU, which to this day is the one organization of the Soviet Union that hasn't changed the acronym. KGB went in and out including in the Yeltsin years and they are still around.
LEVIN: And Whittaker Chambers reversed course.
KENGOR: He did. He became a communist at Columbia University and probably I guess this would have been --
LEVIN: Who doesn't?
KENGOR: Yes, and that would have been around 1920 and then he ended up writing for "Masses and Mainstream," which was one of the leading party newspapers along with "Daily Worker," "People's World."
LEVIN: So why did he reverse course?
KENGOR: He eventually came to see the rotten stench of exactly what Stalinism was, what the Soviets were doing, like a lot of Americans, he was horrified by the Hitler-Stalin pact. I mean, the idea, which especially shocked American communists who were Jewish, the idea that Stalin would work with Hitler to sign a non-aggression pact, this was August 23rd-24th, 1939 where they agreed that they wouldn't go to war with one another, but they agreed that they would - that they would you mutually invade Poland.
That happened one week later, September 1st, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland that started World War II. Everybody forgets two and a half weeks later, September 17th, 1939, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east.
And so American communists to learn, you know, most of them hated Hitler and so to see their boy Stalin and they swore a loyalty oath to Stalin's Soviet Union.
LEVIN: So Chambers flips and he becomes a conservative, in many respects, a Libertarian.
KENGOR: Right.
LEVIN: He starts writing later for "National Review." He's taken under the wing of Richard Nixon and others trying to get to the bottom of this Alger Hiss matter.
KENGOR: He didn't want to work to quote, "ensure the triumph of Soviet power in the United States," which was the exact oath that CPUSA - Communist Party USA members swore in the 1930s including almost every member of the Hollywood 10, but that's --
LEVIN: Let's stay focused on Alger Hiss.
KENGOR: Sure.
LEVIN: So tell us more about Hiss, okay?
KENGOR: So Chambers eventually left the Party and the told members of Congress - this is Cliff Notes version by far, I'm summarizing, tightening a lot of information. But he said that among the people who were the worst contacts within the United States government was a guy who worked for the State Department named Alger Hiss.
And what he eventually accused Hiss of doing and this appears to be what Hiss indeed did, Hiss would leave his State Department office late in the evening and he would take papers with him. These are classified documents that weren't supposed to even leave the office. He would take them home to his wife, Priscilla, who at night with a typewriter would retype these documents verbatim, and then in the morning, he would bring the papers back.
Now Chambers said that he was the courier of those documents from Alger Hiss to a Soviet agent by the name of Bicov (ph) and to give you an exact number to give you a sense of how egregious this was, Chambers estimated that at least 52 times, he acted as a courier of Hiss documents to the Soviets.
LEVIN: So he was a Soviet spy.
KENGOR: Soviet spy.
LEVIN: But he was more than just a State Department apparatchik.
KENGOR: Right.
LEVIN: He was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt.
KENGOR: He was and he was at Yalta.
LEVIN: And he was at Yalta and he was advising Franklin Roosevelt how to negotiate with Stalin and the Soviets while he was a spy for the Soviets.
KENGOR: And his role at Yalta, which Liberals have tried to downplay for decades was much more substantive than people realized. In fact, a great book by the late Stanton Evans and Herb Romerstein called "Stalin's Secret Agents," they have a chapter in there called, "The Ghost Ship at Yalta." Where Hiss is in many ways, the front man at Yalta of all things.
And it was at Yalta. This is February 1945.
LEVIN: But they divided up - or starting dividing up.
KENGOR: Yes, if you want to know where the Cold War began, okay, if you want to tag a date, take that week, February 4th through 11th, 1945. It was really the Cold War began at Yalta where Stalin would lie and break all the promises and assurance he gave to FDR.
LEVIN: And FDR was told over and over again by some of his advisers not to trust Stalin.
KENGOR: That's right.
LEVIN: But he listened to Hiss.
KENGOR: FDR genuinely trusted Stalin. He really did.
LEVIN: Did Franklin Roosevelt - was he ever held to account for what took place in the Oval Office?
KENGOR: Oh no.
LEVIN: I'm going to ask you more about this when we return.
KENGOR: Sure.
LEVIN: Don't forget folks. You can join us most weeknights on LevinTV, just go to blazetv.com/mark to sign up blazetv.com/mark or give us a call right now at 844-LEVIN-TV, that's 844-LEVIN-TV. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. All right, this is an egregious violation of American National Security, leading right into the Oval Office, right into the President's confidenc, the President you said had confidence in Alger Hiss.
When this came out, was it sometime after the FDR administration? Truman administration? When did this start to come out?
KENGOR: Well, so the Hiss-Chambers trial was in 1948, so at that point FDR had been dead for three years. Hiss is eventually convicted of perjury.
LEVIN: But the trial is in 1948.
KENGOR: Right, right.
LEVIN: But the accusations about him must have been before the trial.
KENGOR: Yes, absolutely and a lot of them had taken place behind closed doors as well.
LEVIN: When FDR was President, were there any questions raised near the end of his Presidency?
KENGOR: Oh FDR was getting warned about the communist threat throughout the 1930s, and in fact, Martin Dies who was the head of the Dies Committee, a Texas Democrat which, you know, eventually led into if not became the House Committee on American Activities, he talks in his memoirs about - I think it was in a 1940 meeting, if I get some of these dates wrong, not that this is a shameless plug for my book, but they are in my book, "Dupes," but Martin Dies, I think it was 1940 that he met with FDR and tried to warn him of the penetration of his administration.
Commerce Department, Agriculture Department - throughout all levels of government.
LEVIN: But this is all dismissed today as the Red Scare.
KENGOR: And FDR said to Dies, he said, "Mr. Congressman, you see a bugaboo under every bed." It's the word he used, "bugaboo."
LEVIN: But there was a bugaboo under his bed.
KENGOR: There was a bugaboo.
LEVIN: His name was Alger Hiss.
KENGOR: Alger Hiss among others. Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Lee Pressman, Victor Perlo, guys who had worked on the Wallace campaign in 1948 and a lot of these guys, too - this is a very important point. If they weren't Soviet agents, a lot of them were agents of influence or they were duped, which meant that they were kind of soft liberals who didn't really realize they're being --
LEVIN: Undermining.
KENGOR: Yes, which is probably the case of Harry Hopkins. It's probably the case of FDR's Vice President, Henry Wallace. A lot of times, the worst damage is caused not by a guy who is directly working as an undercover agent feeding information to the other side, but by guys who were clueless.
LEVIN: But where were the investigative journalists back then?
KENGOR: Well they were worshipping FDR. I mean, if they could have - if there would be a progressive Mount Rushmore, FDR would be probably the first head chiseled up there. Any - every ranking by Presidential historians of the greatest Presidents of all time --
LEVIN: He seems to be at the top.
KENGOR: He's always in the top three. It's always Lincoln and Washington in the top two, FDR number three and on this Yalta point, FDR within the last few weeks of his life, so Yalta ended February 11th, 1945. He died April of 1945. He told Averell Harriman, Anna Rosenberg, Bill Leahy, a number of people, he said, "You know, Averell was right. We can't trust Stalin." He was already breaking all of his promises.
LEVIN: And Churchill also told him.
KENGOR: He also told him and the worst quote from FDR was where he said this, "I believe that if I give Stalin everything he asked for and asked nothing from him in return," and then he uses a word "noblesse oblige." "... then he will work with me to advance the world of democracy and peace."
Stalin will not try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace. FDR was - FDR was not a communist, but he did not understand the communist threat. He thought the threat was from fascists and Nazis which is true, but he had a total blind eye to the Communist.
LEVIN: Because he was a leaning Progressive.
KENGOR: That's right.
LEVIN: Which is really the progeny of my view -- Marxism and Hegelianism - - and all the other isms.
KENGOR: And his wife as well. Eleanor is ver naive on this stuff.
LEVIN: So here we have Kennedy undermining Reagan because he's tough on the Soviets. We have FDR with Hiss and others and really, we can say he was naive. That's the best spin you can put on.
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: I mean when you're President, you're being told all the time, you check out this guy and this guy and you can't trust Stalin. I mean, it's a little more than naive in my view.
KENGOR: Amazingly.
LEVIN: But here's my point, so today the Democratic Party claims to be the party that challenges Russia.
KENGOR: Right, right.
LEVIN: Is the Democratic Party the party that challenges Russia? Are they only or are they only really getting into this Russia thing because they think it's a way to get rid of Trump?
KENGOR: Yes, that's what it is. I mean, they are suddenly now Russia Hawks, right? You know, they are suddenly - look out, they are the new Joe McCarthy's, right? They're now looking for a bugaboo under --
LEVIN: Any meeting, any e-mail, any text.
KENGOR: Everything. It's amazing. The slightest whatever, they're all over it and they've got like an entire investigative arm of every major newspaper looking into, you know, looking under every rock.
LEVIN: We have a criminal investigation with a special counsel where there was no information about any quote-unquote "collusion" available to anybody on the Russians. CNN doesn't have any. MSNBC doesn't have any. The Holocaust denying "New York Times" doesn't have any. The "Washington Post" doesn't have any and this criminal investigation goes on and when you look at this in context, what was done against the Reagan administration by a Democrat. When you look what was done in the FDR administration, by spies including Democrats working for the Soviets. I am sorry, this is the history.
And then you look at what they are doing today, turning the government upside down, turning the country upside down. If there's a meeting, if there's an e-mail, if there's a text, if there's something, it's an impeachable offense. It's absolute media insanity.
KENGOR: Well, I had a Liberal friend who e-mailed me about six or seven months ago wanting my help on this stuff. And I am like, "Where have you guys been, man?" Right? Now, all of a sudden, you hate the Russians of all things?
And he wanted to know, too. He said, "Isn't this the worst threat in the world right now, Putin?" And they've gone from being lambs to being wolves on this.
LEVIN: But when they take back the White House one of these days, they'll go back to being lambs. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: I have to ask you this, Professor, the media and the group think, the 1930s and 1940s, they really let us down, as far as I am concerned. And it's not only this and we're not going to get into this today, but there have been books written about how the "New York Times" and other media -- big media -- basically downplayed the Holocaust because they had a Progressive mindset and for a whole bunch of reasons.
You look at that period, then you look at the Reagan period where he was taking on the Soviet Union. He knew what he wanted to do. He really wanted to defeat them and they were pushing investigations and they pushed Iran-Contra. They wanted to take him out, too.
And the media was part of that, of course. The media today which clearly from day one have wanted to take out this President and they're on it every day. They give a pre-speech analysis. The other day, he gives a speech about the border and the budget and then they give a post speech analysis. Now, they are fact checkers in order to conceal, I believe, their ideology. Is that the problem? Is that the problem?
Have the media become devoured by the Progressive movement the way Hollywood has? The way Academia has for the most part? The way the Democratic Party has? Are they just another appendage of the progressive movement at this point?
KENGOR: I think they're driven by their biases and they deny that, but I mean just look at CNN. It's just 24/7 Trump, Trump, Trump.
A friend of mine in the media says that CNN is treating the Trump presidency like a natural disaster, like a hurricane, right, and it's just all negative news all the time. You really can't even go there for news that much.
KENGOR: And it's the tone. You actually have people comparing him to Adolf Hitler, to Joseph Stalin, as a white supremacist, as an anti-Semite who has Jewish children and grandchildren and they call him a liar.
You look at MSNBC, it is day in and day out. CNN does exactly the same thing. They debate whether or not he should be able as President of the United States to give a speech to the nation on our networks because he can't be trusted. He is a liar.
I'm afraid that the media have turned a corner around which they'll never return. That is that they are so ideologically driven and in one direction that it has become basically a party mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.
KENGOR: Well, I think it has been for a long time and in fact, I could see a Liberal watching this show saying, "No, no. It's just because Trump is uniquely bad." "No, no, no. You guys did this to Bush, you did it to both Bushes." Maxine Waters called George H.W. Bush a racist in 1992 and then doubled down on it and said, "No, I'm not apologizing for it. I think he's a racist."
They said horrible things about Reagan. I mean, you remember, it's unbelievable the things that they said about Reagan and Reagan in the 1980s didn't have - he didn't have Fox. He didn't have the internet. He didn't have conservative talk radio. I mean basically, it was ABC, CBS and NBC who is completely controlled by the Democrats.
LEVIN: And to underscore your point, in 1964, Barry Goldwater. You had that publication called "Fact." He had eleven hundred and some-odd psychiatrists who commented on him basically saying that he was mentally unhinged, mentally ill. Then you had the Goldwater Rule put in place by the Association for whatever for whatever.
They broke the rule this time with Trump. Again, they drag on some psychiatrists and psychologists who claim he's mentally unhinged. Let's talk about the 25th Amendment. They don't do this sort of thing with Obama. They don't do this sort of thing with Hillary Clinton. They don't do this sort of thing with Harry Truman, John Kennedy and so forth. That's why I think when we talk about freedom of the press, it's time that we, the people really start talking about it, because freedom of the press exists for us.
KENGOR: Sure.
LEVIN: It doesn't exist for Time Warner. It doesn't exist for Comcast that owns these -- the point of freedom of the press, freedom of the speech, the First Amendment in the Constitution is for the people. Do you think the people are being served by the media today?
KENGOR: No, I don't and it's why you need to push I think for even more different types of media and why people need to go to sources like this, like your show and I think it's why Conservatives need to use media platforms, social media.
Again, with Reagan in the 80, what did Reagan have, Mark? He had like "National Review," "American Spectator of Human Events," and that was it, right? I don't even know if "Washington Times" had started up releasing --
LEVIN: You know what? As you well know, two massive electoral landslides.
KENGOR: Yes.
LEVIN: And the second time around, even though Kennedy was conspiring against him.
KENGOR: Which is an amazing thing.
LEVIN: Massive popular vote, 49 states in the Electoral College and about a thousand short have taken the 50th state, Minnesota from the guy he was running against, Walter Mondale. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN : Now, today the modern Democratic Party is supposed to be upset about Russia. They are electing more and more so-called Democratic Socialists. They have a lot in common with some aspects of that regime.
But let's look at this quickly. You have Cuba. You have the "New York Times" strongly supported the Castro Revolution. You have Jim Wright, former Speaker of the House, Democrat meeting with Ortega, communist in Nicaragua and he's back and he's a thug.
You have John Kerry in 1971 and it's in your book who is meeting with the North Vietnam communist delegation before the peace negotiations, the official peace negotiations. Maybe there's a reason why the media in this country never provide context for the reports.
You've got millennials out there who probably don't know anything that we're talking about, probably aren't taught about it in college and so forth, so they want you to believe that this Russia collusion thing and so forth and so on is a one-off and that it exists and this e-mail means everything and this text means everything this meeting means everything. Am I wrong?
KENGOR: No, no and in fact that "New York Times" reporting on Cuba, it was Herb Matthews who did the infamous reporting, it was like 1957 and I think it was even Che Guevara that said when the world gave us up for dead, it was the Matthew's article and the "New York Times" that resurrected us. It's very true.
And Kerry - John Kerry, after that meeting, he would also go and he would testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about our troops committing war crimes in Vietnam reminiscent in a fashion of Genghis Khan as he put it, right? Genghis Khan.
LEVIN: And Genghis Khan.
KENGOR: That's right.
LEVIN: As the greatest genocidal maniac the earth has ever known. He killed eleven percent of the world's population.
KENGOR: Yes, it's awful. That he would say that and of course, that came back to bite him in 2004 over the Swift boat veterans.
LEVIN: And yet, he was still nominated.
KENGOR: Well that's - exactly. He was the Democratic nominee in 2004. So, not only did they really not complain about that much on their side, it was allowed to go through to the point where he became the junior senator from Massachusetts under Senator Ted Kennedy, the senior senator and got the Democratic nomination in 2004.
So the media, the Liberal media has an incredible ability to ignore the glacier, right and then focus on something else or again look under every rock, look for a bugaboo under every bed when it comes to somebody like Donald Trump. It all depends on whether it affects their guy, if it's their guy in the office or if it's their guy who's not in the office.
LEVIN: All right, it's been a great pleasure.
KENGOR: Oh, thank you.
LEVIN: Thank you, Professor.
KENGOR: Yes, sure thing.
LEVIN: We appreciate it.
KENGOR: Appreciate you.
LEVIN: Don't forget join us next time on "Life, Liberty and Levin."
Content and Programming Copyright 2019 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2019 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox