TED KENNEDY FILES RELEASED

[Bernice Moore]

TED KENNEDY FILES RELEASED SEE

http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/kennedy.htm FOR DOCUMENTS

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/06/14/fbi_will_release_kennedy_file.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34248485/ns/us_news-life/ REVEALS THREATS ON HIS LIFE..

[Bernice Moore]

Buckley notified the FBI of Ted Kennedy assassination rumor

By Matt Viser, Globe Staff

It is unlikely that conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., ever agreed with much that Senator Edward M. Kennedy stood for.

But when Buckley’s office got word of a potential assassination attempt, he immediately notified the FBI, according to new documents released today

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2010/06/buckley_notifie.html

[Bernice Moore]

HI NORMAN, WELL THEY TRACED ONE APARENTLY,BULLY, I IMAGINE THERE WERE MANY MORE ONLY MUMS THE WORD, UPDATE AND A VERY SHORT NEWS UPDATE VIDEO...B

Records: Ted Kennedy threatened in 1985

By ANDREW MIGA and GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - Previously secret FBI records released Monday show there were death threats against then-Sen. Edward Kennedy, even five years after his failed 1980 White House bid.

Read the FBI records

The documents showed that on May 23, 1985, the U.S. Capitol Police passed onto the FBI a copy of a letter sent to the Secret Service, ostensibly by a Warren, Mich., resident. The sender, whose name was redacted, declared: "Brass tacks, I'm gonna kill Kennedy and (President Ronald) Reagan, and I really mean it."

http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/massachusetts/ted-kennedy-docs-show-death-threats-as-late-as-1985

Most of the documents are about death threats and extortion attempts against the Massachusetts Democrat.

"These threats originated from multiple sources, including individuals, anonymous persons, and members of radical groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, "Minutemen" organizations, and the National Socialist White People's Party," the FBI wrote on its website.

[William Kelly]

John Judge's take on the Ted Kennedy FBI Files:

The most recently released files from the FBI on Ted Kennedy are used here to further impugn Sirhan Sirhan and spin the myth that Kennedy's worst enemy was not the intelligence agencies and Pentagon involved in killing both his brothers, but rather an assortment of "lone nuts" from hate groups, all of whom would have had motive enough for public consumption and compromise enough from government entanglements to have made perfect patsies.

However, a third death by assassin would not have been accepted by the public or so easily camouflaged and un-investigated as the first two murders, as the killers well knew. Thus, Chappaquiddick was the operational equivalent, an assassination of character that for whatever reasons Ted affirmed and went along with, even though he could not have been in the car.

Interesting that the FBI was running a check on the travels of Mary Jo Kopechne to Greece, what might that have been about? If she was a simple "boiler-room girl" political secretary, who would have cared.

Was this a link to Onassis? Mary Jo was far more important than we have been led to believe by the controlled press. The last person to see the LAPD files on Robert Kennedy's assassination before they were locked away for decades, a secretary for Senator Smathers of Florida, who was far closer to Joe Kennedy, Sr. and the Nixon/Rebozo/Wooford Dade County Mafia than to the three rebellious sons. Mary Jo worked for Smathers at the same time as her roommate, Carol Tyler, who had been a secretary to Bobby Baker (and who died in a plane crash in Alaska, like Hale Boggs), and also one of Jack Ruby's strippers.

Mae Brussell was tracking her associations when she called Kopechne's parents, three days before Chappaquiddick, to tell them that their daughter would soon be killed. That is why her parents wanted to re-exhume her body when her blouse was found to have been filled with blood. They were convinced not to do so by their recently acquired volunteer attorney, Blatchford, who had penetrated the Peace Corps for the CIA.

Chuck Colson paid $10,000 to Tony Ulascewitz (the "bagman" for the CREEPs behind Watergate, and also the former NYC cop sent to search for city school records on Lee Harvey Oswald) for "Operation Sandwedge" that summer, the details of which were never sought or revealed to the Watergate prosecutors or investigators. Ulazcewitz testified that Colson had asked him to pose as a reporter in Martha's Vineyard to ask "embarassing questions" of Ted Kennedy about the "accident". Strangely, Tony arrived with many of the CREEP operatives on the island three days before the car went in to Poucha Pond, and also never appears at any of the press conferences following the event. The real job was to wedge the Oldsmobile in the sand with Kopechne's dead body inside, many long hours after Ted left the party, attended by many other "boiler-room girls" who rose to prominence in law and media in the years to follow. Ted awoke in the early hours of the morning in dry clothes and came down to ask the time of the motel clerk. He was seen in a jovial mood at breakfast the next morning, unaware of the scandal that awaited him or the death of Mary Jo. All the evidence at the scene makes it abundantly clear he was not in the car at the time it went into the water and could not have gotten out the driver's side had he been.

Somehow he was forced to create a story that the inquest judge clearly did not credit at all, and has stuck to even in his autobiography, taking credit for a crime he did not commit. Was it then coincidence that John F. Kennedy, Jr. died in a plane crash in the waters off Martha's vineyand on the anniversary eve of Chappaquiddick decades later? Or did Sirhan plot that one too? JJ

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KENNEDY_FBI_FILE?SITE=NJMOR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[Terry Mauro]

Who can forget the Kennedy family's involvement in the FBI sting of Hillary Clinton. Edward Kennedy's Brother in law Raymond Reggie was helping the FBI to entrap Hillary Clinton. The Kennedy family is not some squeaky clean group of liberal democrats. Look further at their involvement with the private security firm INTERTEL. Or their decades long association with NSA/ INTERTEL operative Walter Sheridan, of NBC White Paper fame.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/04/24/hillary_clinton_aide_reportedly_taped/

Hillary Clinton aide reportedly taped

Kennedy in-law said to aid the FBI

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | April 24, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brother-in-law secretly taped at least one telephone conversation as part of an FBI investigation into a former aide to Senator Hillary Clinton, according to published reports.

Raymond Reggie, a brother of Kennedy's wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, pleaded guilty Thursday on federal bank fraud charges in New Orleans.

Further:

A New Orleans political consultant who is Senator Kennedy's brother-in-law, Raymond Reggie, has been operating in Democratic circles for the last three years as an undercover informant for the FBI, sources close to the matter said yesterday.

At a federal court hearing yesterday morning, Reggie, 43, who organized fund-raisers for President and Mrs. Clinton, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, bank fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors described check-kiting and loan fraud schemes he operated involving three Louisiana banks, but they did not publicly detail his cooperation with the government.

http://www.nysun.com/national/kennedy-relative-acted-as-informant-in-democrat/12645/

Reggie's role in taping the former Clinton aide for the FBI surfaced as a result of that plea, the reports said. The reports quoted unnamed sources as saying Reggie worked with the FBI in its investigation of former Clinton aide David Rosen.

Reggie cooperated with the FBI in an effort to reduce his sentence, according to reports Friday in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, the New York Post, and The New York Sun.

Rosen has been under investigation on accusations of filing false campaign finance reports, stemming from a 2000 fund-raiser for Clinton in Hollywood. He was indicted last January on charges that he falsely reported that the fund-raiser cost $400,000, instead of the actual cost of the event, $1.2 million, according to an Associated Press report.

Clinton herself is not a target of the investigation, according to The Times-Picayune.

Reggie has been friendly with a number of prominent Democrats, including President Clinton. He has also contributed to the campaigns of former vice president Al Gore and Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, as well as Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign.

Reggie's family has long been close to the Kennedy family. Edmund Reggie, the father of Ray and Victoria, was a key political supporter of President Kennedy.

It was through that connection that Senator Edward M. Kennedy got to know Victoria, whom he married in 1992. Last year, Edmund Reggie, a retired Louisiana judge, came to Boston to help broker a deal related to the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, an effort lauded by Kennedy.

The bank fraud case against Ray Reggie alleges that he defrauded one bank of $3.5 million, according to The Times-Picayune.

The account of the unnamed sources quoted in the published reports could not be verified yesterday by the Globe.

Spokesmen for Senators Kennedy and Clinton, and the lawyer representing Reggie, could not be reached for comment.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

[Pamela Brown]

This was a headline story in the Boston Globe also, as you can imagine;

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/06/15/death_threats_hounded_kennedy_for_decades_fbi_files_show/

I had to grab a copy on my way out of Logan.

[Michael Hogan]

This was a headline story in the Boston Globe also, as you can imagine;

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/06/15/death_threats_hounded_kennedy_for_decades_fbi_files_show/

I had to grab a copy on my way out of Logan.

From that article:

The files, revealed under an agreement with the Kennedy family, lack certain details and insights into critical parts of the senator’s life. Many names are redacted to protect the privacy of other individuals. There is no indication what documents might have been left out entirely at the request of the family, which was allowed to review the file before its release to raise any privacy concerns.

The Kennedy family, through prominent lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, declined to comment on the contents of the file or discuss what might have been kept from public view at their request.

[Pamela Brown]

This was a headline story in the Boston Globe also, as you can imagine;

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/06/15/death_threats_hounded_kennedy_for_decades_fbi_files_show/

I had to grab a copy on my way out of Logan.

From that article:

The files, revealed under an agreement with the Kennedy family, lack certain details and insights into critical parts of the senator’s life. Many names are redacted to protect the privacy of other individuals. There is no indication what documents might have been left out entirely at the request of the family, which was allowed to review the file before its release to raise any privacy concerns.

The Kennedy family, through prominent lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, declined to comment on the contents of the file or discuss what might have been kept from public view at their request.

The mystique will continue. There is information presented at the level of the public, and then there is the rest of the information which the common people are usually not privileged to. So is the JFK Library Camelot Central -- we get to see and hear JFK discussing many issues, including a fascinating half-hour film about the Cuban Missile Crisis narrated using his own statements about it. There is not much on Jackie, perhaps because she had the audacity to marry again, and virtually nothing on John Jr.

[William Kelly]

Here's two contrasting news articles on the release of some of Ted Kennedy's FBI files.

As the guy Ernie Lazar mentioned earlier - Dr. Athan Theoharis is quoted in this article, his interesting perception that the files tell us more about JEH and the FBI than it does about Ted Kennedy, the second article tells us more about the reporter than it does about either Kennedy or the files. I can assure him that for the "knighted" Kennedy Clan and Teddy's widow, it's only David Jones' painful writing that is painful reading, as he clearly doesn't know what he is writing about. As an example he says it is quite obvious why the FBI redacted the name of the London "informant" who harbored JFK's killers and threatened the life of Teddy, - the reason being so we can't check it out, while it was okay to out Mrs. Jacqueline Hammond, the ex wife of the US ambassador to Spain who lived at the Carlyle Hotel and arranged for the Kennedy orgies. Why the double standard? I would guess maybe that the ambassador's wife is dead but the guy who harbored the Mafia Kennedy killer is still alive and living at Wimbledon? I will comment further on if anybody is interested. But off the top of my head, why were these reports not released as part of the JFK Act, as they should have been, and only now being released under Teddy's mantle? - BK

FBI's Kennedy Files Are Window Into A Life And A Bureau

By Sonari Glinton

Published June 15, 2010

BOSTON The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released files on the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who died in August.

The previously secret documents became available after a number of Freedom of Information Act requests by media organizations.

And they are a peek into an extraordinary life.

They contain hundreds and hundreds of pages of death threats. There are also investigations into assassination plots, Kennedy family correspondence with the FBI and press clippings the agency used to keep track of Kennedy.

There is also a strange report of a rumor that the mafia wanted to attack the character of Edward and Robert Kennedy by using associates of Frank Sinatra to compromise the Kennedy brothers at a New York party.

There's an extensive section on Kennedy's 1969 car crash at Chappaquiddick, made up mostly of press clippings. The records detail the car accident that claimed the life of Kennedy's passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, and include a cable showing local police tried to keep her death under wraps at least for a while.

All this, even though Kennedy was not considered a criminal suspect or seen as a security threat.

Athan Theoharis, a historian who's studied the FBI for more than 40 years, says the files reveal as much about the FBI as they do about the late senator.

"Someone who was prominent was not immune to being monitored and to have information collected on that individual," Theoharis said. "And you're finding as well is that they're doing is collecting misinformation, allegations, they're clipping the press."

The files begin in 1961, before Kennedy's election to the U.S. Senate. The FBI has made available documents up to the early 1990s.

Theoharis says the late senator's files help us understand the very complex relationship between the Kennedys and former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover.

"Hoover had in his office file, this massive file about John Kennedy and a massive file on Joseph Kennedy. And they also had this file on Robert Kennedy," Theoharis said, recalling how each of those files has generated lots of publicity over the years. But it hasn't been the same with Sen. Kennedy's file.

"(It) sort of escaped our understanding of how closely they were monitoring him and what particular information they were collecting about him," Theoharis said.

Headline: The Mafia, orgies with Marilyn and the English link to JFK's assassination

By David Jones

Browsing through the FBI files on Edward Kennedy - a 2,352- page dossier whose release last week casts new light on the violence and sexual chicanery that were the staples of daily life for America's 'first family' - I came across one intriguing report which has been overlooked.

Logged in April, 1970, it concerns a tip-off from a man claiming to be a long-standing Mafia member based in London. In two typed letters postmarked Wimbledon and addressed to the FBI's Dallas office, the informant recounts how he became embroiled in the plot to murder President John F. Kennedy seven years earlier - and warns that his youngest brother, Edward, is next on the Mob's hit-list.

Photo caption: Orgies: Marilyn Monroe was said to have been a regular at sex parties attended by the Kennedy brothers

'In 1961 I attended a general meeting of the Mafia, during which the main discussion was the killing of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,' writes the tipster, whose name has been blanked out of the file for obvious reasons. 'Although you may have closed your file on the killing of the President, you are wrong. The man who actually killed him, also the man who paid the killer, is alive and at this moment preparing to kill Senator E. Kennedy (JFK's younger brother Teddy) and Mr Nixon (then newly installed in the White House).'

Claiming to have harboured JFK's hit-man in England for three years after the president was shot, the tipster says his conscience is troubling him and offers to help the FBI trap the assassin. But he pleads with them to preserve his confidentiality 'for if any of this leaks out I am a dead man'.

Photo caption: Damned of brothers: Robert, Ted and John Kennedy, two of whom were shot

Frustratingly, the outcome of the Wimbledon letters inquiry is not recorded. And, of course, Edward Kennedy did not fall to a hit-man's bullet all those years ago, like JFK and his other brother, Robert, who was shot in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968. The youngest of the trio died only last summer; then a florid-faced, white-haired old man of 77, he finally succumbed to a brain tumour.

However, the very fact that these reports were read personally by the FBI's legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered his London-based agents to meet the informer and fully investigate his story, tells us they were taken very seriously.

Reading this historic archive - which has just been made public under U.S. freedom of information laws, despite an attempt to keep it secret by Ted Kennedy's widow, Victoria - one understands why.

Despite the banal and grammatically flawed language of the 'G-men', as the bureau's gumshoes are known, one can almost reach out and touch the vicious hatred directed towards carousing Senator Teddy and his clan of playboy politicos.

Photo caption: (L-R) are Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. It was claimed that Sammy Davis Jr, Sinatra and Peter Lawford attended sex parties

Over the years the FBI received many tips that the Mafia were out to get Teddy and conspiracy theorists will make much of this. They will no doubt claim it reinforces a long-held theory - that JFK was not murdered by a lone gunman (Lee Harvey Oswald), but was the victim of a Mob hit, and perhaps even Robert Kennedy, too.

The Mafia certainly held many grudges against the family, dating back to the days when patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, made his fortune with their help in Boston. But they became disgruntled after allegedly rigging a key election in JFK's favour in Chicago in 1960. They expected the favour to be returned, but once in office he determined to put an end to organised crime, and as his attorney general, Robert, spearheaded his war on the Mafia.

But the death threats against Edward began even before he entered the U.S. Senate, as a young man of 30, and came from almost every quarter of American society. His innumerable enemies included embittered Vietnam War veterans angered by his 'Commie' views; Irish Protestants infuriated by his support for the IRA; white supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan; plus the plethora of deranged loners who simply wanted to get him because he was a Kennedy.

Then there were the many moralists, outraged by the married Kennedy's serial womanising and in particular his reprehensible behaviour after the affair which forever sealed his reputation as a self-serving coward . . . the death of pretty 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, whom he left to drown when his car plunged off a bridge following a drunken party at Chappaquiddick.

Yet, much as the FBI files tell us about Edward Kennedy, they are perhaps more illuminating about the enigmatic Hoover, who founded the organisation in 1935 and remained in charge until his death 37 years later.

Plainly obsessed with the Kennedys, he was desperate to know every detail of their lives. A closet homosexual, Hoover was particularly interested in their innumerable sexual adventures, which at once fascinated and repulsed him.

One can well imagine the goggle-eyed director, arguably the most influential figure in America's corridors of power, solemnly perusing the latest through-the-bedroom-keyhole account, hot off the telex from one of his agents.

'They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot off Bobby's," Ted Kennedy once remarked.

Best-selling Kennedy author Christopher Andersen attributes the FBI chief's prurient interest in Teddy partly to the fact that his organisation failed to protect JFK and Robert. But, as he remarks: 'If we didn't already know the Kennedys were a bizarre combination of Camelot and the Borgias, we surely do now.

'FBI agents doggedly recorded every rumour, every overheard conversation, every titbit of gossip and innuendo. No matter how unreliable or even silly a tip was, it wound up in the files.'

Indeed so. All-embracing as they are, the newly released files only cover the years from 1961 to 1985. But from the first log it is clear that Ted Kennedy was singled out for the sort of attention we might expect in a police state, not the world's greatest democracy.

One early report, made in 1961, records Ted Kennedy's fact-finding visit to Central and South America. On his way home, he left his diary on the plane and it was found by a cleaner. Very conveniently, though, it was not returned to its owner, but to the prying FBI.

Every scrawled page is duly photocopied and filed, and at the height of the Cold War it isn't only Kennedy's earnest admiration for Venezuelan socialism that raises eyebrows at the bureau's Washington HQ. '11.30. Return to hotel - see ****,' Kennedy has scribbled in the diary, the name of his late-night companion having been erased presumably to spare her blushes.

'We have night-cap and hit the sack at 12.00.'

Photo caption: Enemies: John and Robert Kennedy with FBI director J Edgar Hoover

At the time Teddy had been married for just three years to his first wife, Joan, and this is his first secretly recorded act of adultery. But it was by no means the last. In fact, his cheating is a recurrent theme in the secret dossier, and as Christopher Andersen says: 'These files remind us that, for most of his life, Teddy like the rest of his family was engaged in an almost frantic pursuit of power, money and sex - and if other people got hurt, that was just too bad.'

In a report filed in July 1965, by which time Teddy was an apparently clean cut senator aged 33, the scene switches to the Carlyle, the swankiest hotel in New York. Already he is being tipped to follow the slain JFK into the White House, but his debauchery of just a few years before, had it been more widely known, would have put paid to his presidential ambitions.

'It was reported that Mrs Jacqueline Hammond, age 40, has considerable information concerning sex parties . . . in which a number of persons participated at different times,' the file reads. 'Among those mentioned were the following individuals: Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy, Sammy Davis Jr, Mr and Mrs Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe.'

The hostess of these orgies, Mrs Hammond, was a millionaire motherof-two who was divorced from the former U.S. ambassador to Spain, who retained a room at the Carlyle.

Then a Hollywood heart-throb, Lawford was still married to the Kennedys' sister, Patricia, which doesn't seem to have bothered them. The other named participants need no introduction. Monroe had died in 1962, three years before the unidentified snitch behind this report contacted the FBI.

JFK was long dead, too, of course, and there appears to be no corroboration for this potentially explosive tip-off. None of this seemed to concern Hoover, however, and the information went into Kennedy's bulging manila files.

Just a few days later, Sinatra's name was whispered to the FBI in connection with the Kennedys again - only this time he was said to be at the heart of a plot devised by the Mafia to discredit Teddy, Robert and Lawford.

The tip-off came from a 'reliable' informant 'acquainted with some of the Italian hoodlum element in Milwaukee', who claimed Sinatra's Mob associates planned to smear the trio by setting them up 'in a compromising situation' with women.

Where Teddy was concerned it would have been like leading bees to honey, for he appears to have sown his wild oats across the 50 states. On one trip to Nevada, ostensibly to discuss underground nuclear missile testing, he reportedly sloped off to a Las Vegas casino hotel, picked up a 'bosomy' blonde showgirl, aged 25, and repaired to his room, ordering up a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of vodka.

The married senator didn't appear to care that his close-protection detectives were staying on the same floor - much less that his character was under the microscope after the infamous Chappaquiddick episode, which had occurred just a month earlier.

The incident with which his name will for ever be associated happened in July 1969 after a party for the so-called 'Boiler Room Girls' - a group of youthful, and predictably attractive young female volunteers who had helped with Bobby Kennedy's ill-fated presidential campaign.

After downing Bacardi and Cokes, Teddy drove away late at night with Mary Jo in the passenger seat. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, the car veered off a bridge, overturned and sank in the creek. Mary Jo drowned, but although Kennedy escaped he did not even raise the alarm until the following morning, by which time her body had already been found.

Kennedy always denied any impropriety, claiming he barely knew Mary Jo and was simply giving her a lift, and insisted that he had dived repeatedly into the river in an effort to rescue her.

But although he escaped with a suspended two-month jail sentence, his conduct that night appalled the nation and wrecked his hopes of becoming president.

Indeed, the files reveal little else about the incident, but from them we can see how the fall-out tainted Kennedy's life long afterwards. Convinced that Kennedy would be his Democratic opponent at the next presidential election, and intent on using Chappaquiddick to blacken his name, President Richard Nixon took a special interest in the saga.

His aides appear to have discovered that Kennedy had holidayed in Greece without his wife the previous year, so a young White House lawyer, John W. Dean III, was ordered to find out if Mary Jo had been with him.

Dean, who later became Nixon's chief counsel and was embroiled in Watergate, duly asked the FBI to check her passport records. Hoover granted this request without question.

Frustratingly, however, we are not told whether they had a secret tryst, for the results of the inquiry have been expunged from the files. As information can only be withheld on the grounds that it might be damaging to a living person, and not because it might cause embarrassment or scandal, we can only guess as to why it has been withheld.

The assumption must be that the FBI decided it might upset Kopechne's surviving relatives - or Kennedy's. When I spoke to Mr Dean at his California home this week, he insisted he did not know the answer either.

'I didn't even know why I was asking the question,' he told me. 'It did seem odd at the time. But when you are 30 years old, your boss is the Attorney General and you are asked to call the FBI, you call the FBI. It's ancient history now.'

Perhaps so, but endlessly fascinating nonetheless. If Kennedy's life had been in danger before he left poor Mary Jo, afterwards the threats came thick and fast. 'Senator Kennedy, you are a dirty rotton [sic] murderer,' began one typical letter, penned on yellow paper. 'Your two brothers were killed unjustly, but when you get murdered it will be a blessing.'

The writer claimed Kopechne had been pregnant when she drowned - and others came forward with similarly dark theories. Some of threats sound grimly amusing. One came from a prostitute who vowed to kill Kennedy for 'being an immoral man'.

Another was sent by a psychic who predicted his impending doom and boasted of a '96.1 accuracy rate'.

But most professional assassins don't send warnings through the post, and news of the most worrying plots reached the FBI vi a informants. Among them was a chilling tip from a prisoner in California, who for 18 months occupied a cell next to Robert Kennedy's killer, Sirhan Sirhan.

He claimed the deranged Palestinian assassin, who is believed to have shot Robert in 1968 over his pro-Israeli politics, offered him one million dollars - plus a car - in return for murdering Teddy. Small wonder that Teddy would jump whenever he heard a sudden loud noise.

They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot off Bobby's,' he once remarked.

In the opinion of historian Douglas Brinkley, the newly released files - sensational as they are - contain nothing that will further damage Ted Kennedy's reputation. To the contrary, he says, they 'show how brave he was to run for president, to go out on the road, and try to have a normal life with a bull's eye on his chest'.

However, given his conduct after Chappaquiddick, and the despicable way he conducted himself after his brothers were murdered, it is difficult to regard him as any kind of hero.

And remember, thus far we have been privy only to the first part of his life. Very soon the FBI will be compelled to release a second file, covering his later years. Doubtless it will include his role in the attempted cover-up of an alleged rape by his nephew, William Kennedy Smith on a Florida beach in 1991 (Smith was acquitted).

Though the FBI's all-seeing founder was by then long dead, his methods endure, and we can be sure that many other lurid interludes have been recorded. For everyone who remains intrigued with America's first family, they will be enlightening and entertaining.

But for the benighted Kennedy clan, and especially playboy Teddy's widow, they will make for painful reading.

Edited June 25, 2010 by William Kelly

[William Kelly]

Okay,

Ted Kennedy dies and we get to read his fBI file, but then Sen. Byrd of West Virginia dies, and nothing?

Here's a guy who served as Exaulted Grand Master of the KKK and went on to become the longest member of the US Senate,

and nobody's interested in his FBI files like they were Ted Kennedy's

Was Bryd an informant or not?

Inquiring minds want to know.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,595684,00.html