Now that the Democratic primary race is down to two people, I guess it’s time for the silly season to blossom fully in our elite political press. One of the fundamental dynamics in this business holds that, if you work really hard to pry documents loose from the government, what you pry loose must have an inherent newsworthiness, and must be presented in the most dramatic fashion possible, even if what you’ve pried loose is something as innocuous as the menu for a state dinner honoring the Moldovan prime minister.

Hence we have this piece in The New York Times, which I believe is best read in a darkened room with an organ playing ominous minor chords in the background and a coffin for a coffee table. Start with the headline.

The mayor of Burlington, Vt., wrote to a Soviet counterpart in a provincial city that he wanted the United States and the Soviet Union to “live together as friends.” Unbeknown to him, his desire for friendship meshed with the efforts of Soviet officials in Moscow to “reveal American imperialism as the main source of the danger of war.” The New York Times examined 89 pages of letters, telegrams and internal Soviet government documents revealing in far greater detail the extent of Mr. Sanders’s personal effort to establish ties between his city and a country many Americans then still considered an enemy despite the reforms being initiated at the time under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary.



We will pause here to give you time to emit a proper, “Bwah-ha-ha-ha.” We continue.



They also show how the Kremlin viewed these sister city relationships as vehicles to sway American public opinion about the Soviet Union. “One of the most useful channels, in practice, for actively carrying out information-propaganda efforts has proved to be sister-city contact,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry document provided to Yaroslavl officials said. The documents are part of a government archive in Yaroslavl, Russia, which became the sister city of Burlington. The files are open to the public, though archivists there said that, until now, no one had asked to see them.

And why would that be, one wonders. Could it be that the files in question were so banal that anyone researching the archives took lunch rather than examining them?

It is important to remember what was going on while Mayor Bernie Sanders was committing this perfidy. First of all, at that time, the Soviet Union was falling apart. The American public didn’t know that because the CIA largely missed the most momentous geopolitical development of the 20th Century—nice work, fellas—and also because much of the American foreign policy team assembled by Ronald Reagan, cheered on by newly empowered neoconservative think tanks, was still waiting for Sandinistas in pick-up trucks to arrive in Brownsville.

Sanders sits in his office as mayor of Burlington, 1985. Newsday LLC Getty Images

Gorbachev was trying to hold his country together with his teeth, and failing. He was trying to reach a rapprochement with the West, and his relationship with Reagan was beginning to unnerve many of the Cold War relics who saw their main gig dying right before their eyes. (Remember Jeane Kirkpatrick, an acclaimed conservative intellectual of the time, who built her career on the notion that leftist dictatorships never fail of their own accord? That was cool.) George Will memorably ripped Reagan for being a dupe.

In fact, the Sister Cities program, in which Mayor Sanders was attempting to involve the city of Burlington, was part of this effort to thaw the relationship between the United States and the rapidly decomposing USSR. How do I know this? Ronald Reagan said so.

Sister Cities International is also an important part of our effort to expand and broaden contacts and communications between the people of the United States and the Soviet Union. The President and General Secretary Gorbachev agreed in Geneva on the utility of broadening exchanges and contacts and finding new ways to increase cooperation. People-to-people programs can help build better understanding and genuine constituencies for peace.

This story exists for two reasons: one, the Times looked at obscure documents that nobody else ever bothered to read, and two, they wanted to put the name “Bernie Sanders” in a story with the words, “Soviet Union.” If we’re going to go down the road of context-free, ooga-booga, what-else-are-you-hiding? political reporting again, the Times should let us know so we can all go to sleep until December.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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