INTRODUCTION Shortly after the fall of the Berlin
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall commentators in the United States sought to explain
the dramatic revolutions of 1989. Conservative supporters of Ronald Reagan attributed the events
to the United States military build up of the 1980s. More liberal commentators gave credit the
enlightened policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. This work will argue that the revolutions
of 1989 were largely a product of the gradual decay of a social and political system that never took
root in Eastern Europe.
At the same time there was one Western strategist that correctly analyzing the events of
1989. As a Harvard professor in the 1950s, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that the Soviet system was
so ossified that it was incapable of reform. As a consequence Brzezinski insisted that the Soviet
Union’s primitive emphasis on industrial output and the multinational character would eventually
result in the collapse of the Soviet empire. As President Carter’s national security adviser Brzezinski
combined a firm military presence against the Soviet Union with the “soft power” of human rights
that was successful in drawing the Eastern Europe states peacefully away from the Soviet orbit.
As the son of a Polish diplomat, Brzezinski’s world-view was rooted in the experiences of
Central Europe in the 1930s. Brzezinski was born in Warsaw in 1928. At that time Poland was
enjoying its first independence since being partitioned in the late 19th century by the Russian,
Austrian and Prussian empires. It was also the time when Europe was rife with nationalism and
totalitarian ideologies that promised universal answers to the socio-economic dislocations of the
industrial revolution.
The rise of a laboring industrial class in the 19th century created a fertile ground for the
revolutionary theories put forth by Karl Marx. According to Marx all history was a struggle
between a ruling group and an opposing group. In the end, Marx argued, the capitalist system
would bring forth an industrialized society that would eventually give way to a “dictatorship of
the proletariat.”
By the early 20th century the more radical West European revolutionary movements were
gradually co-opted by reforms initiated from within the electoral system. This had the effect of
easing social tensions while bringing the labor movement into the electoral process. But in
autocratic Russia a more radical movement was gathering strength under the leadership of
Vladimir Lenin. As a dogmatic Marxist, Lenin rejected the evolutionary approach as “revisionist”
heresy and insisted that a small cadre of revolutionaries—the “vanguard of the proletariat”— must
seize power on behalf of the working class.
Lenin saw his chance when the political unrest unleashed by World War I led to the
abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. A provisional government, under the leadership of
Alexander Kerensky, was installed in an attempt to introduce liberal reforms along the lines of the
West European governments. Yet Lenin did not believe in “liberal reforms.” On the night of
November 6, 1917 Lenin’s Bolshevik faction seized control of the Winter Palace and proclaimed a
new government in the name of the Soviet Union.
Though it would occur more than a decade before his birth, the Russian Revolution would
greatly impact the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski. While some Western intellectuals insisted that
Lenin’s seizure of power represented an authentic worker revolution, Brzezinski viewed it as a
ruthless coup d’etat that introduced a one-party totalitarian government that would impede
democratic reforms in Russia for the next seventy years. In later years academics would engage in
heated debates about exactly what went “wrong” with Lenin’s revolution. Brzezinski argued that
it was simply “wrong” from the beginning. Brzezinski noted it was Lenin, not Stalin, who first
deceived the peasants about their land, deceived the workers about self-management, turned the
trade unions into organs of oppression, created the concentration camps and sent troops out to the
border areas to crush any national movements, and created the secret police force which established
organized terror as the central feature of the Soviet system.
Lenin regarded Poland as “the red bridge” to link Russia with the more advanced
industrial economies of Europe. By January 1919, the commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky
proclaimed “It is no longer the specter of communism that is haunting Europe…. communism is
flesh and blood and is now stalking the continent.” Poland’s new military leader Josef Pilsudski
took advantage of the Russian civil war by launching an invasion into the Ukraine in the spring of
1920. A sustained Soviet counterattack drove the Poles back to the gates of Warsaw. By the summer
of 1920 Trotsky’s army was driving toward the gates of Warsaw. As the international community
braced for a Soviet victory Polish volunteers dug trenches and strung barbed wire in the fields east
of Warsaw.
Pilsudski’s army, in what became known as the “miracle on the Vistula,” cut off the
advancing Soviet columns outside Warsaw. Yet Poland’s victory proved a mixed blessing. The fact
that Pilsudski launched his Russian campaign alienated the Western power who viewed it as a
romantic act blind to the geo-political realities of the day. The political left in Europe would hold
the “reactionary” Poles in contempt for launching a war against the purportedly “progressive”
forces of Soviet socialism. Most importantly, the Treaty of Riga of March 1921 left a significant
Byelorussian and Ukrainian population inside Poland that would create the threat of
Soviet irredentism throughout the interwar years.
Brzezinski’s father, Tadeusz, fought the Soviet army at Lvov and in the final campaign of
Warsaw in 1920, and would join the Polish Foreign Service in the early 1920. Zbigniew Brzezinski
grew up in a comfortable household in which international relations were a frequent topic of
debate. This was especially relevant since Poland’s survival in the 1930s was under constant threat
from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the two totalitarian regimes that bitterly objected to the
revival of the Polish state in the wake of World War I.
Tadeusz Brzezinski was assigned to a diplomatic post in the Soviet Ukraine at the apex of
Stalin’s Great Terror. In the early 1930s Stalin had embarked on rapid forced industrialization that
terrorized the state’s peasant society. Those who sought to resist were shot or deported to a vast
system of labor camps where they were likely to perish through exposure or starvation. The
relatively wealthy “kulaks’ were a particular target of Stalin’s campaign leading to the
extermination of some ten million. Stalin’s intent was to destroy through fear not just organized
political opposition---but the very idea of dissent. Indeed by the 1930s Stalin’s terror extended to
almost every aspect of Soviet life--millions of ordinary peasants and workers were denounced as
“enemies of the people.”
Brzezinski’s first impressions of the Soviet Union thus came not from left-wing periodicals,
but from stories his father recounted to his son. Yet less informed Western intellectuals insisted that
Stalin’s program appeared “scientific” and “rational’ compared to the injustices of the capitalist
system then wallowing in the midst of the Great Depression. This was effectively symbolized in
Soviet propaganda by heroic images of smoke belching steel factories and young peasant women
heroically gathering wheat for the collective good of the glorious
socialist state.
Yet the threat from the east was only part of Poland’s problems in the 1930s. At a fourpower
conference at Munich in late September 1938 the French and British ceded the Czech
Sudetenland to Germany in return for Hitler’s hollow promise to expand no further. Britain’s Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain’s could dismiss the crisis as a “quarrel in a far away country between
people about whom we know nothing.” Zbigniew Brzezinski would come to learn that this was
not the first or last time that the concerns of an Eastern Europe state were dismissed by Western
diplomats.
A month after the Munich agreement Tadeusz Brzezinski was assigned a diplomatic post
in Canada. It was soon clear that Zbigniew Brzezinski would not be returning to Poland anytime
soon. In the early morning hours of September 1, 1939 the German blitzkrieg broke through the
Polish borders and raced toward Warsaw. Poland, despite declarations of war by France and
Britain, were left to fight the Nazi onslaught on their own. Poland’s fate was sealed two weeks later,
when six Soviet armies attacked Poland from the east in an invasion scarcely less brutal than the
Nazis. Thus marked the beginning of almost six years of unimaginable horror for the Poles.
The war changed dramatically in 1941. In June of that year Hitler launched a massive
invasion of the Soviet Union. In December the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United
States into the war in an awkward alliance with the Soviet Union. President Roosevelt portrayed
Stalin as an avuncular ally in the fight against Hitler. As the German advance stalled at
Stalingrad, Stalin’s armies began a relentless drive to the West. By late summer 1944 the Red
Army was approaching Poland and had already organized the “Lublin Committee” composed of
Polish communists that had spent the war years in Moscow. When the Allied leaders met at Yalta
in February 1945, Stalin agreed to a vague compromise to hold “free and unfettered elections” in
Poland at some point in the future. As Winston Churchill declared in 1946, “an Iron Curtain has
descended across the continent.”
When the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s, the Republicans used “Yalta” as code word
for Roosevelt’s “betrayal” of Eastern Europe. Brzezinski saw it as more of a lack of strategic
planning and Western naiveté in dealing with Stalin. “We do not know whether the Soviets would
have yielded” Brzezinski would later note, “but we do know that they were not tested.
The West showed neither foresight nor courage, and this is why Yalta is not only a symbol of
subsequent division of Europe but a major historical blot on the record of Anglo-American
leadership.”
In 1950 Brzezinski entered the PhD program at Harvard in 1950 where he would establish
himself as a leading authority on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Though
Brzezinski supported President Truman’s firm approach to the Soviet Union, he noted that
“containment” did little for the Eastern European states that at the time were undergoing a ruthless
process of Stalinization. Indeed “containment” was a middle ground between a return to
isolationism or a preventive war against the Soviet Union. The major instruments of policy were
political and economic, not military. The primary threat perceived by American decision makers
was, not a direct attack by Soviet troops, but the continued economic disintegration of West
European nations after the war.
Brzezinski was thus especially critical of the political excesses of the McCarthy era that
witnessed politicians rhetorically demonizing the Soviet Union while taking no active measures to
transform the status quo in Eastern Europe. This was seen most readily in 1952 when Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles pledged the U.S. intent to “liberate” Eastern Europe from Soviet
hegemony. This policy of “rolling back” Soviet power from Eastern Europe was exposed as empty
rhetorical bluster in 1956 when the U.S. watched helplessly as the Soviet Union crushed a
Hungarian revolt partially inspired by Dulles’ liberation rhetoric.
Brzezinski, then an associate professor at Harvard, was among the most vocal critics of
Eisenhower’s liberation pledge. Following the Soviet invasion of Hungary Brzezinski insisted that
the United States must move away from the empty bluster of “liberation” and move toward a policy
that would encourage “evolution” in Eastern Europe rather than “revolution.” In essence
Brzezinski saw Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” metaphor as more akin to a “semi-permeable
membrane” where a more positive Western approach would gradually draw the Soviet bloc states
toward a more Western social-democratic system.
Brzezinski, unlike more vocal émigré groups, argued the United States must be flexible
enough to differentiate between communist regimes in the Soviet bloc as a means to exploit the
growing fissures that had risen in the Communist world in the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953. “My
views gained strategic coherence between 1955 and 1960” Brzezinski recalls. “1955 was the rejection
of any illusions about a head on collision and the pursuit of liberation by Eisenhower and Dulles
and then through the Hungarian revolution, through the rise of Khrushchev and the appearance of
Kennedy, the more systematic formulation of the policy of peaceful engagement, as an offensive
strategy, and not as a defensive posture, an offensive strategy based on historical optimism and not
détente, based on Spenglarian pessimism.”
In 1960 Brzezinski’s views achieved a wider audience when he served as an adviser on the
campaign of John F. Kennedy. That same year Brzezinski produced his classic work Soviet Bloc:
Unity and Conflict that articulated the view that the Eastern European states were becoming
increasingly subject to national and ideological fragmentation. In the spring of 1961 Brzezinski and
William Griffith published a seminal article in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States should
move to transform the Soviet dominated “bloc” into a more “neutral belt of states which, like the
Finnish, would enjoy genuine popular freedom of choice in internal policy while not being hostile
to the Soviet Union and not belonging to Western military alliances.“ This policy, the authors
reasoned, was largely dependent on the willingness of West Germany to accept its postwar border
with Poland and Czechoslovakia, since Bonn’s refusal to do so was strengthening the claim that the
Soviet Union was the only protection for these states against a potentially revanchist Germany.
Brzezinski feared that after the Cuban missile crisis the United States and Soviet Union
were moving toward a de facto condominium agreement that would free the status quo of a divided
Europe. Brzezinski thought this was an especially dangerous situation since it would at once
alienate the United States West European allies while leaving the increasingly chauvinistic Eastern
European regimes to rot in nationalist isolation. In the early 1960s Brzezinski would write a number
of articles insisting that the United States must take the lead in presenting an active program to
actively engage in attenuating what he regarded as the artificial division of the continent.
Brzezinski’s concept of “peaceful engagement” was expanded in his 1965 work Alternative
to Partition that recommended the United States take the lead in a significant multinational
campaign, similar to the Marshall Plan, designed to bridge the political and economic divisions that
still divided Europe. Brzezinski work led to an appointment to the State Department during which
he wrote President Johnson’s famous “bridge building” speech which represented the most
ambitious U.S. approach toward Eastern Europe in the Cold War era.
Yet providing “economic assistance” to communist regimes of Eastern Europe remained
extremely controversial at a time when the United States was fighting a communist regime in
Vietnam. Indeed, the more ambitious aspects of Brzezinski’s “peaceful engagement” were rejected
in U.S. Congress for allegedly being “soft on communism.”
By the late 1960s it became fashionable among the intellectual elite to refer to the United
States as a “reactionary” nation. Brzezinski countered that the United States was leading a
technological revolution that was changing the world much as the transition to the industrial era
had in the 19th century. At the same time Brzezinski argued that the Soviet Union had entered the
state of terminal decline due to its reliance on an anachronistic economic structure and a the
increasing restlessness among its conquered nationalities.
Brzezinski argued that the United States, Western Europe and Japan, must form a
“community of developed nations.” This “trilateral” idea was designed to wean the more advanced
Soviet bloc nations toward the social-democratic model of the West. Brzezinski’s most optimistic
scenario held that the Soviet Union would eventually follow suit, shedding its Leninist roots and
move toward a more humane form of socialism. The greatest hope for Brzezinski’s “peaceful
engagement” occurred in 1968, when Alexander Dubcek embarked on a determined effort to bring
“socialism with a human face” to Czechoslovakia. Dubcek’s reforms challenged two of Lenin’s
most fundamental tenets; that the Communist Party must monopolize all political power, and that
this power must eliminate all forms of political dissent.
Brzezinski was thus especially dismayed by the ambivalence displayed by the United
States toward Dubcek’s reforms. By the summer of 1968 a debate began in the Kremlin over how
to deal with the situation in Czechoslovakia. Brzezinski believed that Johnson Administration’s
obsequious approach to Moscow in the summer of 1968 assured the Kremlin leadership that a
military solution would be relatively cost free. In the late hours of August 20-21, a combined force
of 175,000 troops from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact nations stormed into
Czechoslovakia and ended Dubcek’s reformist government.
Brzezinski saw the invasion as evidence of the success of peaceful engagement. Yet
President Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger moved toward a classic
balance of power politics that would treat the Soviet Union as traditional “great power” with its
own legitimate interests to protect. The result would be a focus on state-to-state diplomacy
negotiated between the great powers with the end goal of preserving geo-political stability in the
world.
Kissinger, as a student of the 19th century conservative statesmen, argued that the United
States had to abandon its crusading habit of attempting to “democratize” its ideological
adversaries. American power, Kissinger would argue, was simply too limited to attempt to
transform another nation’s domestic structure and that linking negotiations to domestic
liberalization would jeopardize negotiations on issues greater importance—particularly arms
control.
Brzezinski would become one of most persistent critics of the Nixon-Kissinger version of
détente. Brzezinski saw the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy as offering the ideal form of détente
from Moscow’s perspective--one that implicitly recognized the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern
Europe, without questioning the coercive tyranny that had been inherent in the Leninist system.
Brzezinski argued that the Soviet Union had very little interest in becoming coerced into a “status
quo” nation. Instead it accepted Western aid and technology while contributing to global anarchy
by reflexively backing “national liberation” causes in the developing world and sponsoring
terrorist groups that sought to disrupt the global economy---a path that Brzezinski believed the
Soviets had had chosen in the 1960s when it became clear that they could not compete with the
more dynamic societies of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.
Brzezinski also argued that the Nixon-Kissinger form of détente was anything but stable if
all it did was to prop up the ossified status quo in Europe. According to Brzezinski, it was essential
that the regimes in Eastern Europe embark of political and economic reform before their
populations exploded into popular unrest. Indeed, in December of 1970 the Polish government
announced a substantial increase in the price of food and fuels. The move was a desperate attempt
to correct the hidden inflationary impact of mass subsidies required to keep the centralized
economy afloat. The workers in Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard responded with a massive work stoppage
that was summarily crushed by Polish security forces.
Brzezinski argued that the Polish turmoil underscored a problem prevailing throughout
the Soviet bloc. One solution, long implicit in Brzezinski’s strategy of peaceful engagement, was to
decentralize their economic systems and open their societies to a freer flow of information, people,
and ideas. A far less painful solution was to borrow capital and technology from the West to prop
up their stagnating regimes. In the early 1970s Western governments and private banks poured
hard currency credits into Eastern Europe. Supporters of such investment argued that the loans
would provide the Eastern European states with higher technology, which would allow them to
manufacture of more sophisticated products, which could then be exported to help pay off the
debts incurred. At the same time Nixon-Kissinger insisted that warmer U.S.-Soviet relations would
eventually trickle down to have a “moderating” impact on the Soviet bloc
nations.
Brzezinski argued that this reliance on change “from above” ignored the events of 1968.
Brzezinski noted the emergence of Dubcek’s “Prague Spring” had convinced the Soviet leaders of
the need to launch an ideological crackdown and a “prophylactic” campaign in Eastern Europe to
stem any ideological “contamination” that might accompany any interaction with the West.
Brzezinski argued that the United States must move to engage Eastern Europe with a European
wide conference as a means to settle the outstanding issues of the World War II.
Brzezinski’s proposal for a European conference would put him in unusual company. The
Soviet leaders had begun calling for an all-European conference on security and cooperation as
early as 1954 in an attempt to consecrate the postwar borders and forestall the West German
entrance into the NATO alliance. The Soviets continued their push for a conference if only to
sanctify the idea of the “inviolability ” of the postwar frontiers.
The United States was far more reluctant to enter a conference that would formally accede
to the Soviet conquest over Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Brzezinski took a more long-term
view, noting that the postwar borders had been conceded de facto for years, and the refusal to
formally do so permitted the Soviets to portray themselves as Eastern Europe’s sole protector.
Brzezinski thus viewed a European security conference not as the recognition of the European
status quo (even if the Soviets would attempt to portray it as such) but as a way to pierce the
hermetic seal that Moscow had imposed on Eastern Europe following the invasion of
Czechoslovakia.
Brzezinski grew frustrated with the Nixon administration’s reluctance to participate in a
European-wide summit. “We should think of it as a process, the purpose of which is to explore and
only eventually resolve the various outstanding legacies of World War II,” Brzezinski noted in 1970.
“But we will not be able to do so if the West—and particularly the United States—keeps shrinking
away from the challenge on the jejune argument that we can’t enter a conference unless we know
in advance what its outcome will be.”
By 1972 the U.S. opposition to the European conference had softened after Moscow acceded
to NATO’s demand for parallel talks on the reduction of conventional military forces
(MBFR) in Central Europe. Deliberations on CSCE began in Helsinki on November 22, 1972.
Throughout the early stages of the Helsinki process it was the West European nations that stressed
the aspects of human rights. The United States delegation, clearly reflecting the views of
Kissinger, stressed the need for greater “realism” and sought to “reign in” the Western Europeans
from raising such delicate issues such as human rights that might complicate détente with Moscow.
President Ford signed the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975. Moscow immediately
emphasized the sections that endorsed the postwar status quo and the permanence of the Soviet
dominion over Eastern Europe. This impression created a political firestorm from anti-détente
forces in the United States who berated Helsinki as a Yalta-like sell-out of Eastern Europe.
Brzezinski, in contrast, argued the Helsinki Accords had codified two of the most essential
aspects of his policy of “peaceful engagement.” First, the Helsinki Final Act finally acknowledged
the territorial status quo in Europe, finally depriving the Moscow’s claim that the Soviet Union was
the sole protection against the threat of a remilitarized West Germany. More importantly,
Brzezinski argued, the Basket III clause of Helsinki had legitimized Western insistence that human
rights be respected within the Soviet Union and Eastern European states.
Zbigniew Brzezinski assumed command of the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter’s campaign
in late 1975. Carter’s stump speeches, taken directly from Brzezinski’s academic writings, attacked
Kissinger’s “obsession with power blocs and spheres of influence,” for allowing the Soviets to get
the best of détente, for being inattentive to the rising turmoil in the developing world, for alienating
the traditional allies in Western Europe and Japan, and for neglecting the issue of human rights in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Brzezinski realized that dissidents in Eastern Europe had begun to focus on living as much
as possible outside the official structures. A key to this “anti-politics” movement asked the
communist regimes only to abide by their own constitutions--and the agreements they had signed
at Helsinki. In June of 1976, two weeks before Carter accepted the Democratic nomination, workers
in Poland rioted after the government imposed another round of price hikes. The Polish intellectual
community organized a vigorous defense of the workers. In September 1976 the group was
formalized as the Worker’s Defense Committee (KOR). By the fall of 1976 the Polish opposition had
been united like never before—an ominous sign for a government already burdened with a severe
economic crisis.
Ford and Kissinger had taken few efforts to emphasize the human rights aspects contained
in Basket III. Indeed on August 1, the one-year anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, Moscow was
still portraying Helsinki as a ringing triumph for Soviet diplomacy. At the same, most conservative
voices in the United States, including Ronald Reagan, continued to berate the
Final Act as a Yalta-like sell out.
Brzezinski thought that the wholesale repudiation of the Final Act was as misguided as the
Ford-Kissinger penchant for ignoring it. By late summer Brzezinski advised Carter to distance
himself from the outright denunciation of the Helsinki Accords, and begin to stress the fact that the
Warsaw Pact nations were not abiding by the still little publicized "Basket Three" aspects they had
signed onto at Helsinki.
In November 1976 Carter defeated Ford in one of the closest elections in U.S. history.
Carter’s victory was greatly assisted by Ford’s incredulous debate claim that Eastern Europe was
not under Soviet domination. Yet Brzezinski’s emphasis on Basket III of the Helsinki Final Act
would have a greater long-term impact on Eastern Europe. Brzezinski, as President Carter's
National Security Adviser, was instrumental in devising a strategy toward Eastern Europe that
would link economic assistance to the respect for human rights. This strategy was coupled with a
sustained covert assistance to opposition groups and a sizable increase into the power and scope
of Radio Free Europe.
The Polish opposition had been inspired by the Helsinki Accords and the presence of
Zbigniew Brzezinski in the White House. As Adam Michnik, a prominent member of the KOR
opposition group, would later note: “Kissinger had a vision like Metternich-- ‘we divide the world
into spheres of influence and we talk with governments’—and Ford continued this policy. But
Brzezinski and Carter said ‘there were not only governments but societies,’ who very often think
different than the government, but they are gagged. And Brzezinski understood what hardly
anybody could understand at that time in America; that an ideological confrontation with the
Soviet bloc had to be undertaken and the American slogan should be human rights.”
On January 1, 1977, 243 Czech individuals signed a 3,000-word petition protesting the
repressive nature of the government. Known as Charter 77, the signatories insisted that they were
not seeking to overthrow the communist regime, but were only asking that the regime adhered to
its own constitution—and what it had signed on to at Helsinki. Although Charter 77 did not refer
to the events of 1968, it was a reminder of the hope and aspirations cut short by the Soviet invasion
of 1968.
In early 1977 Brzezinski prepared a classified Presidential Directive that outlined the
formal U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe. The directive stated 1) the U.S. should cultivate a closer
relationship with Eastern Europe for its own sake rather than as a by-product of détente with the
Soviet Union; 2) the criteria for deciding which countries to concentrate on its domestic policies as
well as foreign policy independence from the USSR; 3) the administration should maintain regular
contacts with representatives of the “loyal opposition” in Eastern Europe; i.e. liberal intellectuals,
artists and church leaders, as well as with government officials.
The summer of 1977 would witness the most tangible success of Brzezinski’s strategy of
peaceful engagement. The Helsinki Final Act, for all its symbolic importance, lacked punitive
provisions to ensure that the Communist governments were to be held accountable for the human
rights provisions found in Basket Three. In June of 1977 the Helsinki Final Act was to be subjected
to a full-fledged international review in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Polish leader Edward Gierek, eager
to retain access to Western credits, unexpectedly announced amnesty for members of Poland’s
growing political opposition. This would solidify the links between KOR, the workers, and the
Catholic Church.
The combination of a protracted economic crisis, an increasingly hesitant regime, and the
election of a Polish Pope, created a fertile atmosphere for Poland's growing opposition movement.
Despite the continuation of Western loans, Poland was on the verge of economic collapse by 1980.
Rather than risk the political dangers of systemic reform the government resorted to an increase
food prices. The gesture was met with a massive nationwide labor strike that came to be known as
Solidarity. Led by an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa, and encouraged by the support
of intellectuals and the Catholic church, the strikers presented a list of demands that challenged the
fundamental institutions of communist authority, and by extension, Soviet rule over Poland.
The emergence of a sizable and organized opposition in Poland was particularly troubling
for Moscow. The conditions that sparked the Polish workers existed throughout the entire region.
By December of 1980 a Soviet invasion appeared imminent. Brzezinski was determined that the
Carter Administration made it clear that a Soviet invasion would not be cost free. While Soviet
troop remained poised on the Polish borders, Brzezinski made it known that a Soviet invasion
would produce a rupture in the political détente in Europe, disrupt East-West economic
cooperation, generate increased NATO budgets, produce severe strains between Western
European Communist parties and the Soviet Union, alienate the Non-Aligned Movement from the
Soviet Union, likely precipitate turmoil elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, and lead to more American-
Chinese military cooperation.
On January 20, 1981 the Polish crisis would be taken up by the incoming Reagan
administration. As the Carter administration served out its final days in office, a more subtle
transition of power was taking place in the Kremlin. The image of an anemic Leonid Brezhnev
struggling with five elderly pallbearers to support the casket of Kosygin provided a macabre
symbol of the rise and fall of the Soviet empire. As the youthful beneficiaries of Stalin's purges, this
generation of leaders had ruled over the longest period of stability in Soviet history. Yet as the
world moved into the 1980s it was apparent that this stability had been achieved at the price of
domestic tyranny, an overly militarized society, and an antiquated economic system. Such
problems were compounded for the satrapies in Eastern Europe whose dependence on an
occupying power in decline put them in a most unfavorable position. By the time the Carter
administration left office in 1981 the Communist system throughout Eastern Europe had entered
an irreversible state of disintegration that would culminate in the revolutions of 1989.
As Charles Gati would note: “People have written so many books about Kissinger and yet
I think that time has proven Brzezinski to be more right than Kissinger. Brzezinski may have been
born in Warsaw and maybe have been brought up by Polish parents in Canada, but he is the one
who reflects the best in America—the dynamism, enthusiasm—and yes, idealism—without losing
sight of what was possible. He kept hope alive. No other American was able to do what Brzezinski
did. This is why every one of these post-Communist governments—outside of Russia itself—just
give him the Red Carpet. He’s their hero—not Kissinger—they may respect
Kissinger—for this or that—but Zbig is the hero—because he kept hope alive.”
CHAPTER ONE: COLD WAR ACADEMIC
In the autumn of 1950 a twenty-two year old Zbigniew Brzezinski entered the graduate
program in Government at Harvard University. Brzezinski would join the collection of young
scholars in Cambridge who would later distinguish themselves in the field of Cold War academia.
These would include Stanley Hoffman, James Schlesinger, Samuel Huntington, Adam Ulam, and,
of course Henry Kissinger, whose name would be linked with Brzezinski’s for the remainder of
their long public and academic careers.
By 1950 America’s leading universities had been transformed into intellectual arsenals in
the broader Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. In a global war based as much on ideas
as armaments, young scholars were being recruited in an attempt to explain and counteract the
strategies coming forth from the Kremlin. At the same time there seemed little hope at that time
that the ideological struggle dividing the world would be resolved peacefully. 1950 had witnessed
Mao Zedong travel to Moscow to sign a treaty with Josef Stalin seemingly uniting the world’s two
communist giants in a monolithic alliance against the United States. Within months Soviet backed
forces of North Korea invaded South Korea. America, only five years removed from World War II,
found itself at war again with a mysterious enemy that appeared relentless in its ideological goal
of bringing forth world revolution.
As he entered Harvard in 1950 Zbigniew Brzezinski was aware that this enemy was not as
relentless and unified as it might appear. He was born to Tadeusz and Ilona Brzezinski in
Warsaw, Poland on March 28, 1928. That same year Josef Stalin assumed power in the Soviet Union.
1928 was also the year that fourteen nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a widely hailed
international agreement that pledged to “outlaw” war as an instrument of national policy.
Though this document contained no formal means of enforcement, the United States’ Secretary of
State assured that the “moral force” of world opinion would enforce its strictures.
As a young Pole coming of age in the 1930s Zbigniew Brzezinski could be excused for
taking a jaded view of the “moral force” of world opinion. As the son of a Polish diplomat
Brzezinski witnessed Poland’s attempt to survive between the two greatest tyrannies of the 20th
century.
In 1931 Brzezinski accompanied his father to a diplomatic posting to Liepzig, Germany.
Within two years the Weimar Republic would fall to Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. The
posting was a delicate one for the Brzezinski family since Hitler’s grand designs entailed the
creating of German ”living” space” to the east, obliteration of the Polish nation and the allegedly
“sub-human” Slavs that lived there.
At the age of five Brzezinski was old enough to sense the foreboding of the torch light
parades and mass rallies celebrating the precepts of Aryan racial supremacy. Indeed, one of
Brzezinski’s earliest memories was walking the streets of a Polish city with his father when an anti-
Semitic student demonstration broke out. Some university students walking with a sign stating
“Warszawa i Krakow sa tylko dla Polakow—Wszystkie Zydzi I Swinie Mieszkaja w Palestynie!” (Warsaw
and Krakow are only for Poles—All Jews and Swine live in Palestine) Brzezinski recalls his father
being so outraged that he charged the group with his cane. After serving four years in Germany
Brzezinski’s father was relieved of his post after it was discovered he had engaged in a covert
program to permit Polish Jews to escape Nazi Germany.
After returning the family to Warsaw Tadeusz Brzezinski accepted a diplomatic posting in
the Soviet republic of Ukraine. The lingering border disputes between Poland and the Soviet
Union stemming from the 1920-21 Russo-Polish War made the posting an especially sensitive one
for a Polish diplomat. For safety considerations Zbigniew Brzezinski would remain at home with
his mother in Warsaw.
Indeed Brzezinski’s father would arrive in the Soviet Union at the peak of Stalin’s Terror.
In the early 1930s Stalin had embarked on rapid forced industrialization coupled with a massive
campaign of state coercion. To satisfy the need for increased food supplies the peasantry was
organized into collective units. The relatively wealthy “kulaks” were a particular target of Stalin’s
campaign leading to the extermination of some ten million.
By means of torture, threats to family, and false promises of mercy Stalin’s secret police
persuaded party leaders to “confess” to crimes they had not committed. The public trials and
purges settled old scores among Bolshevik comrades. Stalin was particularly oppressive of elites of
non-Russian nationalities within the Soviet Union who were labeled as “bourgeois nationalists.”
Foreign communists living in the Soviet Union were executed or simply disappeared. During the
late 1930s the elite of most East European communist parties had perished in the Stalin’s purges.
By the 1930s Stalin’s terror extended throughout the countryside as millions of ordinary peasants
and workers were denounced as “enemies of the people.”
At the same time many Western academics clung to the idealistic view that Stalin was a
committed anti-fascist intent on leveling the inequalities of industrial capitalism. If Stalin’s brutality
was criticized, it was tempered with the metaphorical justification that one had to
“break eggs to make an omelet.” The young Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the more grisly side of the
story when his father would discuss with his son the massive carnage then taking place behind the
shroud of Stalin’s rule. “There’s no doubt his stories about disappearances, people he would deal
with, descriptions of how he would have some elite in the Ukraine to dinner, and he would learn
within weeks that they were arrested and then shot--had an enormous impression on me.”
But it was Poland’s historical misfortune that the threat from Russia was only part of the
problem. In late 1938 Hitler had rebuilt the German Army and was threatening war unless
Czechoslovakia agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. The Western governments, seemingly
willing to pay any price to settle the crisis peacefully, met at Munich where they agreed to grant
the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for Hitler’s promise to expand no further. British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had previously dismissed the situation as a “quarrel in a far
away country between people about whom we know nothing,” returned home to a hero’s welcome
with the claim that he had saved “peace in our time.”
In the weeks following the Munich crisis Tadeusz Brzezinski took his family to Montreal
after being assigned as the Polish consul general in Canada. The move to Montreal was a difficult
one for ten-year old Zbigniew. For the first year in Canada he was too busy being homesick for
Poland to focus much on looming war on the horizon. “As a kid, no I didn’t think things were going
to blow up, I can’t tell you that,” Brzezinski recalled. “I really just wanted to go back to Poland as
soon as possible. I remember bugging my father about whether we were going to go back to Poland
the next year or not for the holidays, which we didn’t. And after that there was no more
opportunity.”
In late August of 1939 Hitler and Stalin shocked the world by signing a non-aggression
pact. The international community scarcely had time to react when on September 1, 1939 sixty
German blitzkrieg divisions broke through the Polish borders and raced toward Warsaw. Though
the British and French governments quickly declared war on Germany, they would take no
offensive measures. Poland was left to face the Nazi onslaught alone. Millions of Poles were
deported for forced labor in Germany while the educated classes were specifically targeted for
extermination. Meanwhile Polish Jews were rounded up and sent to ghettos in Polish cities where
they awaited their fate in the notorious death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek.
The German invasion, for all its horrors, was only half the nightmare that awaited Poland.
On September 17 six Soviet armies attacked Poland from the east. By 1940, hundreds of thousands
of Poles were forcibly deported in the freight trucks to Kazakhstan, the Artic north, or beyond the
Ural Mountains. In 1939 the Soviet army captured 15,000 Polish reserve officers who had been
called up with the outbreak of hostilities. These prisoners were then transported to the Katyn Forest
near Smolensk where there hands were bound and shot execution style in the back of the head
before being thrown into mass graves.
By the time the war broke out Brzezinski was demonstrating an early interest in foreign
affairs. He began to study elementary Russian from a local farmer and would discuss the war with
his father on a regular basis. He would also keep a diary that would deal almost entirely with the
daily events of the war. Brzezinski found a particular fascination with the Polish boy scouts his age
who had escaped into the anti-German underground.
Winston Churchill, who in 1940 had replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister of
Great Britain, was quite aware of the grisly motives driving the Nazi drive to the east. “Monday
Hitler shoots Dutchmen,” declared Churchill, “Tuesday—Norwegians; Wednesday—French or
Belgians stand against the wall; Thursday it is the Czechs who must suffer. But always, all the
days…there are the Poles.”
On the morning of June 22, 1941 180 German divisions drove east in a massive invasion of
the Soviet Union. The German blitzkrieg drove relentlessly through the Soviet Ukraine in the early
months of the campaign. But Moscow was spared when Hitler redirected troops to the south in
hopes of capturing the summer harvest of the Ukraine and the oil fields of the Caucasus. The
ensuing delay meant that Nazi forces would not reach the Soviet capital until late November—
when the frigid Russian winter had begun to take its toll on the German advance.
The first week in December marked the turning point in the war. On December 6, the
Soviets had recovered to launch a counterattack to relieve the pressure on Moscow—marking the
first battle in what would turn into a long and relentless counterdrive toward Berlin. The next day
the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor bringing the United States, the world’s
most powerful industrial nation, into the war on the side of the Soviet Union. The grand alliance
against Hitler, The Big Three, as they were known, included Roosevelt, Churchill, and
Stalin.
It would be an awkward alliance from the beginning. The changing alliances meant that
Stalin had to reconsider his relationship with Poland—a nation that he had ruthlessly invaded less
than two years before. On July 30, 1941 Stalin reestablished diplomatic relations with the non-
communist Polish government-in-exile based in London. But this change of tactics raised some
uncomfortable questions—especially regarding the fate of the 15,000 Polish officers executed on
Stalin’s orders in 1940. It didn’t take long for the issue to be raised.
In 1942 the retreating German army uncovered the mass grave at Katyn. All evidence
pointed to Soviet complicity. Experts from various countries concluded that the killings had taken
place no later than mid-1940, when Katyn was still under Soviet control. Stalin would ironically
twist the grisly discovery at Katyn to take the first steps reestablish Soviet control over the future
of government in Poland. Stalin’s used the London Poles request for inquiry as an excuse to severe
ties with the Polish government-in-exile. At the same time Stalin was already forming the nucleus
of the Polish communist party that would be installed in the wake of the war. As early as November
1941 a small group of Polish Communists was parachuted into
German-occupied Poland, where they contacted a few members of the old KPP (dissolved in March
1938). In January 1942 the Communist Party of Poland was revived in Warsaw under the name
Polish Workers Party.
While the young Zbigniew Brzezinski clearly hoped for an Allied victory, he would be
become disturbed by what he regarded as President Franklin Roosevelt’s obsequious approach to
Stalin. He found Roosevelt’s affectionate public references to “Uncle Joe” to be particularly
troubling. This was especially true after the German army discovered the massacre of the Polish
officers in the Katyn Forest in 1943. As Brzezinski recalled “Precisely because I knew of the Soviets
from my father, there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Soviets did it, although the
Nazis were quite capable of doing it, and did many things rather similar. But in that particular case
I had no doubt whatsoever that that the Soviets did it.”
In November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill traveled to Tehran, for their first face-to-face
meeting with Stalin. With the end of the war in sight, Stalin insisted the Polish frontiers be shifted
200 to 300 kilometers west roughly along the “Curzon Line.” Both Roosevelt and Churchill urged
the Polish government-in-exile to accept the arrangement—compensating the Poles with part of
eastern Germany. Indeed, Roosevelt seemed more intent on winning Stalin over as a friend rather
than engaging in serious diplomacy. This was seen in Roosevelt’s insistence on being housed at the
Soviet Embassy and his mild taunts at Churchill designed to forge an informal “antiimperial”
alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Immediately after Tehran, Roosevelt
sought to assure the public that he got along “fine” with Stalin whom he referred to as “truly
representative of the heart and soul of Russia.” “I believe that we are going to get along very well
with him and the Russian people—very well indeed,” insisted the American president,
“I would call him something like me….a realist.” 15
By the close of the Tehran Conference the Brzezinski family would become increasingly
worried about the postwar fate of Poland. “As a young kid I wasn’t quite as sophisticated,”
Brzezinski recalls, “though I could sense growing alarm in our family over what was happening
after Tehran—echoes of conversations that I would overhear about the growing indications that
team of forensic experts. They dug up the corpses and pronounced the Poles to have died in April
1941. Both the United States and Great Britain wished to avoid trouble with their wartime ally and
let the Soviet claim stand undisputed. Thus, for the next four decades, the Polish Communist
government held to Moscow’s line that it was the Germans who had committed the atrocity. Only
in February 1989 did Poland’s Communists admit that the NKVD perpetuated the atrocity. This
came more than a year after creation of a bilateral Soviet-Polish commission to investigate what
Mikhail Gorbachev rather awkwardly referred to as the “blank spots” in SovietPolish relations. In
April of 1990 the Soviets finally acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the crime. Under
Gorbachev the Soviets released documents that detailed the NKVD’s planning and execution of the
Katyn operation. In 1992 Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s special envoy delivered copies of the
documents to the then Polish president Lech Walesa. The documents were dated March 5, 1940—
complete with Stalin’s signature ordering the execution of 14,700 Polish officers. The documents
also included orders to execute 11,000 Poles then held in Soviet prison camps. See “Polish Massacre:
Stalin Signed Orders for Executions,” The Hamilton Spectator (October 15, 1992). See Thomas S.
Szayna, “Addressing the ‘Blank Spots’ in Polish-Soviet Relations,” Problems of Communism, vol.
XXXVII, (November-December 1988), pp. 37-61.
15 William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (Oxford, 1986), p. 41
maybe some sort of division of Europe into spheres of influence was in the process of being
accepted by the West.”
As the Allied forces landed at Normandy in June 1944, the Red Army was advancing
toward Nazi-occupied Warsaw. On August 1, the non-communist Polish Home Army (AK) began
an uprising in a desperate attempt to liberate the city before the arrival of Soviet forces.
Stalin, despite encouraging the uprising on Radio Moscow, kept the Soviet army east of the Vistula
River as the Nazis obliterated Warsaw and with it much of the Polish non-communist resistance.
As Warsaw lay in rubble the Soviet forces entered the city in January 1945 and handed power to a
group of Polish communists loyal to the dictates of Stalin.
In February of 1945 the Big Three met at Yalta. With the end of the war in sight Roosevelt
and Churchill accepted Stalin’s vague assurances to hold “free and unfettered elections” in
Poland at some point in the future. By the time the Red Army finally entered Berlin in May of 1945
the Soviet Union controlled of all of Europe east of the Elbe River. As the war came to close in the
summer of 1945 it was clear that the Brzezinski family would not be returning to Poland any time
soon.
In 1945 Brzezinski entered Montreal’s McGill University. Brzezinski’s M.A. thesis
examined the Soviet nationalities policy under Bolshevik rule. While many academics insisted on
viewing the Soviet Union as a “voluntary” association of fifteen republics, Brzezinski viewed it as
a cauldron of resentful nationalities that had been violently restored under Lenin’s centralized rule
in the wake of the Russian civil war. Brzezinski would note that this process of “Russification” was
accelerated even more ruthlessly under Stalin’s “Great Patriotic War” when more than 50
nationalities and 3.5 million people—including the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and
Volga Germans--were forcibly deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union. 20 Brzezinski thus
argued that Russia’s much ballyhooed historic sense of “insecurity” was in reality a product of its
own historical impositions on its neighbors—a process that by the close of World War II amounted
to one of the most sustained and uninterrupted imperial drives in world history. 21
Brzezinski’s thesis at McGill would not be his most mature academic work yet it would
certainly stimulate goals slightly more grandiose than those of the average graduate student. As
Brzezinski would later recall: “Quite early on I reached the conviction that the weakness of the
time: troops that had risked their lives and survived “deserved a little fun.”…..The incidence of
rape and other forms of brutality was so much greater on the Soviet than on the western side that
it played a major role in determining which way Germans would tilt in the Cold War that was to
come. It ensured a pro-western orientation from the very beginning of that conflict, which surely
helps to account for why the West German regime was able to establish itself as a legitimate
government while its East German counterpart never did.’ John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know:
Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997), pp. 286-287. For additional insight on the scale of rapes
during the occupation see Atina Grossmann, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women
by Occupation Soldiers,” October 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 43-63. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with
Stalin, translated Michael B. Petrovich (New York, 1962), pp. 87-97, 110-11.
20 Lenin moved immediately after the Russian civil war to centralize control over separatist
areas in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. By 1925 a number of Central Asian and Muslim regions
of Uzbekistan, Turkestan, and Kazakstan were centralized under Moscow’s control. Zbigniew
Brzezinski, M.A. Thesis, Russo-Soviet Nationalism (Montreal: McGill University, 1950). This view
would be later seen in Brzezinski’s efforts in the 1990s to establish a newly independent Ukraine
as a viable post-Soviet counterweight between Germany and Russia and his support for the
Chechen independence movement in the 1990s. See Zbigniew Brzezinski. “The Premature
Partnership,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2 (March-April 1994), pp. 67-82. Also Zbigniew Brzezinski,
“Why the West Should Care about Chechnya,” Wall Street Journal (November 10, 1999).
21 For a later elaboration on this point see Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategic
Framework for the Conduct of the U.S.-Soviet Contest (New York, 1986), pp. 4-42.
Soviet Union, its Achilles heel, was its multinational character. Once I grasped that, and the
beginnings of that conclusion were formulated in my M.A. thesis at McGill, I began to work
increasingly on formulating a strategy, which in a piecemeal fashion would expose the weaknesses
of the Soviet system, detach the countries of the Soviet bloc from the Soviet Union, after detaching
them transform them—or maybe combine the two processes—and then
eventually accomplish the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself.”
In 1950 Brzezinski would take this world-view to Harvard where he would study under
some of the great luminaries in the early field of Soviet studies. Brzezinski’s academic career at
Harvard would be most influenced by Professor Merle Fainsod who quickly became something of
an intellectual and professional mentor for Brzezinski. In 1953 Fainsod produced How Russia is
Ruled, a work that would shape the academic thinking about the Soviet Union for an entire
generation of American scholars.
Fainsod’s work represented one of the opening salvos in one the great academic debates of
the 20th century. Brzezinski, like Fainsod, viewed Lenin’s October Revolution not as a legitimate
“worker revolution” but a coup d’etat engineered by a ruthless minority that institutionalized the
totalitarian system inherited by Stalin. In the 1930s many observers, Leon Trotsky foremost among
them, would insist that Stalin had “betrayed” Lenin’s authentic workerled revolution. Fainsod in
contrast saw Stalin as a direct continuation of Lenin’s authoritarian nature. Brzezinski, like other
advocates of this “continuity theory,” would note that it was Lenin, not Stalin, who unleashed the
all-encompassing power of the secret police, made organized violence the central means of political
control, turned the trade unions into organs of oppression, and sent the Red Army to the border
areas to reestablish the Russia empire.
Brzezinski earned his PhD under Fainsod in 1953 with a doctoral dissertation examining
the phenomenon of the political “purge” which he viewed as a prerequisite for a totalitarian
dictatorship to retain its revolutionary fervor and avoid ideological and political stagnation. In later
years Brzezinski would credit Fainsod for providing him with the intellectual tools to understand
the true nature of the Soviet Union. “What I learned at Harvard was that to deal with the Soviet
Union you had to understand the Soviet Union—and to understand the Soviet Union you had to
be objective and detached, analytical, because only then would you know its strengths and its
weaknesses---Merle Fainsod taught me how to analyze the Soviet system objectively from a
systematic, comprehensive, fashion—he was very systematic and also very detached.”
This detachment became a part of Brzezinski’s teaching style at Harvard. On a number of
occasions he would assume the role of a communist official and defend the theory from that point
of view. In 1952 Samuel Huntington and Brzezinski were teaching the basic undergraduate course
in Government and Political Theory. Huntington recalled “On the section on Marxism each of us
was teaching a section with twenty students or so, and Brzezinski showed up for his section one
day dressed up like Stalin, and he challenged the students to attack Communist theory. He said
‘well you’ve read criticisms of it. Now I will defend it.’ And he defended it for the entire section.”
Brzezinski’s work with Fainsod would dovetail with his academic work examining the
political concept of “totalitarianism.” The term “totalitarianism” would become the subject of
intense political debate over the years. It had become popular in the 1930s to describe the
similarities between the European dictatorships that had emerged in the wake of World War I. In
the 1940s Both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler captured the concept in the literary genre with
their dystopian novels of the late 1940s and in 1951 Hannah Arendt offered a sociological
explanation in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism that rooted the phenomenon in the rise of
mass politics that destroyed the liberal ideas which had flourished in the wake of the French
Revolution.
Yet “totalitarianism” still lacked a precise “model” demanded by the academic field of
political science. The most recognized authority on the concept was Harvard Professor Carl. J.
Friedrich. As a German émigré Friedrich was more familiar with the Nazi experience, so in 1954 he
invited Zbigniew Brzezinski to team-teach his class to include the Soviet experience. In 1956
Friedrich and Brzezinski published their conclusions in Totalitarianism Dictatorship and Autocracy.
The primary thesis of the work held that the rise of the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union in the
1930s represented a completely new phenomenon that surpassed in scope and intensity all
previous forms of authoritarian rule. The end result in both cases was the consolidation of an
allpowerful “socialist” state that used political terror to exact social obedience from a pacified
society.
But the most polemical point of the Friedrich-Brzezinski thesis—especially to academics on
the political left---was the contention that Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had far more
similarities than differences. In later years the model came under a sustained attack from
academics, mostly on the political left, who viewed the term “totalitarianism” as more of a political
weapon than a serious scholarly tool. On the other hand, Jan Prokop, a professor of literature who
lived in Poland under Stalinist rule, argued that Brzezinski had far greater objectivity than most of
his academic critics:
Brzezinski had no illusions about communism like there were among so many Western
intellectuals. He had information from the pre-war Poland because Poles were well informed about
what was happening outside their eastern borders. Brzezinski could talk with many Poles who had
just survived the Russian concentration camps. The whole Polish army under (Wladyslaw) Anders
was composed of those who had escaped the Soviet gulag. So he could hear of these experiences
directly. He was also one of the rare Western academics that read both Polish and Russian. So he
had direct access to the sources and he could read newspapers from both countries. In this respect
he was probably better prepared than even Hannah Arendt whose experience was with Germany
mainly and whose communist experience was indirect--the same with Orwell who was a genius
but did not have the direct experience with the Russian realities.
Charles Gati, a prominent scholar on Eastern Europe, concurred: “I think history has shown
two things. One is that essentially the description of totalitarianism, as he [Brzezinski] saw it, was
more or less accurate. And it was very important to have that label attached to it in order to mobilize
Western public opinion. Where I think the theory did not work out was the view that the totalitarian
regimes were gradually getting worse and worse--and they would have to get tighter and tighter.
Just the opposite happened. They loosened up under tremendous pressure. I think he came to
understand that part, and that doesn’t take much away from his original insights.”
Brzezinski’s work with Friedrich would make him a rising star in Harvard academic circles.
His success was rivaled only by that of another European émigré, whose family had come to
America just before the outbreak of World War II. Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Germany
in 1923 to an assimilated Jewish family. In 1938 Kissinger’s family escaped Nazi
Germany and settled in the United States. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II Kissinger
entered Harvard where he would become something of a legend.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski entered Harvard in 1950 Henry Kissinger had completed his
massive undergraduate thesis that attempted to explain nothing less than the “Meaning of
History.” Perhaps as significant Kissinger was known for his networking abilities that moved
gracefully between the world of academia and international politics. In 1952 Kissinger became the
editor of Confluence: An International Forum, a quarterly journal that published articles by guest
speakers and other prominent foreign policy thinkers at Harvard’s seminars. Kissinger was
appointed to the Harvard government faculty and later became associated with The Council on
Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. Both organizations would link Kissinger
to power centers within the Republican Party, including Nelson Rockefeller, who would become
the most noteworthy patron in his political career.
Throughout their long careers Brzezinski and Kissinger would engage in a number of
policy debates. Their occasional public disagreements would spawn later rumors that the rivalry
was rooted in their years together at Harvard. Both Brzezinski and Kissinger would claim that
journalists exaggerated this point by looking at their collegiate careers in hindsight. “That is not
true for him and it’s not true for me,” Brzezinski recalled, “It just was never so. We were both very
conscious of each other’s existence but there was no direct competition. We were in different
departments and even somewhat different years.” Kissinger recalled his relationship with
Brzezinski at Harvard as being both cordial and academic. “We had different points of emphasis
but we met around the campus and met socially occasionally. He was not a close friend but we
were very friendly.”
But Brzezinski and Kissinger did look at the world of the 1950s through different lenses.
While Brzezinski’s graduate work examined the origins and oppressive nature of the Soviet
political system, Kissinger’s focus was on intellectual and diplomatic history and the importance
of preserving global stability by arranging the proper balances of power. This view was best
reflected in Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation that examined the revolutionary unrest of the
Napoleonic Wars and the efforts of conservative statesmen, Metternich and Castlereagh, to restore
order following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Indeed Kissinger would show little hesitation
when asked if he would prefer to deal with a “legitimate” state that sought unjust ends or a
”revolutionary” state that had justice on its side. “If I had to choose between justice and order,”
Kissinger noted, “I would always choose the latter.”
Brzezinski, as might be expected for a native Pole, had a somewhat different view on the
utility of “balances of power” diplomacy. At the same time Brzezinski would take a much greater
academic interest than Kissinger in the political dynamics of postwar Eastern Europe. Indeed
Brzezinski at the time was one of the few scholars to take interest in a region that most American
still viewed as little more than a colorless and monolithic extension of the Soviet empire.
In the 1950s Brzezinski began to contribute scholarly articles to journals examining the
fragmenting nuances of the Soviet bloc. Brzezinski, unlike many of the more politically active East
European émigrés, was not a reactionary seeking an immediate restoration of the prewar order. He
realized that the communist system had brought forth an initial sense of optimism among
intellectuals and a long delayed sense of social mobility. 40 Yet he believed Eastern Europe’s future
would be better served within the more pluralist social-democratic system then being constructed
in the West. In doing so he helped refute the Soviet claim that the “people’s democracies” were
marching in ideological lockstep toward the same historically determined destiny. He attempted
to break the myth of a “bloc” by noting that some states in “Eastern Europe”--Poland, Hungary,
and Czechoslovakia in particular had strong historical and cultural ties with the West.41
In the summer of 1953 Brzezinski traveled to Munich where he met with Jan
NowakJezioranski, the World War II hero of the Polish resistance, and first director of the Polish
desk of
Radio Free Europe.42 Nowak-Jezioranski, despite initial misgivings about interrupting his busy
I always pictured a small overstuffed and overheated parlor, divided in half (East and West) by a
small iron curtain. It had the same consistency as steel wool, with a faded-pink floral pattern. On
their side fat men swapped guttural secrets in a foreign tongue. On our side a handsome American
agent knelt (either Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., or Jack Kelly), trying desperately to decipher what the fat
men were saying. And that flimsy iron curtain was all that kept Boris from waddling in America’s
back door and taking away the Motorola, the hi-fi, all that kept godless Soviets from drawing thick
black censor’s lines through the messages on the fridge.” Ian Shoales, I Gotta Go (Iowa City, 1985).
40 There was also the widespread view in the East that the Soviet-style centralized economies
would out-perform the capitalist economies while maintaining a standard of “social rights”--
universal equal provision of employment, housing, health care, education—superior to those
achieved in capitalist states. As one writer observed, communism meant that “a whole generation
of workers and particularly peasant children found themselves, for the first time, in a modern
apartment with running water and inside lavatory, or even in a lace-curtained office, with a potted
plant and a plastic Lenin.” Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity, p. 231 41 Interview, Washington, DC
(June 28, 2001).
42Nowak-Jezioranzski was in the early stages of an academic career when he was called to military
duty in 1939 after the Germans invaded Poland. Under the alias of “Jan Nowak” he would become
a key operative in the Polish underground resistance-- making five wartime trips, between
Warsaw, Stockholm, and London, traveling in disguise through Germany, meeting with Winston
Churchill, and the Polish government-in-exile. He took to London the first evidence of schedule,
took Brzezinski out to lunch where they began a conversation about the current situation in Eastern
Europe. As the conversation wore on Brzezinski shocked Nowak-Jezioranski with his encyclopedic
knowledge of the Polish resistance movement in World War II. “This was a man that was born in
Poland but had left as a child. I was therefore amazed that he would be not only interested but that
he would know so much. I spent two hours with him and concluded after our first meeting that
this is a man who will play a considerable role in the future in the United
States government and in the problems of East Central Europe.”43
But Brzezinski was not completely satisfied with the life of pure academia. Brzezinski’s
philosophical leanings in the early 1950s were toward the international wing of the Democratic
Party. This involved the support of the liberal domestic principles of Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal with Harry Truman’s hard line containment policy toward the Soviet Union. At the same time
Brzezinski believed more could be done to assist the populations in Eastern Europe that were then
struggling under the height of Stalinist rule. 44
Indeed while President Truman’s “containment” policy had stabilized Western Europe,
Stalin had brought Eastern Europe firmly under Soviet control. By the early 1950s Eastern Europe
the Nazi death camps, and was the first emissary to arrive after the Warsaw ghetto uprising that
had begun in April 1943. He left Poland as a courier to London during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944
carrying the archives of the Polish Resistance in bandages on an arm that had been broken during
a parachute drop. See Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw, (Detroit, 1982).
43 Interview, Annendale, Virginia (August 16, 1999).
44 George Kennan, the author of containment, saw great dangers in intervening too directly
in Eastern Europe. He cautioned that the region was one of the few issues that Moscow would go
to war over. “The fact of the matter,“ Kennan suggested in 1946, “is that we do not have power in
Eastern Europe really to do anything but talk.” Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace-The Origins of the Cold
War (New York: 1977), p. 255. Kennan did however postulate that over time Eastern Europe would
become a burden to the Soviet empire that would lead to greater liberalization in the region. As
Stalin continued to consolidate his power over Eastern Europe, and event occurred that would
influence U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe for the next forty-five years. Tito’s dramatic break
with Moscow provided new hope that Soviet control over Eastern Europe could be fragmented. As
a result of Tito’s actions, Kennan recommended the U.S. move cautiously to encourage similar
heretical drifts, although he warned that such a move must be undertaken with extreme discretion,
in that proposed operations directed at the satellites “must be measured against the kind and
degree of retaliation which they are likely to provoke from the Kremlin. They must not exceed in
provocation effect what is calculated suitable in the given situation.” John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies
of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford, 1982), p. 46.
was gripped by the same Stalinist frenzy seen in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. This involved the
hyper-centralization of industry, police state rule, show trials, and the elimination of all other
political parties. In 1948 Yugoslavia’s Jozef Tito became the only East European leader to defy
Stalin’s centralization process. Though Tito would survive, Stalin proceeded to take ruthless
measures to purge any “national communists” who might choose to take Tito’s path of “national
deviation.”
The view that the United States was losing the Cold War to a more dynamic and ruthless
opponent sent shock waves through the American political system. The “loss” of China in 1949
allowed Republicans to exploit the obvious shortcomings of Truman’s policy of containment,
which appeared, if only by definition, to be content with the status quo. Thus as the 1952
presidential campaign approached, the merits of merely “containing” communism became a
primary issue for a Republican Party that had not won a national election since 1928.
The Republicans probably ensured their victory when they selected Dwight Eisenhower,
over the more isolationist Robert Taft, as their candidate. As the avuncular hero of World War II
Eisenhower’s political appeal was indisputable and he had been actively recruited by both major
parties since he retired from the military. Though Eisenhower avoided the rhetorical excesses
against Truman’s foreign policy, his running mate Richard Nixon took delight in belittling “Dean
Acheson’s Cowardly College of Containment.”
But it was John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s future secretary of state, who would become
the most blusterous critic of containment on the campaign trial. In the spring of 1952 Dulles
submitted to Eisenhower a policy proposal that promised to “liberate” Eastern Europe from the
Soviet Union while deterring further Soviet expansion with the threat of a massive nuclear
deterrent. 47 Dulles outlined the logic of his proposals many times on the campaign trail. “At a time
when 800 million people are subject to ruthless, terroristic despotism and being whipped, by
fanatics, into a force for aggression, we talk of ‘containment’ and ‘stalemate’ as satisfactory goals.”
In the heated political environment of 1952 Dulles’ pledge proved an effective political
juxtaposition to the defensive policy of containment. Yet in the end “liberation” proved more of a
political calculation than a serious policy proposal. As one observer would later muse, the
47 “New Policy on Reds is Urged by Dulles,” The New York Times (May 16, 1952). Dulles was among
the most “internationalist” of Republican foreign policy specialists. After the war Dulles served the
Truman administration as a senior adviser at the San Francisco conference for the United Nations
and would assist in negotiating a peace treaty with Japan. He had a long and distinguished career
in foreign service. His maternal grandfather was John Watson Foster, who served as secretary of
state under Benjamin Harrison. His uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing, was secretary of state under
Woodrow Wilson. His diplomatic career began at the age of 19 when he accompanied his
grandfather to the second international peace conference at The Hague. Following World War I
Woodrow Wilson appointed Dulles as legal counsel to the Versailles Peace Conference. See Ronald
W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York, 1982).
policy of liberation was devised “primarily to roll back the Democrats from the White House, not
the Red Army in Eastern Europe.” And it would work. In November of 1952 Republican Dwight
Eisenhower buried Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in an electoral landslide.
The politics of Eastern Europe, however, would be affected far more by a less expected
change of power in Moscow. On March 6, 1953 the news filtered out that Joseph Stalin, the
undisputed ruler over the communist world for nearly three decades, had died. Zbigniew
Brzezinski was at home working on his dissertation when he heard the news late at night on the
radio. Without much thinking he called up his professor Merle Fainsod to inform him of the
breaking news. A rather calm but groggy Fainsod, after inquiring exactly what time it was, assured
his eager graduate student that Stalin would still be dead in the morning. Brzezinski, though
slightly embarrassed, thought quickly and reminded his professor that the press would be calling
early in the morning and he might want to be prepared.
Brzezinski was among the many political observers interested in how Dulles’ pledge to
“roll back” Soviet power from Eastern Europe would advance without the dominating presence of
Stalin to control the region. The first indication that Dulles’ policy was based on rhetoric would
occur in June of 1953 when workers in East Berlin erupted in a full-scale revolt. As Soviet tanks
moved to crush the revolt the Eisenhower Administration would offer little more than moral
support.
By 1954 Brzezinski came to believe that if the Eisenhower Administration was serious about
“liberating” Eastern Europe it should reconsider its decision to follow West Germany’s decision
not to recognize the postwar borders in Europe. At the close of World War II it had been agreed by
the Western Allies that Poland would be moved west to compensate for the Soviet occupation of
eastern Poland. The move meant that some 3 million Germans had been expelled from their homes
in order to make room for the incoming Poles. The newly acquired territories were officially called
the “recovered lands” by the Polish government, including the major cities of Gdansk (Danzig),
Wroclaw (Breslau), Szczecin (Stettin) as well as the entire industrial basin of Silesia.
The new German-Polish frontier on Oder and Niesse Rivers thus became an issue of intense
controversy within West Germany. When West Germany was admitted to NATO in 1955 it had
secured from the Western powers, including the United States, the pledge that no Western power
would accept Germany’s eastern borders until a settlement was reached on the reunification of
Germany. This, as Brzezinski would often note, represented a revisionist posture toward Poland
even more demanding than the territorial claims of the Weimar Republic. Though Brzezinski did
not object to the West German entrance into NATO, he thought Bonn’s adamant refusal to accept
the eastern borders was needlessly bolstering the Polish government’s claim that only the Soviet
Union could protect Eastern Europe from the threat of German revanchism. A similar situation
existed in Czechoslovakia, where the Communist regime secured its Stalinist rule by exploiting
Bonn’s refusal to repudiate the 1938 Munich accords upon which Hitler annexed the Sudetenland
and proceeded to dismember the interwar Czechoslovak state.
West German Chancellor Konrad Andenaur’s motives for not recognizing the controversial
border were largely rooted in domestic politics. By the mid-1950s some 20 percent of the West
German population was comprised of Germans that had been, by virtue of the postwar settlement,
expelled from their homes in the east. The expellees represented a strong political force and
represented the revisionist view that the Germans “to the east,” whether in the
GDR or in the remaining German-speaking territories of Eastern Europe, must never be
“abandoned.” It was thus an article of faith for West German politicians that the Yalta divisions
had no de jure status, and that the “legality” of the of the December 1937 frontiers of Germany must
be retained at all costs.
Brzezinski understood that the remilitarization of West German was cleverly exploited by
Soviet propaganda. But he also realized that it was an issue of grave concern in Poland, a country
that had lost 22 percent of its population in World War II. And, in reality it was not all that hard to
convince the Poles that the Germans harbored revisionist aims in the east. Until the 1960s maps in
West German schoolrooms designated the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers as “German
territories temporarily under Polish administration” while West German television viewers saw a
daily weather map that showed Germany’s eastern borders as they existed in 1937.
Thus Brzezinski had doubts about the seriousness of the U.S. pledge to “roll back” Soviet
power from Eastern Europe. “Liberation I thought was a non-starter because we weren’t prepared
to do anything. And the German notion that Germany has to be reunited first with everything open
including the Oder-Neisse Line was a non-starter because that had the effect of consolidating the
status quo. My argument early on was that if you want to detach Central Europe from Russia we
have to give the Central Europeans, particularly the Czechs and Poles, an assurance that Germany
was not going to try to recover territories or homes lost in 1945.”
Brzezinski was however encouraged in 1955 when the newly installed Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev began to show new flexibility toward Eastern Europe. This was seen most dramatically
in a trip to Yugoslavia designed to heal the split with Tito and even more dramatically in the
voluntary removal of Soviet troops from Austria in exchange for that state’s pledge of neutrality.
These two steps provided an indication to Brzezinski that the Soviets might come to realize, if only
out of self-interest, the advantages of having a neutral but tranquil Eastern
Europe next door rather than an empire that risked turning into a region of perpetual conflict.
In February 1956 Khrushchev made an even more dramatic move when he stunned the
Twentieth Party Congress with a lengthy denunciation of Stalin. After listing the crimes committed
by the late Soviet dictator Khrushchev declared that Communist Party must rid itself of the “cult
of the individual” and return to the true “Leninist” roots of the party. To Brzezinski Khrushchev’s
speech had unwittingly exposed the crux of the problem facing the Soviet system--there were
simply were no “Leninist norms” to return to. The Soviet system, according to
Brzezinski, was simply too ossified to enact reforms significant enough to save it.
Indeed Khrushchev’s speech would have a dramatic effect on Eastern Europe for it
immediately raised the question that if Stalin was in fact “fallible” so were the satrapies that had
ruled so despotically under his name. This was particularly the case in Brzezinski’s native Poland,
which from 1948 to 1953 had been ruled by “Muscovite” Poles whose authority had been based on
the personal backing of Stalin.
In June 1956, Brzezinski contributed an article to the New Republic, observing that
Khrushchev’s attempt at de-Stalinization might lead other Eastern European states to assert their
national distinctiveness. “For the first time since 1945,” noted Brzezinski, “the situation in Eastern
Europe was becoming fluid and opportunities for meaningful action were being created.”
That very month a labor strike in the Polish industrial city of Poznan erupted into a fullscale
political riot. The Polish army, then under the command of the Soviet appointed Marshal Konstanin
Rokossovsky, moved to crush the uprising. The actions of the Polish army would leave scores of
Polish strikers dead and hundreds more badly wounded. The Polish government was discredited
to the point where it sought to nominate Wladislaw Gomulka, a more national orientated
communist purged in the anti-Tito hysteria of the late 1940s, as Party Secretary in an effort to regain
a semblance of legitimacy.
Khrushchev, shocked by this act of defiance, flew uninvited to Warsaw where he berated
the “treacherous” activity of the Polish leadership. As he met with Gomulka in Warsaw, Soviet
troops had moved towards the Poland’s major cities and units took up positions across from the
Belvedere Palace where the leaders were meeting. An outraged Gomulka then demanded that
Soviet forces be pulled back with the warning that a Soviet invasion would be met with firm
resistance. Khrushchev, realizing the strength of feeling among the Polish people, grudgingly
conceded to Gomulka’s appointment on the condition that he preserve the Party’s “leading role”
in Polish affairs and keep Poland firmly within the recently constituted Warsaw Pact alliance.The
tepid U.S. response to the “Polish October” gave Brzezinski further doubts about the sincerity of
Dulles’ pledge of liberation. At the height of the Polish crisis Dulles went on the radio and
volunteered the pledge that in the event of Soviet military intervention of Poland the United States
would takes no active measures. Though Brzezinski was not advocating direct U.S. intervention,
he noted that Dulles’ advance declaration had eliminated an area of doubt for the Soviets.
Brzezinski argued, as he would when the United States faced a similar situation twelve years later
in Czechoslovakia, that the perception of U.S. indifference had assured the Soviets that they had a
free hand to resort to a military invasion.
Gomulka’s triumph nonetheless proved contagious in the region. When the Hungarian
authorities broke up a popular demonstration in sympathy for Gomulka’s new regime, 200,000
protesters gathered in Budapest. That night Imre Nagy, who like Gomulka represented a more
“national” brand of communist rule, was recalled as the Hungarian premier. Yet Nagy, unlike
Gomulka, was unwilling or perhaps unable to contain the Hungarian revolution. Encouraged by
Dulles’ pledge of liberation and ill-considered support from Radio Free Europe and Voice of
America—the Hungarians rose up against Soviet rule that culminated in the toppling of the giant
statue of Stalin in the city center.
On October 29 the Kremlin issued the stunning announcement that Soviet troops were
being withdrawn from Hungary. The next day Nagy announced that Hungary would abolish the
one-party system and formally remove itself from the Warsaw Pact. But as the world’s attention
turned to the crisis over the Suez Canal the Soviet saw their chance to reconsolidate their authority.
In early November 2,500 Soviet tanks stormed back into Hungary. After two weeks of bitter
fighting thousands of Hungarians were killed and thousands more wounded. Nagy, who had
initially sought amnesty in the Yugoslav embassy, was taken to Moscow and subsequently
executed. Hungary, under the rule of Janos Kadar, would return to the fold as a loyal member of
the Warsaw Pact.
In the weeks following the Soviet invasion Brzezinski wrote an article offering a trenchant
critique of the supposed U.S. policy of liberation. He noted that the idea of “rolling back” Soviet
power in Eastern Europe was a virtual impossibility if the United States declared its passivity in
advance and if Moscow could assume a “liberated” Eastern Europe would be incorporated into a
NATO alliance spearheaded by a rearmed West Germany. Brzezinski concluded that under such
circumstances of “the Soviets would have been foolish not to intervene.”
Brzezinski also articulated his view that the United States must move away from the empty
bluster of “liberation” toward a policy of “peaceful engagement” that would encourage political
“evolution” rather than “revolution.” While the Cold War was still about military containment,
Brzezinski realized that it was also about the social, cultural, and economic attraction of the West.
He now saw Churchill’s Iron Curtain metaphor as more akin to a “semipermeable membrane”
where a more active U.S. role could have a moderating effect on a region increasingly attracted to
Western economic, technological and cultural influences. To take advantage of this the United
States must begin to “engage” the communist regimes in order to more effectively facilitate this
process.
This was hardly conventional wisdom among the more vocal émigré groups who insisted
that if the United States could not immediately liberate the region it must at the very least restrict
its dealings with the “illegitimate” Communist regimes of Eastern Europe as much as possible.
Indeed, with the notable exception of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the United States had shown little
inclination to deal with the East European Communist regimes. This was largely based on the
popular perception that any sort of economic interaction with an individual Communist regime in
the Eastern Europe would strengthen what was still widely perceived as a monolithic Sino-Soviet
bloc. Brzezinski’s idea of a “peaceful” engagement was hardly popular to American politicians still
clinging to Dulles’ more dramatic calls to “roll back” Soviet power from the region. The prospect
of carefully differentiating between the various shades of communism required some ideological
flexibility that was not always present among U.S. policymakers who had become conditioned to
regard communism as a monolithic evil. Indeed few politicians would be seen pounding podiums
demanding “peaceful engagement” toward the Soviet bloc.
Brzezinski countered that engagement would over time have a “Europeanizing” impact on
the communist states that would reduce the more parochial attitudes within the political elites in
the region. Brzezinski even postulated that the emergence of a more democratic Eastern
Europe might eventually serve as a “transmission belt” to pull the Soviet Union into a greater
Europe, thus ending the ideological division of the continent—and by extension—the very root of
the Cold War:
I thought that the Republicans, particularly after the flop of liberation, were blowhards. I
also felt, as I became more mature, that this country was capable of conducting a protracted strategy
of manipulation, but it is not capable of engaging in a head on confrontation if we can avoid it. And
the policy of liberation, as the Republicans formulated it, did require a willingness to have a head
on confrontation. And in the nuclear age it became increasingly unreal. Therefore the alternative
was a process of penetration, dilution, absorption, engagement, etc. Now once that strategy began
to crystallize in my mind I realized that the only way to make it possible was to make it look
attractive to the Russians—or at least palatable---now could they have then turned the tables on me
by embracing it—a little bit maybe like in ’53?---yes, theoretically yes—but that would require a
change in their attitude and in the way they played the game and it would entail risks so high, that
I just don’t think they could’ve done it. Because they would have had to accept rules of the game
for that part of Europe in which the possibility of them losing, or the thing getting out of hand, for
them would loom rather large, particularly after 1956. So in a sense, and I don’t want to claim that
I was brilliantly Machiavellian, but in a sense there was an element of dissimulation in what I was
publicly advocating. Because essentially what I was saying is peaceful engagement will really affect
the Central Europeans, the Russians won’t really get engaged but perhaps we can entice them to
come along far enough so that we can the change the status quo.
Nonetheless Brzezinski’s optimism toward the Western model seemed even more out of
place when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957. Indeed Sputnik
created fashionable talk in the West that a centralized and dynamic Soviet economy was rapidly
overtaking a complacent America awash in consumer goods. Brzezinski, in an argument he would
make more stridently in later years, noted that the Soviet economy had succeeded only in
developing the more primitive sectors of an industrial economy. In the future the Soviet Union was
likely to compete with a West that combined the advantages of a free market with the social safety
net of the social democratic welfare state.
Though Sputnik may have been impressive, Brzezinski saw another event occurring in
1957 that was likely to be far more important for the future of Eastern Europe. In 1957 the European
Economic Community (EEC) signed the Treaty of Rome that established the first step toward
integrating Western Europe into a single free-trade area and set the precedent of a supranational
authority that maintained powers previously reserved to sovereign states. Brzezinski suggested
that if this policy was good for Western Europe, it could eventually provide a bridge to the less
developed East European economies then under the political dominion of the Soviet Union.
Ultimately Brzezinski thought the most important message was to stress the concept of
gradual liberalization. In the late 1950s Brzezinski was recruited to write programs for Radio Free
Europe, (RFE) the Munich-based network established in 1950 to broadcast to the countries of the
Eastern bloc in their native languages. When RFE first began broadcasting in the early 1950s it took
eagerly to the message of Dulles’ liberation and was often discredited by its extreme language and
political slant. This would lead to the charge that RFE had irresponsibly incited the
Hungarians to take up arms against the Soviet Union in 1956.
There was a good deal of opposition to Brzezinski’s plan of “peaceful engagement” but
over time there was a grudging recognition that there was some strategic sense in it. By the early
1960s RFE assumed a more realistic goal of supporting gradual liberalization before liberation. The
broadcasts also began to encourage the end goal of a gradual reintegration of the Soviet bloc states
into the European community. Indeed after 1956 a number of Soviet bloc states, including Poland,
viewed the language of “peaceful engagement” as tranquil enough to halt the expensive process of
jamming the western broadcasts.
It remained to be seen how the region would respond to the dramatic events of 1956. For a
time Brzezinski’s native Poland appeared to offer the best hope for such “evolutionary” reform.
For the first time in the history of any communist party, the pressure of public opinion had brought
about a change of government. Indeed, the early phase of the Gomulka era
witnessed encouraging signs that Poland was moving toward a more moderate brand of
socialism.
In 1957 Brzezinski returned to Poland for the first time since he had left as a ten-year old
boy shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The city of his youth had been obliterated by the
Nazi occupation and only partially rebuilt in communist-style block housing. The house in which
he was born was destroyed in the war. His grandmother’s house, ironically enough, was partially
incorporated as part of the U.S. embassy. “It was kind of a strange rediscovery of a past which is
no longer a part of you and yet is an indelible part of your past,” Brzezinski recalls. “On subsequent
visits, if anything, I realized how American I had become.” But Brzezinski also detected a new
political atmosphere that encouraged his belief that “peaceful engagement” was already having an
impact on the region. Brzezinski met with Polish military commanders who privately expressed
their deep sense of regret for firing on the Polish workers during the 1956
Poznan riots.
“My sense increasingly,” Brzezinski recalled, “was that the national communists in these
countries wanted to retain power. But if they could retain power and become gradually more
independent from the Russians and more involved with the West--they would love that formula.
It was a much more difficult target for them to shoot at and many people even in the Eastern Bloc
regimes, especially in Poland, were very friendly to me because they saw me as advocating
something which would help them retain their power, retain their status, even retain their core
beliefs, while at the same time being part of the West which they felt entitled to belong.”
In October 1957 Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki proposed a plan for a nuclear free
zone that would include West and East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
Holland. It was designed to promote a relaxation of military tensions between the rival blocs, and
prepare the ground for the German recognition of the Oder-Neisse border. Rapacki argued the
while the unification of Germany (which his plan also proposed) might present a threat, the
continued stalemate between NATO and the Warsaw Pact represented an even greater danger.
72
In the end Rapacki’s proposal was dismissed outright by the United States as another
Soviet effort to divide the NATO alliance. Brzezinski, on the other hand, was attracted to it. “It
seemed to me that is was consistent with what I was beginning increasingly to formulate as a
comprehensive American strategy. I had already visited Poland and I knew by then that many so-
called Polish ‘reds’ were really ‘white’ on the inside.”
Already by the late 1950s, however, Eastern Europe was no longer at the forefront of
American foreign policy. As the rhetoric of “liberation” and “roll back” was quietly retired, the
United States’ legislators took refuge in more ceremonial bluster. In July 1959 the United States
Congress passed a “Captive Nations Week” that henceforth would be commemorated every July.
It was accompanied by a resolution suggesting the Soviet Bloc posed a “dire threat to the security
of the United States” and that it was vital to keep alive the desire for liberty and independence of
the conquered nations in the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic countries. Though Brzezinski
might have agreed with the gesture in principle he feared rhetorical outrage was not as effective as
the active engagement of the region. As it was, the most vocal advocates of the “Captive Nations
Week,” were fierce anti-communists who wanted little to do with anything resembling
“peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe.
Even so, the declaration of the Captive Nations Resolution would, at least indirectly,
demonstrate the power of a softer engagement from the West. The Soviets, not attuned to the
domestic factors that drive such alarmist rhetoric, feared this was another call for liberation and
quite possibly war. “This resolution stinks,” Khrushchev shouted at Vice President Nixon while
the two prepared for the famous “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow. But Brzezinski believed the real
power of the United States was seen in Nixon’s route home. In July 1959 Nixon became the highest
U.S. official ever to visit a Soviet bloc nation when arrived in Warsaw. The word of Nixon’s arrival
in Warsaw was spread quickly by Radio Free Europe. This alone would ensure that Nixon would
be met with a rapturous applause, much to the chagrin of his official hosts.
By the late 1950s the real action in the Cold War confrontation had moved away from
Europe to the Third World. Khrushchev was now boasting that the world’s “correlation of forces,”
was swinging toward Moscow. In 1959, the Soviet Union had directed communist movements
around the world to shift attention from direct confrontation with the industrial powers of the West
to “wars of national liberation” in less developed nations. This atmosphere created the popular
image of ideologically assertive communist world engaging in battle against an idle and defensive
America still relying on the increasingly hollow bluff of “massive
retaliation.”
In 1955 Henry Kissinger had offered the most notable intellectual challenge to President
Eisenhower’s policy of “massive retaliation.” It came in a 1955 article appearing in the journal
Foreign Affairs in which Kissinger argued that “massive retaliation” was no longer credible to deter
the Soviets from expanding into the disputed “gray areas” of the post-colonial world. Kissinger
suggested that the alternative would be to meet limited aggression with limited warfare, using
whatever weapons were appropriate--including fighting “limited nuclear wars.” In 1957
Kissinger’s ideas were expanded into a book entitled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Kissinger’s
book became a best seller and would turn the untenured Harvard instructor into something of an
unlikely national celebrity. Vice President Richard Nixon was among the many public officials that
were seen carrying a copy of the book.
Brzezinski had also become a critic of Eisenhower’s “all or nothing” foreign policy. At the
same time Brzezinski began to advocate more boldly his belief that the Soviet Union was in the
early stages of an ineluctable process of systemic decay. Brzezinski’s primary concern by 1960 was
that the Soviet Union, especially if pressed by the more radical Chinese, could revive its ideological
potency by taking greater risks in the developing world.
Writing in late 1960 Brzezinski noted, “Of the various means the Communist leaders might
employ to slow down or possibly reverse such a gradual process of internal decay, the most
effective would be to score a series of spectacular international successes. For this reason, only a
resolute response to Communism can strengthen those within the Communist movement who
warn against war and against excessive risks. Only by firmness can the United States refute the
Chinese argument of “a paper tiger.”
By 1960 Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy had picked up on this idea that a reliance
on massive retaliation was permitting the communists to take the initiative in places like
Vietnam and Laos. His alternative called for a “flexible response” to Soviet aggression that would
allow the United States to fight guerilla wars in places of its choosing without relying on the
increasingly hollow bluff of threatening to launch an all-out nuclear war.
In 1960 Zbigniew Brzezinski became an active supporter of John F. Kennedy’s run for the
presidency. Like many Americans at the time (Brzezinski became a U.S. citizen in 1958) Brzezinski
saw Kennedy as more than a politician. “I thought he was conveying and personalizing a kind of
youthful and vital America and I thought this was a tremendous asset, especially after the second
Eisenhower term which seemed to be stagnant.”
In November of 1960 Kennedy would defeat Richard Nixon in one of the closet races in
U.S. history. Kennedy’s victory also gave Brzezinski new confidence that it was the United States
that had the upper hand in the Cold War struggle—especially toward Eastern Europe. In the
Kennedy transition Brzezinski wrote papers for the incoming administration on how best to engage
the Soviet bloc states and take advantage of the growing divisions in the communist world.
Brzezinski’s ideas were immediately apparent in Kennedy’s first State of the Union
address, when the newly inaugurated president announced he was seeking congressional authority
to selectively expand economic relations with the Soviet bloc nations and explore with the Polish
government the possibility of using frozen United States funds in that country as
“projects of peace that will demonstrate our abiding friendship and interest in the people of
Poland.”
The new Kennedy administration presented itself as one of youth and vitality. Kennedy
surrounded himself with like-minded men—--the “brightest and the best” as they came to be
known. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was a former Rhodes scholar; General Maxwell Taylor, a
“military intellectual,” became Kennedy’s closest military adviser; and Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara was widely touted as a “whiz kid” who had once taught at the Harvard Business
School.
However it was Kennedy’s “Special Assistant to National Security” McGeorge Bundy who
would have the most dramatic impact the careers of both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry
Kissinger. Kennedy sought to orchestrate foreign policy from the White House where a few trusted
aides could make quick decisions without the constraints of the cumbersome staffs at the
State Department.
As Kennedy’s resident “intellectual,” Bundy would play the public educational role
designed to enlighten the press and public about the nuances of U.S. foreign policy. Now a direct
participant in policy debate, Bundy was specifically instructed to give his own policy views to the
president rather than simply overseeing the process in the National Security Council whereby
decisions had previously been channeled for presidential resolution.
Until 1960 there had been few setbacks in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s academic career. Since his
appointment as an assistant professor at Harvard in 1956, he had become perhaps the nation’s
leading authority on Eastern Europe and had tasted the highest echelons of power working on the
1960 campaign of John Kennedy. But in 1960 Brzezinski’s career suffered an apparent setback when
Harvard passed him over in the selection process for a tenured professorship. In later years
apocryphal stories would emerge among journalists that Brzezinski had lost out to Kissinger in a
bitter head-to-head tenure competition.
In reality they were not in the same department. As Kissinger recalled, “There is nothing
you can personally compete for. You get appointed or you don’t get appointed. But there’s nothing
you can do to each other that would enhance your chances. Zbig was not my so-called competitor
when my name came up for the tenure appointment. That is to say that I was appointed and he
was rejected the year I was appointed. The man who was my competitor when
I was appointed was Stanley Hoffman—and they solved it by appointing both of us.”
There was nevertheless something of a rivalry developing between the two foreign born
academics. “Obviously these were two extremely able people,” recalls Samuel Huntington, who
attended Harvard with both men. “They had both done well in the academic world. They both
wanted to have an impact on policy, they both were foreign policy experts, and so there was a
natural rivalry. It couldn’t be otherwise.”
In later years Brzezinski would admit that at least some of his later disagreements with
Kissinger were rooted in the unique relationship that would develop between the two rising stars
in the foreign policy field. “I think probably I was more critical than I really was,” recalled
Brzezinski, “in part because it was political and to some extent it was personal. We always
remained, to some extent friends, even when we were rivals, but we were young and we were
competing—and so naturally we shot at each other also.”
By 1960 Brzezinski and Kissinger had emerged as the most prominent of the new
generation of foreign policy experts. In the ensuing decade Brzezinski would gain predominance
advising Democratic politicians while Kissinger learned toward Republicans, becoming especially
close to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. In this respect they were seen to be at least as
equally important as the President since these were the men the president called upon for advice
in times of crisis. This led to a degree of stardom and public recognition that eluded most
academics. Despite their apparent differences both Brzezinski and Kissinger believed that it was
imperative for the United States to be engaged in the world and to contain the expansion of Soviet
power. How best to achieve this latter goal would become the subject of their most intense foreign
policy battles in the 1960s.
Meanwhile Brzezinski believed that engaging Eastern Europe also required the United
States to be assertive around the world. “I traveled to the region (Eastern Europe) and I talked to
the people.” Brzezinski recalled. “And I had a sense of how the mindset of the younger generation
was being reshaped by events--in particular by closer contacts with the West. I was impressed by
the vulnerability of the region to the ideas of the West—and also by the appeal of the Western
lifestyle. And therefore I felt that if we just persist and keep on the one hand a strong hand on the
Soviet Union so it isn’t allowed to expand which would revitalize its ideological momentum—but
on the other hand kind of foster more and more links, what I called “peaceful engagement,” that
the end result would be the dissolution of the system.”
CHAPTER TWO: THE TURBULENT 1960s
In the fall of 1960 Brzezinski joined the faculty at Columbia University as an associate
professor of government and public law. At Columbia Brzezinski would found a prominent
research center called Institute on Communist Affairs that was specifically designed to examine the
fragmenting dynamics of the communist world. This reflected Brzezinski’s belief of the growing
importance of the nascent Sino-Soviet split and the rise of “national communism” in Eastern
Europe.
Brzezinski had become something of an academic celebrity and his were among the most
popular classes at Columbia. Brzezinski’s rapid-fire lectures required students to move their pens
with equal rapidity. If students complained that the lectures moved too quickly they were assured
rather abruptly that it was they who were writing too slowly. Steven Goldstein recalled his
experience from Brzezinski’s seminar that he took with a young Madeline Albright in the 1960s. “It
was like sitting at the feet of the master. He was terrific. He was not so much virulently anti-
Communist as virulently analytic. He loved to put things in boxes. We would talk about different
ways to power, different types of transformation.”
Brzezinski had also developed a reputation for not suffering fools in the classroom. Charles
Gati, who served as a graduate assistant at Columbia in the 1960s recalled; “He did not give much
time to students except in class, where he taught them how to think. He did not conform to today’s
image of the ‘good professor’ who sits down and has a beer with you. Many professors might spend
more time with you perhaps, and they put their arm around you. Professor Brzezinski was nothing
like that. There was nothing ‘chummy’ about him, nothing cozy about him. He was very business
like, very helpful, but not to boost your ego or help your psyche. He was there to teach you about
the subject matter. But he read their papers carefully, and when there was something good he
appreciated it. But to get an “A” from him was really hard. “
Brzezinski’s academic work was also reaching new heights. In 1960 Brzezinski produced
Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, a book that would become the magnum opus of his career and a true
classic in the field of East European studies for a generation. As the title would indicate, Unity and
Conflict observed a number of centrifugal forces then festering within communist world.
Brzezinski would later recall the rationale behind his book. “I simply started writing Unity
and Conflict because I was interested in what was happening in this more complex
Communist controlled world that was based no longer just on a single decision maker in the
Kremlin—like Stalin—but now involved units that even if not co-equal and highly subordinate,
still had some degree of autonomy and capacity for action. And it was an important, if I may say
so, historical contribution in the sense that it stood the test of time and was viewed as the definitive
book on the Soviet bloc at that time.”
Brzezinski noted that while the Soviets had survived the twin crises of 1956, the cohesion
of the Soviet bloc was being challenged by a rise in nationalism and the gradual waning of
ideological zeal seen in the immediate postwar era. Brzezinski noted that beyond the familiar
clichés glorifying the ineluctable process of building “socialist internationalism” the Eastern
European regimes had in reality taken to more primitive forms of interwar nationalism. This was
largely an effort to deflect attention from the unpopularity of Moscow’s imperial rule and from the
fact that the region’s economic performance was beginning to fall further behind that of the
West.
Charles Gati recalls the influence of Brzezinski’s work: “That was the masterpiece. Every
course in the United States, and there were more courses on Eastern Europe than there are today,
all learned about the postwar Soviet bloc from that book. I used it for years and years as a teacher
and I think it stands up today. There is just nothing wrong with it. Certainly as an academic I think
it remains his best work.” 6
Despite a name that few Americans could pronounce--‘just ignore the first z’ he would try
and explain—Brzezinski gained increased public notoriety as the print and electronic media began
to solicit his expertise on the Soviet Union and developments within the Soviet bloc.7 Brzezinski’s
ability to succinctly yet effectively encapsulate the complexities of the communist world made him
particularly effective on the new medium of television. Lawrence Spivak, the founder of Meet the
Press, was particularly impressed with Brzezinski’s analysis and made him a frequent quest on the
popular weekend news program. 8
gave the following review: “Only once in the postwar period did someone tie together all
dimensions of the Soviet world. The Soviet Union’s relationship with Eastern Europe, the domestic
sources of change within the Socialist camp, the ongoing struggle with Tito’s Yugoslavia, and, the
most dramatic development of all, the Sino-Soviet conflict. Brzezinski did this with an intellectual
flair and clarity of argument and prose that set his book apart from an increasingly solid collection
of work that by the 1960s was focused on different aspects of Soviet, East European, and Chinese
foreign policy.” “Significant Books of the Last 75 Years,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 5, (September-
October 1997), p. 231.
6 Interview, Washington, DC (September 13, 2001).
7 In March 1962, Columbia University’s School of International Affairs inaugurated a series
of television lectures on contemporary world problems. Brzezinski provided the first lecture in the
series outlining the reasons behind the growing fissures in the communist world. The following
day Brzezinski’s photo appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The newspaper’s
television columnists noted that Brzezinski’s was “an absorbing study of the fragmentation of the
international Communist movement, the power struggle between the Soviet Union and
Communist China, the role of tiny Albania in defying Moscow and the rise of the multiplicity of
voices in the Communist parties of different lands. The meaning of the international stresses
besetting communism, in terms of both the perils and opportunities for the West, were discussed
by Professor Brzezinski with a lucidity that consistently held the attention.” In an amusing case of
popular culture intertwining with Cold War politics the analysis of Brzezinski’s lecture would have
to share space with an equally enthusiastic review of a skit performed by Sid Caesar and Carol
Lawrence on the previous nights’ Ed Sullivan Show. Jack Gould, “TV: Preview of International
Affairs,” The New York Times (March 26, 1962).
8 Interview, Washington, DC (November 4, 1999).
In 1962 Harvard offered Brzezinski a tempting package (full professorship with half time
free for research) in an attempt to regain his services. Samuel Huntington, Brzezinski’s colleague at
Columbia who had also been previously turned down for tenure at Harvard, reflected on the
sequence of events. “In 1962 I got a phone call from the chair of the Harvard Government
Department and he said they had reconsidered and they realized they had made a mistake and
they wanted to invite me back as a full professor. I said ‘Well, I’ll think about it’. And at the end of
our conversation he says ‘Can you transfer me over to Brzezinski’s line, I want to make the same
offer to him,’—which he did.”
Brzezinski had become comfortable in New York. After weeks of deliberation he made the
decision to remain at Columbia. “I was tempted,” Brzezinski recalled, “but I felt that once I had left
Harvard I did not want to retrace my steps, and I also felt that New York City was a better platform
for someone with an activist political orientation.”
Huntington concurs, but recalls there may have been other forces at work. “Zbig and I were
working on our book at that point together,” recalled Huntington, “ and we spent two or three
months trying to decide whether to come back to Harvard or to stay at Columbia. We tried to do
this very scientifically--weighing the advantages of Harvard and Columbia--New York and Boston
and so forth. In the end he decided to stay at Columbia and I decided to come back to Harvard.
There was at least a strong possibility that despite our efforts to be scientific the whole thing was
determined from the beginning because (Brzezinski’s wife) Muska wanted to stay in
New York and my wife wanted to come back to Boston.”
Remaining at Columbia did offer certain advantages, however. In the early 1960s New
York, far more than Washington, was the recognized gateway into the nation’s foreign policy
“establishment.” While in New York Brzezinski was taken under the wing of Hamilton Fish
Armstrong who was an influential member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the
legendary editor of its flagship journal Foreign Affairs. Upon arriving in New York Brzezinski
became a frequent guest at the CFR’s headquarters at 68th Street and Park Avenue, a location that
at once served as a debating center and social club for the more influential of the nation’s foreign
policy doyens.
The CFR emerged in the wake of World War I in an effort to counter the predominant wave
of isolationism then prevailing in the United States Congress. When the U.S. Senate rejected
Woodrow Wilson’s proposal of the League of Nations in 1920 Colonel Edward M. House, a key
adviser to Wilson, recruited a group of intellectuals with a more “internationalist” world-view. The
purpose of this “council” was to provide an intellectual counterweight to isolationist voices and to
promote international commerce through increased trade and financial interaction.
The CFR did not amount to much until 1927 when the Rockefeller family began to fund it
with considerable financial assistance. In 1939, supported by Rockefeller money and encouraged
by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the CFR initiated four planning groups that would provide the
framework for the postwar institutions of, among others, the United Nations, World Bank, and
International Monetary Fund. By the late 1940s the CFR had become the predominant think-tank
in the United States.
The CFR’s elite reputation and internationalist world-view would also make it the bette noir
for conspiracy theorists from across the political spectrum. From the political left the CFR was
viewed as a club of Wall Street bankers, lawyers, and businessmen, meeting covertly to dictate an
elitist foreign policy beyond the watchful eye of the press and elected officials. Even stronger
attacks would come for the fringes of the political right that viewed the CFR as, among other things,
an elitist Rockefeller-led cabal attempting to undermine the sovereign independence of the United
States and establish a one-world socialist government. Indeed Brzezinski’s entrance into the CFR
and the relationship he established with David Rockefeller in the early 1960s would soon make him
the virtual obsession of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
Brzezinski’s association with the CFR in 1960 would also further his goal of weaving the
concept of “peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe more formally into U.S. policy. Hamilton
Fish Armstrong had been editor of Foreign Affairs since 1928. Under his leadership the journal
attained an international reputation that transcended its relatively small circulation. An article
appearing in that journal was likely to be read, and probably discussed, by the luminaries of the
United States foreign policy establishment.
Brzezinski consulted William Griffith, the former chief of Radio Free Europe, to bolster his
chances of publishing an article on “peaceful engagement” in Foreign Affairs. “I wasn’t sure that
they would publish me,” said Brzezinski, “in part because of my very foreign sounding name, in
part because I was still a relatively junior academic. So I proposed to Griffith that we write this
article together especially since our views were similar and I figured that it would have a better
chance of getting in. I suggested the phrase ‘peaceful engagement’ because I had a sense that giving
a policy concept an easy to remember and identifiable label it would generate more impact for it—
and it caught on.”
In the spring of 1961 Brzezinski and Griffith published a seminal article in Foreign Affairs
suggesting that the United States attempt to transform the Soviet dominated “bloc” into a more
“neutral belt of states which, like the Finnish, would enjoy genuine popular freedom of choice in
internal policy while not being hostile to the Soviet Union and not belonging to Western military
alliances.“ The authors argued that the most effective way to achieve this goal was to offer the
incentive of economic assistance to the more moderate regimes in the Soviet bloc, while convincing
the West German government to finally accept its eastern boundaries in order to undermine
Moscow’s claim that the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe was the only assurance against the rise
of German revanchism. 16
This idea of “peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe was largely dependent,
however, on the superpowers coming to some arrangement over Berlin which remained a
vulnerable western outpost located 110 miles inside East Germany—linked to West Germany only
by roads and rail lines surrounded by well armed Soviet divisions. Khrushchev, in his characteristic
earthy candor, liked to refer to the city as the “testicles of the West” which he could “squeeze” any
time he felt like it, something he had attempted as recently in 1958 when he threatened to turn the
divided city over to the administration of East Berlin.17
Yet by the summer of 1961 some 2,000 East Germans a day, mostly highly educated young
professionals, were escaping to the West through East Berlin. This ideological sieve represented a
vast “brain drain” of the East German population and a severe embarrassment to
East Germany. The so-called Hallstein doctrine had already been waived with respect to the Soviet
Union. In German eyes this was a proper exception, since the Soviet Union occupied a part of
Germany. Brzezinski recommended that Bonn consider the possibility of distinguishing between
free and captive nations. The West Germans could state that the Hallstein Doctrine must apply to
free nations that could exercise a free choice--but not to captive ones, the Soviet satellites. This
would give Bonn a far greater freedom of action in respect to Eastern Europe.
16 Brzezinski would continue to note that Western politicians failed to realize the impact in
the east of Germany’s refusal to accept the postwar borders. By 1960 a growing number of Poles
considered the preservation of the western border as nothing less than a matter of national survival.
In this view the postwar boundaries made Poland far more viable politically, economically, and
even strategically than before the war—qualities necessary to withstand any pressure that might
come from the Soviet Union as well. Indeed, many Poles believed that it was this strength that
enabled them to extract a substantial degree of internal autonomy from the Soviet Union in 1956.
By the early 1960s Gomulka had begun to score effective propaganda points with the official line
that only a close relationship with the Soviet Union could keep Moscow from cutting a Rapallo-
like deal with Bonn over the heads of the Poles. Adam Bromke, “Polish Nationalism and
Communism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 40, no. 4 (July 1962), pp. 639-641. For a look at the issue of the
history of the German-Polish border disputes, see Arthur R. Rachwald, “Poland Between the
Superpowers: Three Decades of Foreign Policy,” Orbis, vol. 20, no. 4 (Winter 1977), pp. 1055-1083.
17 See Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin (Baltimore, 1963). Thomas W. Wolfe, Soviet
Power and Europe: 1945-1970 (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 89-93.
Soviet boasts that the world’s “historical forces” were moving their way. In the early hours of
August 12-13, 1961 the East German authorities moved to solve the problem with the construction
of the Berlin Wall. In the days after the initial barbed wire went up, East German workers began
the construction of a more permanent structure that would eventually become a 4.5-meter concrete
wall with a 100 meter cleared strip on the Eastern German side guarded by mines, trip wires,
automatic firing devices and 295 watchtowers manned by armed guards with orders to shoot to
kill.
During the first week of construction all eyes turned to the response of President
Kennedy. But Kennedy’s silence sent the clear implication that so long as the access routes to
West Berlin remained open, events in East Berlin would not merit a direct confrontation with the
Soviet Union. West Berlin mayor Wiley Brandt was among many Germans who denounced
America’s passivity, informing a large public rally “Berlin expects more than words. Berlin expects
political action!” Nevertheless Kennedy had taken the first step in informing Bonn that German
insistence on reunification could no longer prevent a broader détente with the Soviet Union.
“Germany has been divided for sixteen years,” Kennedy would later concede, “and will continued
to stay divided.”
Brzezinski saw this as a potentially dangerous situation for the Western alliance. His
primary concern was that Bonn officials, concluding that German unification was no longer a
priority for the United States, would move toward a more “neutral” East-West position and seek
their own deal with Moscow. Brzezinski’s solution would involve the United States responding
with a far bolder plan of “peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe with the clear end goal of
bringing forth a peaceful reunification of Germany.
Indeed by late 1962 President Kennedy began to speak more forcefully about the need to
“peacefully engage” the more moderate states in Eastern Europe. On October 14, 1962 Kennedy
spoke before a Pulaski Day celebration in Buffalo with a speech that could have been lifted right
out of one of Brzezinski’s academic articles. “We need more flexibility in our economic arsenal,”
Kennedy declared “There are varying shades even within the Communist world. We must be able
to seize the initiative when the opportunity arises in Poland in particular and in other countries as
time goes on behind the Iron Curtain…but we must never—under any statement, declaration,
treaty, or other manner-recognize Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as permanent.”
By the end of that day, however, Kennedy would have more on his mind than Eastern
Europe. As Kennedy was speaking in Buffalo U-2 reconnaissance planes flying over Cuba took
photos of four launch sites being constructed for the use of medium-range missiles. Kennedy, after
two weeks of intense consultations with his advisers, responded with a naval “quarantine” of the
island. In late October the world watched anxiously as the eighteen Soviet-bloc freighters bound
for Cuba reversed direction in the face of an American naval blockade.
While Kennedy came out of the crisis a hero, behind the scenes he had agreed to the
removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba in exchange for the U.S. removal of its Jupiter missiles in
Turkey and a pledge not to invade Cuba. It was a covert deal that the members of the Kennedy
Administration managed to deny for over two decades. Nevertheless in 1963 U.S. missiles were
quietly withdrawn from Turkey under cover stories that the missiles were obsolete and had been
scheduled for removal before the crisis in Cuba.
The week after the crisis Brzezinski contributed an article in the Washington Post suggesting
the Kennedy’s show of strength was decisive in resolving the crisis. In the same article Brzezinski
linked Cuba to a less publicized crisis then troubling the Kennedy Administration. He cautioned
that the United States should not exclude the waging of a “national liberation struggle” against
Castro unless Khrushchev also explicitly disassociated himself from supporting the communist
forces in North Vietnam who were at the time intensifying their guerrilla offensive against South
Vietnam.
Years later Brzezinski would look at the situation rather differently. “Frankly I have to
admit that I did not know we made a covert deal with the Russians, which if analyzed
dispassionately, really transformed the Cuban crisis into more of a Russian success than an
American political success. We gave up any threat to Cuba, and our missiles in Turkey, in return
for the Russians saying they won’t have missiles in Cuba which they no longer needed since we
have already promised that we wouldn’t do anything to Cuba. Politically, publicly it was perceived
as an American success, and at the time I thought it was.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis had nonetheless made it clear to the United States and Soviet
Union that there were advantages in maintaining the global status quo. This nascent U.S-Soviet
détente was demonstrated in Kennedy’s June 1963 “strategy of peace” speech at the American
University and the United States and Soviet Union’s signing of a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in
August of the same year.
The burgeoning détente led Brzezinski to warn that the United States must avoid the
impression that it had entered a purely bilateral arrangement with the Soviet Union over the heads
of a divided Europe. While the benefits of détente were obvious, the perceptions of a condominium
arrangement would likely alienate the Western allies and increase the appeal of
French President Charles De Gaulle’s stated goal of building a Europe stretching from “from the
Atlantic to the Urals.” Brzezinski cautioned that although France lacked the influence to match de
Gaulle’s grand vision, it could become attractive to West Germans angered by the United
States’ passivity on the issue of German unification.
Brzezinski thus urged the Kennedy Administration not to rest with the status quo but to
use this lull in the Cold War to initiate an even bolder plan to bridge the gap then separating the
European continent. “We must keep open channels of communication with the Communist
countries,” Brzezinski wrote, “and speak directly to the peoples now under Communist rule.
Instead of merely hoping for the political leaders in these countries to bring them into the Western
camp, we must persistently invite them to join a constructive all-European undertaking, thereby
stimulating popular pressure on the Communist leaders.”
Unfortunately tragic and unforeseen circumstances would impede any such plans.
Brzezinski, like most Americans, recalled the precise moment that he heard the news of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination while on a campaign swing through Texas. “I remember vividly,’ he
recalled some four decades later, “I was having lunch at the faculty club at Columbia when one of
the waiters came up to me and said ‘Professor, President Kennedy has been shot.’ I literally leapt
up from my chair--literally just jumped right up. Then I rushed downstairs one floor below from
the dining room where there was a TV set. And I remember Walter Cronkite coming on at some
point, around 1.15 or 1.30, and saying that there was a rumor, I repeat only a rumor, that the
President is dead.”
The rumor was soon verified as fact. “I was stunned coming back to my office,” Brzezinski
continued, “and for the next two or three days I was glued to the television set. I was very mortified
because I was a great admirer of Kennedy at the time. Subsequently I became much more critical
and much more aware of his shortcomings both as a human being and the president, but at the
time I will admit I was engaged in a kind of hero worship. I treated it as almost a personal loss.”
Yet the nation’s business had to proceed. The moment Kennedy’s death became official
Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One while Jackie
Kennedy, still wearing her blood stained pink dress, looked on in grief. Upon his return to
Andrews Air Force base in Washington, the newly inaugurated President Johnson quietly stepped
to the microphone. “I will do my best,” he said “that is all I can do. I ask for your help, and God’s.”
Johnson then climbed aboard a military helicopter, accompanied by his national security assistant
McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Before they landed on the White
House lawn Johnson had informed both men they would be retained in their current positions. In
turn the two men briefed their new President on the especially urgent situation transpiring in
Vietnam.
By 1964 Brzezinski was fully associated with the Democratic Party and would become a
prominent supporter of Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 election. On the other side the Republican
campaign was marked by an intensely bitter ideological struggle that saw Barry Goldwater’s
conservative line triumph over the moderate stance of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Goldwater would sweep to victory in the San Francisco convention--evoking thunderous applause
with his declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Though Goldwater’s
supporters objected strongly to the “creeping socialism” of Johnson’s Great Society, they saved
their most visceral attacks for Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate Republican forces he
represented.
This rise of the conservative “New Right” would have an impact on the career of Zbigniew
Brzezinski as well. While conservative Republicans may have shared Brzezinski’s hard line toward
the Soviet Union, they were highly suspicious of Brzezinski’s connections with such disreputable
outfits like the Council on Foreign Relations—which was referred to as a virtual obscenity by the
hard right of the GOP. In addition Brzezinski’s penchant for multilateral solutions and “peaceful
engagement” toward the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was taken as nothing less than
fellow traveling by members of the Goldwater wing of the Republican
Party. This view was particularly prevalent among members of the arch-conservative John Birch
Society whose literature would eventually become obsessed with exposing Brzezinski as a closet
communist and, together with the Rockefeller family, among the most dangerous men in
America.
In the end, the outcome of the 1964 election was never really in doubt. The political
martyrdom of John F. Kennedy, combined with general concerns over Goldwater’s right-wing
extremism, proved an effective combination for the Democratic Party. Goldwater’s campaign
slogan “In your heart you know his right,” was inverted by Democrats to read, “In your heart, you
know he might!”---a not so subtle suggestion that the Arizona Senator was not the politician to trust
with the nuclear trigger. Indeed a mass of defecting moderate “Rockefeller Republicans,” including
Henry Kissinger, contributed its votes to Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory.
The closing weeks of the Johnson-Goldwater campaign coincided with an even more
shocking power transition in Moscow. October 15, 1964 Soviet citizens awoke to hear the stunning
news that First Secretary Khrushchev had “resigned” due to poor health. In reality the Soviet leader
had been ousted in a Kremlin coup d’etat sponsored by a shadowy troika of apparatchiks named
Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgorny.
In October 1964 few people were certain what it all meant. The most widely articulated
view held that these rather ordinary looking men in gray business suits marked another step away
from Stalin’s monstrous rule and toward the “normalization” of Soviet politics. New publications
naturally were left to analyzing the more accessible traits, noting that Brezhnev was by Soviet
standards a “careful dresser” with a fondness for Western suits, Italian neckties and silk shirts.
“Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev,” declared a flattering profile in Newsweek, “the new First
Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party is a ruggedly handsome, seemingly straightforward man
who moves with the gait of an ex-athlete nowadays just a bit out of shape…Yugoslav officials who
have dealt with him dismiss him as a predictable man lacking in mental resources. But most
Western diplomats who know Brezhnev disagree. He is, they say, a man of intelligence and
authority who will make a popular and formidable leader.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, if pressed, would certainly side with the Yugoslavs in that debate. By
1964 Brzezinski had begun to state more emphatically his view that the Soviet Union was entering
an irreversible state of disintegration. In the days following Khrushchev’s ouster Brzezinski
contributed a prescient article to the New Republic that would analyze the long-term significance of
this emerging generation of “clerical mediocrities.”
Brzezinski noted that Stalin’s instinct was to liquidate anybody showing the slightest
inclination toward individual initiative and that this incoming generation of “clerks” had risen to
power in the 1930s during Stalin’s massive purges of the Communist Party. The result was that for
the next generation the Soviet leadership would be manned by an elite that had risen to power on
the basis of a perverse form of “reverse natural selection” whereby only the most unimaginative
minds survived to be promoted. The result, argued Brzezinski, was likely to be a prolonged era of
political and economic stagnation in the Soviet Union.
“Bureaucratic politics tends to elevate non-entities,” Brzezinski concluded, “and the
nonentities have a stake in making certain that only some like themselves emerges as the primus
inter pares. The weakening of personal dictatorial power hence reflects a trend toward government
by clerical mediocrities, a trend inherent in the gradual fading of the revolutionary generation and
its replacement by a bureaucratic one. Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev: the decline in
intellectual and personal qualities seems too unilinear and too marked to be merely
accidental.”
Indeed Leonid Brezhnev’s career had risen steadily in the late 1930s under the sponsorship
of Nikita Khrushchev whom Stalin had sent to the Ukraine with orders purge the local Communist
Party. Khrushchev, like most of Stalin’s officials, carried out the commands with ruthless efficiency.
By 1938 virtually the entire Ukrainian party leadership was either directly murdered or perished
in Siberian labor camps. Brezhnev’s career began its long advance to the top when Khrushchev was
put in charge of filling the mass vacancies provided by the purge—a process that a young Zbigniew
Brzezinski witnessed from the more troubling stories his father brought back to Warsaw after
serving at that time as Poland’s consul general to Soviet
Ukraine.
By 1964 Brzezinski writings continued to focus on the need to “build bridges” to Eastern
Europe. Yet by the summer of that year events far away from Europe were developing that would
quietly mark the beginning of what would become the longest and most bitterly contested war in
U.S. history. In August 1964 President Johnson appeared on national television to announce that
the U.S. naval vessels had come under fire from North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of
Tonkin. Within days the United States Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing
Johnson to take “all necessary measures” to defend U.S. or allied forces in Vietnam.
Brzezinski was an early and public supporter of the war in Vietnam. Since 1960 he had been
writing of the importance and the bitterness of the Sino-Soviet split. Brzezinski thus saw great
danger if the South Vietnamese government were perceived to fall so easily to communist
insurgents. He did not fear the perceived dangers in a communist “domino theory” so much as the
fanatical ideological competition that had developed between the Soviet Union and China. 42
Brzezinski also feared the rise of perpetual instability in Asia should the more militant
Chinese be proven right in their argument with the Soviet Union that the United States was in fact
little more than a “paper tiger” and that the best way to foment global revolution was to foment
endless battles of “national liberation” in the post-colonial world. Brzezinski believed that the
Soviet Union was a comparatively rational power compared to the intensity that was about to be
unleashed in Mao Zedong’s Great Cultural Revolution which by 1965 would turn into a
the job. Until then, RFE has work ahead of it, day in and day out, year in and year out.” Department
of State Bulletin (December 21, 1964), p. 867.
42 Brzezinski assessed the situation in Vietnam in an article that appeared a week before President
Kennedy’s assassination. “If North Vietnamese aid to the civil war in the south is of importance we
would then perhaps encourage the South Vietnamese to undertake reciprocal guerrilla warfare in
North Vietnam, through sporadic mobile raids, directed mainly at the collective farm system hated
by the peasantry. The purpose would be to force Ho Chi Minh either to halt his aid to the civil war
in the south or to face the risk of becoming subordinate to the Chinese by asking them for more
help. Given the historical fear of Chinese domination, and Ho Chi Mihn’s internal agricultural
problems, such pressure might encourage him to desist from the sponsorship of the civil war in the
south, thereby containing this local conflict. At the same time, however, we should gradually
extend options to the Chinese for the purpose of inducing them to moderate their policies. The
Soviet trade blockade of China has hurt the Chinese economy. Blockaded economically by the
Soviets, blocked militarily by the U.S., the Chinese, for the sake of their domestic development, may
eventually acquire a stake in international stability, especially if alternatives become available
through Japanese or West European trade. We should encourage such trade.” Zbigniew Brzezinski,
“Calculations and Suggestions,” Newsweek (November 25,
1963), p. 52.
frenzied campaign directed against anyone accused of accepting Soviet-style “revisionism” or the
heretical belief that the superpowers could somehow “peacefully co-exist.”
In June of 1965, Brzezinski participated in a nationally televised debate on the merits of the
war in Vietnam. Brzezinski and McGeorge Bundy spoke in support of the war against, among
others, the noted political scientist Hans Morganthau who argued that the policy of containment
may have succeeded in Europe, but was bound to fail in Asia. Brzezinski, though a strong admirer
of Morganthau, responded that unless the United States took decisive action in Vietnam, the Soviet
Union would feel added pressure to compete with the Chinese to demonstrate their true ideological
commitment to wars of “national liberation.” Brzezinski concluded that unless a degree of stability
could be achieved in Asia, at least comparable to that reached in Europe, there might be “no end to
wars in the region.”
Brzezinski continued to insist, however, that the engaging of Eastern Europe should
remain the focal point of U.S. foreign policy. Charles Gati recalled that Brzezinski remained focused
on Eastern Europe at a time when the nation’s foreign policy was paralyzed in Vietnam. Gati noted
that Brzezinski believed if the Cold War ended in Europe, additional “Vietnams” might be
unnecessary.
Certainly Eastern Europe was the single most important thing for him. But he understood
that he could push the issue only so far, that there was an audience out there yes, that the State
Department was interested in it, U.S. Presidents were interested in it, but it was not a central issue
for U.S. policy to ease the burden of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe. But he was committed
to keeping Eastern Europe on the agenda. I think he understood that the Cold War, more than any
other single issue, began with the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army, and that in order
to end the Cold War you have to get the Soviets out of Eastern Europe. It was really deep down as
simple as that.
By 1965 Brzezinski believed that the rise of “national communism” had created extreme
dangers in the region. Albania’s successful defiance of the Soviet Union was made possible by
support from the more dogmatic Chinese and a fanatic ideological and cultural revolution that
would strengthen party supremacy under the eccentric dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. In 1964
Romania followed a similar path when Moscow attempted to turn Romania into the “breadbasket”
of Eastern Europe. Like Albania, Romania’s defiance of Moscow was facilitated by a skillful use of
nationalism and the doctrinal support provided by the Chinese.
Brzezinski had serious concerns about the rise of this blood and soil nationalism that he
believed was more akin to the prewar European fascist parties than to the utopian internationalism
as envisioned by Marx. Brzezinski thus raised the ironic possibility that the “highest stage” of
Communism might well be fascism-- whereby power was wielded by an
intensely chauvinist, first-generation, lower middle-class political elite.
Indeed, by 1965 one could hear Albanian broadcasts supporting a pro-Chinese
underground faction in Poland that objected to rule by “Gomulka and his Zionist gang.”
Hungarians were protesting the treatment of the Magyar minority in Slovakia and used selected
quotations by Marx to prove that the Slovaks had historically been “reactionaries.” The Slovaks
accused Marx and Engels of holding a “pan-German” bias. Hungarians charged the Romanians
with mistreating the Magyar minority in Transylvania. Romanians, in turn challenged Moscow
over the mistreatment of the Romanian minority in Soviet Moldava, formerly the interwar
Romanian territory of Bessarabia.
Brzezinski feared that this revival of nationalist tensions in the region renewed the
dangerous specter that had played a role in triggering both great wars of the 20th
century.49Brzezinski’s solution to this troubling revival of nationalist zeal lay paradoxically in the
continued unification of Western Europe. Brzezinski argued that since World War II
“transnational” forces were combining to create a more centralized international system that would
gradually reduce the significance of the nation-state. He thus envisioned an increasingly globalized
“community of developed nations”--spanning from Japan to Scandinavia—that would join forces
to better handle the growing complexities of the 20th century post-colonial world. 50
Brzezinski argued that once this “community of developed nations” had been solidified in
the West, it could then develop common policies toward the communist nations of the Soviet bloc
that might draw them into a broader relationship with the Western social democracies. The most
hopeful scenario would have the Soviet Union recognize the folly of its imperial pretensions in
Eastern Europe and embark on a more social-democratic version of socialism rather than its
Thus the terms a “national” and a “citizen” could be used almost synonymously. A person’s
nationality was determined by the place of residence and the authority to which one owed
allegiance. Nationalism could be used as a cohesive force that strengthened the popular roots of
government by reinforcing the sense of separate identity shared by a given country, its population
and its rulers. An entirely different concept prevailed in the East where “nationality” and
“citizenship” were often quite distinct. Language, cultural traits, and religion were more relevant
than arbitrary borders. Only two East European states, Bulgaria and Albania, had occupied the
same borders since World War I. In the early 20th century various right wing nationalist movements
rose to power, often supported by base appeals to the anti-liberal sentiments so prevalent amongst
the “masses” in the region. See Lonnie R. Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends
(Oxford, 1996).
49 In this respect Brzezinski was particularly concerned with the case of Yugoslavia.
Brzezinski noted that once Tito’s unifying presence was gone, “his successors for power are likely
to split on the issue of relations with the East and the West. The party apparatchiki, likely to be
supported by the Serbs and the more backward regions of Yugoslavia, might press for closer
contacts with the East and for heavier industrial development within Yugoslavia, favoring the
more backward regions. Spokesman for the more developed parts of the country—Slovenia and
Croatia—may insist on maintaining the present, relatively decentralized system, with preferential
treatment for the more developed regions and closer contacts with the West. Conflicting internal
tendencies are likely to be aggravated by persisting nationality differences in the country, made
even more serious by differences in levels of economic development.” Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Alternative to Partition: For a Broader Conception of America’s Role in Europe (New York, 1965), p. 34.
50 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Toward a Community of Developed Nations,” Department of State
Bulletin (March 13, 1967), pp. 415-416.
stultifying Leninist centralism that was becoming an impediment to Soviet economic
modernization and development.
In 1965 Brzezinski detailed this solution in the work Alternative to Partition: For a Broader
Conception of America’s Role in Europe. Brzezinski’s plan involved an ambitious all-European
economic plan involving a vast array of international institutions that would initiate trade and
common investment projects as a means to narrow the economic disparities between East and
West. To make this vision tangible, Brzezinski suggested “the United States, speaking through its
President, should address a proposal to the European powers, including Russia, to join with
America in formulating a joint, all-European economic development plan. The plan would be
designed to cut across the present European partition, to narrow existing disparities in European
living standards, to reduce the economic and political significance of existing frontiers, and to
promote East-West trade and human contacts by the development of an all-European system of
communications.” “The proposal would be premised,” Brzezinski concluded, “on an implicit
acceptance by the East of the principle that the reconstruction of Europe would involve in time the
reunification of Germany.”
Henry Owen, then Director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, was impressed
with Brzezinski’s views. “I had read something he had written. It struck me as very unusual that
here a fellow who was interested in Eastern Europe and he comes to the conclusion that the best
way of pursuing that interest of promoting change in Eastern Europe was to promote greater West
European integration. So many people whose primary interest was Eastern Europe wrote that
Western European integration was the obverse of that. Zbig had exactly the reverse view. He
thought, and he turned out to be right, that West European integration would create an entity that
the Eastern countries would want to join, and which in order to join they would have to accept
change. So I thought I’d better get to know this guy.”
In May of 1966 Owen recruited Brzezinski to join the Policy Planning Staff of the State
Department. Despite a rather low-level position in the formal pecking order Brzezinski was hardly
a typical State Department bureaucrat. As an outside academic with public visibility he would
enjoy an unusual degree of access to President Johnson.
Owen recalled that Brzezinski’s views toward Eastern Europe did not always endear him
to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “I don’t think Rusk was fascinated by Zbig, and I don’t think Zbig
was fascinated by Rusk. I think they got along well together in a practical sense. But Rusk’s attitude
was sort of if you can’t prove it, it ain’t so. And this general view of the future and predictions of
what was going to happen (in Eastern Europe) without any proof left Rusk not cold, but it didn’t
change him.”
Indeed Brzezinski’s stint in the State Department found him clashing with the mandarins
of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Dean Acheson emerged as a vocal opponent of Brzezinski’s
peaceful engagement and sought to torpedo it by using his considerable influence from outside the
White House. Averell Harriman, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, remarked caustically
that Brzezinski was “basically a Pole,” who had never accepted the
“American ethos” and was “perfectly willing to get the United States into a confrontation with
Russia for the sake of Poland.” Charles Bohlen, another member of America’s old foreign policy
establishment, was also skeptical of Brzezinski. “Chip Bohlen was a great critic of Zbig,” recalled
Owen, “and criticized him because he thought his views on foreign policy were influenced by his
being Polish. He made a public criticism of Zbig--which Zbig deeply resented-- that his foreign
policy views were based on the fact that he was Polish rather than that he was intelligent and
looking at the facts.”
Brzezinski knew, however, that influence in Washington required getting his ideas
circulated beyond the State Department. “He and Muska were very active in giving dinners with
influential people,” Owen recalled years later. “And I think what he did outside of the department
vis a vis the media, giving dinners and cocktail parties and so forth was just as important than what
he did in the department. I’ve never seen people in the department who were that good in
influencing the media. He spent part of his time at the State Department doing his work, but part
of his time outside the State Department meeting these media people and talking to them in a way
that helped bring their views closer to his, and helped propagate a sensible view of what was
happening in Europe throughout Washington.”
But Brzezinski realized that a policy would go nowhere unless it was formally adopted by
the President himself. After meeting considerable opposition from within the State Department,
Brzezinski would use a “white lie” to encourage Johnson toward a bolder approach toward Eastern
Europe. In the autumn of 1966 Brzezinski informed a Johnson adviser that his
“Kennedy friends” had tipped him off that Robert Kennedy was set to deliver a major speech on
American policy towards Europe. Brzezinski noted that Kennedy’s speech was likely to be critical
of Johnson’s passivity on the subject and that there was a good speech in the State Department
which could steal Kennedy’s thunder on the issue. “Kennedy was already then campaigning for
the presidency,” recalled Brzezinski, “and I knew that this would really activate Johnson. The guy
rushed over to Johnson and I am convinced that this really accelerated or even precipitated
Johnson’s decision to deliver that very speech.”
Indeed Brzezinski “white lie” had its impact. On October 7, 1966, President Johnson went
before the National Conference of Editorial Writers in New York to deliver a major speech, written
by Brzezinski, on the need to initiate a “peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe.
Europe has been at peace since 1945 but it is a restless peace that’s shattered by the threat
of violence. Europe is partitioned. An unnatural line runs through the heart of a very great and
very proud nation. History warns us that until this harsh division has been resolved, peace in
Europe will never be secure. Our purpose is not to overturn other governments, but to help the
people of Europe to achieve together a continent in which the peoples of Eastern and Western
Europe work shoulder-to-shoulder together for the common good—a continent in which alliances
do not confront each other in bitter hostility but instead provide a framework in which West and
East can act together in order to secure the security of us all…Hand in hand with these steps to
increase East-West tries must go measures to remove territorial and border disputes as a source of
friction in Europe. The Atlantic nations oppose the use of force to change existing frontiers and that
is the bedrock, too, of our American foreign policy. We respect the integrity of a nation’s boundary
lines--and to this end, I pledge my country’s best efforts—best efforts to achieve new thrust for the
alliance, to support movement toward Western European unity, to bring about a far-reaching
improvement in relations between the East and the West. Our object is to end the bitter legacy of
World War II and let all of those who wish us well, and all others also, know that our guard will be
up but our hand will always be out.
The speech was important for it finally indicated that the United States was willing to put
an engagement of Eastern Europe before the priority of German unification. Indeed West German
Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the German Christian Democratic Party were especially concerned
that Johnson’s speech toward Eastern Europe made the point that reunification could only be the
end result of, not the precondition for, East-West détente. Indeed by 1966 West German
policymakers had begin to concede that their static policy toward the East left them without a policy
to counteract what appeared to be the growing consolidation of the Communist regime in East
Germany. While it was not yet possible to approach East Berlin directly, West German overtures to
Eastern Europe increased under the so-called “Grand Coalition” of 19661969 that broke with the
so-called Hallstein Doctrine to recognize Romania in 1967. Bonn’s subsequent overtures toward the
East, over the head of East Germany, met firm Soviet opposition. Moscow reacted by forging what
became known as the “Northern Triangle” to ensure that Poland and Czechoslovakia would not
follow Romania’s lead. Even bolder West
German moves toward the east would be undertaken under Wiley Brandt’s more activist
Ostpolitik policies in the early 1970s.
Johnson’s speech was also prominent enough to elevate Brzezinski’s national profile.
“When his name appears on a Washington guest list,” noted a flattering profile in Newsweek, “it
looks like a typographical error, and few maitre d’s along M Street have bothered to learn how to
pronounce it. Yet Zbigniew Brzezinski, a brilliant, 38 year-old political-scientist, is one of the fastest-
rising stars in the Johnson Administration. Appointed four months ago as a braintruster on the
State Department Planning Council, he has already become one of the architects of U.S. foreign
policy.” The article went on to note that Brzezinski had established a reputation as “hardnosed
intellectual” who did not “suffer fools lightly” but “even those whom he sometimes rubs the wrong
way readily admit that Brzezinski is a veritable dynamo of fresh ideas. Says one top White House
aide; ‘I’d rather talk for a half hour with Brzezinski than with anybody else in
Washington.’”62
Leonid Brezhnev, as might be expected, was somewhat less impressed with Brzezinski’s
efforts. Indeed the Soviet Union took immediate steps to block any of the “bridges” toward Eastern
Europe that had been articulated in Johnson’s speech. A week after the speech Brezhnev informed
a visiting Polish party-state delegation that reconciliation between the two blocs was unacceptable.
“American officials,” said the Soviet leader, “were laboring under a strange and persistent delusion
if they thought it possible to improve relations with the USSR and Eastern
Europe despite the conflict in Vietnam.”
Brzezinski believed that such palpable hostility from Moscow was evidence that
“peaceful engagement” was hitting its mark. He was thus dismayed when the idea met even
62 “The Thinker,” Newsweek (November 14, 1966), p. 44. Brzezinski reflected on the impact of
Johnson’s speech in a 1971 interview. “Well, if I may be perfectly frank, I have a double feeling
about it. I think the President basically believed, and still does, and I think rightly, that ultimately
some form of reconciliation with the East is necessary for global stability. In that sense, he did
believe it. I have the suspicion that he wasn’t fully aware of the extent to which his speech actually
involved a reversal of hitherto fundamental tenets of our policy towards Europe, and I suspect that
he was rather surprised by the extent to which some of the more conservative elements in West
Germany, including the Chancellor, were shocked by that speech. I have a feeling that he wasn’t
fully aware of the nuances involved, for example, let’s say, a reversal of the preconditions for
German reunification and all that. This, I don’t think he had a real awareness of. Within the State
Department there were sort of two reactions. The first was to simply say that the speech said
nothing new, namely, to kind of try to co-opt the new elements into the old in the hope of
smothering the new. And the second one was that of shock and dismay. As some fellow once said:
before I came to Washington, the United States had no European policy, but it had allies, and after
I got through with it, we had a European policy, but no more any allies. This was particularly in
reference to the fall of the Erhard regime, which to some extent was connected with this speech.
But there were a number of people in the State Department who really were for change, and had
the Vietnamese War, perhaps, not been so absorbing of our attention and energies, more would
have been done.” Oral History Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski,” General Services
Administration, National Archives and Records Service, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, (Austin,
1971), p. 13.
more determined opposition from anti-communist forces in the United States. Brzezinski noted
that such thinking reflected a lack of flexibility that was required for the United States to take
advantage of the subtle distinctions within the Communist world. As he argued in a 1965 article:
Those in the West who oppose the expansion of trade on the grounds that it helps the
Communist governments overlook the fact that, first of all, such trade will grow in spite of
American objections and that, secondly, to the extent that such trade and credits are badly needed
by the Communists, they could be useful as sources of leverage…helping their economic
development can be justified only if at the same time other consequences follow, resulting in the
erosion of the Communist commitment to domination, in structural reforms in the Communist
economic systems, in the growth of closer contacts, in an increasingly free flow of ideas and people.
These changes will not take place spontaneously, but as a result of steady pressure. Economic
difficulties in the East stimulate intense power conflicts and tend to loosen the
Communist structure.
Yet such arguments were not convincing to much of the right wing in America at that time.
Indeed the political complications of differentiating between different shades of communism
proved the fatal blow to Brzezinski’s more ambitious plans toward Eastern Europe.
Johnson’s attempt at “bridge-building” toward Eastern Europe drew a fierce response from the
John Birch Society which collected more than one and half million signatures on a petition opposing
aid and trade with the Communists. A boycott was also organized by the “Committee to Warn of
the Arrival of Communist Merchandise on the Local Business Scene,” which published a list of
goods in its stated effort “to combat, sidetrack and eventually wreck the economic efforts of the
Communists to bleed and destroy our Nation.” The tenor of this campaign could be seen in a
prominent newspaper advertisement alerting shoppers in Florida that they could “buy your
Communist merchandise at ‘Super Giant.’”
The delicate politics of “aiding” Communist regimes during the Cold War also met
opposition in the U.S. Congress. The fact that the Eastern European states were providing support
to North Vietnam at the time led many U.S. legislators to steadfastly oppose Johnson’s efforts
toward Eastern Europe. In 1966 the United States Congress flatly rejected the East-West Trade
Relations bill, which at the time represented the most significant legislative proposal to initiate
Brzezinski’s concept of peaceful engagement in its proposal to empower the U.S. President to enter
into three-year, renewable commercial agreements with the communist states and to extend most-
favored-nation treatment.67 As Johnson’s ambassador to Poland would observe, the concept of
peaceful-engagement simply “ran into deep trouble under the sustained attack of those to whom
peaceful engagement is being ‘soft on communism.’”68
Brzezinski continued to believe that his vision of a “community of developed nations” had
more of a future than a static bilateral détente with Moscow that did little more than perpetuate the
status quo. In January 1967 Brzezinski expressed this point in a prominent speech on behalf of the
U.S. State Department:
Someday—and that day will come sooner than many of us yesterday dared to hope, Europe
will embrace an entire continent of reunited peoples. It will be a continent no longer divided by
rusted barbed wire or sterile ideological conflicts. It will be a continent that links the United States
and the Soviet Union—and indeed, even Japan—in a larger community of developed nations,
sharing a common recognition of the moral absolute that in our age technological advancement
and material well being impose a fundamental obligation toward the rest of mankind. 69
Most significantly, Brzezinski’s vision toward Eastern Europe would become a victim of
the nation’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War. By 1967 U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were
economic links to Poland. At the same time Congress rejected a $10 million program for the
purchase of U.S. publications and films in Poland. Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation, p. 259.
67 “Foreign Relations: Nyet to Nicolae,” Time (May 20, 1966), p. 29.
68 Ambassador John A. Gronouski, “The Intellectual and American Foreign Policy,”
Department of State Bulletin, vol. LVII, no. 1475, (October 2, 1967), p. 434.
69 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Toward a Community of Developed Nations,” Department of State
Bulletin (March 13, 1967), pp. 415-416.
approaching half a million and the death toll had surpassed 20,000. At the same time it had
becoming painfully evident that the Vietcong could not be quickly “uprooted” and destroyed.
Johnson, desperate for a way out of the growing quagmire, turned toward Moscow in the hope of
finding a peaceful solution.
In June 1967 Johnson met Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin at a highly publicized summit
meeting in Glassboro, New Jersey. The cordial encounter was the first step toward the more
widespread bilateral détente enacted by the Nixon Administration. At the same time Brzezinski
was very skeptical that the Soviets were acting as an honest broker in the Vietnam peace
negotiations. Knowing his view was contrary the prevailing view in the State Department,
especially that of Averell Harriman, Brzezinski advised Johnson directly that he should not count
on the Soviets to help extricate the United States from Vietnam. “I wrote a memo to Johnson,”
Brzezinski recalled, “telling him that the Russians are not supporting a peaceful solution in
Vietnam---they find it very convenient that the war was going on, and they’re playing a double
game, and we’re being suckered.” Brzezinski recalled that his memo to Johnson did not exactly
please Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Averill Harriman who both objected to having their
authority questioned by a mere “functionary” in the State Department.
Indeed, a somewhat frustrated Brzezinski would soon return to Columbia. Henry Owen
recalled that Brzezinski found his first stint in Washington somewhat humbling. “I think Zbig was
a little disappointed that the Policy Planning Staff didn’t immediately produce opportunities to do
things. It was a staff that was supposed to give ideas to the secretary (Rusk) and I think he thought
somehow it would be more involved in producing immediate results than it was, and to some
extent he was disappointed, but his interest and attitude remained unchanged. The way to get
change in the east was to promote change in Western Europe.” 71
In December of 1967 Brzezinski announced his departure from the Johnson State
Department. In doing so he again articulated his view that it was imperative that the United States
move away from its fixation on the Vietnam War and begin to focus its attention on ending the
Cold War division in Europe. To this end, Brzezinski urged the formulation of a Europeanwide
conference that would involve “open-ended discussions of security in Central Europe.” Brzezinski
concluded that “Alliances in the past were designed to wage war; in recent times they have helped
to deter war; in years to come they must concentrate on promoting peace.” 72
Fortunately, I deposited a copy of the memo for the President in the Secretary’s office the same
morning, so I could point out to the Secretary that there was a copy of the memo waiting for him.
But this is purely to illustrate the point that an outsider, who had an independent positions to which
he could return and with friends elsewhere, particularly in the White House, could operate
essentially not as a member of the Policy Planning Council, but as an independent, policyconcerned
individual, who was within the government but who was able to short-circuit some of the limits
which otherwise, in fact, were reducing the effectiveness of the Council as an institution.” Oral
History Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
71 Interview, Washington DC, (June 28, 2001).
72 See Peter Grose, “East-West Talks on Europe Urged-U.S. Ex-Aide Says Blocs Should Confer
Directly,” The New York Times (December 18, 1967). Brzezinski’s parting recommendations were
published shortly thereafter in a prominent article in Foreign Affairs. Brzezinski noted that burying
the Cold War does not, and should not, mean the reviving Yalta. “Growing West European
integration will inevitably act as a magnet for an Eastern Europe increasingly selfassertive and
anxious to participate in the European adventure. This growing East-West cooperation will not be
confined to bilateral agreements; even more important will be the many new multilateral bonds,
with East European states increasingly wishing to become associated with common all-European
institutions and ventures. In effect, a looser all-European economic community will be taking
shape, with Western Europe as its more homogeneous core.” See Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The
Framework of East-West Reconciliation,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 46, no. 2 (January 1968) pp. 256-75.
Though Brzezinski’s concept of “peaceful engagement” was not enacted to the extent he
would have liked, he would later maintain that it did at least change the argument in Washington.
I think that probably in the broadest sense my contribution in the ‘60s was to offer a more
systematic conceptualization of an alternative to the narrowly conceived but stand pat Atlanticism
on the one hand, and also to the then much more limited appeal, of essentially the appeasement
notion of accepting forever the division of Europe. I was offering a third way, namely that without
igniting a sharper division, and without accepting the existing division, one could through peaceful
engagement or deliberately manipulated conciliation, in fact change the status quo, without
participating a collapse of the of the existing status quo that would be violent. So, in some ways
what happened in the late 1980s and early 90s, was the fulfillment of that third scenario.
Those days were still far off. In early 1968 Brzezinski returned to Columbia where he would
find that the Vietnam War had also had a very direct effect on the world of academia. The war had
led many in the intellectual community to see the United States and the Soviet Union as
“moral equivalents.” More extreme elements of this view accused the United States of having a
“sphere of influence” in Western Europe, not essentially different from the Soviet presence in
Eastern Europe. This view, once limited to a leftist fringe, gathered a large degree of credibility
among the “New Left” of the 1960s.
By the late 1960s a new group of “revisionist” U.S. diplomatic historians (though very few
with a firm background on the history of the Soviet Union) charged that the origins of the Cold
War were rooted not in Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe, but to America’s insatiable
quest for capital and markets, a development that forced an otherwise well-meaning
Stalin to consolidate his rule in Eastern Europe.
Brzezinski’s scholarship came under an even more direct attack in the rapidly changing
field of Soviet studies. By the late 1960s many scholars would come to dismiss Brzezinski’s
totalitarian model as political weapon rather than the objective work of a serious scholar.
Brzezinski would also come under attack by a new cohort of Soviet scholars who claimed that
Lenin’s October Revolution was not a putsch carried out by a conspiratorial party but a popular
uprising carried out by the industrial classes. Their methodology sought to move away from
Brzezinski’s “totalitarian” view of an all-pervading state and instead focus on the laboring
“industrial masses” as the prime mover of Soviet history.
dependent on a continuous overseas economic expansion. Under the assumption that such
economic expansion was crucial, America’s postwar leaders came to see efforts by other powers to
obstruct this goal as a threat to the very existence of the American system. Stalin’s goals, according
to Wililams, were limited to three major objectives: friendly governments on Russia’s western
borders, guarantees against a resurgent Germany, and securing the economic restructuring of the
Soviet Union’s war-ravaged economy. On essentially all other matters, Williams believed Stalin
was flexible and generally inclined to cooperate with the United States. See William Appleman
Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962). For a skeptical view on the
revisionist school see Adam Ulam, “Re-reading the Cold War,” Interplay (March 1969), pp. 51-53.
The implicit charge among many in this new generation of Soviet specialists was that
Brzezinski was a “reactionary” Polish émigré who was simply too emotional to be an effective
judge on the true nature of the Soviet Union. The most frequent attack on his “totalitarian model”
held that it might have some relevance to Nazi Germany, but not to a Soviet Union of the 1960s that
had clearly moved away from Stalin’s arbitrary use of terror to become a rather “normal” if not
“pluralist” state. Brzezinski would counter this argument by pointing out that Hitler and Stalin
represented only the most extreme instances of totalitarianism and that more emphasis should have
been placed on the “decay” variant of totalitarianism’s dynamics that would set in once a
totalitarian regime could no longer be run by outright terror. 77
Few scholars in the 1960s, however, were paying much attention to Brzezinski’s predictions
about the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed the academic focus on the
Soviet Union moved away from the “value laden” totalitarian model to focus on how the Soviet
Union had evolved into something of a “normal” state. The most popular academic theory in this
respect came to be known as “modernization theory.” As the name implied this approach focused
less on high politics and history, and more on the “sociological” and “developmental” process that
led the Soviet Union from rural backwardness to an “urbanized, industrial, educated society” that
was fully capable of evolving into a democratic state. 78 This idea of modernization
indoctrinated with a single and false account of their own lives.” Robert Conquest, “Reluctant
Converts: How the Revisionists are Slowly Coming Round to the Truth about Stalin,” Time Literary
Supplement (February 11, 1994), p. 7.
77 William Odom, “The Pluralist Mirage,” The National Interest (Spring 1993), p. 102. See
Walter Laqueur, “Is There Now, or Has There Ever Been, Such a Thing as Totalitarianism?,”
Commentary vol. 80 no. 4, (October 1985), p. 30. Brzezinski would often note that Hitler was a
student of the political practices initiated by Lenin, especially on how to construct a state based
system of terror backed by an elaborate secret police apparatus and the use of collective guilt as the
justification for large-scale social persecution. Brzezinski noted that although Hitler’s historical
vision was shaped by doctrines of race and Lenin’s of class warfare---in the end each strove to
shape a genocidal utopia and to subordinate society to a rigid ideological morality that justified
virtually any action that moved toward their historical missions. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of
Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century (New York, 1993), p. 30.
78 The Soviet model came to be viewed, in the words of an influential article, as a move “from
utopia to development,” in which the ideological goals of socialism had resulted in a “special type
of politically forced development.” See Richard Lowenthal, “Development versus Utopia in was
closely related to the idea of “convergence theory” which held that all states having undergone the
process of development—i.e., industrialization, urbanization, mass education--would eventually
“converge” to a point where they would become more or less
indistinguishable. 79
Brzezinski was among the most vocal critics of what he regarded as the intellectual fashions
of “modernization” and “convergence.” Brzezinski noted that any serious analysis of the U.S. and
Soviet systems must examine both the nature of the political system and the methods by which the
industrialization had been accomplished. In the end he argued that both theories exaggerated the
social importance of “industrialization” while overlooking the enormous differences in the
historical experiences of the United States and the Soviet Union. Brzezinski concluded that as long
as the Soviet Union was run by centralized political monopolies with an inherent contempt for the
rule of law there was little evidence to expect any true “convergence” between the two systems.80
Communist Policy,” in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Palo Alto, CA, 1970).
This idea of the Soviet Union’s ability to “reform” to its original ideals would later spawn a renewed
focus on Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” (NEP) of the 1920s. It also led to the idea that Stalin had
betrayed Lenin’s original goals and that the system could be set “right” again with the proper
leadership. This was seen in a revisionist view of Nikolai Bukharin many scholars began to view
as the true heir to Lenin’s revolution. This was popularized after Princeton scholar Stephen Cohen
published a widely discussed biography of Bukharin with the underlying theme was that the Soviet
Union had greater prospects for evolutionary liberalism and that Bukharin would have avoided
Stalin’s terror and forced industrialization. In 1975 Cohen argued in a conference paper that
historians must separate Bolshevism from the excesses of Stalinism and that it was the fault of
Brzezinski’s totalitarian model that the two had become linked. Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism
and Stalinism,” in Robert C. Tucker ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York,
1977), pp. 3-29. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-
1938 (New York, 1974).
79 For a critical look at “Modernization” theory see Cyril E. Black, “Marxism and
Modernization,” Slavic Review, vol. 29, no. 2 (June 1970): pp. 182-86. Samuel P. Huntington,
“Modernization, Development, and Politics,” vol. 3, no. 3 (April 1971), pp. 283-322. William E.
Griffith, “The Pitfalls of the Theory of Modernization,” Survey vol. 33 no. 2, (June 1974) pp. 246258.
80 Brzezinski’s most thorough critique of convergence theory was outlined in Political Power:
USA/USSR, a book he co-wrote with Samuel Huntington in 1964. The authors noted that while the
Soviet Union may have become “industrialized” the methods to achieve it were constructed along
totalitarian lines which meant its institutions could not be simply “retooled” to serve pluralist
goals. The Soviet Union, according to the authors, had been “modernized” through In the end
Brzezinski’s criticism of “modernization” theory centered on a more simple premise; that the Soviet
system, for all its bravado about moving with the “ineluctable forces of history,” was simply not
modernizing. By the mid-1960s Brzezinski’s writings had moved beyond the communist world to
analyze the global revolution being brought forth by the rise of computer automation. By the late
1960s it had become common among intellectual circles to depict the United States as “reactionary”
nation falling behind the more progressive forces in the world. Brzezinski countered that the
United States was at the vanguard of a “technetronic” revolution that made it the only true
“revolutionary” nation in the world.
Though few Americans even realized its historical significance, Brzezinski proposed the
world was on the eve of a technological transformation whose significance would dwarf the
importance of either the French or the Bolshevik revolutions. Brzezinski noted that no society had
ever experienced such dramatic socio-economic changes as that which occurred in America after
1945. Brzezinski cited various factors had contributed to this American Revolution. Among them
were the massive influx of ex-GIs into American universities, the social primacy of education, the
nexus of national power and modern science, the harnessing of nuclear energy, the federal
government emerging as a major sponsor of scientific investigation, television, the world’s most
modern highway system, the rapid growth in the aerospace industry, a uniquely effective instant
coercive social mobilization put forth by a highly disciplined and dictatorial political elite. In the
United States this development process was far more spontaneous, with national political
coordination emerging only after social, economic, and political pluralism had already taken root.
These patterns of development had thus resulted in a strikingly different relationship between
society and politics in each country. The American Revolution freed a society from the bonds of an
“irrelevant and restraining aristocratic order” and made possible its largely spontaneous organic
growth in the late 19th century. They noted that while Essen under the Nazis was similar to Detroit
in an economic and technological, as well as cultural, sense, this hardly prevented the Nazis from
imposing a system of mobilization and control that was clearly absent in Detroit. Zbigniew
Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, Political Power USA/USSR (New York: 1964), p. 422. For
another critique of convergence theory see Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(New York, 1971), pp. 628-29.
transcontinental telephone system—and finally, the appearance of modern computers that had
intermeshed these advanced features into the most modern high-tech society in the world.
Brzezinski saw the Soviet Union moving in a rather different direction. This view was
articulated most starkly in a 1967 article entitled “Communism is Dead” which suggested that
Leninism had become an “obsolete dogma” with little relevance in the “novel psychological and
scientific dilemmas of the post-industrial, technetronic age.”
Brzezinski would frequently note that much of this was simply due to the constraints
imposed by the Soviet system. Indeed Stalin had dictated in the late 1940s that computers were part
of “a capitalist plot for increasing the exploitation of the working class.” Accompanying
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 came the uncomfortable realization that computers
were indeed the key to modern economic development. The result was the inevitable full-scale
campaign, so familiar in Russian history, to mount a breakneck effort to “catch up.” But the Soviets
would find that high technology, unlike the industrialization process, could not be advanced with
the use of “shock workers” and the centralized dictates from Moscow.
All of this led Brzezinski to suggest that the Soviet Union had entered an irreparable state
of system decay. In 1966 the journal Problems of Communism dedicated an entire issue to the future
course of the Soviet Union. So dire was Brzezinski’s scenario that he was asked to elaborate on his
view in a follow up discussion in the same journal:
It is my estimate that the Soviet Communist Party, having been for some years the source
of social innovation, has now become a brake on social progress with the Soviet Union. The Soviet
society has acquired the wherewithal for further growth, and the bureaucratic and dogmatic
restraints imposed on it by the ruling party have become dysfunctional to that growth. Thus a gap
is opening between the society and the political system, in some ways reminiscent of the late Tsarist
period. This condition is aggravated by a decline in the quality of the Soviet political elite, and by
the growing assertiveness of various other key groups…The political elite, increasingly
bureaucratized, self-centered and aging, is unable to respond effectively either through terror or
reform. The result is stagnation—which, unless corrected by major institutional reforms, will lead
to degeneration.
Brzezinski would proceed to note that this was not the only problem facing the Soviet
Union. He argued, as he had some twenty years before in his M.A. thesis at McGill University, that
academics too often overlooked the basic fact that the Soviet Union was not a single entity and was
almost certain to confront periodic uprisings from its multitude of conquered
nationalities.
“This omission,” noted Brzezinski, “it seems to me, is indicative of the inclination of many
Western scholars of Soviet affairs to minimize what I fear may be potentially a very explosive issue
in the Soviet polity. We still live in an age of nationalism, and my own highly generalized feeling
is that it is going to be exceedingly difficult for the Soviet Union to avoid having some of its many
nationalities go through a phase of assertive nationalism. History teaches us, be it in Algeria or in
Indonesia or in Africa that these demands grow rather than decline. If they are not met or are
suppressed, it is likely that the demands will become sharper and more self-assertive. If they are
satisfied, they will grow with the eating.” 87
Brzezinski concluded that while everything pointed to a continued growth in Soviet
military power there was a growing possibility that the Soviet political and economic system would
not withstand a protracted rivalry with the United States. To Brzezinski it was the job of the United
States to help convince the Soviet Union that either rebuilding an “anti-imperialist communist
community” or a reliance on military expenditures would not serve the long-term interests of the
Soviet Union. Brzezinski noted it was imperative that the “second major nuclear power does not
remain an increasingly antiquated despotism, a vestigial remnant of 19th century
87 Brzezinski, “Reflections on the Soviet System,” p. 48. In 1982 the historian John Lewis Gaddis
produced Strategies of Containment, a work that has since become recognized as a classic in the field
of U.S. diplomatic history. In his concluding chapter on the Carter Administration Gaddis
presented a comparison between Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Kissinger from the
beginning of his career had articulated a remarkably consistent view of international affairs: one
could read A World Restored (published in 1957) and find in it a generally reliable guide to the
policies Kissinger would seek to implement a decade and half later. Brzezinski’s writings showed
no such depth: there was instead, as one observer has put it, an ‘enduring penchant for fashionable
issues and concepts that are adopted or discarded in the light of changing circumstances…an
unbecoming reliance on the intellectual cliché of the moment.’ Gaddis went on to note: “’The
respected political writer, Elizabeth Drew, has noted pointedly: ‘Of all the many people I have
discussed the subject of Brzezinski with, hardly any have used the word thoughtful.’” John Lewis
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, (Oxford, 1982), pp. 349-350. It is thus interesting to compare
Brzezinski’s rather prophetic observations in the 1960s with Gaddis’ observations after the fall of
the Soviet Union. Gaddis wrote in 1992 “Given what we now know about the inadequacies of
Marxist systems, one wonders why it took so long for this to happen. Several reasons suggest
themselves: that command economies work reasonably well during the initial stages of
industrialization, and that it was not until the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe began to move
beyond those stages that the deficiencies of Marxism-Leninism became apparent; that the
coincidence of de-colonization with the onset of the Cold War gave the Soviet model an appeal in
newly independent Third World countries that it would not otherwise have had, that the energy
crisis in the West during the 1970s may have magnified the weakness of market economies and
conceded—for a time at least—those of command economies; and that neither the Soviet Union nor
its satellites possessed effective mechanisms for replacing aging leaders and the discredited policies
they perpetuated. Only death could do that, and it keeps its own schedule. As a result, it was not
until the 1980s that a consensus as to the superiority of market economics— and with it a sense of
the triumph of democratic politics—began to develop. Underlying tectonic forces had been
pointing in that direction for some time, but it took time for the blinders that had obscured those
processes to drop away. That finally happened in 1989; suddenly it became obvious to everyone
(with the exception of a few isolated holdouts like Fidel Castro and Kim Ilsung) that economic
progress and centralized authority simply do not mesh.” John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and
the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York, 1992), pp. 160-161.
ideology and of early industrial bureaucratism, committed to domestic and international goals of
fading relevance to the new realities.”
Though Brzezinski now carried the unfashionable moniker of a dogmatic anticommunist,
he continued to argue that the best path for the Soviet Union was not outright revolution, but a
gradual move toward a more humanist version of socialism. “It is no exaggeration to say,” noted
Brzezinski, “though some anti-Communists may be loathe to admit this---that the peace of
mankind depends in large measure on the Soviet Union’s return to the occidental Marxist tradition,
from which the more oriental Leninism-Stalinism had diverted it; this need not necessarily involve
the outright abandonment of Marxism.”
In any case Brzezinski’s rather optimistic scenario for the United States seemed out of place
as the United States entered that memorable year of 1968. The Vietnam War had ripped the nation
apart and Lyndon Johnson was bound to pay a political price. On January 31, 1968, Vietcong and
North Vietnamese army regulars launched a coordinated attack known as the “Tet Offensive” on
U.S. backed strongholds throughout South Vietnam. Though the offensive was eventually repelled,
it came as a shock to Americans who had been assured by Johnson the previous month that there
was “light at the end of the tunnel” in the war.
Johnson was now confronted with a major decision on how to proceed in Vietnam.
Following Tet an increasing number of “doves” began to advocate an outright withdrawal from
Vietnam while more vocal “hawks” were urging the U.S. to simply end the war with the use of
nuclear weapons. General William Westmoreland, commander of America’s military forces,
argued that the North Vietnamese forces had thrown everything they had into Tet and insisted that
he could finish the job if he was provided an additional 206,000 soldiers.
Before considering Westmoreland’s request, Johnson sought the counsel of his new
Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. Most political observers believed Clifford was a “hawk” on the
war and had been selected to replace the wavering Robert McNamara the previous month largely
for this reason. But Clifford was among the many, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had begun
to doubt the utility of carrying on the war in its current state. Before considering General
Westmoreland’s request for more troops Clifford ordered a comprehensive study on the war.
In February 1968 Brzezinski traveled to Vietnam as part of this fact-finding mission. Since
the early 1960s Brzezinski had maintained that the U.S. presence in Vietnam was necessary to
disprove the Chinese thesis that the United States was a “paper tiger.” The trip to Vietnam led him
to conclude that this mission was complete as far as the American public would tolerate it and he
recommended the United States begin a process of disengagement. Brzezinski also began to
articulate this view in the popular media. “If we want to win a complete victory in Vietnam,”
Brzezinski noted in early 1968, “we would have to go in with a million and a half men and make a
massive effort. It would be totally out of proportion to the stakes at issue, and this country wouldn’t
support it.”
“I concluded that the way we were waging the war we could never win,” Brzezinski
recalled years later, “and therefore I felt we ought to disengage. I thought until 1968 that the
United States should be actively engaged and should prevail, even if necessary by invading the
North. By ’68 I concluded that we were over-Americanizing the war. My trip to Vietnam led to the
view that we were doing too much and were giving the South Vietnamese a disincentive to do what
they needed to do---in fact encouraging them to do less and letting us carry the war.”
In February of 1968 Brzezinski sent a confidential memo to Defense Secretary Clifford
recommending the United States begin a substantial disengagement from the war in Vietnam:
The War in Vietnam: For a Balance between U.S. Goals and U.S. Means. 1. Why are we in
Vietnam? The U.S. involvement has a two-fold purpose. A. to promote regional stability in
Southeast Asia; B. to prevent the deliberate, externally sponsored effort to take over South Vietnam
through the so-called “national liberation” Communist strategy. 2. What have we accomplished?
a. The major regional objective is well underway to being attained. Even a cursory comparison of
conditions prevailing today in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia with those
prevailing three years ago shows phenomenal progress toward greater selfassurance and regional
cooperation. The local objective, the prevention of communist take-over, is still being contested. Its
steady pursuit can only be assured if we do not lose sight of the basically preventative purpose of
our initial involvement. This requires being candid and realistic with the American people, and
shaping our military tactics in keeping with our goals. 3. Public support for the war. a. It is waning
because public expectations of peace or victory were stimulated by ill-considered statements and
subsequently refuted by self-evident events. The fact is that conditions for a truly peaceful
settlement (and not merely a transparent cover for a fundamental concession by one side to the
other) are now roughly as good as those in Spain in 1938! The chances of winning a real military
victory with the present level of U.S. manpower committed to Vietnam are not much higher. To
win such a victory, we would need to commit considerably greater forces and in the process we
would also have to change the purpose of our commitment to Vietnam to that of winning a clear-
cut victory through U.S. efforts. It is doubtful that the public would support this and it is even more
doubtful that such a massive effort would be either worth the price, or, short of a brutal application
of U.S. might, any more likely to succeed than the efforts so far. b. In appealing to the public, the
Administration should emphasize two key points: that our purpose is essentially a negative one, to
offset the North’s aggression so that South Vietnam can win its civil war; and that, in any case,
given the kind of world we live in, we will have to face the fact that occasionally the U.S. will have
to be involved to some degree in some sporadic violence somewhere during the rest of the century.
Brzezinski’s changing views on Vietnam did not make him any more popular with the
student demonstrators who had come to dominate the nation’s campuses in the late 1960s. In the
spring of 1968, campus demonstrations, student violence and building seizures became
increasingly commonplace after which student radicals forced deans and administrative officials
to submit to their “non-negotiable” demands. After serving a year in the Johnson State
Department, Brzezinski was seen as nothing less than a “war criminal” and purveyor of
“genocide” in the eyes of the more militant student demonstrators.
Brzezinski was one of the few intellectuals at the time to engage in direct intellectual
combat with the New Left. He believed that the New Left was not unlike the totalitarian movements
of the 1930s and he failed to see how its “democratic” rhetoric could be reconciled with its
intolerance and self-righteous denunciation of anybody disagreeing with their views.
He observed that the vast majority of the New Left was a negative force more concerned
with shocking the middle class “bourgeoisie” than working to alleviate the very real crises then
besetting American society. In this respect the Left’s “political” violence was rewarded by favorable
publicity from the middle-aged supporters while little attention was given to those students taking
more productive routes, such as those serving in VISTA programs or the Peace Corps. Brzezinski
saw support of the New Left from the liberal faculty members as a part of a reflexive mentality
among American intellectuals who feared being “outflanked on the left,” no matter how radical or
extreme the cause. 96
In his most controversial statement Brzezinski argued that the validity of a “revolution”
must be determined by whether it was “historically relevant.” Some revolutions, Brzezinski
argued, were dynamic and forward looking. This was the case in the French Revolution 1789, the
1848 “Spring of Nations” in Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the American civil rights
movement of the 1960s. In turn Brzezinski argued that some “revolutions” in history were
Democratic Society (SDS), engaged in a angry exchange with Irving Howe, the social-democratic
editor of the journal Dissent. Hayden argued that the Soviet bloc states could not be called
“totalitarian.” Howe, in apparent disbelief, replied “‘What would you call them, Tom?” According
to SDS member Todd Gitlin, Howe’s comment filled Hayden “with rage and contempt.” The word
“totalitarian” that had appeared in the original SDS constitution in a cautionary context was
removed in 1965 as a “relic of a bygone era.” See Todd Giltin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York, 1987), p. 190.
96 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970),
p. 227. In 1970 Tom Wolfe referred to this phenomenon less politely. Wolfe coined the term “radical
chic” to describe a party given by composer Leonard Bernstein for members of the Black Panthers.
Wolfe’s article exposed the fashionable trend of the late 1960s of the rich and famous to endorse
radical causes while they retained a rather posh lifestyle. Wolfe noted that there were two rules of
“radical chic.“ One rule is that nostalgie de la boure---i.e., the styles of romantic, rawvital Low Rent
primitives---are good; and middle-class, whether black or white, is bad.” A second “rule” for
“radical chic” was the conviction “that no matter what, one should always maintain a proper
address, a proper scale of interior decoration, and servants.” Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party
at Lenny’s,” New York (June 8, 1970).
in reality “reactionary spasms” attempting to cling to a bygone era. Brzezinski argued the New
Left, along with China’s Red Guards, should be listed in the latter category.
In 1967 Brzezinski would write a controversial article in The New Republic denouncing the
student “revolution” as a “counter-revolution.” In his view, the “revolutionaries” were more akin
to modern-day Luddites unable or unwilling to adapt to the changes occurring in post-industrial
America. Brzezinski claimed it was the United States—not China or the Soviet Union--that was the
world’s true revolutionary nation--serving as a vanguard into the uncertain age of high technology
and computer automation. In failing to assimilate intellectually to the novelty of the current
American transition, the New Left had made itself an essentially “negative and obsolescent” force.
“Above all I just didn’t take them very seriously,” Brzezinski recalled years later. “They
saw themselves as Trotsky and Paris Communards, and stuff like that. Anybody who has a
European history and had seen what happened this century knew that there is a great difference
between the real blood and guts of revolution that involves risk and personal sacrifice and this kind
of posturing by rich liberal kids pretending to be something that we didn’t understand. Well, you
know, they’ve all grown up and a lot of them are very sensible civil people, but it terms of their
conduct and their sloganeering, and their mannerisms, I thought they were a bunch of spoiled
brats. And I still feel that way. I labeled them as Luddites in the New Republic article. Well, they
weren’t probably as Luddite as I thought. But they were kind of spoiled brats basically.”
By contrast the student militants at Columbia in 1968 took Brzezinski very seriously.
Doubtless, the radicals preferred to be critiqued by artists from the world of country-western music
and local law enforcement officials. Brzezinski’s analysis was harder to dismiss. His suggestion that
the student “revolutionaries” were not the center of the earth---but were in fact “irrelevant”---was
not very popular with the more vocal factions of the New Left.
Brzezinski had grown increasingly impatient as his lectures at the School of International
Affairs were frequently interrupted by bomb threats and forced building evacuations. Adam Ulam,
a Soviet specialist at Harvard, recalled his experience as a guest lecturer in one of
Brzezinski’s Columbia seminars. “Sure enough the bomb-warning bell rang,” Ulam recalled, “and
under instructions not to use elevators, we started down the stairs. After three floors Zbig said ‘to
hell with it’ and we went back to complete the class, with few defections among the students.”
On another occasion protesters marched toward Brzezinski’s office parading a pig by the
snout, chanting “A pig, a pig, for Professor Zbig!” Brzezinski, concerned about the levels of violence
seen in some recent student demonstrations, called the dean’s office in order to disperse the crowd
gathering in front of his office. Brzezinski’s would encounter a small problem in his request. “The
deans were all scared shitless,” he recalled.
Brzezinski was thus surprised when two police cars screeched to a halt in front of his office
and ordered the crowd to disperse. “I was looking through the window and then I see police cars
with sirens pulling up and stopping the students, cops jumping out gestulating. I said to myself the
dean had finally mustered some courage to call the cops.”
In reality Brzezinski found out that the police had been summoned by a complaint from a
concerned citizen about the mistreatment of the pig. “It was some little old lady on the street,” he
recalled, “who saw the pig being dragged on a rope and she called the SPCA, and they called the
cops. So the cops were there to protect not me, but the pig.” The students returned to Brzezinski’s
office a few days later (without the pig) for another confrontation. Growing weary of the daily
confrontations Brzezinski came downstairs and confronted the crowd. “You have ten minutes in
which to ask me any question you want,” he told them, “and then I have to go back to my office
and plan some more genocide.” Brzezinski recalled the comment led to divisions within the ranks
of the protesters. “Some kind of laughed sheepishly,” he said, “then someone said ‘don’t laugh!’
That’s what he does!’ Then they all started arguing with each other.”
In April of 1968 Columbia University was taken over by student radicals. Brzezinski
watched with disgust and amusement as the campus was plastered with portraits of Che
Guevara and graffiti that stated “Lenin won, Fidel won, we will win!” For the next week a Red Flag
was seen flying over several university buildings. The President’s office was occupied and the
students rifled through papers and defecated on the desk. The students refused to budge until they
were granted amnesty.
The chief spokesman for the campus seizure was Mark Rudd, a 20-year old selfproclaimed
advocate of “total revolution.” At the outset of protest, Rudd wrote an “open letter” to Grayson
Kirk, the 64-year old president of Columbia. Rudd’s letter claimed that the student revolution was
based on “our meaningless studies, our identity crisis, and our revulsion with being cogs in your
corporate machines. If we win we will take control of your world, your corporations, your
university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live like human beings.”
Rudd’s letter to Kirk concluded with the Black Panther slogan eagerly adopted by Columbia’s
student radicals: “Up against the wall, mother-fucker, this is a stick up.”
After a week the university called in hundreds of New York City police who evicted the
demonstrators. The university shut down for the duration of the semester. In the ensuing weeks
1,500 Columbia students would sign petitions denouncing the “tasteless, inconsiderate and illegal”
protest.103
Brzezinski remained a popular professor among the less radical students. Among them
was a thirty-year old graduate student named Madeline Albright, who was preparing to defend
her PhD oral exams in the spring of 1968 and became annoyed at the constant demonstrations that
blocked her access to the library. Albright’s dim view of the student radicals was also attributed to
the fact that the United States granted her family asylum after the 1948 communist coup left her
native Czechoslovakia in the grip of a hard line Stalinist regime. In the late 1970s
Brzezinski would appoint Albright to his national security staff in the Carter White House that
shortened from the Polish “Rudnicki”) was a Polish émigré who had settled in New Jersey where
he founded a profitable real estate business. Brzezinski’s administrative assistant, Christine
Dodson, recalled a scene in which Rudd’s mother embarrassed the leader of “total revolution” by
arriving at one demonstration with a plastic bag full of chicken soup. “Mark is used to having his
chicken soup,” she explained. Dobbs, p. 214.
103 “Columbia at Bay,” Newsweek (May 6, 1968), p. 43. Brzezinski responded to the events at
Columbia with another article to the New Republic entitled “Revolution and Counterrevolution (But
Not Necessarily About Columbia!).” This article, even more controversial than the first, was a
scathing indictment of the student radicals whose “violence and revolutionary slogans are
merely—and sadly—the death rattle of the historical irrelevants.” In the end Brzezinski argued that
the authorities were fighting a losing battle in hoping to appease the more radical demands of the
New Left. “The revolutionary leaders by their probes, seek to identify weak spots and provoke a
head-on direct clash. The critical phase occurs when a weak spot has been identified, appealing
issues articulated, and the probe becomes a confrontation. At this stage the purpose of
revolutionary activity is to legitimize violence. If the initial act of violence is suppressed quickly by
established authorities, the chances are that the revolutionary act itself will gain social opprobrium;
society generally tends to be conservative, even in a situation of crisis of values. Thus a
revolutionary act is likely to be condemned by most, provided it is rapidly suppressed. If the
revolutionary act endures, then automatically it gains legitimacy with the passage of time.
Enduring violence thus becomes a symbol of the authorities’ disintegration and collapse, and it
prompts in turn further escalation of support for the revolutionary act.” Zbigniew Brzezinski,
“Revolution and Counterrevolution (But Not Necessarily About Columbia!),” The New Republic
(June 1, 1968), p. 23. Brzezinski’s article generated a storm of controversy, including the suggestion
that he himself was a “Stalinist.” See in particular A. Mendel, “Robots and Rebels,” The New Republic
(January 11, 1969).
began her rise to become the United States’ first female Secretary of State under President Clinton
In the end Brzezinski believed the youthful radical movements were a largely transient fad.
Yet he also understood that it had revived the more conservative factions in the United States that
represented a severe threat to the unity of Democratic Party. Brzezinski feared the damage done by
the New Left had discredited traditional American liberalism in the same manner that
Joseph McCarthy had on liberal anti-communism in the 1950s. As Brzezinski noted in 1968:
When old values no longer remain secure and when new values haven’t been defined,
small groups and sects become absolutely obsessive in their motivations. The short-range effect of
violence could be to push the country toward the Right and to produce a far greater preoccupation
with what can be called ‘law and order’ and that in effect can become repression. It seems to me
that anyone who is interested in preserving liberal, democratic order in the United States ought to
be particularly insistent right now on combining social change with orderly procedure. Unless we
combine both we will have initially some change and violence and later on no change accompanied
by repression. It seems to me you cannot be selective about violence. Violence, in most cases, is
socially destructive. There is nothing easier in society than to be a revolutionary or a reactionary.
Both are extremist Manicheans—those who see all of reality reduced to a confrontation between
simple good and simple evil.
Indeed, as the Democratic Party was ripped apart by the Vietnam War, the more
conservative voices of Richard Nixon and George Wallace were campaigning in the summer of
1968 on the promise to bring “law and order” back to America. On the brighter side 1968 would
also witness the emergence of a reform movement in Czechoslovakia that would seek to move
away from the Leninist dictates of the Soviet Union and promote a form of socialism with a
“human face.” The emergence of an “evolutionary” rather than a “revolutionary” movement in
Eastern Europe was the ideal scenario outlined in Brzezinski’ original idea of peaceful engagement.
The question would soon become whether the Soviet Union would follow suit and become more
affiliated with the “community of developed nations”—or seek to stifle the reformist impulses
coming from Prague in the name of Leninist centralism. On this question,
Brzezinski found little cause for optimism.
CHAPTER THREE: 1968
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s return to Columbia in early 1968 coincided with the outset of one of
the most tumultuous political years in American history. In the summer of 1967 the liberal activist
Allard Lowenstein, began a search for an antiwar candidate to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the
1968 nomination. The most obvious candidate was Robert Kennedy who had come to oppose the
war and had a long personal feud with Johnson dating back to the early 1960s. Yet when Kennedy
hesitated, the antiwar factions united behind a less glamorous choice. In late November 1967
Eugene McCarthy, an iconoclastic senator from Minnesota, announced that he would challenge
Johnson for the Democratic nomination.
For the first few months of his candidacy McCarthy was dismissed as little more than a
protest candidate. But the Tet Offensive had dealt a severe political blow to President Johnson. In
mid-March McCarthy shocked the sitting president by polling a remarkable 42 percent in the New
Hampshire primary. Five days later, an already wounded Johnson saw his worst nightmare come
true when Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. Though Kennedy’s entry embittered many of
McCarthy’s youthful supporters, his charisma and antiwar views were thought to present an even
stronger challenge to Lyndon Johnson. On the evening of March 31, Johnson appeared before the
nation and made the shocking announcement that he would not seek
another term in office.
Brzezinski was among many centrist Democrats who threw their support behind Vice
President Hubert Humphrey who was now the de facto incumbent in the race. Brzezinski had
become acquainted with Humphrey during his tenure in the State Department. The Vice President
would visit the Brzezinskis’ Georgetown home on occasion to socialize and discuss the broader
questions of foreign policy. Indeed in the early 1960s Humphrey had been one of the more vocal
supporters of Brzezinski’s policy of “peaceful engagement” as reflected in a glowing endorsement
from the then Senator Humphrey that appeared on the back cover of Alternative to
Partition.
Yet Humphrey was a damaged political candidate in the increasingly bizarre political
environment that was 1968. In 1948 Humphrey emerged as a liberal of national prominence when
he proposed a civil rights plank be added to the Democratic platform. The move enraged prominent
Southern “Dixiecrats” who broke from the Democratic Party to nominate South
Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate for the new “States Rights Party.”
Humphrey had established a reputation as the leading liberal voice in the U.S. Senate before he was
selected as President Johnson’s running mate in 1964.
By 1968, however, Hubert Humphrey’s once saintly image among liberals had been stained
by his association with Lyndon Johnson and his support for the Vietnam War. When Humphrey
officially declared his candidacy in April, McCarthy supporters were quick to denounce the Vice
President as simply part of “the system.” Roving bands of hecklers met Humphrey at every
campaign stop with the chant “Dump the Hump!” as they lifted signs scrawled with overstated
political statements such as “Hitler, Hubert and Hirohito.” In one of
Humphrey’s first campaign appearances at Kent State University in Ohio several demonstrators
walked out of a rally when Humphrey denounced the violent student takeovers that had recently
taken place at Columbia and other campuses. “This is amazing,” Humphrey declared. “The last
time anybody walked out on me was in 1948 when I pleaded for civil rights at the Democratic
Convention.”
In addition to the challenge from McCarthy, Humphrey’s campaign had even greater
concerns about the magnetic political appeal of Robert F. Kennedy. In 1964 Kennedy had run
successfully for a New York Senate seat from which he used to speak out increasingly against the
war in Vietnam. Kennedy had also developed a passionate following among minority groups and
those hoping that he could reunite the Democratic Party behind the old glamour of Camelot. Yet it
was not to be. In the late night hours of June 6 Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel
shortly after winning the California primary. The tragedy shocked a nation that was still coming to
terms with the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. in April. A country that seemed so united behind
the liberal consensus of the 1950s was in the midst of its greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War.
That same June Vice President Humphrey asked Brzezinski to assume direction of his
foreign policy task forces. According to Brzezinski the campaign was hardly united at the time. “I
was invited to be the head of his foreign policy task force in the summer of ’68, during the
presidential campaign itself. I was then asked to come down and take charge of the task force,
working with John Reilly and Ted Van Dyk, who was Humphrey’s principal foreign policy adviser.
There was some sort of internal rivalry between them, and they invited me to come down and be
the head of the task force from the outside.”
Johnson’s continued hawkish stance on Vietnam continued to bitterly divide the
Democratic Party. Brzezinski had come aboard the campaign in June convinced that Humphrey
had to distance himself from Johnson on Vietnam. On July 25, Brzezinski was present at a Vietnam
task force meeting that attempted to outline a compromise plank for the Democratic platform. The
goal was to give Humphrey some “breathing room” on the issue without offending President
Johnson. But it would not be an easy task. As Brzezinski recalled in a 1971 interview:
We had a special meeting of the task force, and a few outsiders, with the Vice President,
and I participated in it. We drafted a statement, after a great many discussions and long
deliberations, indicating the Vice President would favor a cease-fire, and in any case, a suspension
of the air attacks against the North. And this would have meant a major departure from the
established policy. After the Vice President discussed this issue, I had a session with him, and we
agreed that this was the right thing to do, that this was politically timely, internationally, and not
damaging to American interests, and that he should issue a statement. It was agreed that he would
show it to the President, naturally and quite properly so, but I remember saying to the Vice
President before he went to see the President—I did not go with him—that he should make it clear
to the President that he’s showing him the statement not in his capacity as a Vice President, but in
his capacity as a presidential candidate of the Democratic
Party—that this was a statement that he was issuing in that capacity.
Huntington, who had known Brzezinski since their early days at Harvard, recalled the
difficulty of getting Humphrey to part with Johnson on the war. “We worked on a variety of papers
and drafted a statement for Humphrey in mid-July advocating a suspension of the bombing. We
had a long morning meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington with Humphrey. He went
over each word and he finally said ‘ok, we’ll go with it as it is now.’ He then said ‘I’m going to the
White House the day after tomorrow for a dinner, and after the dinner I’ll tell the President that
I’m going to issue this statement.’ Well, Humphrey chickened out. Somebody on his staff told
Johnson that Humphrey was going to issue this statement and Johnson took the initiative and
accused Humphrey of deserting the Administration’s position and threatened him, at least
implicitly, that he would withdraw his endorsement for him. So
Humphrey did not issue that statement.”
Indeed Johnson was holding firm on Vietnam. Humphrey would later recall what
transpired in his meeting with Johnson. “I showed it to him, went all over it with him. His reaction
was, in substance, ‘Hubert, if you do this, I’ll just have to be opposed to it, and say so. Secondly,
Hubert, you ought not to do this because we have some things under way [in the Paris negotiations]
now that can lead to very important developments. Thirdly, Hubert, I have two sons-in-law over
there, and I consider this proposal to be a direct slap at their safety and at what they are trying to
do.” 10
Richard Nixon was the most immediate beneficiary of Humphrey’s hesitation on
Vietnam. Nixon’s political career appeared finished after he lost a bitterly contested race for the
California governorship in 1962. Yet the Goldwater debacle in 1964 would ironically permit
Nixon to reposition himself as a “voice of moderation” in Republican politics. Nixon thus entered
1968 as an “elder statesman” with claims to be a more relaxed “new Nixon.”
Nixon’s primary opponent in the Republican race was thought to be New York governor
Nelson Rockefeller. Brzezinski had become socially acquainted with both Nelson and David
Rockefeller at the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1960s. Though he was a Democrat and
personally closer to David Rockefeller, Brzezinski was not averse to Nelson Rockefeller’s
internationalist world-view and moderate brand of Republican politics.
In the late 1960s Rockefeller aide Emmet John Hughes had sought to bring Brzezinski into
the Rockefeller camp as a foreign policy adviser. Hughes, who had a somewhat cool relationship
with Kissinger, argued that Brzezinski had a better mind than Kissinger and, perhaps more
importantly, would be easier to work with. Kissinger, as might be expected, was rather less excited
about the prospect of sharing turf with his old Harvard rival.
The journalist David Halberstam would later note that Kissinger was particularly
disturbed when he heard that Hughes had invited Brzezinski to lunch at a place where
Rockefeller’s staffers were commonly offered the more important jobs.13 Halberstam would go on
to say that Brzezinski was somewhat torn in the spring of 1968 between working for Humphrey or
Rockefeller. Brzezinski recalled that there was no hesitation in his decision to work for Humphrey.
“I did hear in the latter sixties that Nelson Rockefeller wanted in some fashion to get me involved
on his side. But that never transpired, largely—as I was told—because of Kissinger. In any case, I
was not torn between supporting Rockefeller or Humphrey. The choice for me at the time was quite
clear, and I became Humphrey’s key foreign policy adviser.”
By 1968 Nelson Rockefeller was facing an uncertain political future. As the voice of the
liberal wing of the GOP, Rockefeller was a throwback to the days when “Eisenhower
Republicanism” was the dominant trend in the GOP. But Rockefeller’s bitter ideological showdown
with Barry Goldwater in 1964 had made him an anathema to the conservative wing of the party.
In March of 1968 Rockefeller shocked the political world by pulling out of the race. Instead
he announced he was backing Michigan governor George Romney for the nomination, going so far
as to offer the services of his assistant Henry Kissinger. But the Romney campaign imploded a few
weeks later after his declaration that he had been “brainwashed” on the war in
Vietnam. Republican moderates, dismayed by the prospect of nominating Richard Nixon, urged
Rockefeller to get back into the race.
In April of 1968 Rockefeller gathered his team of advisers in New York to discuss the
feasibility of resurrecting the campaign. Joseph Persico, a Rockefeller speechwriter in attendance
that day, recalls that Henry Kissinger was asked about how much time he would be able to donate
if Rockefeller decided to get back in. “Not as much as Nelson will want,” Kissinger replied. After
hearing this, Persico suggested that perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski should be brought in as a foreign
policy consultant. “Not at all the required depth,” Kissinger shot back. Persico took this to mean
that Kissinger would be able to make more time than he had previously thought.
In May of 1968 Nelson Rockefeller announced that he was getting back into the race to
challenge Nixon. But Rockefeller had lost much momentum during his two months away from the
campaign. By May Nixon had garnered the institutional support from much of the GOP rank and
file. “People don’t like the coy approach anymore,” explained Republican House minority leader
Gerald Ford, who like many Republican congressman, had thrown his political support solidly
behind Nixon.
But Rockefeller’s political problems in 1968 would run far deeper than simply being
“coy.” Indeed some Nixon’s staffers could not hide their delight with the prospect of using
Rockefeller as an ideological punching bag to solidify Nixon’s credentials with the more
conservative wing of the GOP. “It creates excitement and interest we didn’t have before,” beamed
Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s brash young press secretary, “it puts us back on page one again.”
Indeed, in hindsight the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami Beach could be seen as
marking the death knell for the Rockefeller wing of the Party. The only good news for Rockefeller
when he arrived at the convention was that Nixon seemed to be having surprising difficulty
holding off the late-breaking conservative challenge from California governor Ronald Reagan. But
Rockefeller was coming to the uncomfortable realization that Ronald Reagan was the future of the
GOP.
Reagan’s televised speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 had turned the former
film star into an icon of the conservative wing of the party. In this respect the Republican moderate
Nelson Rockefeller was viewed with far more disdain than the most liberal of Democrats. In 1965
the then actor Ronald Reagan seized the titular leadership of the conservative wing of the
Republican Party. In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat he firmly denounced those Republicans,
especially Nelson Rockefeller, who had challenged Goldwater the previous year for the
nomination. When some Republicans attempted to place anti-Goldwater moderates into leadership
positions in the Republican Party Reagan threw down the emotional gauntlet. “I don’t think we
should turn the high command over to leaders who were traitors during the battle just ended.”
Perhaps most disturbing to Rockefeller was the fact that Reagan’s late breaking challenge
to Nixon was based on strong grass roots conservative support in the South. But Nixon had a
trump that even Reagan’s ideological purity could not overcome. As Reagan’s momentum started
to roll South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond ended it by using his sizable influence in the
South to rally the forces behind Nixon. Thurmond’s role as the kingmaker in Miami Beach
demonstrated the South’s rising political power in GOP politics. “For months,” complained one
dejected Reagan aide “we sat around worrying among ourselves that too many appearances in the
South would get people to talking about the Reagan Southern strategy. That’s funny, because the
guy with the real Southern strategy was Nixon—using Thurmond.”21
Nixon expressed his gratitude by vowing to consult Thurmond before choosing a
vicepresidential running mate. “I won’t ram anyone down the throat of the South,” Nixon assured
the South Carolina Senator. Some more moderate Republicans would grumble that Nixon had little
choice since Thurmond vowed to denounce Nixon’s selection from the convention floor if it came
from the Rockefeller-wing of the Party. In the end Thurmond appeared satisfied with
Nixon’s choice of Maryland governor Ted “Spiro” Agnew whose recent “get tough on agitators”
Democratic Party, would become the most visible symbol of the sustained anti-integrationist
movement that rose in the South in the early 1960s. Wallace joined his fellow Southerner Strom
Thurmond in criticizing the federal government for not cracking down on the ”communist
influences” among the followers of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963 Wallace—after claiming to have
been “out-segged” in a previous election--was elected governor of Alabama on the slogan
“segregation forever.” The Democratic Party was thus tarnished by the decision of Wallace’s police
chief Bull Connor, to unleash dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham and the
image of Wallace standing in the doorway of the administration building at the University of
Alabama to prevent the admission of two black students. In 1968 Wallace’s overtly racist messages
were placed under the more respectable slgoan of “law and order.” He denounced the forced
busing of students, the proliferation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and the
government’s permissive response to the antiwar demonstrations that were becoming increasingly
commonplace. Wallace’s conservative message was amplified by his selection of retired Air Force
General Curtis Le May as his running mate. Le May, who was caricatured in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.
Stangelove, came aboard the Wallace campaign claiming that the American people had “a phobia
about nuclear weapons.” Le May assured reporters that while the land crabs at the Bikini Island
nuclear testing site were “a little bit hot,” the rats on the atoll were “bigger, fatter, and healthier
than they ever were before.” Jules Witcover, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-76 (New
York, 1977), p. 283.
21 “Eyeball to Eyeball with Strom,” Newsweek (August 19, 1968), pp. 26-27.
statement and “shoot to kill” orders on urban looters appeared to go over well with Southern
conservatives.
Nixon’s victory at Miami Beach would cloud the political future of Henry Kissinger.
Moments after Rockefeller conceded to Nixon, Presidential historian Theodore White visited the
Rockefeller camp where he found a rather disconsolate Henry Kissinger. “I have never been greeted
so warmly,” White would later recall, “it was as if I were his last friend on earth.”
According to White, Kissinger then proceeded with a prolonged harangue against the new
Republican nominee: “’Teddy, we have to stop his madman Nixon…’, that he was not to be trusted,
that he represented everything dark and dangerous, that he was not worthy of the office and that
America might not survive a Nixon presidency.”
With Rockefeller out the race many observers believed that Henry Kissinger would cross
party lines to support the campaign of Hubert Humphrey. Those predictions would prove at least
partially true. Indeed in the ensuing months Kissinger maneuvered furtively between the
respective camps of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. The Republicans broke from their
convention united behind Nixon. At the same Zbigniew Brzezinski was attempting to formulate a
campaign strategy within a Democratic Party that showed no signs of uniting behind anything.
In any event Brzezinski contacted Kissinger shortly after the Republican Convention to
inquire if he might be willing to comment on some of the Humphrey foreign policy papers.
Kissinger surprised Brzezinski by informing him that he had been in contact with Humphrey
himself--and that he would do more than comment on papers. According to Brzezinski, Kissinger
at that time offered to provide Humphrey with access to the Rockefeller campaign’s extensive
private file on Nixon.
Brzezinski was intrigued. Kissinger went on to explain that the papers were known, rather
crudely, as the Nixon "shit files. ” They included a vast index of Nixon speeches and newspaper
clippings that had been accumulated over the years by the well-financed Rockefeller staff. Kissinger
told Brzezinski that he would offer them to the Humphrey campaign provided it was kept quiet,
and if Humphrey was informed of Kissinger's assistance in the campaign. The motivation seemed
as much personal as political. "Look, I've hated Nixon for years,” Kissinger reportedly told
Brzezinski. The Humphrey campaign, for reasons that would become the source of some dispute,
would never see the “Nixon files.”
Brzezinski’s involvement with the Humphrey campaign coincided with dramatic
developments taking place in Eastern Europe. On January 5, 1968 Alexander Dubcek took over as
First Party Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. The Czech economy, after two
decades of stifling centralized planning, had reached a standstill. The economic crisis that began in
the early 1960s had split the Party between the conservative apparatchiks who had ruled since 1948
and a more progressive wing that believed socialism could only survive if it were practiced along
social democratic lines. Dubcek, though hardly known as a radical, sided with the reformers. Over
the next eight months he would embark on a bold course of reform designed to bring forth
“socialism with a human face.”
In April of 1968 Dubcek’s reforms were codified in the Party’s “Action Program” which
introduced a relaxation in censorship, reduced the powers of the secret police, proposed economic
decentralization and promised guarantees of freedom of opinion and assembly. In the ensuing
weeks intellectuals and students throughout Czechoslovakia tested the limits of what became
known as the Prague Spring. At the same time Dubcek took extra precautions to insist that
Czechoslovakia would remain a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact and that the Communist
Party would retain its “leading role” in the government.
While Dubcek was attempting to initiate a gradualist reform from “above” in
Czechoslovakia, the story was dramatically different in Brzezinski’s native Poland. One the
primary motivations behind Brzezinski’s goal of “engaging” Eastern Europe was to dilute the more
chauvinistic brand of communism that had begun to surface throughout the region. By the mid-
1960s the early promise of the Polish October of 1956 had been supplanted by a staid and
bureaucratic dictatorship laced with a primitive strain of anti-Semitism.
In 1964 two Warsaw University graduate students Karol Modzelewski and Jacek Kuron
were arrested after composing an “Open Letter to the Party” that urged the Polish leadership to
move beyond bureaucratic centralism and return to the idealism that was at the root of Communist
ideology. In the autumn of 1966 Professor Leszek Kolokowski used the tenth anniversary of the
Polish October to criticize Gomulka’s political leadership. Kolokowski’s speech would lead to his
expulsion from the Party. In addition there were severe reprisals against university students who
had attended the lecture--including a young history student named
Adam Michnik.
Michnik personified Brzezinski’s hopes of introducing a more humane brand of socialism
to Eastern Europe. Michnik was born in 1946 and raised by Jewish parents who were dedicated
communists in the interwar period. Yet by the early 1960s Michnik began to question official
dogma after becoming aware of a relative who had been banished to Siberia and with that the
darker aspects of Poland’s historical relationship with Russia. Michnik’s career in the political
opposition at the age of fifteen when he organized a high school political-discussion group called
the “Seekers of Contradictions.” Michnik’s actions had already drawn enough notice that Gomulka
himself denounced the teenager as an “enemy of socialism.” In 1964 Michnik was arrested for the
first time for distributing the “Open Letter” written by Kuron and Modzelewski.
27
Michnik had been introduced to Brzezinski in 1964 through Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, still
the head of the Polish desk of Radio Free Europe. Michnik, though somewhat awed at his first
meeting with Brzezinski, also found something of a kindred spirit in the Polish-American political
scientist. “For a long time the Soviet leadership hated Brzezinski,” Michnik noted some years later.
“They thought he had a Polish anti-Russian obsession. But he didn’t have any obsession. He just
knew Russian history very well. What I’ve always liked about Brzezinski very much is that his way
of thinking is completely free of ethnic chauvinism.”
Michnik’s hopes that the Polish government would “reform” communism along the path
of Alexander Dubcek would be dashed by the existence of “ethnic chauvinism.” By 1968 the Polish
government had become sharply divided between forces loyal to Gomulka and the more nationalist
elements led by General Mieczyslaw Moczar whose distaste for liberalism and democracy coupled
with a raw anti-Semitism harkened back to the ultra-nationalist Endecja party that flourished in
Poland’s interwar political environment.
Moczar’s political authority was based on his leadership of the “Partisans,” a group of
Polish communists who spent World War II in Poland and were thus distinct from the
“Muscovite” (and largely Jewish) communists who spent the war in the Soviet Union. Yet
Moczar’s political rise after the war was curtailed in the anti-Titoist purges of the late 1940s. In 1957
the Partisans made a comeback in Polish politics when General Moczar became the Minister of
Interior. Over the next decade he would oversee a secret-police network and a “Workers
Militia” which played a role not unlike that of the Nazi brown shirts. Moczar’s “Jewish
Department” of the secret police ran a propaganda campaign against an alleged
“imperialistZionist conspiracy” which suggested that West German “revenge-seekers” and
“Zionist aggressors” were seeking simultaneously to unseat socialism in Poland.
Moczar’s power increased dramatically after Israel’s shocking victory over the Arab states
in the Six-Day War in June 1967. Gomulka was infuriated by the reports of Poles celebrating the
Israeli victory over the Arab states that had been supported by the Soviet Union.
The Partisans moved to initiate a mass purge of purported “Zionists” in the Polish government.
This dismissal of “racially unreliable elements” created thousands of vacant posts that were quickly
filled by officials loyal to Moczar. By the spring of 1968 the Partisans had gained control over the
media and most of the ideological and educational institutions.
These developments did not bode well for Adam Michnik’s hopes to encouraging a more
“humane” brand of socialism. In early 1968 Polish students, encouraged by the reforms in
neighboring Czechoslovakia, adopted the rhyming chant “Polska czeka na swego Dubczeka”
(Poland is waiting for its own Dubcek). The main focus of student dissent centered on the
National Theatre in Warsaw and the nightly production of “Forefather’s Eve” (Dziady), a play by
19th century writer Adam Mickiewicz. Of particular sensitivity to Polish authorities was the raucous
applause that followed the line “the only things Moscow sends us are jackasses, idiots, and spies.”
On January 30, 1968, Polish authorities ordered the National Theatre to close its production,
sparking a month of protest among Warsaw University students.
In March of 1968 Adam Michnik and another student were expelled from Warsaw
University after their attempt to gather signatures for a letter protesting the government action.
Michnik’s arrest led to further demonstrations in the courtyard of Warsaw University demanding
the resumption of the performances of “Forefather’s Eve.” On March 8 violent clashes between the
students and the police ensued. On March 11 the police were aided by busloads of Moczar’s “angry
workers” who had been motivated by government assurances that the student demonstrations
were part of a “Zionist plot” designed to deprive them of their “hard-earned benefits.”
For the next month official propaganda blamed the student riots on the actions of
“Zionist lackeys,” “political degenerates,” anarchists” “revisionists,” “reactionaries,” “saboteurs,”
“subversives,” and “cosmopolitans in nylons.” In early April Gomulka gave a radio and television
speech stating that if Jews chose to emigrate, the government wouldn’t stand in their way. Of the
30,000 Jews still in Poland, 20,000 would leave Poland the next few months—many of them former
leaders of the Communist Party.
In the weeks following the student unrest the Partisans attempted to gain control of the
Ministry of Defense by circulating the charge that the current Defense Minister Marian Spychalski
was Jewish and that his wife and sister had “fled” to Israel. In April Spychalski, who had once been
the victim of the purges of the Stalinist era, was dismissed from his post. In his place stepped
Wojciech Jaruzelski, a young solider known for his steadfast political reliability. Brzezinski,
disturbed by the tenor of the purges in Poland, precipitated a letter of protest to the New York Times
on behalf of the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences, a New York based organization of Polish
émigrés, hardly known for their affection to the communist regime in Poland. “There was a big flap
on that board,” Brzezinski recalls, “because some people felt that a lot of the Jews that were being
expelled were senior communist officials and that this was not such a bad thing. But I felt that on
the whole this was acquiring the manifestations of really violent anti-Semitism. I thought it was
morally imperative that the Polish-American community be clearly on record in condemning it.”
Meanwhile Dubcek’s reforms had moved rapidly forward in Czechoslovakia. For
Brzezinski the Prague Spring would represent a crucial test for the future development of the
Communist world. The Hungarian revolt of 1956 was essentially a rebellion against the excesses of
Stalin and could be considered more a protest against Stalinist rule. The Prague Spring was another
matter entirely. Though Dubcek and his supporters were careful not to say so, the reforms in Prague
were challenging two of Lenin’s most fundamental tenets; that the Communist Party must
monopolize all political power, and that this power must be exercised with ruthless ideological
dogmatism to eliminate all political dissent. Thus, by raising this “crisis of Leninism” Dubcek’s
reforms represented the hope of moving away from the Soviet model and undermining the
Kremlin’s grip on the multitude of nationalities centralized under the iron grip of Moscow.
By mid-summer Brzezinski was growing increasingly concerned about the Johnson
Administration’s approach to the events in Prague. The painful memories of the disastrous
Hungarian revolt in 1956 would indeed prevent any overt signs of support for Dubcek. Yet
Brzezinski saw danger signs that Moscow would interpret Johnson’s apparent disregard for the
situation as in implicit green light to do as they wished in Eastern Europe.
In June of 1968 Brzezinski accepted an official invitation to speak before the Prague Institute
of International Economics. “The atmosphere was absolutely euphoric,” Brzezinski recalled years
later, “a sense that this was kind of a new dawn for a socialism with a human face—very naïve and
very romantic and not terribly determined. There was widespread conviction that the Soviets
would not intervene—and I was somewhat less convinced that they would not.”
Brzezinski’s speech noted that Dubcek’s reforms were the best way to gradually move
toward a more humane brand of socialism. He also started rather categorically that “Leninism has
no relevance in an advanced modern society.” “I gave a speech in Prague,” recalled Brzezinski,
“the one that the Soviets had supposedly seized a great deal as justification for the suppression of
the Prague Spring. I said that Eastern Europe was evolving and that, by peaceful engagement, we
could transform the situation. I didn’t explicitly say that communism would be overthrown, but
that in effect, communism would be transformed.”41
Brzezinski also knew, however, that this was the approach from the West that frightened
communist hardliners the most. By June East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht was mounting a relentless
campaign to gather support for a military invasion to put an end to Dubeck’s experimentation.
Ulbricht, knowing that Gomulka held a particular distaste for Brzezinski, immediately sent files to
Warsaw drawing attention to Brzezinski’s “counterrevolutionary lecture in support of Dubeck.”
A blistering editorial in the East German Communist Party newspaper lambasted
Brzezinski’s Prague speech as “counter-revolutionary” and “imperialist” as well as an
“interference in the internal affairs” of Czechoslovakia. Brzezinski, speaking from his post on the
Humphrey campaign, took East Germany’s hysterical response as an indication that peaceful
engagement was hitting its mark. “It was typical that the East Germans would single me out for
personal attack,” Brzezinski declared, “rather than those more hard line voices in the West that
opposed any East-West reconciliation. Only dogmatic Communists who desire continued cold
war and are willing to run the risk of a nuclear confrontation would disagree with my views. It
puts them in the same category as the extreme right wing in this country.”
Brzezinski saw this as a natural, albeit unfortunate, response from East European leaders.
“By 1968 I think the more informed communist leaders basically understood what it was I was
advocating. They weren’t fooled. The people that were fooled tended to be in the United States—
like the liberals who didn’t realize that what I was really doing was pursuing a more anti-Soviet
policy under an accommodationist label, or the hardliners in the United States who didn’t have the
smarts to realize that sometimes you have to be deceptive vis a vis your opponent in order to obtain
your objectives instead of maintaining a rigid ideological line--which is self-paralyzing.”
By July the Soviet leaders were planning the early stages of a military invasion. Moscow
was particularly alarmed by the release in late June of the so-called “Two-Thousand Words”
statement. Issued by Czechoslovak intellectuals, the statement was an indictment of twenty years
of party dictatorship, a demand for accelerated reform, and an urgent plea to Dubcek to avoid
giving in to external pressure.
By July the Soviet Union had stepped up its threats to Czechoslovakia. On July 14-15 the
leaders of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations convened a summit meeting in Warsaw to
discuss the ongoing events in Czechoslovakia. The meeting produced an ominous joint letter
warning that “counterrevolutionary forces” were jeopardizing socialism, and that the events
emanating from Prague were “absolutely unacceptable.”
Indeed the United States seemed to be making it clear that they wanted nothing to do with
the deliberations surrounding the affairs of the Soviet bloc. Moscow had timed its ominous
warnings to Dubcek to coincide with a conspicuous flirtation with the Johnson Administration over
arms control and a possible summit meeting. Since his June 1967 summit with Alexei Kosygin
Johnson seemed eager to arrange a summit meeting in Moscow before he the election in
November. At the same time KGB agents, posed as Western tourists, were moving to plant caches
of arms on the West German border and distributing inflammatory posters about an
anticommunist coup.
On July 22 Secretary of State Rusk met publicly with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to
refute Soviet charges of American “interference” in Czechoslovakia. According to East European
sources, Rusk informed Dobrynin that while the United States would strongly “deplore” the use of
Soviet force in the crisis, he left the Soviet ambassador with the impression that the United States
would not intervene militarily to save the reformist Czech regime.
Brzezinski believed Washington officials were failing to utilize the advantages of
diplomatic ambiguity regarding the events in Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile a Wall Street Journal
editorial warned about repeating the “dark days” of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was partitioned in
hopes of appeasing Hitler: “Ironically, U.S. policy makers are fond of contending that not to defend
South Vietnam would be comparable to the infamy at Munich, an analogy disputed by others. The
irony is that right now we have a genuine repeat of Munich, concerning the very same country, in
the making. Surely, to let Czechoslovakia fall back under the iron sway of orthodox communism
and Soviet domination is unpleasantly similar to what happened in 1938.”
51
In early August President Tito of Yugoslavia arrived in Prague to a rapturous welcome.
Tito, as the symbol of the most successful defiance of the Soviet Union, seemed to indicate that the
Czechoslovaks were by no means alone in their struggle to break free from Moscow. The tenor of
the reception left even Tito astonished. Ignoring a heavy summer rain, thousands of Czechoslovaks
greeted Tito’s plane waving Yugoslav flags. As Tito moved throughout Prague chants of “Tito-
Dubcek” and “Tito yes, Ulbricht no!” could be heard throughout the city.
In early August a debate began in the Kremlin over how to deal with the situation in
Czechoslovakia. The more hard-line elements in the Kremlin argued that the passive stance of the
United States was enough assurance that a military solution would be relatively cost free. In the
late hours of August 20-21, a combined force of 175,000 troops from the Soviet Union and four other
Warsaw Pact nations stormed into Czechoslovakia.
Within a few hours these forces were overrunning the Czechoslovak countryside and had
begun to occupy the country’s leading cities. A small stream of citizens were still emerging from
the nightclubs and cafes around Wenceslaus Square when the first Soviet tanks rumbled across the
Charles Bridge into the center of Prague. In the ensuing hours tens of thousands of Czechs poured
into the streets, jeered at Soviet soldiers and chalked swastikas on the tanks.
But the Prague Spring was over. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, announced the
occupation had been in response to a request for assistance against “counter-revolutionary” forces.
The charge rang particularly hollow since the entire Czechoslovak leadership had been placed
under arrest at the outset of the invasion. The Soviets had seized and manacled seven liberal
Czechoslovak leaders, including Dubcek and took them to Moscow. The Soviet Union accused
Dubcek of having led a minority faction that supported counter-revolution and represented a
“treacherous betrayal” of Communist ideals.
The Soviets took immediate measures to reverse the reforms that had been enacted over
the previous eight months. Censorship of the press was rigidly enforced and all non-Communist
political activity was effectively banned. The Kremlin then insisted on the right to station Soviet
troops permanently along the Czech border with West Germany. The Soviet leadership would soon
justify the invasion with the “Brezhnev Doctrine” which claimed the right to “protect and preserve”
socialism in Eastern Europe, by force if necessary.
The supporters of Dubcek were thus forced to resort to a different form of political
resistance. At the height of the invasion Czech playwright Vaclav Havel issued an urgent plea of
support in the name of all Czech and Slovak writers from an underground station in the city
Liberec.
That week was an experience I’ll never forget. I saw Soviet tanks smash down arcades on
the main square and bury several people in the rubble. I saw a tank commander start shooting
wildly into the crowd. I saw and experienced many things, but what affected me most was that
special phenomenon of solidarity and community which was so typical of the time. That week
showed how helpless military power is when confronted by an opponent unlike any that power
has been trained to confront: it showed how hard it is to govern a country in which, though it may
not defend itself militarily, all the civil structures simply turn their backs on the aggressors.
Brzezinski was at his home in Englewood, New Jersey when he heard the news that the
Soviets had invaded. “There was some event connected with the Humphrey campaign, and I was
spending the night in my home when I heard on the radio that the Soviets had moved into Prague.
My reaction was two-fold; I had a sense of outrage and sympathy for the Czechs on one hand. But
secondly, a conviction that this was the death rattle of communism--that to use force to maintain
communism wasn’t permitting it to reform itself---even though the Soviets had asserted the more
traditional orthodox version of communism in Czechoslovakia. What it really meant was that it
was not reformable, that the Soviet Union would not permit reform, and that eventually it would
have to crash.”
In the days after the Soviet invasion Brzezinski contributed an op-ed piece that appeared
on the front page of the Washington Post.
Basically the suppression of Czechoslovakia means the death of international communism.
The Soviet Union had the choice of either accepting a community of independent Communist states
and thereby acting in the spirit of Communist internationalism or of acting like a major imperialist
power motivated purely by nationalist interests. The Soviet Union chose the latter course. It did so
because in the course of the last few years, the darker forces within the Soviet political system had
been steadily gaining strength. The present Soviet leadership is acting more like a fascist than a
Communist government. It is to be remembered that fascism was a radical, socialist, nationalist,
and imperialistic movement. The invasion of Czechoslovakia will hasten the process not only of
disintegration of international communism but in all probability also of the internal decay of the
Soviet political system. Without a doubt, the more enlightened segments of Soviet society are as
outraged and disgusted as the rest of the world. Before long, the contagion of freedom which is
temporarily being snuffed out in Prague will spread to Kiev and
Moscow.
At the same time Brzezinski insisted that the U.S. not limit a response to rhetorical outrage.
“I would regret it if we were forced by the Soviet invasion to adopt such a simplistically hostile
position---rigid, militant anti-Communism---as to make it easier for the Soviet Union to reassert its
control over Eastern Europe---we must differentiate between our immediate outrage and our
immediate retaliatory response to express this outrage from our long-term policy of building
bridges. It was the success of this policy that forced the Soviet into this criminal act. In the short
term, we should react, but in the long run we shouldn’t flip.”
The President of the United States indeed took a rather subdued attitude toward the
invasion. Johnson would rationalize the U.S. approach to the crisis shortly after the invasion. “There
was little we could do through the use of military force, to assist any of those countries without
automatically engaging in general war with the Soviet Union.” For Brzezinski Johnson’s link
between backing Dubcek’s reforms and World War III was a false dilemma. As he had long noted,
the strategy of peaceful engagement was designed to provide assistance to East
European reform movements before the issue reached a crisis point.
Indeed, Brzezinski would be even more critical of Johnson’s approach in later years. “I have
to confess that I did not know the extent of his indifference to what the Soviets did until I read
Dobrynin’s memoirs where he describes in detail how totally indifferent Johnson was and how
Johnson went through a routine of just saying a few words of complaint and then resumed pressing
for a date for a summit meeting----conveying to Dobrynin the message that he didn’t give a damn
about the occupation of Czechoslovakia---I did not know that at the time.”62
Back in the United States Brzezinski was with the Humphrey campaign preparing for the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. The Soviet invasion would indeed have an impact on the tenor
of the campaign. The Soviet act gave Richard Nixon a chance to dust off his anti-communist
credentials. Nixon, who had noticeably softened his rhetoric toward the Soviet Union in the
campaign, noted that it was a “sad commentary on the nature of the Soviet system that simple
assertion of basic liberties brings repression by the troops of five nations.” Nixon’s political
operatives, on the other hand, didn’t sound quite so aggrieved. “What a break!” shouted Frank
62 Dobrynin, who had arrived at the White House just as the tanks were rolling into Prague, was
astonished by Johnson’s rather mild reaction. “Much to my surprise he did not react to it at all, just
thanked me for the information and said he would probably discuss the statement with Rusk and
others the next morning and give us a reply, if need be. He proceeded to another subject, on which
he seemed to be much more keen. He said he was awaiting our response to his plans to announce
his visit to the Soviet Union. The announcement was scheduled for 10 o’clock the following
morning. (Moscow had agreed in principle to his visit a couple of days before, but now, of course,
there was slight hope that the visit would take place.) The president added that he had already
invited some friends to breakfast at the White House in order to break the news about his trip and
then make a major announcement about it to the press. Still utterly oblivious to the impact of what
was happening in Prague, Johnson asked us to give him a reply about his visit to Moscow in time
for the next morning’s meetings, or not later than between 8 and 9 a.m. He looked cheerful and said
he attached great importance to his forthcoming meeting with the Soviet leaders; he hoped to
discuss a number of major topics, including Vietnam and the Middle East. Johnson pointed out that
this time he ‘had more freedom of action,’ and that he expected the meeting to produce certain
results. Johnson then reverted to his meeting with Kosygin in Glassboro, going over the details in
his memory and evaluating the whole thing positively. He offered me a whiskey (I would have
agreed to drink anything at that moment!) and began to tell me various entertaining stories about
Texas. He was good at it. While the president was going on about his forthcoming trip, the
Glassboro summit, and other things that pleased him, Rostow, the only witness to the conversation,
sat with lowering face, trying not to interrupt the president. As we parted, Johnson was very
friendly and once again reminded me that he was looking forward to our response so he could
announce his visit to the Soviet Union.” Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to
America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York, 1995), pp. 178185.
Shakespeare, a Nixon adviser, “This Czech thing is just perfect. It puts the soft-liners in a hell of a
box!”64
Indeed some of the more prominent Democrats preparing to go to Chicago would not
distinguish themselves in response to the Soviet invasion. Eugene McCarthy called a press
conference where he issued the statement that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was “not a
major world crisis” and that President Johnson had acted “out of proportion” by calling for a special
late night meeting of the National Security Council.
Brzezinski was irate with McCarthy’s cavalier dismissal of the events in Czechoslovakia.
He also saw it as a portent of the escapist isolationism that seemed to be gaining control over much
of the Democratic Party. “The process of resolving the legacies of the cold war and building a
viable world order has doubtless been set back by a number of years. What has
64 Joe McGinnis, “The Selling of the President 1968,” Harper’s Magazine (August 1969), p. 185.
California Governor Ronald Reagan, fresh off his conservative challenge to Nixon for the GOP
nomination, warned that the Soviet invasion was a reminder that “America must not relax its
guard. Here is the answer to those people who have lulled themselves into the belief that Russia
has changed its attitude.” “Reagan Asks Vigilance,” The New York Times (August 22, 1968).
happened is therefore both sad and important and one can only regret Senator McCarthy’s idiotic
and cynical dismissal of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as unimportant. Renewed tensions
can contribute to stronger right-wing tendencies both in the West and in the East.”
As the campaign continued, Humphrey, now virtually assured the nomination, sought to
heal the wounds of a divided party as the Democrats approached their convention in Chicago.
But McCarthy’s supporters continued to view Humphrey as every bit the enemy as Richard Nixon.
As the convention approached thousands of young demonstrators announced their intent to travel
to Chicago to protest their distaste for the “old politics” of the Democratic Party. What ensued was
a public relations nightmare for the Humphrey campaign. On August 28, delegates at the
convention had just rejected by a three to two margin an antiwar resolution. As the delegates
debated inside the convention hall, police and protesters clashed outside the convention hall.
As Humphrey prepared to receive the nomination, television cameras cut between the
convention speeches and the chaos outside where Chicago police were brutally dispersing the
protesters. Humphrey’s more dovish opponents implied he was at least indirectly to blame for the
ruckus. “With George McGovern as President,” shouted Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff,
“we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” At this point even the worst lip
readers in America were then treated with the scene where a beet red Mayor Daley could be seen
calling the distinguished Senator a “mother-fucker.”
McCarthy was indeed conspicuously absent on the podium from Humphrey’s postspeech
“show of unity” and after Chicago his supporters were in no mood to join forces with Humphrey
for the greater good of defeating Nixon. “It’s worse than Prague,” replied McCarthy that night from
the fifteenth floor of his Hilton headquarters as he looked down at the riots below. Though he left
Chicago with nomination, Humphrey was despondent. “Chicago was a catastrophe,” he would
later concede, “My wife and I went home heartbroken, battered, and beaten.”
The Nixon campaign wasted no time in capitalizing on the public dismay with the
Democratic Convention. A week later Nixon campaigned in Chicago under a very different
atmosphere. Lunch-hour crowds estimated at 400,000 turned out as his motorcade moved along its
nineteen-block route beneath a shower of confetti arranged by his advance men. An exhilarated
Nixon “tanned and rested into fighting trim,” noted Newsweek, “the crowds cheered each time he
stood in the rear of his convertible to thrust his arms up into a victory V.” For his part Nixon’s
running mate Spiro Agnew spoke for a sizable chunk of former blue-collar Democrats. “If you tell
me the hippies and the yippies are going to be able to do the job of helping America,” blistered
Agnew, “I’ll tell you this: they can’t run a bus, they can’t serve in government office, they can’t run
a lathe in a factory. All they can do is lay down in the park and sleep and kick policemen.”
With Humphrey trailing badly in all of the major polls Brzezinski sought some help from
his old friend Henry Kissinger. With little to lose Brzezinski and John Reilly were prepared to make
the trip to Cambridge to inspect the Nixon “files” Kissinger had mentioned earlier in the summer.
In mid-September Brzezinski telephoned Kissinger's office to inquire if the offer was still open.
Kissinger’s secretary came on the line. “You know, Dr. Brzezinski, that Dr. Kissinger is working for
Nixon now?" The Humphrey campaign would hear no more about the Nixon “shit
files.”
Years later Brzezinski sought to downplay the controversy. “We had a flap over some
documents that he had from the Rockefeller campaign. He maintains that he didn’t say something
that I think I heard him say. But it’s not really terribly material. The point is that at that time
Kissinger was with Rockefeller, then Rockefeller fell by the side and Henry, in a politically skillful
way, made himself available both to Humphrey and to Nixon without
(committing) to either.”
Kissinger would take a more adamant view. “It’s total non-sense—absolute nonsense. I
mean it’s an insult to the intelligence of the people involved. I always had been friendly with
Humphrey. I knew Humphrey better than Nixon. But I didn’t deal with Humphrey during the
campaign. The only files I had were academic type files. I was not involved in the political side
whatsoever. But the fact is I didn’t make any files available. There’s no dispute about that.”
Yet there remains at least some dispute about whether the original offer had been made.
Samuel Huntington recalls the event more vividly. “Kissinger was playing both sides. He had an
office right next to mine at Harvard. He kept saying that he was going to cooperate and he would
make promises.” Huntington recalls Kissinger made a specific offer while the two met each other
that summer at Martha’s Vineyard.
“He said he had all these files on Nixon and that he would supply them to us--but he never
did. I don’t think they had any particular dirt, but you have to recognize that this was long before
computers, the Internet, or anything like that. I gathered from what Kissinger told me that they had
every statement that Nixon had ever made—cataloged by topic and so forth and so on—so if you
wanted to pin Nixon down or quote something it was all there—and we didn’t have any capability
to do that sort of research.”
With or without the files, by mid-September Humphrey had begun to chip way at Nixon’s
once sizable lead. With the campaign in its final stages Brzezinski and other aides urged
Humphrey to break with Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Since June Brzezinski was frustrated by
Humphrey’s unwillingness to stand up to Johnson and stake out his own path. On September 30
Brzezinski and John Reilly outlined the speech for Humphrey in Salt Lake City where the vice
president declared his commitment to a unilateral bombing halt on North Vietnam.
As the 1968 campaign entered its final month Henry Kissinger would become embroiled in
still another campaign controversy. The Paris Peace talks had commenced in the spring of 1968 in
an effort to reach a peace settlement in Vietnam. The negotiations had long been deadlocked over
South Vietnamese objections. Yet by October both sides appeared close to an agreement. The Nixon
campaign understood that any dramatic announcement about peace in Vietnam would add
considerable momentum to Humphrey’s late charging campaign.
At this time Nixon’s foreign policy aide Richard Allen claimed that Kissinger approached
the Nixon campaign offering to provide classified information surrounding the negotiations in
Paris. According to Allen’s account he was working at Nixon’s national headquarters in early
September when he got an unsolicited call from Kissinger inquiring whether the Nixon staff would
be interested in any inside information that he might be able to provide from the Paris peace talks.
Kissinger, according to Allen, mentioned that he had friends on the delegation and that such
information would enable Nixon to counteract, any dramatic “peace” announcement by the
Johnson administration.
Allen claimed that Kissinger, after returning from meetings with the U.S. peace delegation
in Paris, reported directly to the Nixon campaignthat “something big was afoot regarding
Vietnam.” In a final telephone call just before the election, Kissinger informed the Allen that
Ambassador Averell Harriman had “broken open the champagne” because a bombing halt had
been achieved. 76
On October 31 President Johnson announced his commitment to a unilateral bombing halt
in North Vietnam. But the tentative agreement on a bombing halt was still dependent on approval
by South Vietnamese president Thieu. With the election only days away, President Johnson
received FBI reports that Anna Chennault, a Nixon fund-raiser, was acting as a gobetween for the
Republicans with the South Vietnamese government. Nixon’s campaign manager had asked
Chennault to inform Thieu that he should oppose the bombing halt and thereby undermine the
peace talks. Thieu was then assured that he would get a better deal should Nixon defeat Humphrey
in the upcoming election. President Thieu would indeed publicly repudiate the breakthrough three
days before the American election, using the excuse that he would not attend any peace talks at
which the Vietcong were in attendance.
US embassy spy operations and wiretaps of Thieu’s offices meant that Johnson was aware
of the Thieu-Nixon backdoor connection. Yet Johnson’s strained relations with J Edgar Hoover at
the FBI meant that Hoover did not tell the president everything. Nonetheless Johnson was said to
have “exploded” when he heard of Thieu’s decision to pull out of the peace talks. He told his
advisers that he could “rock the world” if he went public with the Nixon’s pre-election
“conniving” with the South Vietnamese regime. Johnson called Nixon the weekend before the
election to ask him about the situation. Nixon proceeded to deny that Chennault was working for
him. It was reported that when the call ended “Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter.”
78
Johnson, certain that Nixon was lying, informed Humphrey of the events while the Vice
President was at the time in route to a campaign stop. “By God,” said Humphrey in uncharacteristic
outrage,“ when we land I’m going to denounce Thieu. I’ll denounce Nixon!”. But Humphrey
decided against going public with such an explosive charge. The presidential historian Theodore
White would later call Humphrey’s decision to sit on such information one of the most “decent
actions ever taken by an American political figure.” 79 Richard Holbrooke, then a young aide to
Averell Harriman, would later charge that the Nixon campaign had “massively, directly and
covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation, probably one of the most important
negotiations in American diplomatic history.”80
In November 1968 Nixon edged Humphrey in one of the closest races in American history.
Brzezinski was at Humphrey headquarters in St. Paul watching the television reports as the vote
swung back and forth. In the early morning hours the networks reported that Nixon had received
43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7. George Wallace, absorbing a significant chunk of the
old blue-collar labor left, took 13.5 percent. 81 Brzezinski, watching from the gloomy Humphrey
headquarters, recalls being torn by mixed emotions that evening:
78 Ibid, 79
Ibid. 80
Ibid.
81 The splits in the Democratic Party would prove fatal to Humphrey’s late breaking comeback. As
one observer put it, “It was the rule-or-ruin liberals—academic, journalistic, and political— who let
down the side most conspicuously. In retrospect, it is ludicrous that the Democrat with the best
liberal record of anyone in public life, aligned with the President who has advanced the causes of
liberalism further than anybody since Roosevelt, should have been undone by liberal defectors. Yet
this is clearly what happened. Americans for Democratic Action, the bellwether New York Times,
the McCarthyites, many academicians and many Democratic Congressional candidates endorsed
Humphrey late and halfheartedly, or, if wholeheartedly, in afterthoughts of doubtful
conviction…Vietnam was always the excuse for these liberals’ reluctance to support Humphrey, if
it could be called support. Yet Mr. Johnson had obviously sacrificed himself to make peace and
Nixon was more hawkish than Humphrey. So it was never a valid excuse except I remember sitting
there that night with Humphrey watching the election seesaw—and really being worried what
would happen to the United States if we won. Because by then I had concluded that Humphrey
was a wonderfully decent man but probably would be a lousy president. I wasn’t at all happy about
Nixon—I didn’t admire him at all. But I had the feeling that Humphrey would be just a chaotic,
indecisive president. It was the things he did, the indecisive way he ran the campaign, and the way
he would hedge the foreign policy issues, and couldn’t make up his mind, the Vietnam War
problem he didn’t want to bite the bullet on it because he was intimidated by Johnson. It just made
me feel that he was a terribly nice, decent attractive human being but might not have had the guts
to be the kind of tough decision maker the president needs to be.82
In late November of 1968 Richard Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger as his special assistant
of national security affairs. The announcement came as a surprise to many who had reason to
believe that Kissinger had never thought much of Nixon. Those working behind the scenes on the
Nixon campaign staff were less surprised. Richard Allen recalled; “My attitude was that it was
inevitable that Kissinger would have to be part of our administration…Kissinger had proven his
mettle by tipping us. It took some balls to give us those tips.”83
Zbigniew Brzezinski left the Humphrey campaign and returned to his post at Columbia.
He was aware that 1968 marked a turning point, both in U.S. domestic politics, and perhaps as
to freak liberals who embrace the recently fashionable New Left doctrine that Communism would
be good for South Vietnam, indeed for all of benighted Southeast Asia.” Kenneth Crawford,
“Liberal Lemmings,” Newsweek (November 25, 1968), p. 37.
82 Interview, Washington, DC (March 29, 2000). The columnist Stewart Alsop captured this
point in a column shortly after the election. “Every politician likes to be liked, and it is the art of
politics to gather people of contradictory views under one large tent. But nobody likes to be liked
more than Humphrey—this may be his greatest weakness. And it surely should have been obvious
that it would be impossible to gather under one tent Lyndon Johnson and his followers and Eugene
McCarthy and his followers. It should surely have been obvious that it was not possible to reach
any sort of accommodation with McCarthy, simply because an accommodation would have
destroyed McCarthy’s political reason for being. But Humphrey foolishly tried. Every time
Humphrey made cooing noises, McCarthy simply took more extreme positions—like his proposal
for forcing this country’s South Vietnamese allies into a coalition with their life-anddeath enemies,
the Communists, before holding an election. Instead of denouncing this proposal as morally
indefensible and big-power imperialism of the crassest sort—which it was— Humphrey went on
making cooing noises. Finally, and inevitably, Humphrey had no choice but to support the basic
policies of the Administration of which he had been a part. Thus the cooing noises earned him
nothing but a reputation for weakness.” Stewart Alsop, “Can Humphrey Win?” Newsweek
(September 9, 1968), p. 104.
83 Terence Smith, “Kissinger Role in ’68 Race Stirs Conflicting Views,” The New York Times
(June 13, 1983).
importantly, on the political situation in Eastern Europe. Adam Michnik was in jail during the time
of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Within a few months he would be sentenced to three
years in prison for his role in the March protests in Poland. He, like many in the opposition, was
beginning to feel excluded by the bilateral nature of the U.S.-Soviet relationship.
“The American attitude wasn’t good,” recalled Michnik some years later. “It was like they
practically agreed with the Brezhnev Doctrine. Senator McCarthy said that the intervention in
Czechoslovakia was a ‘minor incident.’ Brzezinski said this was a very cynical statement and that
he was an imbecile for making it—and he was absolutely right.”
While American student radicals spent 1968 shouting communist slogans and hoisting the
red flags to demonstrate their commitment to socialism Michnik was having different thoughts on
the future of the communist system. “That was the year it turned out that everything had been non-
sense. The system that proclaimed freedom attacked defenseless students with inspired goons and
vigilantes. The system that proclaimed liberty sent tanks into Czechoslovakia. The system that
hung its slogans of universal brotherhood unleashed the most disgusting antiSemitic campaign in
Poland, the first in postwar Europe. This is the point where I said to myself, halt, stop, I do not want
to have anything to do with the system…. I cut my umbilical cord to
Communism.”
Brzezinski believed that 1968 had shown that the Soviet system was now rotting from
within. But Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the few members of the intellectual community who
continued to believe that the “forces of history” were moving in America’s direction. Brzezinski
understood that the West European communist parties had been shocked by the brutal force used
to crush Alexander Dubeck’s attempt to introduce “socialism with a human face.” He believed this
would open up new inroads for the policy of “peaceful engagement” if the Nixon Administration
did not take the temptation to enter a condominium arrangement over the heads of the Europeans.
At the same Brzezinski also left the Humphrey campaign with tremendous misgivings about the
leftward shift in the Democratic Party. Nixon’s victory and the performance of George Wallace had
demonstrated the electoral power of the South. Yet Brzezinski also believed there were Democratic
alternatives to the segregationist message of George Wallace and
Strom Thurmond. Indeed, while the national Democratic Party was shifting leftward, a young
“born again” peanut farmer named James Earl “Jimmy” Carter spent that memorable year of
1968 mounting a rather improbable grassroots campaign for the governorship of Georgia.
CHAPTER FOUR: ENTER NIXON AND KISSINGER
Richard Nixon entered the White House at a particularly vexing moment in U.S. history. A
nation that in 1960 stood as the undisputed leader of the “free world” now appeared as an uncertain
giant timid and unsure of its role in a vastly changing world. It was the beginning of what political
observers would term the “crisis of confidence” in the United States. Brzezinski believed that the
United States was engulfed in a cultural and intellectual malaise that was inflicting great harm. The
roots ran far deeper than Vietnam. The nation was coming off a decade that saw race riots,
economic decline, and the rise of extremes across the political spectrum. Indeed, the prospects for
improvement looked scarcely better. American factories now appeared antiquated products of a
bygone era. The great industrial cities of the Midwest, once the models of American productivity,
were now referred to disparagingly as the “rust belt.”
In December of 1968 Zbigniew Brzezinski attended a four-day conference hosted by
Princeton University and sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom. The
conference was entitled “The United States. It’s Problems, Impact, and Image in the World.” The
issue appeared grave enough to attract a vast cross-section of thinkers-- including Henry
Kissinger—whose public profile had been elevated by his appointment as Richard Nixon’s special
assistant for national security affairs only two weeks before.
The overwhelming tone of the conference was hostile to the U.S. role in the world—
particularly the continuing war in Vietnam. Brzezinski, who had come to favor a major deescalation
in Vietnam, took issue with what he saw as a supercilious attitude coming from European
intellectuals. “There is something quaintly old-fashioned in the eloquent denunciations of United
States global involvement,” noted Brzezinski,“ especially coming from Europeans, whose record
for successful maintenance of world peace is not exactly admirable. The fact that the United States’
commitment to international affairs is now on a global scale has been determined by history. It
cannot be undone, and the only relevant question that remains is what will be its form and goals.”
Brzezinski then offered what he saw as the most urgent priorities of President-elect Nixon’s
foreign policy: “The first order of business will be to see whether the war in Vietnam can be
terminated on terms acceptable to the American people—not only in terms of the immediate future
but also of the likely anticipated reaction of the American public three or four years from now.
Secondly, I think it’s time to redefine our attitude toward China. The abnormalcy not only hurts
American interests in Asia but also affects negatively our relationship with the Soviet
Union. In Europe there is a crisis of confidence not only because of the loss of momentum toward
European unity but also because of Czechoslovakia; and because of the bitterness many Europeans
have toward bilateral American-Soviet negotiations on arms control. “
Brzezinski’s comments also indicated his concerns that the growing cultural pessimism in
the West was preventing the construction of a meaningful global community. He warned that a
U.S. retreat to isolationism could unleash anarchy into the global system that would likely be
assisted, rather than contained, by the Soviet Union. Brzezinski stressed the difficulties that awaited
the United States in the 1970s: “Here they [the Nixon administration] will have to do the almost
impossible; intensify consultations with the West Europeans, see what kind of spontaneous moves
toward unity there can be and at the same time maintaining bilateral arms control talks with Russia.
We can try to create options so that the Russians can become involved in the positive tasks of the
world with the rest of the developed world if they choose to, but not to have too high expectations
that they will.”
Brzezinski presented his still controversial view that the Soviet Union was no longer an
ideological competitor but disruptive force that, for all its rhetoric, was acting as a brake on
assisting the more impoverished nations of the world. “I believe we live in a world in which there
is a far greater social consciousness about human misery, and that even the material problems
within the United States do not mean a total indifference to what’s happening in the world. Our
political consciousness is catching up. We’re no longer living in a society in which 80 percent of the
people live reasonably well. And we’re moving into a stage in which we’re no longer satisfied with
a world in which America and Europe and Japan move rapidly, and the rest stagnate.”
In the late 1960s Brzezinski’s academic work had moved away from his previously strict
focus on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Brzezinski saw the United States entering a new
challenge—one that made the Soviet Union almost irrelevant. In 1970 Brzezinski would produce
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. Brzezinski had worked on the book for four
years. He conceded that it had taken him that long to understand the vast changes then taking place
around the globe. Brzezinski lifted the title from an excerpt out of Herman Hesse’s novel
Steppenwolf . “Human life “ wrote the German novelist “was reduced to real suffering only when
two ages, two cultures and religions overlap… when a whole generation is caught in this way
between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand
itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.”
Between Two Ages would provide a rather prophetic look at the world of next thirty years--
including an analysis of the global impact of high technology, the increasingly global reach of
American cultural and economic influence (later known as “globalization”), the economic
stagnation and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and—perhaps most importantly---the
looming threat of a global backlash from the world’s poorer nations as the more economically
advanced nations moved further into an era of post-industrial prosperity.
Brzezinski was particularly disdainful of “the self-flagellating mood” that had seized a
good part of the American intellectual world. “The fashionable talk today is all on the subject of the
country’s imminent doom,” he noted in a 1970 interview. “The more pessimistic the prediction the
louder the acclaim it evokes.” Brzezinski’s work was hardly polyannish, however. He warned that
the last time the world was caught “between ages” occurred in the 19th century when the European
nations began to move from the agricultural to the industrial age. The result was the rise of “mass
politics” and the coming to power of totalitarian ideologies that offered messianic solutions to the
uncertainties of the day. Brzezinski observed that the world in 1970 was about to embark on a
similar transition—and it should take immediate measures to
prepare for it.
Brzezinski’s work refuted the fashionable claims that the United States was a “reactionary”
nation that had already entered a state of decline. On the contrary, he noted that the United States
remained the most innovative and powerful nation in the world and was certain to continue this
role well into the 21st century. Brzezinski noted that America’s problems of the 1960s were rooted
in the difficulty of serving as history’s “guinea pig”—that is, the first nation to make the traumatic
adjustment from the industrial age into what he termed the age of “technetronics.” Brzezinski
concluded rather optimistically that the American society had “the capacity, the talent, the wealth
and, increasingly, the will” to surmount the difficulties in the current historic transition. Indeed,
the American economy at the time was already undergoing a transition from the “rust belt”
economy to the nascent hi-tech industry then taking root in California’s “silicon valley.”
As a sweeping generalization, it can be said that Rome exported law; England,
parliamentary political democracy; France, culture and republican nationalism; the contemporary
United States, technological-scientific innovation and mass culture derived from high
consumption. Brzezinski noted, “American society, more than any other, ‘communicates’ with the
entire globe. Roughly sixty-five percent of all world communications originate in this country.”
This, he hinted, would only increase with the coming impact of a global communications network.
“Moreover, the United States has been most active in the promotion of a global communications
system by means of satellites and it is pioneering the development of a world-wide information
grid. It is expected that such a grid will come into being about 1975. For the first time in history the
cumulative knowledge of mankind will be made accessible on a global scale—and it will be almost
instantaneously available in response to demand.”
Brzezinski was thus optimistic about the United States’ ability to move with relative ease
into the new age of high technology. The reasons for this were rooted in what he regarded as basic
American characteristics. “What makes America unique in our time,” Brzezinski argued “is that
confrontation with the new is part of the daily American experience. For better or worse, the rest
of the world learns what is in store for it by observing what happens in the United States; whether
it be the latest scientific discoveries in space and medicine or the electric toothbrush in the
bathroom, pop art of LSD; air conditioning or air pollution; old-age problems or juvenile
delinquency. The evidence is more elusive in such matters as style, music, values, and social mores,
but there too the term ‘Americanization’ obviously implies a specific source.”
Brzezinski was far less confident about the Soviet Union’s ability to make the necessary
adjustments to the new age. His analysis of the Soviet system utilized a variant on the “end of
ideology” idea, popularized in the 1950s by Daniel Bell and Walter Rostow, that all nations
eventually follow a uniform model of the “stages of economic growth.” But Brzezinski placed the
argument in more familiar “dialectical terms” to make his point abouit the Soviet Union. Simply
put, Brzezinski argued that the Soviets had been mistaken that history had concluded with the rise
of the industrial age. While Soviet propaganda continued to boast of massive outputs of raw
industrial goods it had fallen behind the more advanced nations who were moving gradually into
the “technetronic” era.
“I wrote that book in part deliberately using Marxist categories,” Brzezinski recalled some
thirty years after its publication, “because I thought the book would have its greatest impact in the
communist world by using the categories of historical analysis to which they were accustomed.
This was to demonstrate to them that far from being part of an inevitably successful progression
toward world communism they were part of an inevitably doomed system---for historically
determinist reasons.”
The Soviet official press mounted a visceral denunciation of the book. Although it usually
took the Soviets some time to review foreign books, Between Two Ages was reviewed almost
instantly in both the academic as well as popular Soviet press. The critiques were particularly
hostile to Brzezinski’s charge that the Soviet system was in a “dialectally hostile” relationship to
the growth needs of its society. Despite the official efforts Brzezinski recalls the book hit its intended
audience. “The book actually had its greatest impact over there,” Brzezinski recalled. “It was passed
around quite a bit and read illicitly. The Soviets were quite critical of its thesis. But on the private
level I suspect among the more knowledgeable Russians--the kind of KGB or the institute
generation--it was appreciated. Because it corresponded to their feelings and their sensitivities, the
waste and lack of competitiveness, and the stupid determinism based on increasingly irrelevant
categories such as ‘we’re going to produce more iron or coal than the
Americans.’”
Yet Brzezinski’s final analysis did not bode well for the world’s more advanced nations
unless they took immediate precautions. The world, Brzezinski warned, was now experiencing the
most extensive and the most intensive transformation in its entire history. He noted the most
significant threat to world stability was the looming backlash that could arise should the Western
world continued to grow wealthy while the world’s poorer regions remained mired in relative
poverty. This problem was made even more acute by the fact that the economic disparities were
increasingly visible in a world linked by an increasingly sophisticated global communications
network.
Brzezinski associated the central phenomenon of global political awakening with a number
of monumental changes in the political condition of the world since World War II. The most
obvious was the collapse of Western colonialism, a phenomenon that had guided the international
system since roughly 1500. Brzezinski noted that on the eve of World War II, about 80 percent of
the land mass of the world and 75 percent of the world’s population were then under the control
of Western imperial powers. Of that, 25 percent of the population was under the singular control
of the British Empire.
The postwar de-colonization was accompanied by the staggering fact that the world’s
population had grown more in the twenty-five years after the war than it had in the preceding 200
years, particularly in the world’s more impoverished regions. Brzezinski noted that the addition of
some 100 additional new states made for an increasingly combustible international system.
Traditional agrarian societies in these states were moving on a massive scale toward urbanization
and, most frequently these new urban centers had emerged without an adequate social
infrastructure. Brzezinski warned that “most of these people would be living in the developing
world, most will be young, most of them will be poor, most of them will be politically awakened,
most of them will be concentrated in urban areas, most of them will be susceptible to mass
mobilization.”
Brzezinski noted that America, while clearly the most innovative and creative society in
the world, was also a “major disruptive influence on the world scene. In fact communism, which
many Americans see as the principal cause of unrest, primarily capitalizes on frustrations and
aspirations, whose major source is the American impact on the rest of the world.” Brzezinski
argued that this problem was made worse in that the absolute economic growth would no longer
be enough to satisfy the increasingly restive nations. “Whether the less developed countries grow
rapidly or slowly, or not at all,” Brzezinski warned, “almost inevitably many of them will continue
to be dominated by intensifying feelings of psychological deprivation. In a world electronically
intermeshed, absolute or relative underdevelopment will be intolerable, especially as the more
advanced countries begin to move beyond that industrial era into which the less developed
countries have as yet to enter. It is thus no longer a matter of the ‘revolution of rising expectations.’”
The problem, Brzezinski cautioned, “arises from an intensifying feeling of relative deprivation of
which they are made more acutely aware by the spread of education and communications. As a
result, passive resignation may give way to active explosions of undirected anger.”
In August of 1970 Brzezinski discussed these themes in an interview with the New York
Times. He suggested that Marshal McLuhan’s “global village” was a rather hopeful myth. The
accurate analogy was that of a “global city”—“a nervous, agitated, tense, and fragmented web of
interdependent relations.” Brzezinski believed that Americans needed only to look at the
degenerating state of its largest city to find an appropriate metaphor. Brzezinski suggested the
“messy, fragmented, incoherent, congested, violent” state of New York City could be the model of
the turmoil that could engulf the world in the coming years. “You see more violence in the poorer
segment than in the richer segment here,” he noted from his office at Columbia. “In the world-city
it is the same thing. No one is really in charge; thus you have a state of anarchy.”
As Brzezinski was granting that interview construction was being completed on two office
buildings that would dramatically change the skyline of lower Manhattan. Though formally known
as “The World Trade Center,” the city tabloids took to calling the two buildings “Nelson and
David” due to the vast influence the Rockefeller brothers had on their planning and development.
The towers, at least for a time, would be the world’s tallest buildings and provide office space for
more than 50,000 people—and in thirty years they would also provide the most dramatic target for
the possible backlash Brzezinski spoke of in Between Two Ages.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Between Two Ages was Brzezinski’s proposed
solution. This would entail not a bilateral détente with the Soviet Union—or even a rapprochement
with China—though both were desirable to an extent. What was urgently needed, he insisted, was
a sustained effort to promote closer “trilateral” ties between the United States, Japan and Western
Europe—which were also beginning to confront the challenges of the new technetronic era.
Brzezinski insisted this community of developed nations must eventually band together—perhaps
even institutionally—to distribute more effectively the fruits of science and technology and provide
the most basic tools to narrow the North-South economic disparities. These “trilateral” regions
were also linked by still one further very important similarity—unlike the Soviet Union and China-
-they were operating “within a framework of democratic institutions that, though far from perfect,
represent the most decent and just system of government so far devised by man.”
Brzezinski insisted this would be possible only with the creation of a more efficient and
organized system of disseminating such scientific and technological breakthroughs on a global
scale. Brzezinski’s “trilateral” solution would make him an anathema to the more extreme fringes
of the United States political system. The political right castigated Brzezinski for “one-worldism”
that sought to institute global socialism. More leftist voices tended to dismiss Brzezinski’s solutions
as a diabolical plot to make the world safe for capitalism and multinational corporations. The
debate would rage long and hard for decades. Brzezinski’s case for technology was, and would
continue to be, extremely controversial. 16
Brzezinski was particularly skeptical of the fashionable solution of “zero growth” which
advocated the halting of economic and demographic growth in the advanced society as a means to
overcome global inequality. Brzezinski warned that the ability of the advanced countries to assist
the less advanced countries would be significantly reduced by the “zero growth” plan since a major
effort at a redistribution of the world’s wealth was unlikely without sustaining economic growth
in the more developed nations of the world, not to mention the fact that there was simply no
international agency powerful with the authority to mandate such a plan.
16 Between Two Ages was viewed with marked skepticism by many left-wing critics who focused
almost exclusively on Brzezinski’s ongoing verbal battles with the New Left. A notable exception
was Michael Harrington who wrote a review of Brzezinski ‘s book for The Village Voice. “One of the
reasons Zbigniew Brzezinski’s new book is so important,” Harrington noted, “would also persuade
some of The Voice’s readers (and reviewers) not to read it: the author was a member of the Policy
Planning Council in the State Department between 1966 and 1968 and served as foreign policy
adviser to Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in 1968. In the fashionable, antiintellectual cant of some
on the left, that makes him a ‘war criminal’ and one can put down this volume after having read
nothing but the short biographical note. I believe the war in Vietnam is unconscionable, and must
be ended now. But that hardly permits one to make nonsensical analogies between Lyndon
Johnson’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany or to overlook the honest, and even anguished,
decency of some who supported that venture. Moreover, in Brzezinski’s case it is extremely
significant that a man who participated at such high levels of government in that period is now
convinced that ideological politics—that simple counterposition of Communism and anti-
Communism which dominated American life at the height of the Cold War—must come to an end.”
Michael Harrington, “Books,” The Village Voice (December 17, 1970).
Brzezinski thought it ironic that the very groups that so demonstrably pointed out the
desperate condition of the world’s poorest countries were steadfastly opposed to the most
immediate solution to relieve their plight-- the remarkable scientific and technological revolution
then taking place in the more advanced nations. Brzezinski rejected the fashionable dismissal of
science as necessarily evil. “Without science, modern philosophy cannot possibly supply answers
to such concrete problems as ecology, survival, pollution, nutrition, even peace---without
philosophy, science would be directionless, possibly destructive. We have to ask why---that is the
philosophical part. We also have to ask how---that is the scientific part. That is why the New Left
has absolutely no answer. It’s an historic reaction, rather than an historic vanguard. It fails to
perceive the novelty of our technetronic age. It is an obsolescent force because it thinks it can escape
from science by turning its back on it—to opt out. It cannot. The New Left will become more the
violent left, because of its frustration.” 18
Brzezinski’s trilateral proposals also met opposition from within the White House.
Richard Nixon was determined to direct foreign policy within the confines of the White House. The
tradition of American diplomacy held that official contacts with foreign governments went through
the channels of the State Department. The idea was that information--even highly classified---
should move through the bureaucratic mill until the various analysts, department heads, and
diplomats had the opportunity to weigh in with their recommendations and/or
relied on the idea of rapid economic growth as a partial substitute for forced coercion. When they
did not grow, the element of coercion was always much higher. Violent uprisings, Brzezinski
observed, had already occurred in those Communist countries where growth slowed to the point
that it affected the social condition. Such “zero-growth” had done little to improve the
environments of those countries—which at the time were among the most polluted on the planet.
The inequality that existed in the United States , he noted, had been at least partially tolerated by
the American tradition of a relatively balanced opportunity. But this opportunity, Brzezinski
argued, was dependent on flexibility and mobility—concepts inherent in the concept of economic
growth. This growth—achieved by initiative and creativity, provided at least the hope of upward
mobility. Brzezinski suggested the end result of “zero growth” solution was “stagnant socialism”
which was already visible throughout the Soviet style economies. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The
Politics of Zero Growth,” Newsweek (March 27, 1972), p. 54.
18 McCandlish Phillips, “Scholar Sees U.S. At a Turning Point,” The New York Times (August 12,
1970).
objections. Nixon did not trust bureaucracies and would move to exclude the State Department,
and particularly Secretary of State William Rogers, from foreign policy decisions.
Nixon would enlist Henry Kissinger to ensure that this process worked. In the ensuing
years Kissinger’s post of national security adviser would be transformed from a mere policy
coordinator, to the president’s foremost adviser in formulating policy. Nixon and Kissinger would
then erect a system that excluded their own professional foreign service from any significant role
in shaping policy. The motives for doing so also reflected Nixon’s darker side.
Upon assuming office he told his staff that foreign policy was to be handled by the White House,
“not by the striped-pants faggots in Foggy Bottom.” The relationship produced a complex system
of operations that bypassed the professional diplomats in the State Department.
The initial result was a fierce turf battle between Kissinger and Rogers. “I’m sorry about
how Henry and Bill go at each other,” Nixon once told his speech-writer William Safire. “It’s really
rather deep-seated. Henry thinks Bill isn’t very deep, and Bill thinks Henry is power
crazy.” The president then smiled. “And in a sense,” he said, “they’re both right.” By the end of
their first year in office Nixon and Kissinger were spending hours each day in rambling
conversations that sought in every way to exclude the Secretary of State from weighing in on the
more vital issues of foreign policy. As Kissinger biographer Walter Issacson recalls “Kissinger
would guide him along like a deferential tutor, praising his observations, adding a few insights,
and pointing out various shortcomings of the State Department.”
With Nixon’s agreement, Kissinger initiated “back channel” contact with important
officials representing the United States abroad. While most diplomatic cables continued to go to
the State Department, the more essential material came directly to Kissinger. Those few individuals
who dared reveal the existence of the “back channel” found themselves isolated. The most
significant back channel was of course the secret negotiating conduit to Moscow. Early in the
administration Kissinger held a series of private meetings with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly
Dobrynin. Secretary of State Rogers would not be invited. Henceforth the most important
substantive contact with the Soviet leadership would take place directly through Kissinger.
Thereafter Dobrynin would visit as often as once a week, usually coming through a little known
door to the East Wing of the White House and meeting Kissinger privately.
The relationship with the Soviet Union was particularly important to Nixon and Kissinger.
They were both exceedingly pessimistic that the United States could continue to pursue a strict
foreign policy of containment. Vietnam had sharply discredited the idea of foreign intervention to
counter Soviet moves in the third world. At the same time the Soviet military buildup made the
military containment practiced before Vietnam a virtual impossibility. Détente was thus an attempt
to make a virtue out of necessity.
Nixon and Kissinger believed that the only counter America’s growing mood of retreat was
to construct a more viable détente with Moscow. Kissinger, in the parlance of academia, was a
proponent of “realism.” This was a historically European world-view that stressed the need for an
unsentimental “balance of power” diplomacy. He thus saw the need to move toward a classic
balance of power politics that would no longer treat the Soviet Union and China as ideological
competitors, but as traditional “great powers” with their own legitimate interests to protect. The
end result would be a renewed focus on state-to-state diplomacy negotiated between the great
powers with the end goal of preserving geo-political stability in the world.
The philosophical underpinnings of Nixon’s foreign policy could be found in Kissinger’s
Harvard doctoral dissertation. Later published as A World Restored, Kissinger wrote of the efforts
of the Austrian statesman Metternich and his ability to control the revolutionary changes at the
Congress of Vienna in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Kissinger believed that stability was the
prime goal of diplomacy. In that sense “moral crusades” made for dangerous diplomacy— indeed,
he would argue, a stable world order was a moral principle in itself since lofty ideas of human
rights were unlikely to prosper in conditions of international anarchy. As one Harvard colleague
suggested at the time, if Kissinger had to choose between disorder and injustice he would choose
injustice “not because he favors injustice, but because he feels in his bones there can be no justice
without order.”
The idea was that Moscow could be “entangled” in a web of mutual economic and
diplomatic interests that would gradually turn the Soviet Union from a “revolutionary” state trying
to undermine the global system to a “status quo” state with its own vested interests in maintaining
global stability. The term heard most often was “linkage,” which held that progress on one issue
would be tied to progress on others—until there emerged something close to a general settlement
on the cold war hot spots. In short, the Nixon-Kissinger policy would be an attempt to convince the
Soviets that it was in their own vested interest to “contain” themselves.
Brzezinski would become one of most persistent critics of the Nixon-Kissinger version of
détente. Among his most frequent refrains was that the Soviet Union “was simply too strong
militarily not to be a rival and yet too weak domestically to become a confident and relaxed partner.
“ He believed that a return to a 19th century world-view was not the answer to manage the very
modern problems then facing a rapidly changing world. These objections were also rooted in his
fundamental belief that the Soviet Union had very little interest in becoming a “status quo” state.
Indeed the bulk of Brzezinski’s academic work was based on the premise that the Soviet Union was
decidedly not a status quo power—and to simply act if one were dealing with France or Belgium
was an exercise in self-delusion. The problem was deeply rooted in the nature and political
education of the Soviet leadership. Indeed, while Nixon and Kissinger saw economic interaction as
a way to “entangle” the Soviets into cooperation, Brzezinski believed it was a futile attempt to
buttress a bankrupt system and would reduce pressure for badly needed political and economic
liberalization.
Brzezinski was particularly skeptical about using détente with Moscow as another form of
“containment.” He warned that a troubling combination of deeply engrained ideological
orthodoxy and recently awakened great-power nationalism would mean that Moscow would
interpret détente as a sign of weakness. The Soviet leaders, in his view, were equipped with an
almost reflexive desire to attempt to match the United States in power and influence. This was
especially true if the Soviets interpreted U.S. resolve as retracting in the wake of
Vietnam.Brzezinski cautioned that the perception of U.S. weakness was likely to invigorate Soviet
claims that the world’s “correlation of forces” was moving in their direction. This condition was
made more dangerous by the development of Soviet long-range intervention forces that would
tempt the Soviet leaders into global undertakings that they previously had little choice but to
eschew.
Brzezinski’s chief concern was that the Soviets were merely engaging in a “selective
détente” that would use the benefits of détente while continuing to exploit opportunities—and thus
promote chaos---around the globe. Though Brzezinski ridiculed the notion of a “paxSovietica,” he
did fear the Soviets as a source of global disruption. Even if the Soviet Union could not manufacture
a computer chip, it was still quite capable of contributing to global anarchy by arming revolutionary
causes in the developing world or sponsoring terrorists to disrupt the global economy---a path that
Brzezinski believed the Soviets had chosen in the 1960s when it became clear that they could not
compete with the more dynamic societies of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.
“Stability on the basis of condominium was something I feared very much,” Brzezinski
recalled years later. “I thought that condominium would first of all not be stable---and secondly it
would elevate the Soviet Union and make permanent its control over Eastern Europe while at the
same time create a strong reaction against the United States within our own sphere. So I didn’t
think it was a good historical formula. I also sensed, or more than sensed, I knew from
conversations that I had with Henry that at that time it was based on a very pervasive Spenglarian
pessimism which was motivating Henry. The feeling that the West was in historical decline, where
as I was arguing in Between Two Ages that the gap was just beginning to widen in our favor and that
it would widen in a qualitative fashion soon. So it involved a somewhat different historical
perspective on the nature of our times.”
Brzezinski was also skeptical about claims that détente with the Soviet Union made the
situation in Europe more “stable.” This came back to Brzezinski’s original ideas of peaceful
engagement. One of Kissinger’s first acts in the White House was to inform Soviet ambassador
Dobrynin that President Nixon “intended to make no move in relation to Eastern Europe that
would be assessed in Moscow as a ‘challenge’ to its position in this region.”
Brzezinski saw the Nixon-Kissinger approach to Eastern Europe not only a defeatist policy-
- but a potentially unstable one. Writing in January of 1970 Brzezinski warned that if the
populations of Eastern Europe lose faith in the idea of gradual liberalization they would turn to
more violent solutions, “especially if at some point paralysis in the Soviet leadership were to
produce what might appear to be an opportunity.”
Events would soon prove him right. On December 13, 1970 the Polish government
announced a substantial increase in the price of food and fuels. The move was a desperate attempt
to correct the hidden inflationary impact of mass subsidies required to keep the centralized
economy afloat. The move, although merited by economic realities, revealed the gap between the
Polish public and the communist party. Announced on the eve of the Christmas holidays, the price
hikes were especially provocative. The workers in Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard responded with a
massive work stoppage. When police attempted to disperse the crowds with truncheons and water
cannons, the workers responded with widespread rioting. Armed with lead pipes and bicycle
chains the striking workers took to the streets looting and brawling with police. Another group of
rioters, singing the Internationale, marched to the local Communist party headquarters and set it
to flame.
The government-controlled media in Poland claimed that the demonstrators were merely
“hooligans and adventurers, having nothing in common with the working class.” But it soon
became clear that the rioters were indeed workers, and that they were interested in far more than
mere plunder. The strikers had expanded their demands to include freedom of the press and
religion as well as the right to form unions that were not run by the communist party. Of particular
significance, the Gdansk workers sent a delegation to the local university to apologize to the
students for their failure to support their cause in 1968.
The disturbances spread rapidly along the Baltic coast to the cities of Sopot and Gdynia.
Alarmed by the growing demonstrations, the government contemplated its options. In a televised
address to the nation, Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz promised that the workers’ complaints over the
new prices could be “discussed.” The Prime Minister, insisting that “enemies of Poland” were
behind the disturbances—also warned that the police were authorized to shoot demonstrators if
necessary.
When workers refused to vacate the Gdansk shipyard facilities, heavily armed units were
mobilized in an attempt to disperse them. On December 16 police troops opened fire on the
workers. According to official accounts 45 had been killed and nearly 1,200 injured. More
independent estimates would come to higher numbers on both counts. The events of December
1970 would become a powerful symbol for the increasingly active Polish opposition. The shooting
of Polish workers in front of the shipyard gates violated that unwritten commandment that Pole
shall not kill Pole. The myth of the martyrs proved durable to the shipyard workers. To Lech
Walesa, then a young shipyard electrician, the duty to honor the shipyard martyrs became a
burning obsession.
Gomulka would become a personal scapegoat for all of the ills that had beset Polish society.
Edward Gierek, the party’s new leader, promised reforms and punishment of the guilty. Gierek, a
former coal miner, conceded that the party had lost touch with the workers---and moved to rescind
the price hikes. He was widely considered a “technocrat,” a term used to describe the leaders of
communist regimes less inclined to preach world revolution and more concerned with maintaining
stable societies with modern economies. Gierek visited a Warsaw steel plant, shaking hands, like a
Western politician on the campaign circuit, with workers as well as officials. Gierek had “admitted”
in private that “Gomulka and his group” were to blame for the December events. 38
“The workers,” said one Warsaw intellectual shortly after the strike, “have kicked open the
door to the future. But who will walk through and what they will do remains to be seen.” A Gdansk
journalist noted rather prophetically “People have discovered that they can change things. So they
say that if what happened in December doesn’t improve their lives, maybe they’ll do it again.” 39
And, of course, they would do it again in 1976 and 1980. In the meantime the Polish riots
attracted relatively little attention in the United States. But Moscow viewed the unrest as a grave
threat. 40 This, after all, was not a philosophical protest of reformist intellectuals. It was a revolt
by workers against the oppression of a “worker-state.”41 As Brzezinski had long noted, the
he reported. “The brutality was all on one side. Only those in uniform used terror.” Moments later,
a Polish voice broke to the line and cut him off. “We Want Food, We Want Food!” p. 22.
38Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity (Princeton, 1991) p. 23.
39 “Poland: Patching It Up,” Newsweek (February 1, 1971), p. 34.
40 As Brzezinski noted this remained a basic problem of stability in the Communist world.
“More than 50 years after its creation the Communist system still does not provide for orderly
political succession. Power is still personal—not constitutional—and changes occur only through
bitter and debilitating coups. Most recently such a coup shook Poland with more reliance on force
to effect the change in leadership than is generally realized….This situation prompts both rigidity
and insecurity.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The State of Communism,” Newsweek (March 15, 1971), p.
56.
41 Even more threatening to Moscow was the fact that the worker’s grievances went beyond
the economic sphere. As formulated in numerous statements, leaflets, and an open letter to Gierek,
Polish turmoil underscored a problem prevailing throughout the Soviet bloc; the increasing
impatience that their living standards were lagging far behind those of the West. One route, implicit
in Brzezinski’s strategy of peaceful engagement, was to decentralize the political and economic
system and open communist regimes to a freer flow of information. A less painful solution was to
simply borrow capital and technology from the West to prop up their stagnating economies. And
this is what they did.42
Eastern Europe, however, was not really the focus of the Nixon and Kissinger foreign
policy. In early March of 1969 a battle erupted when a contingent of Chinese soldiers attacked some
Soviet frontier guards on Dmansky Island, a disputed island in the Ussuri River that marked the
Sino-Soviet border. Soviet casualties reportedly included the death of several dozen border guards.
Strongly worded protest notes were sent by both sides. On March 15, the Soviets launched a sharp
attack with heavy artillery units that also included missiles and tanks. They thrust deep into
Chinese territory for a short period of time—casualties were believed to be heavy.
In April of 1970 Moscow’s Red Square was decorated with flags and bunting in a lavish
production for what would have been Lenin’s 100th birthday. More than 6,000 representatives of
the world’s Communist parties gathered in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. They would hear
two days of speechmaking about the glories of the Soviet system. Leonid Brezhnev’s keynote
address trumpeted Soviet accomplishments and Communist invincibility. Not only did the Chinese
refuse to show up for the celebrations in Moscow. Indeed they chose to honor Lenin’s birthday
with a violent verbal attack on the Soviet Union.. Chinese pronouncements declared the
their demands also included the release of all demonstrators still under arrest and a moratorium
on further sanctions against strikers; the punishment of officials responsible for the use of violence
in December; the improvement of public information on state policies; the transformation of the
trade unions into genuine channels for the institutionalized expression of workers’ interests; and
in the latter connection, the free election of local union representatives. See Radio Free Europe,
“Polish Situation Report, “no. 5 (January 22, 1971). Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution:
Solidarity, (New York, 1985), pp. 11-12.
42 J.F. Brown, "Détente and Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe," Survey (Spring/Summer, 1974),
pp. 46-58.
Soviet Union to be “a Hitler-type dictatorship,” and denounced the “Brezhnev doctrine as
“imperialism with a socialist label.”
Though Brzezinski would use less invective language, he was left unimpressed with the
celebrations surrounding Lenin’s centennial. As a leading voice on Soviet affairs, he was frequently
asked to comment on the significance of the Lenin’s legacy. “Lenin’s emphasis on dogmatic belief,
intolerance toward dissent, violence, conspiratorial activity, almost total subordination of the
individual to the party, not to speak of his paranoiac supsiciousness….were not only dictated by
the brutal autocratic tradition in which Lenin operated but became also the extension of that very
tradition.”
Brzezinski was even less impressed by Soviet “achievements.” “It is a staggering fact,”
noted Brzezinski, “that 50 years after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviets still cannot produce an
economically viable automobile and have to have Italian help in doing so. It is even more ominous,
from the standpoint of their technological competition with the West that today the United States
has something like 60,000 computers in use in its economy while the Soviet Union has probably no
more than 3,000.”
“The Soviet Union,” Brzezinski continued, “is ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. This
governing elite relies on the bureaucratization of virtually every walk of life as a means of carrying
out policy, maintaining security, controlling change and promoting progress. It has become
abundantly clear over the past decade to any close observer of Russian affairs that this combination
of an aging oligarchy atop an all-pervading bureaucracy has turned out to be a cumbersome vehicle
with which to effect a broad process of modernization. Russia’s ruling group is unquestionably the
oldest, man for man, in any nation of importance in the modern-day world. As a group, it is
uncertain, cautious, ambiguous, mired in party dogma, and moribund. In some ways, it is a
throwback to the Curia of the Vatican—that ancient clerical bureaucracy that deteriorated into a
body of venerable reactionaries. At the same time, the Soviet bureaucracy has developed into a
deeply conservative institution—preservers of the status quo of Russian
Communism.” Brzezinski would then offer a rather prescient picture of the Soviet future.
A red flag raised spontaneously by the students of Moscow over their university, given the
authoritarian political setting, will have much graver political symbolism than the same flag
fluttering over Columbia or the Sorbonne. But it will not be, I feel, until the early 1980s that the first
fully post-Stalin new political leadership will begin to enter into the political arena. An aspiring
leader aged 45 in 1980 will have been only 18 at the time of Stalin’s death, and 21 when de-
Stalinization actually began in the Soviet Union. Though that generation will probably find its
access to power blocked by political leaders a decade or even two decades older, it will press for
influence from the echelons immediately below that of the Central Committee. Given the more
volatile domestic as well as global setting in which it will have matured, given its higher education,
given probably by then the more flexible character of the adjoining East European states, it is quite
possible that the emerging political elite may be less committed to the notion that social
development requires intense concentration of political power. Nonetheless, even then evolution
into a pluralist system is likely to be resisted by the entrenched political oligarchy. The introduction
of political pluralism will require at some point a deliberate decision to open the Soviet Union to
competitive ideas, to let each Soviet citizen read what he wants, to reduce the level of the party’s
ideological control, to decentralize decision-making and thus to share power with society; in effect,
a major transformation of the system as a whole. Unintended consequences of economic-
technological adjustments will not suffice to bring about significant political change. As in
Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia (prior to 1968), at some point the political elite must decide to
embark on political reforms if there are to be significant political changes.
In 1970, however, the reform attempts of Mikhail Gorbachev were still a distant prospect
as Nixon and Kissinger began to play a double game involving the Soviet Union and China. On
July 15, 1971 Nixon went before a national television audience to announce that he would visit
Beijing within the next year in an effort to normalize relations between the two countries that had
been suspended since 1949. It was a shocking announcement, not in the least because it came from
a president who forged his political reputation denouncing the evils of the communist system. The
politics of the announcement required Nixon’s original vision and credentials as an anti-
communist---as well as Kissinger’s covert negotiations and his ability to turn the vision into a global
framework that kept the United States at the center of the triangular relationship that drove a
wedge between the world’s two communist giants.
At a time when the mood in America was moving toward its traditional isolationist
impulses, the opening to China rekindled the idea that America could play a vital and constructive
role in the world. Two decades of “yellow peril” were replaced by a love affair with China. Nixon’s
announcement was soon overshadowed by press reports detailing the two years of secret
negotiations carried on through Henry Kissinger, the American and Chinese embassies in Warsaw,
and third parties like Pakistan. Nixon’s proposed visit would elevate Kissinger’s star to new
heights--much to the dismay of Nixon who would soon order that Kissinger set up “an absolute
wall around himself—he must not see on any basis the New York Times, the
Washington Post, CBS, or NBC.”
Brzezinski had mixed emotions about Nixon’s shocking announcement. Since 1968 he had
been urging the U.S. to make an opening to China as a method of countering Soviet aggression. He
compared Nixon’s announcement to a scenario of “800 million Mexicans recalling bitterly that
Americans stole large slices of Mexican territory, condemning daily the American social system as
decadent and ripe for the ash can of history, arming themselves with nuclear weapons---and it was
suddenly announced that Mr. Brezhnev was to pay a call on the Mexican leaders.”
Yet Brzezinski noted that the secretive nature of U.S. negotiations had offended
America’s more traditional allies—particularly the increasingly important relationship with Japan.
The United States had repeatedly assured Japan that there was no “race” to normalize relations
with China—with whom Japan had been seeking closer political relations to supplement its already
burgeoning trade relations. Tokyo officials would indeed express shock and anger at the U.S.
failure to provide advance notice of its sudden opening—especially after
U.S. leaders had assured Tokyo that it would be consulted on issues of vital importance. This would
presumably include one as significant as Nixon’s overture to China.
Few Americans were paying attention to Japan, however, when President Nixon’s plane
touched down in Beijing on February 21, 1972. While United States bombers continued to attack
Communist forces in Cambodia and Vietnam, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) band welcomed
Nixon with its best version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” In any case the Chinese leadership was
less interested in ideological consistency than to utilize the U.S. as a counterweight to the
increasingly bellicose Soviet Union and an economically revived Japan. It was indeed a remarkable
visit. Millions of Americans watched Nixon, through the modern wonder of satellite television,
shake hands with China’s Chairman Mao Zedong and take a tour of the Great Wall and the Imperial
Palace. For eight days all three national networks interrupted their regular programming to
provide daily reports of Nixon’s amazing visit.
In what Nixon would term a “week that changed the world” he and Mao held “frank”
discussions stipulating that United States and China would not seek dominance in the Asian Pacific
region while promising to cooperate in preventing other powers (read the Soviet Union) from doing
so, and to avoid international war. Both governments declared that they would seek to develop
trade, improve cultural and scientific relations and work to restore full diplomatic relations. The
most contentious issue of Taiwan was papered over with Nixon’s promise that the
United States would eventually withdraw its military forces from Taiwan and Indochina--though
these pronouncements were obscured in the conveniently ambiguous language of the final
communiqué.
The Nixon “grand strategy” had still an even bigger card to play. In October 1971 he had
announced he would travel to Moscow in May of 1972. But Moscow was less willing to concede
the ideological high ground. Both Nixon and Kissinger saw improved relations with Moscow as
“linkage” that would compel Moscow to pressure the North Vietnamese to reach an
accommodation with Washington in exchange for credits and arms control treaties. Kissinger was
officious in this respect—requesting Dobrynin’s cooperation ten times in 1969 alone. Brzezinski
was especially skeptical of the Soviet willingness to cooperate. Indeed, the Soviets soon learned
that reverse linkage could be applied.
In March of 1972, two months before Nixon’s scheduled visit to Moscow, North
Vietnamese forces—complete with Soviet-supplied tanks--launched a massive offensive across
Vietnam’s demilitarized zone. Saigon’s army fled in a massive retreat. Nixon feared that the
collapse of South Vietnam was one of the few things that could seriously imperil his election in the
fall. Nixon for a time postured that the North Vietnamese aggression was enough to threaten the
Moscow summit. But it soon appeared that Washington was even more eager to convene the
summit as scheduled. Moscow made this clear when they sent a note to Washington suggesting
that restraint in the face of Hanoi’s invasion would improve prospects for negotiations at the May
summit.
Brzezinski pointed to Vietnam as only the most immediate example of misplaced optimism
that the Soviets would “contain” themselves in the name of détente. Brzezinski had cautioned
President Johnson that the Soviets were not acting as an honest broker in Vietnam. He was even
more incredulous that Kissigner believed that somehow the Soviets would be willing to invest their
ideological capital to help extricate the United States from its bleeding wound. “The Soviets clearly
have a vested interest in dragging out the war,” noted Brzezinski at the time, “if only because it
exacerbates U.S. difficulties with China, and contributes to domestic discontent and continues to
drain the U.S. economy. “
Nixon responded with a massive air assault against Hanoi. For the first time since 1969,
American planes attacked targets deep into Vietnam, hitting the outskirts of both Hanoi and
Haiphong. For the first time U.S. jets would utilize the pinpoint accuracy of laser assisted “smart
bombs” –to destroy bridges. When this offensive failed to halt the North Vietnamese attacks on the
South, Nixon ordered the Navy to mine the approaches to Haiphong harbor where a number of
Soviet supply ships were docked. Brezhnev, despite bitter appeals from North Vietnam to cancel
the summit, decided it would go ahead as planned. The Soviet Central Committee would ratify the
decision only three days before Nixon’s flight was due to arrive.55
There were of course other reasons behind the decision. The Soviets, while passionately
refuting Brzezinski’s charges in Between Two Ages, were deeply concerned about falling further
behind the West in the scientific-technological revolution. There was thus a strong motivation to
look to the West for a “technological fix” to assist their stagnating economy—especially if it could
be done without the risks of engaging in any meaningful political or economic liberalization—or in
any way challenge the interests of the bureaucracies that were passionately committed to
selfpreservation. In the end the Soviet leadership decided that imports of Western technology and
agricultural goods was the only solution. Perhaps as important was Russia’s historic quest to match
the West. A visit by the U.S. president also seemed to at least partially satisfy the Soviet obsession
to be regarded as something of a “co-superpower.” “We will face the U.S. as equals” exulted a
Soviet journalist on the eve of the summit. “This has been our dream for a decade. This is our
biggest achievement.”
On May 22, 1972 Nixon and Kissinger arrived in the Soviet Union. Despite the escalating
war in Vietnam, the Soviets greeted Nixon warmly. In the glittering surroundings of St. George’s
Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace, Nixon and Brezhnev engaged amiably over vodka and caviar.
The new relationship was symbolized by new terminology—it became known as “détente.” The
word, French in origin, was defined as the loosening of tension as in a taut string. In Russian it
translated as “razryadka” which meant a relaxation of tension. President Kennedy had used the
term in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. But the term came into widespread use by the press
corps when Kissinger used it in his background briefings in Moscow.
At the end of eight days the U.S and Soviet delegations reached agreement on a number of
issues—the foremost being the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) which
pledged each superpower to set limits on the arms race.59 The ceremonies concluded with the
signing of “basic principles” which committed the two nations to “peace and security” and “will
not be subject to outside interference in their internal affairs.” If this might be seen as a revocation
of the Brezhnev Doctrine, it was carefully stipulated that the agreement would not affect “any
obligations with respect to other countries earlier assumed.”60 Nixon and Brezhnev signed a U.S.-
Soviet Basic Principles Agreement that directly contradicted the idea of institutionalizing any form
of human rights policies at the international level. Nixon even went out of his way to stress the
theme of “non-interference” in an address (televised throughout the Soviet Union) during the
summit. “The only sound basis for a peaceful and progressive international order is sovereign
equality and mutual respect. We believe in the right of each nation to chart its own course, to choose
its own system to go its own way, without interference from other nations.” 61 In the end Nixon
hailed the summit as another step toward a “generation
in various mutually beneficial enterprises;” Walter Laqueur, “Détente: Western and Soviet
Interpretations,” Survey vol. 19 no. 3 (Summer 1973), pp. 75-76.
59 A key component of SALT I was the fact that it recognized Soviet parity in nuclear striking
power. Nixon was willing to give up the insistence of American numerical superiority in order to
secure limits on Soviet defensive and offensive missiles. One of the documents, an executive
agreement, “froze” offensive missiles at near existing levels for a five-year period. The other
documents, contained in a treaty requiring Senate approval, limited each nation to two antiballistic
missile sites in its territory. It also placed a limit on the number of American and Soviet land-based
and submarine-based missile forces. The press hailed the SALT documents as the beginning of
effective arms control. More realistic experts realized that the agreements had only moved the
competition to the laboratories. Indeed the United States and Soviet Union would use the five-year
freeze as an opportunity to develop more sophisticated weapons systems. The Soviets immediately
launched a major effort to master MIRV technology, while the United States began to develop the
B-1 bomber and the Trident submarine. Instead of an immediate reduction in defense spending,
SALT I led to a new round of strategic-arms expenditures as the United States sought to build the
weapons of the future.
60 See “Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics,” Department of State Bulletin (June 26, 1972), pp. 898-99.
61 John J. Maresca, To Helsinki: The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973-1975
(Durham, NC 1987), p. 12.
of peace.” The ceremonial toast by the two leaders added to the growing impression that the Cold
War was finally coming to a peaceful end.
Brzezinski’s doubts about the nature of détente were confirmed when Nixon visited Poland
on the way home from the Moscow summit. The euphoria of the new superpower relationship was
still in the air as Air Force One set down in Warsaw. Gierek’s economic policy had been based on
a crash program of massive spending—which in turn required massive borrowing to finance
investments. The idea was that goods produced with the newly imported Western technology
would be sold back to the West—which would then pay for the loans. In contrast to the stagnant
1960s, when real incomes rose annually by 1 or 2 percent, the early 1970s were a period of
unprecedented advancement in which annual pay raises of ten percent were seen. More privileged
groups (miners, shipbuilders, functionaries, police and military) would do even better. For the first
time, the general population began to believe in profiting from the communist system.
Most commentators saw Nixon’s visit to Poland as a natural off-shoot of détente with the
Soviet Union. The Polish regime had reason to think so. Advance reports stated that the presidential
visit “was aimed at demonstrating that Washington and Communist East European states can deal
with each other without using Moscow as a broker.” The main U.S. strategy it was said was to
“depoliliticize” differences, and instead, stress economic, cultural and scientific relations. 63
Brzezinski noted that Nixon’s visit--- the first presidential visit to an East European state
not defying Moscow--- represented a tacit recognition of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Though he still
favored increased economic interaction with the Soviet bloc nations, he thought the foreign loans
would simply be wasted unless they were accompanied by the promise of political and economic
reforms.
Indeed, the primary goal from the standpoint of the Polish government was to garner
Western assistance in hopes of resuscitating a flagging economy. The highlight of Nixon’s trip was
a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz at a dinner in the president’s honor
63 “After Russia—Two Other Important Stops for the President,” U.S. News and World Report (May
29, 1972), p. 31.
in the Council of Ministers’ Palace. After he exchanged toasts with Nixon, Jaroszewicz made a
formal request for economic assistance from the United States. The following day, Poland and the
United States announced the establishment of a joint commission designed to expand trade through
“increased contacts on governmental and business levels.” According to the official communiqué,
Poland “indicated an interest in purchases of capital goods, licenses and technology” while the
United States would consider “further steps leading to bilateral trade and economic cooperation.”
Nixon, at the same time, paid very little attention to the fact that he was visiting a rather
oppressive state. Jaroszewicz, as mentioned, was widely seen as “Moscow’s man” in the Polish
oligarchy, instructed by the Kremlin to keep an eye on Gierek, whose “Western” background
created some reservations in the Kremlin. At the very moment Nixon was toasting Jaroszewicz
less than a half a mile away another event was taking place. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Polish
Primate, was leading tens of thousands of Catholic worshipers in a celebration of Corpus Christi.
The new protocols of detente required Nixon not to meet with a religious leader out of favor with
the government—and he wouldn’t. But Brzezinski realized it was a significant issue for the Polish
population—and a fact he would seek to amend when he made a similar visit with
President Carter five years later.
Nixon’s failure to meet with or even mention the Polish opposition was little noticed in the
drama surrounding that weeks’ visit to Moscow. But some noticed more than others. Adam
Michnik was among several Poles jailed in anticipation of the Nixon’s visit. “When Nixon came to
Poland members of the democratic opposition were arrested,” Michnik recalls.“ I wondered
whether we it was because they were worried we would throw a bomb at him, or throw flowers at
him. The point was that the Americans seemed to consider it a normal thing that people were
imprisoned during this visit and they were not very concerned about it. At the same time Nixon
did not offer any encouragement to the opposition. It was if we were told ‘resign yourself to your
fate.’”
Few were paying much attention to Poland, however, in those heady days of détente. The
openings to China and the Soviet Union would elevate Kissinger’s status as an international pop
phenomenon. By 1972 his fame transcended his craft the same way Muhammad Ali’s did in prize
fighting or Walter Cronkite’s did in news broadcasting. Over the next two decades he would appear
on the cover of Time twenty-one times--more than any person in the magazine’s history except for
Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Carter.71 Kissinger became the toast of Katherine Graham’s
Georgetown cocktail parties and was seen in public with the likes of Jill St. John, Shirley MacLaine,
Marlo Thomas, Liv Ulman, Gloria Steinham, and Diane Sawyer. This female attention gave the
owlish bachelor the unlikely status as a sex symbol —and gave credence to his famous quip that
“power was the greatest aphrodisiac.”
At the same time Kissinger, most unlike Nixon, was a master at courting the press corps.
Armed with a self-deprecating wit and professorial charms Kissinger became an extraordinary
spokesman for his diplomatic breakthroughs. Perhaps just as important was the fact that most
national reporters were for the most part supporters of détente with Moscow. After the turmoil of
the 1960s it was hard for most journalists to be “against” a sharp reduction in superpower tensions.
Kissinger also had a way with nurturing rather favorite coverage. In this respect
Kissinger was known to resort to subtle flattery. “I’m calling you,” Kissinger would confide,
“because I know you are the only one covering me who will understand this.” “You know you are
being played like a violin,” said Christopher Ogden, who covered Kissinger for Time, “but it’s still
extremely seductive.” “You always have the feeling that he’s told you ten percent more than he has
to,” recalled Barbara Walters.72
Journalists also were known to bask in the reflected glory of an international icon.
Kissinger’s celebrity made stars out of those reporters who covered him. When Kissinger’s plane
would land, the local correspondents and even a few diplomats were known to converge on his
press entourage on the tarmac and interview its members. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. “We
amused. “Enough is enough,” he raged on the flight home. “It’s inexcusable to upstage the
president.” Issacson, p. 438.
71 Issacson, p. 581.
72 Issacson, p. 577.
know more than most U.S. ambassadors in the places we visit,” commented one reporter on the
Kissinger beat, probably accurately.
Brzezinski would always insist that he was not “anti-détente.” Indeed, the entire concept
of peaceful engagement outlined in the early 1960s was based on the belief that more relaxed East-
West relations would help to transform the Soviet bloc regimes into more moderate social
democracies. Yet he viewed the Nixon-Kissinger détente as a “highly compartmentalized” and
“pessimistic” détente that provided the Soviets with what they wanted yet asking very little in
return. Indeed Brzezinski insisted that his alternative to the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was not
a return to Cold War tension of the 1950s—but a more “reciprocal” détente where credits and
technology would be linked to reforms designed to liberalize and de-centralize the system—and
gradually loosen Moscow’s grip on Eastern Europe.
Nevertheless Brzezinski’s criticisms of détente tended to be dismissed as the antiquated
views of a Cold Warrior, or still more often, the product of petty jealousy for the masterstrokes of
his rival Henry Kissinger. Indeed, compared to Kissinger’s fame Brzezinski’s name still looked like
a typographical error to most Americans. Brzezinski’s profile was elevated when he began writing
a regular column for Newsweek in 1971. He had written several hundred articles since the 1950s, but
the vast majority of them appeared in scholarly journals with a limited audience. By contrast the
Newsweek column would ensure mass readership found in the nation’s barber-shops, airports and
waiting rooms. “I thought for me at the time that it was a bonanza,” he recalls. “It was getting my
name across—and getting my views accepted and for people to accept the originality of my name.”
The Newsweek column would also offer a succinct platform to criticize the NixonKissinger
form of détente. Kissinger, predictably, was not impressed with many of Brzezinski’s critiques of
détente. Still he was not averse to consulting with his old Harvard colleague who was now shaping
up as a formidable rival. “I read them most of the time,” Kissinger recalled years later. “I wasn’t
crazy about some of them. On the other hand I invited him regularly to come and have lunch with
me. You don’t have too much time—as Security Adviser or Secretary of State--but four or five times
a year I would say.”
If Brzezinski was critical of Nixon’s foreign policy, he was even more disillusioned by the
Democrats inability to formulate anything resembling a credible philosophical opposition. It was
widely believed that Nixon’s dramatic openings to China and the Soviet Union had gone far to
blunt Democratic opposition to his re-election on foreign policy grounds. Yet Brzezinski insisted
that a Democratic candidate must have the courage and foresight to step forth with an alternative
foreign policy. Brzezinski’s primary concern was that the Democratic leaders were putting all their
energy into simply opposing the war in Vietnam rather than outlining the need for a more positive
and engaged American role in the rapidly changing world.
“In a foreign policy, alternatives are not so much a matter of contrast as of emphasis”
Brzezinski argued. “The Democrats need not reject Mr. Nixon’s approaches to Peking or to
Moscow; indeed, within proper limits they are highly desirable, both for tactical as well as strategic
reasons, yet by and large what the Democrats have offered is very limited indeed. Leaving aside
the escapist isolationism of those for whom foreign policy can be reduced to a ritualistic incantation
about ‘reordering our national priorities,’ much of the Democratic fire has so far been focused on
the question of Vietnam. To be sure, the war still poses painful dilemmas for this country, but the
foreign policy of the U.S. in the 1970s will have to be concerned with issues broader than those
currently posed by this tragic conflict.”
Brzezinski’s hawkish reputation had nonetheless estranged him from the liberal wing that
had succeeded in taking over the Democratic Party after 1968. The Democrats were indeed wedded
to the idea of détente with Moscow. In their view since the Soviets were ready to establish friendly
ties with the West, everything must be done by the West to prevent a relapse into confrontation.
Indeed, since the late 1960s it had become fashionable among American liberals to suggest that both
the United States and the Soviet Union maintained “spheres of influence” in Europe that differed
little in their nature. The situation was described as a “moral equivalency”—and Brzezinski would
regard this term as a gross misrepresentation that simply ignored the vast historical differences
between the two powers.
The Democratic Party, becoming increasingly dominated by its liberal wing, had reason to
delude itself into thinking that a mere antiwar stance could defeat Nixon. On October 15, 1971 more
than 1 million Americans left their schools and jobs to participate in Vietnam “Moratorium Day”
activities. The largest crowd gathered on Boston Common, where an estimated 100,000 people
heard antiwar speeches from liberal Senators Edward Kennedy and George McGovern, who were
emerging as the leading Democratic front-runners to challenge Nixon in 1972.
Nixon’s political advisers sensed a growing frustration from American voters that the
Democratic Party had swung too far to the left. In the spring of 1970, a group of “hard hat”
construction workers, put off by the increasingly irreverent tactics of some of the antiwar
demonstrators, led a counter-demonstration in New York City. According to Donald Rogers, a
Nixon labor adviser, the workers had acted on their own volition when they heard that antiwar
protestors had burned the American flag, raised the North Vietnamese banner, and urinated on a
statue of George Washington. Nixon staffers had little trouble linking such protests to his primary
challengers within the Democratic Party.
Nixon telephoned the leaders of the “hard hats” that evening and invited them to the
White House to show his appreciation. This show of public support for Nixon constituted for
Charles Colson, special assistant to the President, “a seminal event” and an “important symbol of
an emerging political coalition.” Nixon came to believe that many “silent” Americans had come to
oppose the Vietnam War chiefly because the United States seemed unwilling to win it— what they
really opposed was a unilateral withdrawal, particularly if U.S. POWs remained captive of the
North Vietnamese forces.
In early November 1971 Nixon gave a televised speech that appealed to the “great silent
majority of my fellow Americans.” Nixon coupled a firm denunciation of the antiwar protestors
with a plan to withdraw all United States combat forces “on an orderly scheduled timetable.”
Nixon’s speech would go far to blunt the momentum of the antiwar movement and isolate
Democrats demanding an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. According to Colson, the
“buckets” of telegrams supporting Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” poured in about
“standing firm in Vietnam.” In the ensuing weeks Nixon’s standing in the opinion polls had risen
substantially. Shortly thereafter Nixon announced additional troop withdrawals from Vietnam.
He could point out that this made a total of 115,000 American soldiers he had brought home since
he had taken office.
Nixon and his senior advisers would convene later in Key Biscayne, Florida to formally
discuss a more formal strategy to attract the increasingly conservative ethnic and labor electorate
long associated with the Democratic Party. Nixon’s political advisers had been especially attracted
by the political analysis offered by a young scholar named Kevin Phillips. Phillips had recently
written a book called The Emerging Republican Majority. As the title indicated, Phillips argued that
Nixon’s victory in 1968 was not an aberration. He argued that the real significance of the tumult of
the 1960s was a populist revolt of the American middle-class that had grown more conservative in
its postwar prosperity. The “economic issue” which had benefited the Democratic Party since the
Great Depression was being eclipsed by a revolt of the middle class and its rejection of the perceived
permissiveness of 1960s liberalism. This was particularly encouraging to the more conservative
Reagan-wing of the GOP, who feared that Barry Goldwater’s debacle in
1964 meant that no candidate with similar views could ever sustain a national campaign to the
White House.
Brzezinski, who had warned of such an occurrence in the late 1960s, was not encouraged
by the Democratic chances of unseating Nixon. The early front-runner was Senator Edmund
Muskie of Maine. Damaged by his role as Humphrey’s running-mate in 1968, Muskie’s easy- going
manner failed to excite the more liberal core vote needed to carry the primaries. Muskie’s attempts
to do so seemed somewhat forced and officious. His only surefire applause line on the campaign
came when he echoed New York Times’ columnist Anthony Lewis’ assertion that “the
United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world.” Otherwise the Muskie
campaign went nowhere. He won by a surprisingly narrow margin in his neighboring state of New
Hampshire. His campaign then imploded when he broke down in tears while defending his wife
from charges leveled against her in a conservative local newspaper. Muskie’s disappointing results
in the Florida and Wisconsin primaries would drive him out of the running.
The Democratic field was now narrowed to a choice between Alabama governor George
Wallace and South Dakota Senator George McGovern. To Brzezinski, and a dwindling number of
centrist Democrats, this was the predictable fallout from the 1968 campaign. Wallace, coming off
his surprisingly successful 1968 third-party candidacy, appealed to those voters disaffected by the
excesses of the 1960s. He was particularly effective in veiling his more overt racism into criticism
of school bussing which he blamed on the “pointy-headed” intellectuals who were now running
the Democratic Party. Wallace, though an embarrassment to the more establishment Democrats,
had an electoral appeal that was hard to ignore. He won the Florida primary supported by a
calculated racist appeal to white blue-collar workers. He was also a major contender in the
Northern industrial states before an assassination attempt in May left the Alabama governor
paralyzed from the waist down and removed him from the race. It also allowed Nixon to fulfill the
Southern strategy of combining Republican and Wallace supporters of the Old Confederacy.
This left the contest for the Democratic nomination to McGovern who had displayed
surprising strength, scoring well in New Hampshire and sweeping to victory in Wisconsin with a
well-organized campaign that appealed to party liberals and the newly enfranchised voters under
the age of twenty-one. McGovern, sounding an old isolationist refrain, asked American to “come
home again.” This, it was understood, meant not only that he would get out of Vietnam-- but that
he would—in a favorite liberal phrase of the day---“reorder our priorities” from an emphasis on
foreign affairs to a primary concern with domestic problems. The McGovern campaign called for a
$30 billion cut in defense spending, amnesty for Vietnam war deserters, total withdrawal of support
for the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. Particularly worrisome to Brzezinski was McGovern’s
pledge to cut the U.S. military presence in Europe “to the bone” by pulling out half the American
troops stationed there.
McGovern’s liberalism would alienate many moderates and the old-wing of the
Democratic party. Hubert Humphrey, the party’s standard-bearer in 1968, mounted a last ditch
campaign to capture the nomination. The showdown came in California when Humphrey waged
an all-out effort to portray McGovern as an unelectable liberal outside the national mainstream.
McGovern didn’t exactly move to dispel this image. “Quite frankly,” he declared, “I am not a
centrist candidate.” In the end McGovern held off Humphrey’s challenge. He now faced the more
difficult task of unseating Richard Nixon in the November election.
Brzezinski was more concerned with foreign policy aspects of the election. “The whole
country came turning inward” Brzezinski recalls, “and it became increasingly difficult to conduct
any sort of strategically minded foreign policy and everything became polarized. So we had
Nixon on one side and McGovern on the other—those weren’t exactly rational alternatives.”
To be fair the McGovernites weren’t all that crazy about Brzezinski either. “Brzezinski was totally
out of fashion and out of circulation during the McGovern era when the Democratic Party
committed suicide,” Charles Gati recalled. “Not only political suicide but a total moral suicide. It
was absurd—it was just really stupid. Those were the years when the Democratic Party was not
hospitable to the centrist crowd—that Brzezinski stood for—which was basically the Humphrey
view at that time. That is, no illusions about Soviet communism but pursue a liberal agenda at
home. That was the Truman position and that was Brzezinski’s position. ‘Come Home
America’ was McGovern’s phrase at the 1972 convention and that was not something that an
internationalist like Brzezinski could take--because McGovern was full of illusions about the
outside world. He was full of illusions about Soviet communism and he underestimated this
system. Not only the power of the United States but the moral obligation of the United States to do
good. He was a prime example of this idea of moral equivalence—that is—‘the outside world is
bad—so are we—therefore we should not set an example and we should not be active.’ Well that’s
the sort of thing that Brzezinski could never accept.”
Indeed McGovern’s liberal strength in the primaries proved his weakness in the general
election. While McGovern’s views appealed to an energetic minority, they offended precisely those
segments of the New Deal coalition that Nixon hoped to win to his cause. Nixon’s highly publicized
trips to Beijing and Moscow (and the continuing withdrawal of troops from Vietnam) had co-opted
Democratic opposition on foreign policy grounds. Nixon now could rely on a strategy that would
reaffirm his support among “middle Americans” to both occupy the center and mobilize the right.
He did the former by promising to be a president of “peace and prosperity” and by appealing
nostalgically to the politics of the fifties, while he strengthened his appeal to the right by pledging
to end “the age of permissiveness” and attacking McGovern on the controversial social issues.
Indeed, Nixon’s seasoned operatives had little trouble in portraying the South Dakota senator as a
candidate widely outside the mainstream of American values. Throughout the campaign the liberal
McGovern would be forced to assure a skeptical electorate that he was not in fact the candidate of
“acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
The result was a sizable defection among more moderate Democrats, a virtual mirror image
of what happened to the GOP in 1964 when the Republican right split the party with its fervent
support of Barry Goldwater. By the summer of 1972 many old-line Democrats mounted a
conspicuous “Anyone But McGovern” campaign from the Democratic center. When the party
platform took bold positions on the issues of abortion, busing, and the war, many old-line
Democrats insisted that they would either vote for Nixon or refuse to endorse the ticket. As one
AFL-CIO leader lamented “We can’t hold our own rank and file with McGovern---He’s surrounded
by people who are more interested in amnesty and pot than in jobs.” Jimmy Carter, then a rather
obscure one-term governor from Georgia, was one of the many centrist Democrats who believed
that McGovern was simply too liberal to get elected. Indeed, only a few weeks before the
convention Carter had been at the forefront of a last-ditch stop McGovern effort at a National
Governors’ Conference in Houston.
The McGovern campaign was also plagued by a predictable degree of incoherence. The
Democratic convention in Miami Beach could have been taken from the GOP playbook. The
publicly aired convention debates on such controversial topics as abortion and homosexuality
would further divide the party. The turmoil also delayed to 3.00 a.m. McGovern’s acceptance
speech which he was forced to deliver to a television audience composed of political junkies and
insomniacs. “There is too much hair,” grumbled one labor leader, “ and not enough cigars at this
convention.”
There was another issue stemming from the convention. McGovern had not seriously
considerd a running-mate until very late in the game. Many names were considered in an attempt
to bolster McGovern’s already slim chances against Richard Nixon. One name that was apparently
in the running was Jimmy Carter. Carter, surprisingly, was receptive when several of his Atlanta
aides approached him with the rather odd idea of joining McGovern on the national
ticket.
Carter and his advisers were also aware how John Kennedy’s unsuccessful bid for the
1956 Democratic vice-presidential slot had lifted his national profile for his successful run in 1960.
Carter’s media adviser first broached the subject at a convention party in Miami Beach. “Let me ask
you,” Gerald Rafshoon said, “would you be interested in Vice President?” Carter, seeing little to
lose, replied, “Why not?” Rafshoon had access to polls that showed McGovern, to say the very least,
was running behind Nixon in the South. Armed with these polls findings, Rafshoon and
Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s executive secretary at the time, sought to make their case to the
McGovern people that the addition of Carter to the ticket might lift his chances. But they didn’t get
far. Rafshoon recalled that the most degrading moment was when he and Jordan found themselves
stonewalled by McGovern’s advisers. Their best hope was to try to get a hearing with Pat Caddell-
- McGovern’s twenty-two year old pollster who was at the time still a Harvard undergraduate.
“We could never get in to see him,” Rafshoon recalled. “He wanted to see us but he was
busy and all that. The scene is, we’re sitting outside, trying to get on the main floor at the Doral
Hotel, the nineteenth floor, and we had been waiting for an hour on the floor below, where they
kept the turkeys. The holding room.” When Rafshoon and Jordan finally reached Caddell, they
sensed that that were getting the classic brush off. “We spent about three minutes with Caddell,”
Rafshoon recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it looks good. Oh yeah, I’m going to make a
recommendation.’ He said later he recommended a Southerner. I think he recommended (Florida
governor) Reuben Askew. He thought we were crazy.”
Shortly afterward Peter Bourne (a psychiatrist who had worked with Carter’s wife,
Rosalynn, on mental-health and drug-abuse problems) prepared a ten-page memo to Carter
outlining a potential campaign strategy for 1976. The memo noted that reforms had changed who
controlled the Democratic Party. “The old politicians who think that once McGovern is defeated, it
will be politics as usual are dead wrong,” Bourne wrote, “and do not understand the social forces
at work in the country.” McGovern was not a Goldwater, who was a throwback;
McGovern was where the party was heading.”
The day Carter received Bourne’s memo, McGovern went on national television to
announce that Missouri Senator Thomas F. Eagleton would be his running mate. Eagleton’s appeal
was thought to be in his pro-labor voting record, border-state geography, and traditional
Catholicism. All of this vanished when newspapers revealed the next week that the Missouri
senator had twice been treated for manic depression and given electric shock therapy. McGovern
immediately insisted he was “1000 percent for Tom Eagelton.” But as the controversy mounted,
McGovern forced Eagleton off the ticket. The Democratic National Committee quickly selected
Sargent Shriver to fill the void. But the damage had been done. An underdog from the outset,
McGovern’s only chance to win lay in his appeal as a sincere and forthright candidate and to
demonstrate that he was not the dangerous radical the Republicans had portrayed. The Eagelton
affair convinced many wavering voters that McGovern could not be trusted with the presidency.
In reality McGovern’s running mate wasn’t going to help him much. More importantly, in
the final weeks of the campaign, Kissinger stole McGovern’s only viable issue. After lengthy
negotiation Kissinger would announce, just days before the election, that “peace is at hand” in
Vietnam. On election-day Nixon took 61 percent of the popular vote and buried McGovern in the
electoral college by 521 to 17. McGovern could console the party’s true believers by taking the
District of Columbia and the single state of Massachusetts. Nixon captured the entirety of the once
“solid south” from the Democrats. Nixon, once dismissed as the “great American loser,” had won
a larger majority than any nominee in the history of the Republican Party. But
Brzezinski believed that Nixon’s overwhelming victory was due in large part to the quality of the
Democratic candidate than to the popularity of Nixon. Indeed, the low turnout, only 55 percent of
the electorate, confirmed reports that many Americans had voted for the lesser of two evils and
had displayed a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. In June 1972 five burglars—
later linked to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP)—had been arrested by as they
attempted to break into Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Indeed, as
Nixon took office for a second term, the vast web of conspiracy behind the break-in was beginning
to unravel.
CHAPTER FIVE: JIMMY CARTER AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The Democrats came out of 1972 election in a state of turmoil. The New Deal collation that
had dominated presidential politics since the 1930s had splintered amidst the chaos of the late
1960s. More troubling to Zbigniew Brzezinski was that things seemed only to be getting worse.
Only four years earlier Hubert Humphrey lost a razor thin decision to Richard Nixon. But this was
at the height of the Vietnam War and the aftermath of the disastrous Chicago convention. This time
George McGovern had lost 49 states—including his own---and the vast majority of the popular
vote. However good it felt for Democrats to vote their “conscious” the fact remained that Richard
Nixon, a candidate with rather sizable flaws, had obliterated McGovern in one the greatest
landslides in American history.
It was not surprising then that the dramatic breakthroughs with the Soviet Union and
China were given credit for Nixon’s overwhelming victory. Such in house efforts to credit the glory
to Nixon would do little, however, to dampen the press adulation surrounding Henry Kissinger.
Indeed, as Nixon took his second oath of office in January 1973 Kissinger was truly an international
superstar. His behind-the-scenes role in engineering the dramatic openings to China and the Soviet
Union had intrigued the national press corps, who had never quite warmed to Nixon. Public
opinion polls in 1973 listed Kissinger as the “most popular person in America.” In a move that
would puzzle and outrage the administration’s anti-war critics, Kissinger was awarded the 1973
Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam. His fame would even
extend to reaches beyond the world of international diplomacy—given some credence to his
famous line that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Indeed a poll of Playboy
Club bunnies in 1972 ranked Kissinger number one as “the man I would most like to go out on a
date with. Contestants at the 1973 Miss Universe pageant would go a step further by voting
Kissinger as “the greatest person in the world today.”
In the wake of the 1972 election Zbigniew Brzezinski’s writings continued to be
characterized by his contention that Nixon’s “generation of peace” had been oversold for domestic
consumption and that the long-term prospects for any meaningful détente with the Soviet Union
were rather limited. Brzezinski believed that, quite unlike McGovern’s neoisolationism, a
Democratic candidate seeking the White House in 1976 must put forth an optimistic vision for the
construction of a more stable international order.
Brzezinski was also distrustful of the rising influence of the “New Right” of the
Republican Party affiliated with the hard line rhetoric of California governor Ronald Reagan.
While perhaps sharing some of the same distrust of Soviet motives, Brzezinski believed the New
Right was prone to lump global complexities into categories of “good vs. evil.” The New Right not
only firmly rejected the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy of détente, but also saw Brzezinski’s concept
of “peaceful engagement” toward Eastern Europe as little more than aiding and abetting what it
regarded a monolithic communist evil.
Brzezinski also came to believe that conservative political forces in America had become
obsessed with the Soviet threat while overlooking the problems associated with an increasingly
turbulent Third World beset by “magnifying distinctions between the rich and poor” and
“punctured by percolating anarchistic violence.”4 If the New Right was suspicious of its own
government, it was on the verge of paranoia about any dealings with multilateral organizations
that might be seen as impeding on U.S. sovereignty. Brzezinski’s efforts to move the United States
toward a more “multilateral” foreign policy thus came under relentless attack from the fringes of
the right wing of the Republican Party.” 5
Brzezinski insisted that the Nixon-Kissinger focus on a strictly bilateral détente with
Moscow had alienated the United States’ more traditional allies in Western Europe and Japan. At
the same time its focus on a 19th century style balance of power prevented it from dealing with the
anarchy that threatened to emerge from the increasingly impoverished and overpopulated regions
of the developing world. Brzezinski’s most familiar alternative was that of a “reciprocal” détente
with the Soviet Union which would include more formalized institutional “trilateral” links between
Western Europe and Japan. 6
Assails U.S. Foreign Policy,” The New York Times (November 17, 1982). “Q & A: Zbigniew
Brzezinski: View From the Democratic Sidelines,” MaCleans vol. 95 no. 24, (June 14, 1982), p. 8.
4 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Not War But Anarchy,” Newsweek (April 5, 1971), p. 47. See also
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The International and the Planetary,’ Encounter, vol. 39 no. 2 (August 1972),
pp. 49-55.
5 For a look at some of the more hostile right-wing criticisms of Brzezinski, see “Zbig
Brother,” Public Opinion (February 1978), pp 5-110. Henry Paolucci, “Carter’s Kissinger,” The
National Review (October 1, 1976), pp. 1054-1060.
6 Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Western Europe’s Drift Toward Neutralism,” Newsweek (June 25,
1973), p. 43. Also “U.S. and Western Europe: An Alliance in Trouble,” U.S. News & World Report
(April 16, 1973), pp. 45-48. Brzezinski had long argued that a strictly bilateral détente with Moscow
would eventually lead to the splintering of the Western alliance. Indeed, by the early 1970s
Brzezinski feared the Soviets had been at least equally successful in their longtime goal of
“finlandizing” Western Europe. Yet as one observer noted there was a significant difference in what
the West Europeans were doing as compared to the Finns. “What the Finns are doing is dictated by
circumstances largely beyond their control, whereas Europeans would be in this situation on a
more voluntary basis. It is a melancholy thought that during the Khrushchev period many East
Europeans hoped to eventually reach the status of Finland. They have not achieved it. And now
the prospect is no longer excluded that it is the West European nations This “trilateral” vision of
global cooperation was based on Brzezinski’s belief that the world’s most advanced industrial
democracies must continue to move toward greater political and economic integration. Brzezinski
regarded Japan as the linchpin in this “trilateral” formulation. It was based on his belief that, after
five centuries of a world dominated by Europe, Asia was becoming increasingly important in
international affairs. The United States, Brzezinski insisted, must adjust to these circumstances. This
conviction also led to the uncomfortable realization that he himself was not fully equipped to
appreciate the nature of the changing world:
In 1968 I was Humphrey’s foreign policy director in the campaign. I went back to Columbia
with the realization that if Humphrey had won I might have had some sort of senior position in
foreign affairs of the United States and with a keen awareness that I would be holding that position
knowing a great deal about the Soviet Union and Central Europe, somewhat about Western Europe
and not much more than that about the rest of the foreign policy issues. And I said to myself ‘this
is ridiculous,’ I am really not prepared for a top position. Because of the campaign, it dawned on
me painfully that I was in the tradition of Bundy, Rostow, and earlier Kennan and others. Namely,
a person who knows a great deal about international affairs from the prism of the European
experience at a time when Europe was no longer the center of the world. I thought it is likely that
in the years to come, the Far East, in particular Japan, is going to be very important. 7
Brzezinski also recalls there was an obvious problem to overcome. “I knew nothing about
Asia, literally. And therefore, as soon as we lost the election, I wrote to Mac Bundy, the president
of the Ford Foundation. I said to him, ‘Look, I would like to propose to you that you give me a
fellowship for a year or two. And what I’ll do is I’ll go to Japan---and I’ll just sit there---I’m not
going to learn Japanese, I’m not pretending or intending to be a Far Eastern expert. It’s too late in
which eventually find themselves in this position (without having Finnish sisu to cope with). Anti-
Americanism parading as pro-Europeanism, squabbles over agricultural prices with small regard
for wider political considerations, concealed and unconcealed neutralist tendencies—all these may
lead to West European non-alignment rather than to West European unity. The French policy of
being in and out of NATO at one and the same time, the ‘Scandinavian’ attitude of Norway,
Denmark and Iceland, German illusions about Ostpolitik, the internal malaise of Italy and Great
Britain—all these West European political and economic weaknesses provide opportunity targets
for Soviet policy and Soviet leaders are only too well aware of this. “Exploiting the contradictions
among the imperialists’ is an old Leninist tradition. The Soviet and East European press constantly
harp on the differences over trade and monetary policies which are occurring between the United
States, the EEC, and Japan.” Leopold Labedz, “The Soviet Union and Western Europe,” Survey vol.
19 no. 3 (Summer 1973), p. 15.
7 Interview, Washington DC, (March 29, 2000).
my life and I’m not interested in that. But I think, given my interest in foreign affairs and U.S.
foreign policy in particular I ought to have a higher sensitivity to what is looming in the Far East,
in particular Japan’s emerging role---and I would like to look at the world from the vantage point
of Japan and give some thought to what Japan might be doing in the world and how it effects
American interests—Korea, America, China.“
In early 1971 Brzezinski began a six-month stay in Japan. Brzezinski visit occurred at a
sensitive point in U.S.-Japanese relations. The Japanese economic boom had created resentment in
the United States based on the perception that Japan’s “economic miracle” was rooted in unfair
trade practices. By 1970 U.S. politicians were facing increasing pressure to combat Japanese imports
with a sharp increase in protectionist measures. Brzezinski argued that Japan’s rapid rate of growth
was likely to slow dramatically which could provide an unprecedented challenge to its postwar
political stability.
Brzezinski’s observations were put forth in a book entitled The Fragile Blossom. “I wrote The
Fragile Blossom, which I did not intend to write,” Brzezinski recalled years later, “But I got more
impressions than I expected. I came back with the concept that it is time to elevate Japan from
underneath the umbrella of American tutelage and make it part of a larger cooperative entity.”
Brzezinski also believed that the Nixon-Kissinger emphasis on a bilateral détente with
Moscow had done little to further the “trilateral” idea. Indeed by the early 1970s relations between
the United States and Western Europe were complicated by policy differences on Vietnam and the
Middle East as well as by the more fundamental disputes over trade, monetary policies, and the
allocation of defense costs. Indeed while prominent U.S. politicians continued to lobby for a sizable
U.S. force reductions in Western Europe, increasingly vocal left-wing European voices began to
suggest that the American postwar “occupation” of Western Europe was little different than the
Soviet presence in Eastern Europe.
By 1972 the NATO alliance appeared to have reached its postwar low point. There were, as
Newsweek correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave would observe, a few clumsy attempts to heal the
breach: “Nightmares about an American troop pullout are not all that worry Europe’s leaders. In
many recent actions of the Nixon Administration, European officials see signs of a clear American
lack of interest in the Continent’s problems—an attitude that could tempt fate. When it was
announced that California’s Gov. Ronald Reagan would be Mr. Nixon’s special emissary to
reassure Europe of U.S. support, one European Foreign Minister raged, ‘You send Henry Kissinger
to Peking and Reagan to Europe. If you were trying to kill off the idea of a warm transatlantic
relationship completely you couldn’t do better than sending Reagan to talk to men who have dealt
over the years with the likes of Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk and
George Ball.’”
Nevertheless, both sides of the Atlantic realized that the problems afflicting the Western
allies were rooted far more in economics than personalities. As Nixon took office in 1969, the U.S.
economy was suffering from spiraling inflation. As trade deficits and dollars abroad accumulated
other nations began to cash their dollars for American gold before their value was further eroded
by American inflation.
In August of 1971 Nixon and his economic advisers gathered at Camp David to discuss a
bolder economic strategy to ensure that the nation’s economy would recover in time for the 1972
election. Nixon returned to Washington with a stunning new economic program. Without prior
consultation with the United States’ main trading partners, Nixon announced a temporary 10
percent surtax on imported goods and the suspending the United States’ practice of converting
dollars to gold. The “Nixon shocks” would stun America’s closest allies. By 1972 new trade barriers
were being erected throughout the world—between the lesser developed countries and the
developed countries—as well as between the industrialized nations of Japan, the United
States, and Western Europe.
Nixon’s moves furthered Brzezinski’s belief that Western alliance needed a more formal
“trilateral” organization to more closely orchestrate its political and economic structures. In
December 1971 Brzezinski asked Huntington Harris, a trustee of the Brookings Institution, to fund
a series of reports analyzing foreign affairs from the "trilateral" viewpoint. The strength of these
Tripartite Studies persuaded David Rockefeller to place his influence and financial support behind
the concept.
Rockefeller arranged the initial planning group at the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills,
in Tarytown, New York. Henry Owen was in attendance at that initial meeting. “There was
something like seventeen people there. And we reached agreement that that’s what we wanted—
a ‘trilateral commission’-- and that was what we agreed to call it. We established it with equal
number of Japanese, Europeans, and Americans. And we agreed to have meetings regularly with
Zbig, who had played such a vital role in bringing it about, as sort of a secretary-general of the
whole commission.”
In July 1973 Brzezinski took a leave from his post at Columbia to become the first director
of the Trilateral Commission. Among his initial duties would be to oversee the selection of its
original 200 members that would ultimately include a remarkable cross section of the world’s
power centers. But the most significant member would turn out to be a little known one-term
governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.
Brzezinski recalled how the selection came about. “I remember discussing his membership
with my two principal Trilateral Commission colleagues, Gerard Smith and George Franklin. We
wanted a forward-looking Democratic governor who would be congenial to the trilateral
perspective. Reubin Askew of Florida was mentioned as a logical candidate, but then one of them
noted that Jimmy Carter, the newly elected governor of Georgia, courageous on civil rights and
reportedly a bright and upcoming Democrat, was interested in developing trade
relations between his state of Georgia and the Common Market and Japan. I then said, ’Well, he’s
obviously our man.’”20
Carter’s subsequent political rise would fuel the obsession of right-wing conspiracy
theorists who viewed the Trilateral Commission as a front to impose a “socialist” world
government.” A different sort of charge came from left-wingers who viewed the Trilateral
Commission as a “rich man’s club” seeking to hold off a long overdue social revolution in the
Third World.21
20 Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 5.
21 The “X-Files”theme was seen in this sample found on the internet. “In July of 1952 the
world was electrified by large newspaper headlines and photos of squadrons of UFOs flying
repeatedly over the nation’s capital in Washington DC. Four months later WWII General Dwight
Eisenhower was elected President. The same month President Eisenhower took office (January
1953) the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) was ordered to determine if UFOs were
interstellar vehicles. OSI convened the Robertson Panel of scientists, which recommended
expansion of an Air Force study on UFOs, Project Blue Book. A year later, in April, 1954, as
documented by Gerald Light, President Eisenhower made a secret trip to Muroc Field in the
California desert, accompanied by generals, reporter Franklin Allen of the Hearst Newspapers
Group, Los Angeles Catholic Bishop James McIntyre and others. The President had previously
arranged to be in nearby Palm Springs, purportedly for a golfing vacation. He was spirited over to
Muroc one night, while reporters were fed the cover story that the President had a toothache and
needed to see a dentist. While at Muroc Air Field, Eisenhower was present while an extraterrestrial
disc landed. Several Star Visitors emerged to converse with the President and the generals. The
extraterrestrials requested that Eisenhower make the public aware of extraterrestrial contact with
Earth forthwith. The President protested that humans were not ready, and needed time to be
prepared for adjusting to this stupendous reality. By the end of the following month, May 1954,
President Eisenhower’s CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, Prince Bernhard of Netherlands, David
Rockefeller and other top world financiers, later-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, later British Minister
of Defense Dennis Healey, and other Western power leaders convened the inaugural meeting of
the Bilderberg Group, a means of Western collective management of the world order. One of the
early items on the Bilderberg agenda was extraterrestrial contact. Shortly after establishing itself,
the Bilderberg Group collaborated with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), another
international policy body devoted to world management. They discussed the problem of adjusting
humankind to extraterrestrial presence. Bilderberg and CFR decided jointly in the mid-1950s to
enter into an arrangement with the extraterrestrials. The ET’s were given an island in the French
Polynesia as a base on Earth. This arrangement afforded them an opportunity to monitor closely
Earth cultures and behavior and it permitted Earth governments a way to monitor extraterrestrial
culture and behavior.” The report went on to suggest that the U.S. held out for many concessions
before agreeing to the arrangement “and history subsequent to 1954 suggests that what the U.S.
obtained was the lion’s share of extraterrestrial scientist consultants, to assist American scientists
in understanding and adapting exotic ET technologies into such devices we now know as the
computer chip, fibre optics, lasers, gene-splicing therapy, cloning, night-vision equipment, super-
tenacity fibers (such as Kevlar lightweight armor), aerospace ceramics, Stealth technology, particle-
beam devices, and Like most conspiracy theories those targeted at the Trilateral Commission were
diverse and occasionally bizarre. Pat Robertson, the conservative television evangelist, would insist
the Trilateral Commission was somehow linked to free-masonry and the occult, and that it sprung
from the “depth of something that is evil.” Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas, 1993), pp.
33, 102. Lyndon Larouche, a perennial fringe political candidate, accused the Trilateral Commission
of just about everything imaginable, including the maintenance of a vast international drug trade.
In his quest for the 1980 Republican nomination George Bush was pressured to resign from the
Trilateral Commission to appease the increasingly influential rightwing of the party. In 1992 there
emerged a whispering campaign that Bill Clinton, a longtime Trilateral member, had been
“anointed” the Democratic presidential nominee by the Bilderberg group. Perhaps the most
grandiose Trilateral conspiracy could be seen in “The X-Files,” the popular 1990s television
program whose plot surrounded a determined FBI agent determined to unearth a covert “world
government” that was conspiring with highly advanced alien beings. In the early 1990s Professor
McGriff, a member of the militant rap group Public Enemy, marked his concerts with long diatribes
against the Trilateral Commission--which he referred to as a “wicked global Jewish conspiracy.”22
Timothy McVeigh insisted the Trilateral Commission was the heart of a secret “New World Order”
to which he expressed his displeasure by blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City in
1995.23
Over the years Brzezinski would become visibly irritated when approached with such
charges:
I encounter that all the time when I speak around the country and the kooks that you know
pop up with this theory come from either the loony left wing or the loony right wing perspective.
If it’s the loony right-winger, he’ll stand up and say, ‘You’re a conspiracy of people who want to
impose one world government and deprive us of our sovereignty.’ And if it’s an
gravity control flight.” “Believe it Or Not!” Received from Dr. Richard Boylan,
http://www.ettracker.com/index -21.html
22 David Mills, “Beware the Trilateral Commission! The Influential World Panel Conspiracy
Theorists Love to Hate,” The Washington Post (April 25, 1992).
23 See Godfrey Sperling, “Zbigniew Brzezinski on Oklahoma City,” The Christian Science
Monitor (May ?, 1995).
extremely loony left-winger he’ll stand up and say, ‘You’re a conspiracy of rich capitalists who
want to control the world for the sake of global profits.’ And that crazy outfit Larouche, started
with the left and swung to the right for example over the last 15 years. But the answer is, look, the
Commission operates openly, there’s nothing secret about it. It is a group of influential people, we
don’t hide that. On the contrary, we deliberately want influential people from the three regions
who try to deal with the problems of the three regions encounter by discussion, by promotional
studies, by advocacy. We have advocated over the years debt relief for the poor countries of the
world. We have advocated a close cooperation in science between our industrial democracies. We
are by and large in favor of free trade arrangement. We are against protectionism tariffs….I think
we perform a useful educational function. Any viewer who is watching me wants to explore the
so-called conspiracy, all he has to do is to write to the Office of the Commission and we will give
him whatever he wants. There is nothing secret about it.
James Earl Carter, Jr. was born to Earl and Lillian Carter in 1924 in Plains, Georgia-- a rural
community in southwestern Georgia with a single main street and population of a few hundred.
Jimmy Carter’s childhood was unique in that region, if only because most of his playmates were
the children of the black tenants who lived on or around his father’s farm. “Jimmy was raised up
with nothin’ but colored people,’” recalled A.D. Davis, one of Jimmy Carter’s African-American
childhood friends, “he ain’t never acted like he was more’ somebody because he was white.”
In 1946 Jimmy Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis with a focus on
nuclear engineering. In 1951 Carter was assigned to the Navy’s newly formed nuclear-submarine
program directed by the legendary Captain Hyman Rickover. The two had met in 1952 when
Carter sat down before the admiral for a job interview. At the end of the two-hour sitting, Rickover’s
asked Carter if he had always “done his best.” The young sailor from Georgia, after giving it some
thought, conceded that perhaps he had not always tried his “best.” Rickover’s curt reply of “Why
not!?” left an indelible impression on Carter.
The career path of Jimmy Carter would change abruptly in 1953. That year, following the
death of his father, Carter made the agonizing decision to resign from the navy and return to Plains
to manage the family’s indebted family farm. With wife Rosalynn keeping the books, Carter
transformed the struggling peanut business into a multi-million dollar venture. “During the
harvest,” recalls one friend, “he and Rosalynn would work eighteen and twenty hours a day. He
never sat on his bottom and waited for business—and before long he increased his daddy’s volume
25 times.”
Carter’s return to Plains also coincided with a development that would impact Southern
politics for a generation. In 1954 the United States Supreme Court would outlaw the segregation of
public school. The Brown v. Board of Education decision would create a backlash throughout the
South that would significantly impact the political career of Jimmy Carter. One friend recalls that
the Carter’s attitude was like that of the lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a
Mockingbird,”—a moderate who did not buck the basic racial order but tried to do the “decent
things” within it.
Carter became active in local affairs in and around Plains—becoming a deacon of the
church and serving on the local school board. Despite frequent “invitations” from the local police
chief, Carter was one of the few white male citizens in Plains to hold out against joining the
segregationist “White Citizens Council.” This act would subject Carter’s peanut business to a local
boycott. In 1962 Carter ran a successful campaign for a seat in the Georgia State Senate. Although
the initial election returns showed Carter losing by a narrow margin, he filed a successful suit that
would overturn the result.
Carter’s term in the Georgia Senate would thus coincide with the changing politics in the
South. Gradually even the most “yellow dog” Democrats were turning away from the civil rights
messages of Lyndon Johnson, to the more conservative message of Barry Goldwater or the more
overtly racist appeal of Alabama governor George Wallace. Jimmy Carter’s eldest son Chip, at the
time fourteen years old, wore an “LBJ” button to school, only to have it repeatedly ripped off his
shirt by classmates. One day the scuffles were serious enough that the Chip came home to his father
in tears. Jimmy Carter’s advice was rather firm. “Put the button back on,” he told his son “What if
they tear it off again?” asked Chip. “Put it on again,” said his father. “Then, they’ll just tear it off
again,” Chip persisted. “Then, you just put it back on again if you want to wear it. Do what you
want to do—and learn to box.”
Jimmy Carter meanwhile was attempting to wade through the uneasy political waters of
being a racial moderate in the South that was turning increasing to the segregationist voice of
George Wallace. Carter would collect 200 petition signatures to support county-attorney Warren
Fortson, who had been threatened with dismissal for proposing the formation of a biracial
committee to mediate in the civil rights campaign in nearby Sumter. This act would again subject
Carter’s business to public pressure. “Jimmy got boycotted again because he spoke up for me,”
recalled Fortson, “He sure and hell did. They tried to fry him for it. In my book, that’s courage.” In
the summer of 1965, at the height of the civil rights demonstrations in nearby Americus, the Plains
Baptist Church scheduled a vote on whether to continue to exclude AfricanAmericans from the
congregation. Carter’s uncharacteristically impassioned speech against exclusion led some
members of his church to organize still another boycott of his business.
In 1966 Carter surprised even his closest friends in announcing that he was running for the
governorship of Georgia. Carter’s campaign would face serious obstacles. He was virtually
unknown in statewide politics, had little money to speak of, and had virtually no connections with
Atlanta’s influential “old boy” network. Indeed, the Atlanta newspapers would quickly dismiss
him as “Jimmy Who?” But Carter’s simple resiliency made his quixotic campaign hard to ignore.
Carter would not win, but his methodical campaign had given him statewide name recognition. It
would also provide the groundwork for a more successful campaign in 1970.
In early 1967 Carter had what he would later describe as a “profound religious experience.”
The pastor of the Plains Baptist Church gave a sermon entitled “If You Were Arrested for Being a
Christian, Would There Be Any Evidence to Convict You?” Carter’s answer led him to a serious
reconsideration of his religious priorities. “I recognized for the first time that
I had lacked something very precious—a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy
Spirit in my life in a more profound and personal way, and since then I’ve had an inner peace and
inner conviction and assurance that transformed my life for the better.”
For nearly four years Carter would manage the family peanut farm while running an
exhaustive campaign for the governorship of Georgia. In November of 1970, Jimmy Carter, at the
age of 46, was elected governor of Georgia. Carter’s innaugral address signaled a dramatic change
in the tenor of Southern politics. “At the end of a long campaign I believe I know our people as well
as anyone. Based on this knowledge of Georgians—north and south, rural and urban, liberal and
conservative--I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” Carter’s
inaugural speech would be the most important of his political career. In May of
1971 Carter appeared on the cover of Time in a feature depicting a more forward-looking “New
South.”
Yet Carter’s impact was impeded by a Georgia law that limited the governor to a single
four -year term. In late 1972 Carter thus began entertaining even bolder plans. The unceremonious
rebuff by George McGovern at the convention in Miami Beach had provided a valuable lesson for
Carter’s advisers. As Gerald Rafshoon would later note: “We came out of there realizing that as
much as we knew about Jimmy Carter and thought he had a good national image, the national
politicians didn’t take him seriously, and didn’t take us seriously. I remember walking back from
the convention the night McGovern was nominated, and Hamilton and I are saying, ‘Why can’t
Jimmy run for President? He’s not going to run for the Senate. And four years from now we
certainly aren’t going to go around here trying to curry favor with somebody asking to put an ex-
Georgia governor on as Vice-President.’”
In September 1972 Carter’s staff met in Atlanta to explore the idea of a embarking on a
presidential campaign. “I can’t tell you how difficult it was to talk about,” Hamilton Jordan would
later note. “There we were, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the Governor’s mansion in 1972. The general
election hadn’t even taken place. We all knew it looked kind of preposterous. But we were serious
about it. It was hard to say it. I can remember I didn’t make a very good presentation. It was hard
to really talk about it. It was almost embarrassing.”33
On December 12, 1974, Carter formally declared himself as a candidate for the presidency
of the United States. Carter’s announcement was met, as one biographer has noted, “with yawns
and a few chuckles, but little more.” Carter’s early campaign strategy was based on a threeway
race between Senator Edward Kennedy and Alabama Governor George Wallace. Few pundits at
the time were taking Carter seriously. “The notion,” commented campaign journalist
Jules Witcover “that Jimmy Carter could beat either Wallace or Kennedy anywhere was, of course,
considered ludicrous by nearly everyone who had ever heard of Carter, and outside of
Georgia that meant practically nobody.”
National anonymity was only one of Carter’s potential weaknesses. At the height of the
Cold War Carter’s advisers knew that few voters would be willing to entrust the presidency to a
one-term governor with no foreign policy experience. In 1973 campaign adviser Hamilton Jordan
suggested that Carter apply for membership in the Trilateral Commission. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
recalling the rather dismal choice between Nixon and McGovern, was one of the few who did take
notice. “I saw in him decency and humaneness,” Brzezinski would later note, “and I also felt that
there was a great deal of steel underneath. As a result, I hoped that in the area of foreign policy he
would be able to combine principle with power, the only prescription in my judgment for a
successful American foreign-policy.”
Indeed Brzezinski understood that the world had become far more complicated in the
decades since the moral certainties of the early Cold War. Brzezinski believed the United States had
painted itself into a corner by refusing to settle the Middle East conflict in the wake of the Six-Day
War in 1967. By the early 1970s Brzezinski believed that Israel’s continued occupation of the
disputed lands it had won in 1967 highlighted the dangerous global “fault-line” between the
world’s rich and poor nations he had discussed in Between Two Ages.
Brzezinski argued that a negotiated settlement granting “land for peace,” was
paradoxically in Israel’s long-term interest since a westernized democracy, could not permanently
subjugate millions of Palestinians. Israel’s own democracy and moral self-respect, he reasoned,
would be jeopardized if it attempted to do so. Brzezinski believed the United States must put
pressure on Israel to enact a settlement--especially since he had come to believe that
Israel actually preferred a stalemate to a settlement as Brzezinski argued in a controversial 1971
Newsweek article:
They do so because, understandably enough, they put little faith in international
guarantees or Arab promises. They do so also because a stalemate increases the likelihood of Israeli
retention of Arab territory. It is here that American and Israeli interests diverge. It is also here that,
paradoxically, Israel and Soviet tactics converge. The Soviets too prefer a stalemate to either a new
war or a settlement. The former poses the prospect of another Arab defeat (or costly and dangerous
Soviet involvement) and the latter would inevitably reduce the dependence of the Arabs on the
Soviets. It follows therefore, that it is both ultimately beneficial to Israel and certainly in the
American interest for the U.S. to use its diplomatic and military leverage to separate the question
of territory from the question of security. Our objective should be to link a graduated step-by-step
Israeli withdrawal essentially to the old frontiers with a parallel reduction in the Soviet military
presence in the Middle East, with the vacated territories subject to supervised demilitarization. An
approach of this sort might still find the Arabs receptive, for it would mean recovery of territory in
exchange for acceptance of Israel and the departure of the
territories did little to downplay this impression. “If there is one thing I have learned in the Middle
East, it is that the so-called extremists or religious zealots, whether in Jewish or Muslim society, are
not as extreme as we might think. The reason they are both tolerated and successful is that they are
almost always acting on the basis of widely shared feelings or yearnings. The West Bank Jewish
settlers were no exception. As Israel became more modern, materialistic, sterile, Americanized
society after 1967, many Israelis identified in their hearts with those men climbing the rocky hills
of the West Bank, rifles in hand and barbed wire at their feet, keeping watch for the Arabs gathering
in the distance. The settlers worked out the increasingly bourgeois Israeli’s repressed yearnings to
once again be a pioneer. Because the Labor Party leaders got caught up in the intensity of what the
settlers were doing, and because they had no real ideological vision strong enough to stand up
against them, they never really stopped and examined the long-term consequences and never
noticed that the passion of so many of the settlers was a subsidized passion—a passion that began
by living in tents and caravan homes but would insist on swimming pools, paved roads, army
protection, tax breaks, and ranch-style suburban homes before they were through. Nevertheless, a
pattern was began in Hebron that would be repeated all over the West Bank during the next decade:
Jewish settlers would go out and create facts, the government would respond half-heartedly, with
some of the Labor ministers openly supporting the settlers, the government would reach some
ambiguous compromise allowing them to stay, and then another group of settlers would go out
and create another fact.” Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York, 1990), pp. 261-262,
459.
Soviet military. At least, it would hold out an alternative more promising than a hopeless stalemate.
The Arab states responded to the new situation with the one very tangible source of
leverage they possessed. In 1973 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia sent his oil minister to warn the
United States that future oil exports would depend on a more balanced American policy in the
Arab-Israeli dispute. In June 1973 Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Washington for the second
superpower summit in two years. Beyond the customary ceremonial pomp, Brezhnev proposed
that the Soviet Union and United States agree on a Middle East settlement. He warned that the
United States pro-Israeli stance in the Middle-East was making it difficult for Moscow to restrain
its Arab allies.
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an effort to
recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. The Israelis, at the time observing Yom Kippur, suffered
severe losses in the first week of the war. With their backs to the wall the situation looked ominous.
Kissinger, after a tense emergency meeting with the Israeli ambassador, feared
Israel might exercise its nuclear capabilities. As William Quant, a Middle East expert on Kissinger’s
staff, recalled “Without being told in so many words, we knew that a desperate Israel might activate
its nuclear option. This situation, by itself, created a kind of blackmail potential….But no one had
to say it, and I don’t think anybody did.”
Nixon, after some controversial deliberation, responded with a massive airlift to supply the
Israeli army. It would prove a turning point in the war. The Israeli army scrambled to recover the
offensive. Within two weeks Israeli troops were driving toward Damascus in the north and were
within sixty miles of Cairo threatening to envelope the entire Egyptian Third
Army. The Egyptians, faced with a humiliating defeat, called upon Moscow for support. The
Soviets, angered by the U.S. failure to persuade Israel to accept a cease-fire, threatened to move
unilaterally in an effort to save the Egyptian troops. With Nixon embroiled in the Watergate
scandal, Kissinger convened a special meeting of the National Security Council and, with the
president’s approval, ordered American forces around the world to advance to “ Defense Condition
3,” midway up the ladder to launching a nuclear attack. 42 At that point Kissinger then intervened
and pressured the Israelis to accept the cease-fire.
Brzezinski understood that the war in the Middle East had further aggravated U.S.
relations with its NATO allies in Europe. To many West Europeans the problem in the Middle East
centered on the U.S. one-sided support of Israel. They pointed out that Israel had ignored
42 At the very moment Kissinger was attempting to negotiate a Middle East cease-fire, Nixon was
desperately trying to find an attorney general willing to fire Watergate special prosecutor
Archibald Cox, who was pressuring Nixon to release potentially incriminating White House tapes
that would prove his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon ordered Attorney General
Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson instead chose to resign rather than carry out the order.
The White House then turned to the Deputy Attorney General to fire Cox, but he too refused and
resigned in protest. The same instructions were given to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who as
Acting Attorney General fired Cox. But the events would only compound Nixon’s problems as the
White House and Congress were deluged by telegrams condemning what became known in the
press as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” For an excellent insight into Nixon’s attempt to manage
the simultaneous “double crisis” over Watergate and the Middle East war see John Morton Blum,
Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (New York, 1991), pp. 451-456.
the UN Security Council (Resolution 242) by refusing to negotiate a peace settlement and relinquish
the Arab territories occupied in 1967. The NATO allies were especially disturbed when the United
States, without prior consultation, placed the NATO alliance in the middle of a potential nuclear
confrontation for the sake of Israel. At the height of the war the West Europeans
(who received 80 percent of their oil from the Arab producers) defied the United States the use of
NATO military bases to airlift supplies to Israel. The move by the West Europeans enraged
Kissinger who was heard to say “I don’t care what happens to NATO I’m so disgusted.”
The real crisis for America was only beginning. At the height of the war the Arab
oilproducing nations launched an oil embargo on the United States and all other nations that were
assisting Israel. The dramatic cutback in the world’s oil production created an immediate hike in
energy prices and would throw the Western economies into a decade of recession. Some observers,
including Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter, would note that with only 6 percent of the world’s
population, the United States was consuming nearly a third of all the energy produced.
But this did little to heal the shock for the average American who was enraged at having to pay
more for a commodity that had always been cheap and readily available. 46
Brzezinski was perhaps uniquely optimistic regarding America’s role in the world. He
argued that the current crisis in the United States was part of a deep cultural malaise that had
infected much of America’s intellectual elite. Brzezinski warned that this pessimism marked a
sharp break with the basic ideas (progress, liberty, confidence, civility, and compromise) that had
guided the United States throughout its history and served as a model for the rest of the world. “It
is hard to think of a period since the American Revolution,” remarked Brzezinski, “when the
democratic system had had less appeal for the intellectual elite of the world.” He insisted that it
was “essential to tackle head-on the pervasive mood of pessimism which dominates our centers of
thought and learning.”
46In the 1950s, the major Western oil companies in the Middle East had operated on what was
known as the “50-50 system.” This meant that they essentially halved the profits from oil
production (after subtracting all costs and expenses) with the country from which the raw crude
oil had been extracted. This system was largely beneficial to the western oil companies since they
not only gained access to the vast supplies of cheap Middle Eastern oil but could also use the 50
percent payment to the oil producing governments as an income-tax deduction. But gradually the
oil producing nations would begin to exercise more power. In 1960, the world’s major oilproducing
nations, led by Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, founded the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC). In the 1960s a global glut of oil, caused in part by new discoveries in Libya and
Algeria, prevented OPEC from attaining its goal of generating higher oil prices. That situation
changed dramatically in the early 1970s as the rapid industrial expansion in the United States,
Japan, and Western Europe created new demand. In 1971 OPEC was able to take advantage of this
situation by signing the Teheran agreement with the major oil companies, which led to a rise in the
posted price of oil. By the summer of 1973 oil prices had more than doubled from the levels that
had been relatively stable for more than two decades. For a look at the politics and diplomacy of
oil see Daniel Yergin The Prize (New York, 1991).
Such was the atmosphere in May of 1975 when Brzezinski presided over the annual
Trilateral Commission meeting in Kyoto, Japan. Brzezinski’s keynote presentation warned that the
main axis of conflict was no longer between the Western world and the Communist world but
between the advanced countries and the developing countries. For the first time, he noted, the 72
“new” nations had succeeded in inflicting significant reversals upon the world’s industrialized
states. While the developed nations still remained the focus of growth and prosperity, the world’s
new nations possessed what Brzezinski termed “negative power”—that is, the ability to refuse their
cooperation in the maintenance of world order--and instead opt for violence and chaos: 49
If 1945 was the beginning of the existing international system, 1973 marked the beginning
of its end and hopefully the beginning of its renovation and readjustment. And that readjustment
is badly needed, for the world has changed profoundly in the course of the last thirty years. The
system in which we have operated for the last quarter of a century was a system created largely by
European-American initiative right after World War II. It was a system which embraced at most 40
states, many of which were client states. Today the world community is composed of some 150
states, dominated by a sense of nationalism, by an awareness of national aspirations, and it is a
community with remarkable inequality in social and economic conditions. Today, in a world much
more alive with political demands, the greatest single awareness is that of the inequity and
inequality of the human condition. If I were to generalize broadly, I would say that the 19th century
was dominated by the passion for liberty, while today the demand for equity is the dominant
political force in the world. And well it should be, for the world is truly extraordinarily unequal.
The community of 150 or so states contains only five (with a population of only some 240 million)
where per capita income is over $5000. It contains fifteen states (with roughly 13% of world
population—550 million) where per capita annual income is over $25000; fifteen more states (with
a similar population) with incomes over $1500; and 25 states (with almost 10% of the world’s
population) where income is over $500 per year. Finally, over 90 states, comprising close to 60% of
the world’s population, have annual per capita incomes of under $500. And I many add, of these
90 states, as of last year, only 25 were growing at an annual rate higher than 5% per annum. 50
Nixon administration that came into power in 1969. Covert, manipulative, and deceptive in style,
it seemed committed to a largely static view of the world, based on a traditional balance of power,
seeking accommodation among the major powers on the basis of spheres of influence, and more
generally orientated toward preserving the status quo than reforming it.” Zbigniew Brzezinski,
“America in a Hostile World,” Foreign Policy, 23 (Summer 1976), p. 73.
49 Robert C. Christopher, “The World’s New Cold War,” Newsweek (June 16, 1975), p. 37.
50 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Trilateral Relations in a Global Context,” excerpts from Trilateral
Conference presentation, (May 31, 1975).
Jimmy Carter was in attendance at Kyoto in the early stages of his long shot run for the
White House. Though few at the time were taking Carter seriously (his national recognition factor
remained at a rather uninspiring 2 percent) he had received some good fortune. The unexpected
departure of Edward Kennedy from the campaign for the Democratic nomination in
November 1974 opened the floodgates to a dozen candidates, most of them coming from the
McGovernite-wing of the party.
Brzezinski was impressed by Carter’s speech at Kyoto which advocated a “comprehensive”
Middle East peace plan. The term “comprehensive” was a code phase for pressing Israel to make
some territorial sacrifices in exchange for peace. This was particularly dangerous for a Democratic
candidate since American Jews had traditionally been active in
Democratic Party. Brzezinski complimented Carter at one of the plenary sessions. “It’s nice”
Brzezinski noted, “ to see a Democratic candidate for President who has guts.” At the end of the
conference Carter asked Brzezinski to appear with him at a press conference to provide some
visibility to what until then had been an anonymous candidacy:
He was running for president already and there were a number of American
newspapermen, and they gave him a hell of a time. They mocked him, ridiculed him, laughed at
him, said ‘what are you really running for?’ You just hope to squeeze in on the ticket as vice
president” and so forth. I remember being impressed; one, how he kept his cool; two, how amiable
he was; three, what he said—and he said to them the following; ‘The first test will be in Iowa, and
I have really campaigned hard. I have done more in that state than the other candidates, and I
expect to win. You fellows will probably ignore the victory. But then will come the New Hampshire
primary. I have campaigned all over the state and as hard as I have ever campaigned in Georgia. I
will win, and then your headlines will say ‘Southerner Wins in the North,’ and after that will come
Florida. It is right next to my home state, and I think I can knock Wallace below the 40 percentage
line, thus lifting the scourge of Wallace from the Democratic
Party; or I might even beat him. And then your headlines will say ‘Carter Front-runner.” 54
Carter’s comments would prove prophetic. Over the next three years Brzezinski would
emerge as Carter’s most trusted foreign policy adviser. “Brzezinski was the first guy in the
Community to pay attention to Carter, to take him seriously,” noted one Washington insider,
“He spent time with Carter, talked to him, sent him books and articles, educated him.”55 By late
1975 Brzezinski began writing foreign policy papers for Carter on a more systematic basis. Carter,
in turn, requested the right to “plagiarize freely” from Brzezinski’s notes and articles. For the
hopefuls, America had lost its sense of values; it had stopped caring and standing for anything. He
was selling himself as a kind of “Good Henry Kissinger.” It was not as if Brzezinski had to break
down the doors to meet the Democratic candidates. By the time he went to them, they all wanted
him. He gave them a kind of legitimacy, the most important kind of the 1970s: expertise. Like his
contemporaries who were working in the same vineyard, he had met the politicians at conferences,
dined with them, sent them copies of his articles, and took their telephone calls to provide quick
advice for a comment to the news media. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski new how to talk to men of
power, to appreciate politics, to combine the language of scholarship and expertise with the world
of power. He could explain problems and ideas simply, put them in words that politicians could
use in speeches and televisions appearances, give them a clever phrase to catch a headline. He
understood their dilemmas, the need to combine high moral purpose with newsounding
approaches and phrases that could win elections. It was not a waste of time for politicians to talk
with this professor.” Leslie Gelb, Our Own Worst Enemy (New York, 1984), pp. 94-95.
54 Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 6.
55 Leslie Gelb, “The Secretary of State Sweepstakes,” New York Times Magazine (May 23, 1976).
next two years the bulk of Carter’s foreign policy speeches would be lifted, almost verbatim, from
Brzezinski’s academic articles.
In late December 1975 Carter asked Brzezinski to develop an outline of a “basic
speech/statement” on foreign affairs. Brzezinski responded with the following memo.
As a framework for your own foreign affairs approach let me suggest that your basic case
ought to be that our national purpose must be (1) as the first priority to create a stable inner core
for world affairs, based on closer collaboration among the advanced democracies (open-ended
trilateralism); (2) to shape on the above basis a more stable North-South relations, which means (i)
more cooperation with the emerging Third World countries (the richer and more successful),
though such devices as the tripartite Paris conferences, etc; (ii) compassionate aid to the Fourth
World, which the U.S. should grant as a matter of conscience as well as interest, but in which it
ought to also engage other states on a multilateral basis; (3) to promote détente with the Soviet
Union and to court China. Détente, of course is desirable but it ought to be more reciprocal.
Moreover, since the element of rivalry remains a reality, it cannot be the basis for coping with global
problems.
This would become the basic foreign policy outline for Jimmy Carter’s improbable run for
the presidency in 1976. The most important factor in this outline would be Brzezinski’s call for a
more “reciprocal” détente. This included a far more assertive policy toward Eastern Europe.
Kissinger and Brzezinski saw the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia through vastly different
lenses. While Brzezinski saw it as the success of peaceful engagement Kissinger took a more
conservative position. “No Western policy can guarantee a more favorable evolution in Central
Euorpe; all it can do is to take advantage of an opportunity if it arises.” Kissinger noted that greater
Western European unity would exert a growing attraction in the East, and “the major initiatives to
improve relations between Western and Eastern Europe should originate in Europe with the United
States in a reserve position.”
Brzezinski criticized this defeatist approach toward Eastern Europe as one of "moral
indifference" and "benign neglect." Though Nixon would embark on a number of visits to Eastern
Europe (to Romania in 1969, Yugoslavia in 1970, and Poland in 1972) Brzezinski would argue that
the nature of these visits paid little attention to the regions civil populations and thus had the effect
of an implicit U.S. support of the Brezhnev Doctrine. The defenders of the Nixon-Kissinger détente
would insist that stability was of paramount importance in the region. It was also argued that once
the region was “stabilized” the Soviet bloc regimes would feel secure enough to enact “top down”
reforms that would gradually loosen their regimes and open up their societies to the West.
Brzezinski argued that such an interpretation involved a blatant misreading of the events
following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia after which Moscow engaged in a “prophylactic”
campaign to prevent any ideological “contamination” that might accompany détente with the
West.
In the euphoria days of high détente, however, Brzezinski’s views toward Eastern Europe
were more often derided as the anachronistic views of a frustrated Cold Warrior. Indeed by the
early 1970s many in the United States assumed that the Cold War had come to a peaceful conclusion
with the Nixon-Brezhnev summit of 1972.
This attitude was reflected in the sustained attack on Radio Free Europe in the early 1970s.
In 1967 Ramparts, a left-wing periodical, had exposed the fact that the CIA had long assisted in the
funding of the operating costs of Radio Free Europe.61 This revelation, coupled with détente, led
to a sustained campaign to close RFE. Moreover the warming atmosphere of superpower détente
led U.S. liberals to charge that RFE harbored a primitive brand of anticommunism out of step with
the improved relations with Moscow.
Radio Free Europe also came under attack from the U.S. State Department and supporters
of the Nixon-Kissinger détente who sought to tame the radio services in order to assuage Moscow’s
sensitivities. Pressure also came from within the Western alliance. West German Chancellors Willy
Brandt and Helmut Schmidt both viewed Radio Free Europe an obstacle to their policy of
promoting a greater East-West “understanding.” Throughout the 1970s both chancellors would
seek to force RFE out of West Germany either by threatening to refuse a renewal of its license or by
inducing it to relocate “voluntarily.” 62 Rumors closer to home suggested that Henry Kissinger was
dangling RFE as a bargaining chip for Soviet concessions in other areas. 63 But the most prominent
opponent of Radio Free Europe was U.S. Senator William
(Spring/Summer, 1974), pp. 46-58.
61 See John M. Goshko, “RFE Alters Sullied Image,” The Washington Post (November 22, 1970).
62 See “Radio Free Europe: Station Break?” Newsweek (March 6, 1972), p. 50.
63 Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule, p. 520. The other radio services were impacted
by détente. In 1974 James Keogh, the former executive editor for Time, took over the directorship
of USIA and immediately moved to distance his agency from the old “cold war” attitudes of his
hard line predecessor Frank Shakespeare. Under Keogh Voice of America began to reflect the views
of Kissinger’s détente. When the program department planned a series of ten-minute excerpts and
summaries from Solzhenitzyn’s Gulag Archipelago, they were cancelled on the claim that they
amounted to “advocacy journalism.” Responding to criticism that the radio services had “gone
soft,” Keogh explained, “The Voice of America is not an international NBC or CBS. Détente
Fulbright, who argued before the Senate in 1972 that the “radios should be given an opportunity
to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold-war relics.”64
Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, the long time head of the Polish desk of RFE, recalled that
Brzezinski’s role was crucial in saving the radio services when they came under attack in the early
1970s.
Whenever we had problems of surviving I called Brzezinski and he immediately used his
influence. Brzezinski understood that the competition of the Cold War was not just a race of arms
but an ideological conflict and that the main instrument of this ideological conflict was Radio Free
Europe on the American end. He consistently protected us and used all the influence he could. He
was one of the few who played a tremendous role in protecting Radio Free Europe, against hostile
Senators, some ultra-liberal elements, and Henry Kissinger, who considered that broadcasting to
foreign countries over the heads of the government was a manipulation of détente.65
Nowak-Jezioranski also knew that he was fighting a problem of perception rather than
reality. Indeed RFE would never fully recover from the charge that it was responsible for stoking
false hopes to the Hungarian opposition in 1956. Some journalists had even coined the term
“Radio Free Europe Syndrome” to describe the American tendency to encourage rebellion in
has changed what we must do in USIA. Our program managers must be sensitive to U.S. policy as
enunciated by the President and the Secretary of State. That policy is that we do not interfere in the
internal affairs of other countries. We’re not in the business of trying to provoke revolutions and
uprisings.” See “Muted Voice of American,” Time (December 16, 1974), p. 85.
64 Bernard Gwertzman, “Senate Panel Rebuffs Nixon on Radio Free Europe,” The New York
Times (July 22, 1971). Brzezinski’s views were no doubt reflected in the comments of a RFE staff
member who had become frustrated with Fulbright’s repeated accusations that RFE was
“antidétente.” “It depends on how you understand détente” argued RFE’s Lucjan Perzanowski. “If
you mean a better relationship between governments while borders remain practically closed,
censorship fully in effect and contacts between people unfree, then Senator Fulbright’s criticism
has some justification. But I understand détente as a long-range process, involving the people at
large. If nothing is done to keep the Western side alive, then this real détente will die. Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty are factors in keeping real détente alive.” Henry Kamm, “Listening in
on Radio Free Europe-The Station That Fulbright Wants to Shut Down,” The New York Times
Magazine (March 26, 1972).
65 Nowak-Jezioranski could, however, take solace in the support he did have—and some
supporters would turn out to be more important than others. In November of 1974 he attended a
talk in West Germany by a Polish Cardinal named Karol Wojtyla in honor of a Nazi war victim. At
a reception afterward, Nowak introduced himself to the future Pope John Paul II who in turn
replied there was hardly a need for an introduction. “I recognize your voice,’ he told Nowak, “I
listen to you every morning as I shave.” Jonathon Kwitny, Man of the Century: The Life and Times of
Pope John Paul II (New York: 1998), p. 246-247.
Eastern Europe only to step back at the moment of truth. But such assessments overlooked the fact
that the tone of RFE had changed a great deal since 1956. Much of the changes were due to the
efforts of Brzezinski and Nowak-Jezioranski who in the late 1950s ensured that RFE tailor its
message to emphasize the idea of “evolution” rather than “revolution.”
Indeed, RFE had a vast audience in Poland. Bronislaw Geremek, who would become a key
adviser to Lech Walesa in Poland’s Solidarity movement, argued that RFE did more to tame the
appetite for revolution than to stoke it:
Without Radio Free Europe I couldn’t imagine the evolution of Poland in the ‘70s. I couldn’t
imagine the appearance of a democratic opposition or the underground publications. When I came
to the Gdansk shipyard in 1980 my first impression was that Radio Free Europe is present here in
Poland—you can see the workers having their radio with them and listening to Radio Free
Europe—and it was not only to get information—it was an expression of freedom-- to have the
possibility to listen the RFE in a free way—-the jamming was terrible but we could always listen to
RFE—we were informed. What Jan Nowak-Jezioranski assured was a kind of political thinking---
that was the difference between Poland and other countries in the region. I think we owe that to
Brzezinski’s activity with Jan Nowak-Jezioranski—that we should think in terms of international
strategy—we should take it step by step—we could contain more freedom, and more freedom was
better than no freedom. Sometimes we had the feeling ‘freedom or not’ as woman cannot be ‘half
pregnant’ and a country cannot be ‘half-free.’ But we understood—and I think that was the result
of Radio Free Europe’s activity in Poland—information and analysis.
And behind that was- of course-Brzezinski.
The events of 1980 were still far on the horizon in Eastern Europe. The question of the 1970s
remained exactly what it had been in 1956 and 1968. What could be done to change the situation
inside what had implicitly, by word and deed, been accepted by Washington as the Soviet sphere
of influence? Brzezinski’s solution, as it had been since the mid-1960s, was to encourage a
European-wide conference in an effort to settle the outstanding issues of World War
II.
This was hardly conventional wisdom. As one scholar has noted Brzezinski represented
“the lone voice in advocating new multilateral frameworks for addressing European security and
attenuating the division of the continent. Two years after the enunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine,
Brzezinski again urged the creation of some permanent consultative mechanism, a joint NATO-
Warsaw Pact commission or a European security commission, to monitor eventual security
arrangements and perhaps even to initiate others.”
Brzezinski was the “lone voice” largely because his call for multilateral postwar conference
put him in rather unusual company. The Soviet leaders had begun calling for an allEuropean
conference on security and cooperation as early as 1954 in an attempt to consecrate the postwar
borders and forestall the West German entrance into the NATO alliance. The call for a European-
wide conference became a mantra for Soviet leaders in the late 1960s as a means to split Western
Europe from the United States while impeding further West European unity.
The United States was less willing to enter a conference that would in effect grant
Western acceptance of the Soviet conquest over Eastern Europe and the Baltic states of Latvia,
Estonia and Lithuania. Yet there were always some in the U.S., Brzezinski foremost among them,
who maintained that the Western powers refusal to formally recognize the borders only
strengthened Soviet control over the region. Brzezinski believed a European conference was
essential to open up the region that had been hermetically sealed since the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Brzezinski found little encouragement from the White House. Indeed Nixon and Kissinger
saw little merit in undertaking a multilateral European framework while the fruits of détente
looked so promising. Brzezinski noted in 1970 that this was short-term thinking. “We should think
of it as a process, the purpose of which is to explore and only eventually resolve the various
outstanding legacies of World War II but we will not be able to do so if the West—and particularly
the United States—keeps shrinking away from the challenge on the jejune argument that we can’t
enter a conference unless we know in advance what its outcome will be.”
By 1972, however, the United States’ opposition to what became formally known as the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) had softened for a number of important
reasons. The Soviets agreed to include both the United States and Canada in the European
conference and agreed to NATO’s demand for parallel talks on the reduction of conventional
military forces (MBFR) in Central Europe. Meanwhile the West had exacted a fourpower agreement
on Berlin. As Kissinger aide, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, would note of the CSCE, “we sold it for the
German-Soviet treaty, we sold it for the Berlin agreement, and we sold it again for the opening of
the MBFR.”
Deliberations on the CSCE began in Helsinki on November 22, 1972. Few observers, even
Zbigniew Brzezinski, would predict how instrumental the conference would be in changing the
political dynamics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Though history would remember the
CSCE for its final “Basket III” declaration on human rights, the United States initially sough to
downplay the issue that could raise problems with Moscow. Indeed Kissinger was known to view
lofty issues such as human rights as a political nuisance in the balance of power game he had
constructed with Moscow. In less formal terms, Kissinger, would dismiss the CSCE process as a
conference about “a bunch of crappy issues.”
In reality the issue of human rights would have far more support from the Western
European delegations. The United States representation, reflecting the views of Kissinger,
continuously stressed the need for greater “realism” and sought to “reign in” the Western
Europeans from raising the delicate issue of human rights. At the same time the Soviet Union used
the early deliberations to stress the sections pertaining to “the inviolability of frontiers” and the
“non-intervention in internal affairs.”
There was still little progress on considerations of human rights when the first round of
CSCE talks ended in Geneva early December 1973. By then the West Europeans expressed
frustration about the lack of support from the United States in advocating the so-called “Basket III”
human rights concerns. The head of the U.S. delegation would never personally participate in the
Basket III negotiations for fear of confronting the Soviets on such a sensitive issue. “We were the
big hitter on the NATO team, but we couldn’t come to the plate,” recalled one frustrated U.S.
diplomat involved in the negotiations.
Nevertheless the Soviet delegation’s efforts to paper over the issue of human rights were
impeded by a number of widely publicized incidents. In August of 1973, the noted Soviet dissident
Andrei Sakharov commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
with an emotional warning against over-selling the virtues of détente. Sakharov, sounding much
like Brzezinski, noted:
Détente without democratization [in the Soviet Union], détente in which the West in effect
accepts the Soviet rules of the game, would be dangerous, it would not really solve any of the
world’s problems and would simply mean capitulating in the face of real or exaggerated Soviet
power. It would mean trading with the Soviet Union, buying its gas and oil, while ignoring other
aspects. I think such a development would be dangerous because it would contaminate the whole
world with the anti-democratic peculiarities of Soviet society, it would enable the Soviet Union to
bypass problems it cannot resolve on its own and to concentrate on accumulating still further
strength. As a result, the world would become helpless before this uncontrollable bureaucratic
machine. I think that if détente were to proceed totally without qualifications, on Soviet terms, it
would pose a serious threat to the world as a whole. It would mean cultivating a closed country
where anything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes, a country wearing a mask that
hides it true face.
In late 1973 the Soviet Union’s other most prominent dissident entered the news when
Soviet authorities arrested Alexander Solzhenitzyn after a copy of The Gulag Archipelago, an intense
three-volume expose of the horrors of Soviet labor camps, was smuggled out of the Soviet
Union and published in the West. In February of 1974 the Soviet leadership solved its problem by
expelling Solzhenitzyn from the Soviet Union. The tempestuous Russian would eventually settle
in the small town of Vermont where he would become a vocal critic of the Nixon-Kissinger version
of détente.
At the same time Nixon and Kissinger continued to view the domestic orientation of the
Soviet Union as off limits. At a NATO meeting in June 1974, Kissinger urged the West Europeans
to be more flexible on pressing issues of human rights at the CSCE, noting that the Soviet system
had survived for fifty years and “would not be changed if Western newspapers were put on sale in
a few kiosks in Moscow.”
President Nixon’s public pronouncements on the human rights issue took a similar line.
Nixon, in a prominent speech in June 1974, denounced “eloquent speeches” and “appeals” from
those urging the United States to utilize its influence on behalf of human rights in other countries,
including the Soviet Union. “We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our
domestic affairs and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene directly
in theirs.”
Brzezinski, commenting midway through the CSCE deliberations, was among the many
political observers who thought Nixon and Kissinger were going to unnecessary lengths to mollify
Moscow on issues of human rights;
While the Soviet side has continued to proclaim domestically that the ideological conflict
must go on unabated and that therefore severe restrictions of basic human rights are justified, the
U.S. side has been relatively inactive at the East-West European Conference now in progress, where
the West Europeans have been assertively demanding freer East-West contacts, and it has been
quietly reducing the effectiveness of both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which for less than
15 cents per head per year have become the most significant U.S. levers for freer communications-
-and thus for social change--in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Nixon’s apparent disregard for Eastern Europe was seen when the site of Yalta was selected
for his last summit with Brezhnev. Nixon, of all people, knew the symbolic power of Yalta. He was
among the most vocal of the Republican voices making political capital by charging that Franklin
Roosevelt had betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta in the closing months of World War II.83 Now
under increasing pressure from the Watergate scandal, Nixon used the summit to put his personal
stamp on détente by stressing the importance of his special relationship with Brezhnev. Détente
had all been possible, Nixon insisted in a speech (perhaps directed as much at his domestic pursuers
as to his Soviet hosts) “because of a personal relationship that was established between the General
Secretary and the President of the United States….because of our personal relationship, there is no
question about our will to keep these agreements and to make more.” 84
83 Reporters at the time took note that Nixon had a choice regarding the site of the summit,
specifically Sochi on the east coast of the Black Sea, or Pitsunda, east of Sochi. Nixon staffers
explained rather defensively that the Yalta site was more “practical” considering the large White
House staff and hundreds of news reporters that were accompanying the United States president.
It was also suggested that Nixon did not want to be “rude” since Brezhnev had voiced his
preference for the Yalta site to show off his version of the Nixon compound he had visited the year
before at San Clemente. Nixon officials remained sensitive to the issue of “Yalta.” In apparent
deference to such sensitivities, Soviet newsmen were instructed by Soviet authorities not to use the
term “Yalta” in their stories. A plan to have the mayor of Yalta give a press briefing to the visiting
American press was also canceled to conform to Nixon’s efforts to have history record the summit
as “Oreanda” rather than “Yalta.” See Murrey Marder “An Irony of Détente Takes Nixon to Yalta,”
The Washington Post (July 1, 1974). Also William Safire, “Ghosts of Yalta,” The New York Times (July
1, 1974).
84 “Reunion at the Summit,” Newsweek (July 8, 1974), p. 18. Nixon would further show his
appreciation by presenting Brezhnev with a silver Chevrolet Monte Carlo to go with the Cadillac
and the Lincoln Continental he had bestowed on the Soviet leader at previous summits. There was
indeed something of an “Animal Farm” effect that had dramatically afflicted the communist
leaderships by the 1970s. The most familiar term applied to the ruling elite of a communist party
state was the “new class” which was the title of a book authored by Milovan Djilas in 1955. Djilas,
a former communist vice-president of Yugoslavia, argued that communist party states were ruled
by a “new class” of party bureaucrats that had secured all power to themselves. Communism,
rather than destroying the class system, had merely substituted a new elite whose power was
defined not by direct ownership of the means of production, as it was under capitalism, but by its
control of and access to special privileges that emanated from its monopoly of power. Djilas’
description of the lifestyle of the new party elite, the access to special stores, cars, vacation villas,
was in sharp contrast to the modest life of the workers in whose name they claimed to rule. Milovan
Djilas, The New Class (New York, 1967). Brezhnev used several luxurious dachas, including a
“hunting lodge” near Moscow and a summer place on the Black Sea. Kissinger recalled that at one
point Brezhnev was showing off his rather expansive hunting lodge (which included a movie
theatre) and asking his American guests to estimate how much it would cost in the United States.
When Kissinger estimated $400,000 Brezhnev’s face grew distraught. Aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt
quickly came to rescue by suggesting it was worth closer to $2 million. The leader of the world’s
workers beamed with pride. “The Cautious Bully,” Newsweek (November
22, 1982), p. 48.
Despite such cordiality, there were some awkward moments at the summit. The major U.S.
television networks had planned to feature stories on Soviet dissidents, including a report by ABC
on Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, who had marked Nixon’s arrival in Moscow with a hunger
strike in protest of the Soviet treatment of political prisoners. The report had scarcely begun when
the production went blank on the word “Sakharov.” Soviet officials later apologized, insisting,
rather implausibly, that the blackout was a spontaneous gesture of
“outrage” by their “television engineers.”
The Soviets would also use the Yalta summit to protest the continued West European focus
on human rights then occurring at the CSCE negotiations. Kissinger, after assuring the Soviet
leadership, would soon approve a preliminary CSCE summit communiqué that significantly
downplayed the human rights provisions being pushed by the West European delegations. The
draft was seen as rather friendly to Soviet interests. As one British diplomat
noted after viewing Kissinger’s advance copy, “At first glance the section on the CSCE reads like a
Soviet draft.”
As mentioned, this would be Nixon’s last summit. In August 1974 the “smoking gun’
appeared which revealed that Nixon had deceived the American public about his direct role in the
Watergate scandal. Nixon, faced with almost certain impeachment by the House and
conviction in the Senate, chose to resign from office.
President Gerald Ford’s reassuring personal style would serve the nation well in the
aftermath of such a polarizing crisis. Yet the new chief executive knew little about foreign affairs.
Few were thus surprised when he announced that Henry Kissinger would stay on board as his
primary foreign policy adviser.
Yet Ford created an immediate controversy within his own party when he chose Nelson
Rockefeller, Kissinger’s long-time patron and personification of the liberal wing of the GOP, as his
Vice President. It was, by most accounts, a reasonable choice considering Rockefeller’s long
executive experience as governor of New York. Yet the decision would enrage the right-wing of the
GOP and led many conservatives to quietly shift their allegiances to Ronald Reagan who would
challenge Ford for the GOP nomination in 1976.
By 1974 the shine was also finally coming off détente. Opposition to détente especially
characterized the increasingly disenchanted right wing of the Republican party, which had never
warmed to the rationale of détente in the first place. Indeed Soviet assertiveness around the world
seemed to contradict Kissinger’s claim that détente was simply another form of
“containment.”
In April of 1975, the North Vietnamese mounted a full-scale offensive against the South.
U.S. television viewers watched the surreal scene as South Vietnamese officials, together with the
American embassy staff, desperately attempted to flee the advancing communist forces. North
Vietnamese forces quickly occupied the capital, renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, and began the
unification of Vietnam under the harsh rule of Hanoi. The final humiliation in Vietnam was
aggravated by more cocksure Soviet boasts that the economic downturn in the West represented a
general “crisis of capitalism” that opened up chances for communist gains, not only in fomenting
“national liberation” struggles in developing world, but also in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.
In hindsight, 1975 would mark the nadir of America’s postwar prestige. Nevertheless
Brzezinski was determined to keep the apparently dead issue of “peaceful engagement” toward
Eastern Europe alive in the public debate. In 1975 Charles Gati, former Brzezinski assistant and
scholar on Eastern European affairs, contributed a controversial article to Foreign Policy magazine
arguing that Eastern Europe had been eclipsed by the policies of détente with Moscow.
“I got a lot of reaction to that piece,” recalled Gati, “including from the Nixon-Kissinger
crowd. They didn’t like it. I wrote it first when I was Columbia, not knowing who I was writing it
for and I showed it to Zbig who was at that time, with Samuel Huntington, one of the two editors
at Foreign Policy magazine. Zbig said we would publish it. He loved it, I think because that was the
sort of thing he would’ve written. But the managing editor was Dick Holbrooke who told me
‘It’s very well written but I would never publish it. I just disagree with you so much. But since
Zbig says, he is the editor, we’re going to run it.’”
Of particular sensitivity was Gati’s critique of the soft line being taken by the U.S.
delegation at the CSCE:
There was something pathetic about American diplomats who, at such international
forums as the European Security Conference, feel obliged to tell their Western European colleagues
to go easy on the Russians on this or similar issues. Détente need not suffer if we were to compete
peacefully for political influence in the Soviet sphere; it is, after all, as legitimate as is the right of
the Soviet Union to compete with us peacefully in our sphere. For that matter, détente need not
suffer a mortal blow if we were to counter the Russian’s bold assertions about our imperial ventures
by pointing out quietly but publicly what everyone knows but has been afraid to say: that, with the
passing of the Portuguese empire, the Soviet Union is the only old-fashioned colonial power left in
the world today.
By this time criticism was also mounting on Kissinger’s apparent disregard for human
rights. The most tangible effort was seen in the Jackson-Vanik Trade bill linked the passage of
Most Favored Trade (MFN) status for the Soviet Union to its policies of Jewish emigration.
Kissinger saw this insertion of domestic politics as a dire threat to the entire edifice of his version
of détente with the Soviet Union. Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
September of 1974, Kissinger remained adamant that the United States must not make domestic
considerations an element of détente. “The United States must realize its limited ability to change
conditions in the East and to combine détente with increasing pressure on the Soviets would be
disastrous.”
Despite Kissinger’s objections the tenor of the CSCE process began to change in the spring
of 1975. The Soviets were calling to conclude the process by summer. The Twenty-Fifth
Party Congress had been scheduled for the spring of 1976, and a successful conclusion to the
Helsinki process was essential to demonstrate the personal success of the Brezhnev in pursuing the
policy of détente. The Soviet Union also planned to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of
World War II to portray that war as a colossal Soviet victory and to reestablish Soviet leadership of
the European communist movement by convening a conference of European communist parties.
Kissinger, in an attempt to deflect charges that he was callous to the plight of Soviet
dissidents, took a firmer line in the negotiations. Despite his apparent disregard for the importance
of the CSCE process, Kissinger was instrumental in successfully concluding the CSCE process in
the spring of 1975. He made it clear to Gromyko that the Soviet Union would have to grant further
concessions on human rights if the West was to accept the final draft. Kissinger’s newfound
firmness, combined with Moscow’s clear desire to conclude the conference were enough to
conclude the process. In May of 1975 Kissinger met with Foreign Minister Gromyko in
Vienna where the Soviets agreed to a trade-off in compromises over Baskets One and Three.
Some high-level Soviet officials expressed concerns that the Basket Three sections would
set a dangerous precedent. Yet Brezhnev and Gromyko prevailed with the argument that they
could sign the accord and simply ignore the clauses they objected to. “We are masters in our own
house,” said Brezhnev rather bluntly, “and we shall decide what we implement and what we
ignore.”95 It was, no doubt, a reasonable argument so long as Kissinger was directing the foreign
policy of the United States.
Indeed, the Soviet concessions on Basket III did seem rather too good to be true to some on
the U.S. delegation. Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, at the time the beleaguered head of Radio Free Europe,
was among those who argued that the issue was resolved more in spite of Kissinger than because
of him. “I remember I talked to George Vest—from the State Department—he was under
Kissinger at the delegation—and he said that they already realized the advantage would be in
Basket III—and he said we, against Kissinger, made it a condition that the Soviets accept Basket
III or we will not sign it—and Russia accepted it believing that it would be meaningless.”
Indeed as soon as the Helsinki “Final Act” was announced in June of 1975 the Soviet Union
began an intense public relations campaign to emphasize the section of the document that endorsed
the postwar frontiers in Europe. This would enrage anti-détente forces in the United States who
immediately charged that Helsinki was nothing more than another Yalta.
It was significant then that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had devoted an entire career to
undoing the results of Yalta, was one of the few public supporters of the Helsinki Final Act.
Indeed, in May of 1975 Brzezinski gave a hopeful speech on the future of Eastern Europe. “History
teaches us,” Brzezinski declared rather presciently, “ that the worst possible way of predicting the
future is viewing it as a continuation of the present. History is full of dramatic gaps and sudden
changes.”
Brzezinski would indeed have reasons to be optimistic about the Helsinki Accords. The
Final Act, he believed, had codified two of the most essential aspects of his “peaceful engagement”
program he had first outlined in the late 1950s. First, the Helsinki Accords finally acknowledged
the long disputed territorial status quo in Europe. This, as Brzezinski often argued, was necessary
to debunk the Soviet claim that it was Eastern Europe’s only protection against the threat of West
German revanchism. More importantly, Brzezinski argued that the
Helsinki Accords legitimized Western influence in the domestic affairs of the Soviet Union and
Eastern European states.
Brzezinski at this time was often demonized within his own Democratic Party as a reflexive
Cold Warrior. Yet Brzezinski’s expertise on the nuances of Eastern Europe and his longterm
strategy toward the region clearly led him to view Helsinki in a much more positive light than did
the more ideologically rigid hard right of the Republican Party which in years hence would so often
be credited with single-handedly defeating the Soviet empire. Paul Henze, who directed Radio Free
Europe under Brzezinski in the Carter Administration, believed Brzezinski’s expertise on the
nuances of Eastern Europe was behind his lonely support for the Helsinki Accords when so many
hardliners in the West viewed it as a capitulation to the Soviet Union:
This was one of the things that enormously appealed to Brzezinski about Radio Free
Europe from the beginning. That is you get into the system and you capitalize on things that the
system says it stands for but obviously doesn’t—that are fraudulent. In agreeing to the whole
Helsinki system the Soviet Union obviously was taking a risk on being able to continue to distort
and misrepresent it—and Brzezinski seized on that very rapidly—and the concept of human rights
Brzezinski saw as the kind of concept which no one could really object to—but which could be
utilized—exploited--to the advantage of spreading freedom not only in Eastern Europe but in other
places as well.
Few agreed with Brzezinski’s initial interpretation of Helsinki. In late June Alexander
Solzhenitzyn was invited to address a gala Washington dinner, hosted by the AFL-CIO, in his
honor. Kissinger advised President Ford to avoid the dinner since Solzhenitzyn’s speech was likely
to include his familiar criticisms of détente. Ford, heeding Kissinger’s advice, stayed away from the
dinner.
Ford’s apparent snub of Solzhenitzyn would provide political red meat for Ronald
Reagan’s right-wing challenge to Ford in the 1976 election. Two conservative Senators, Jesse Helms
of North Carolina, and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, had written Ford in advance, asking
that he formally receive the Russian novelist. (The arch-conservative Helms met with Solzhenitzyn
privately--he was not really considered a “friend of labor” and was not on the guest list of the AFL-
CIO dinner). Upon hearing Ford’s decision not to attend the dinner Helms stormed on the Senate
floor, “I suggest that this is a sad day for our country, if the United States of America must tremble
in cowering timidity for fear of offending Communists unless the
President refuses to see a dedicated exponent of freedom.”
Ford, wary of the looming thunder from the right, quickly announced that he would be
“pleased” to meet with Solzhenitzyn. But the Russian author would only create even more
problems for Ford with his emotional declaration that the Helsinki Accords amounted to the
“enslavement” of Eastern Europe.
In a telephone conversation from the home of Aleksandra Tolstoy, the only surviving
daughter of Leo Tolstoy, Solzhenitzyn took aim at the Helsinki Final Act that Ford was about to
sign. “Since I left Washington for the second time,” remarked Solzhenitzyn, “there have been many
reports in the press concerning the White House change of intention and now the desire to see me.
Among the somewhat contradictory explanations as to why this meeting did not take place earlier,
it was stated that President Ford would prefer only meetings that were ‘substantive’ rather than
‘symbolic.’ I entirely share this view. Nobody needs symbolic meetings. The President will shortly
be leaving for Europe to sign the betrayal of Eastern Europe, to acknowledge officially its slavery
forever. Had I the hope of dissuading him from signing this treaty I myself would seek such a
meeting. However, there is not such hope. If the President considers the 30-year raging of
worldwide totalitarianism as an example of an ‘era of peace’ what will the basis be for a
conversation?”103
There were the magic words—the “betrayal of Eastern Europe.” The remarks set off a
political firestorm in Washington. Solzhenitzyn’s direct attack on the Helsinki Accords revived the
controversy surrounding the original Yalta agreement—more hostile critics considered it another
Munich. Critics from the Republican right stepped up their often over-stated arguments that Ford
and Kissinger had simply handed the Soviets their thirty-year ambition of Western acquiescence to
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe while the West received only vague
States should pursue and aggressive policy to overthrow the Soviet Union. Now I believe that
Solzhenitsyn is a man whose suffering entitles him to be heard and who has stood with great
anguish for his views. But I do believe that if his views became the national policy of the United
States, we would be in a period—we would be confronting a considerable threat of military
conflict.” “Kissinger Sees Perils in Solzhenitzyn’s Views,” The New York Times (July 17, 1975).
103 Bernard Gwertzman, “Solzhenitsyn Says Ford Joins in Eastern Europe’s ‘Betrayal’,” The New
York Times (June 22, 1975).
assurances with respect human rights—provisions, it was argued, that were already included in
their constitutions. The Democratic presidential candidates—including two of Jimmy Carter’s main
rivals—sought to make political capital out of the affair and the souring of détente. Senator Henry
Jackson, long the most vocal critic of détente among Democratic politicians, seized the opportunity
to denounce the Helsinki Accords and meet with Solzhenitzyn—bestowing the Russian author with
a very public Russian style bear hug. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, also critical of détente,
publicly urged Ford to cancel his trip to Helsinki because of Soviet financial support for the
Portuguese Communists.
Solzenitzyn’s remarks set off a barrage of anti-Helsinki sentiments. The New York Times and
The Washington Post, both known generally to be pro-detente, argued respectively that the
CSCE “should not have happened” and that the summit was “unnecessary.” The widely respected
New York Times columnist James Reston, long the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment,
summed up the objections to Ford’s signing of the Helsinki Final Act in a column bluntly titled “Is
Ford Really Serious?” “President Ford,” noted Reston, “ has gone along with this one-sided game
apparently in the belief that if he agrees that the frontiers of Eastern Europe are ‘inviolable’ the
Soviet Union will agree that human rights and internal affairs are also inviolable. But the
compromise, which should probably have been arranged before Helsinki, now has to be tested after
Brezhnev had gotten the border agreements he wanted most.”
“The Final Act” was signed at Helsinki on August 1, 1975, the largest European summit
since the 1815 Congress of Vienna (a point that didn’t help Kissinger’s cause with his more
historically minded critics). The 35 representatives sat shoulder to shoulder at a row of tables under
the television lights of Finlandia House. For a silent seventeen minutes each man in turn put his
signature to a separate page of the 2-inch think, green-leather bound document.
The Helsinki Final Act was not a binding treaty and was thus largely dependent on how it
was interpreted by the various signatories. In his speech at Helsinki the visibly ailing Leonid
Brezhnev gave a perfunctory mention to the provisions for “exchanges between individuals” and
that the Soviet Union would “translate into life” the Helsinki agreement. The Soviet leader, who
had been slurring some of his speech, raised his voice and sharply enunciated his words when he
added that the “main conclusion” of the conference was that no one should try to dictate to others
how “they ought to manage their internal affairs.”
Ford’s speech at Helsinki would prophetically note, “History will judge this conference not
by what we say here today, but what we do tomorrow, not by the promises we make, but by the
promises we keep.” Indeed both Ford and Kissinger would in later years protest the fact that the
administration’s critics misunderstood Helsinki. This claim undoubtedly has some truth to it. Yet
for the remainder of their term in office Ford and Kissinger would say virtually nothing about
Helsinki or the human rights aspects that Brzezinski saw as an opportunity to put the Soviet Union
on defensive. Indeed the term “Basket III” would gain currency in the United States only when
prominent dissidents took it as a rallying call—and when Brzezinski began to advise Jimmy Carter
to focus on it in 1976 presidential campaign.
Indeed the Soviets seemed to win the early spinning wars. The day after the Helsinki
summit, the Soviet Communist daily Pravda was devoted to the CSCE, including the full text of the
Final Act, banner headlines, and photos of Brezhnev at the signing ceremony. The Soviet Politburo
then announced triumphantly, “The all-European conference is the culmination of everything
positive that has been done thus far on our continent to bring about the changeover from ‘cold war’
to détente and the genuine implementation of the principles of peaceful coexistence.”
The nascent opposition groups, faced with such triumphant interpretations by their official
media, had little choice but to interpret Helsinki as another Yalta. But as word spread about the
actual content of the Helsinki Final Act (partly through Western radio broadcasts such as the BBC
and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), opposition groups throughout Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union began to view Helsinki as an opportunity to challenge the repressive regimes under
which they lived.
In Poland the opposition was buoyed by Zbigniew Brzezinski’s prominent defense of the
Final Act. Bronilsaw Geremek recalled those days immediately after the signing the Helsinki Final
Act:
To say very frankly we had some doubts about the Helsinki process. It was thus extremely
important to us that Zbigniew Brzezinski was involved in the process—and he supported the Third
Basket. I have no doubt the Third Basket had the revolutionary role in the implosion of the Soviet
empire. The dissidents, until the third basket, had this feeling of being marginal—and had no legal
reference. With the Helsinki agreement—and the third basket— everybody could say ‘you did sign
it’---if you signed the agreement--and so now we are asking about freedom of information, freedom
of expression, freedom of travels and so on.
Needless to say, Ford’s opponents on the right, especially Ronald Reagan, did not interpret
Helsinki in this respect. The fall-out from the “sell out” at Helsinki was only part of a larger pattern
of discontent that emerged from the right wing of the GOP. By 1975 objections to Kissinger’s
détente were being voiced from within the Ford administration itself. Kissinger’s most prominent
in-house critic was Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, an outspoken intellectual rival who began
to garner headlines with his public concerns about the growing
Soviet military threat and the need for the U.S. to take a harder line in the SALT negotiations. Ford’s
more prescient advisers worried that Schlesinger’s views were adding fuel to the possibility of a
hard line primary challenge from Ronald Reagan.
To Brzezinski, one of the keys to bolster Carter’s foreign policy credentials was to take on
the myth that had come to surround Henry Kissinger. On October 28, 1975 Brzezinski sent Carter
the following memo”
Dear Jimmy: One thought occurs to me: at some point it will be necessary for someone to
take the Kissinger foreign policy head-on. Blaming its shortcomings on Nixon or on Ford will not
do, while Kissinger is likely to become one of the major pillars of the Republican pitch for reelection.
Accordingly, Kissinger’s foreign policy ought to be attacked directly, and his personal role in
shaping it and giving it its somewhat dubious moral-political outlook ought to be the major focus
of such a speech. Moreover, this should be done fairly soon and not during the actual Presidential
campaign, for at that time the credibility of some of the criticisms is going to be necessarily reduced.
Finally, given the fascination of the mass media with Kissinger, an attack directly on his foreign
policy is likely to provoke a great deal of attention. Best Regards, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. P.S. Let me know when you are in NYC.
Carter, however, was beaten to the punch as he considered taking up this strategy. In the
autumn of 1975 Ford’s advisers began to attribute his declining polls numbers to the appearance of
“internal anarchy” at the White House. In order to correct this perception Ford fired Alexander
Haig as his chief of staff and replaced him with Donald Rumsfeld, an ambitious young Illinois
congressman. One of Rumsfeld’s first goals as chief of staff was to show that it was the president,
rather than Kissinger, who was running U.S. foreign policy. Rumsfeld told Ford that his stature
was being damaged by the perception that he was delegating the major foreign policy decisions to
Kissinger while leaving himself with ceremonial tasks such as “ meeting with the Sunflower
Queen and receiving the Thanksgiving turkey.”
In early November of 1975 Rumsfeld was at the center of a major cabinet shakeup designed
in part to “downgrade” Kissinger in an effort to appease the GOP right wing. The complicated
game of musical chairs began suddenly in late October when Vice President Rockefeller
“voluntarily” announced that he would not be Ford’s running mate in 1976. Ford then fired the
outspoken Schlesinger as Defense Secretary and replaced him with Rumsfeld. Richard Cheney,
then a 34-year old Rumsfeld aide, stepped in as Ford’s Chief of Staff. CIA director William Colby,
who was being widely criticized by the right-wing for being overly cooperative with in the
congressional investigations of the CIA, was replaced by George Bush, who was recalled from
Beijing where he was serving as the first U.S. representative to the
People’s Republic of China.
Ford’s rather elaborate attempt to mollify the right wing would prove unsuccessful. In
November 1975 Ronald Reagan appeared before the National Press Club to announce that he
would challenge Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. The closing months of 1975 contained
even more bad news for Kissinger. In November 1975, the Soviet backed Popular Movement for
the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) came to power in Angola. It marked the first time that Soviet
backed military forces (in the form of tanks, planes and rocket launchers and the arrival of 12,000
Cuban combat troops) had intervened on such a scale in Africa. The boldness of the Soviet
involvement in Angola came as a shock to U.S. officials. The Ford administration turned to
Congress to request additional aid for its allies in Angola. Both the Senate and the House, coming
off a decade in Vietnam, voted against allocating more resources for what seemed to be another an
equally lost cause.
Ronald Reagan, now actively campaigning in New Hampshire, rallied his conservative
forces with the call that “It’s time to straighten up and eyeball it with Russia, and the time to start
is in Angola.” Brzezinski, now more directly advising Carter’s presidential campaign, took a more
cautious tone, noting that the “sweeping generalizations made by the Administration, about a
‘generation of peace’ were wrong and misleading. Détente is going to be a mixed relationship with
elements of both conflict and cooperation.”
The victory of Soviet arms in Angola would, in hindsight, represent the most optimistic
point in the Soviet role in the world. In March 1976 Brezhnev used the Twenty-Fifth Party
Congress to reaffirm his leadership of the Party and to proclaim the recent string of Soviet foreign
policy successes. Brezhnev’s five-hour keynote address, heard by some 5,000 Soviet delegates and
hundreds of foreign guests, including Fidel Castro and North Vietnam’s Le Duan, extolled the
benefits of détente, listing the recent string of Soviet foreign policy victories--in Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, and Angola, treaties of friendship and cooperation with Iraq and India, as well as the
normalization of relations with West Germany. Summing it up, Brezhnev concluded, optimistically
that the “international position of the Soviet Union has never been more stable.”
Brzezinski thought otherwise. As the Soviet Union boasted of its own version of détente
and its new role as a global superpower, Brzezinski saw opportunities to exploit Moscow’s
weaknesses in a place few thought the Soviets were vulnerable. In late January 1976 Brzezinski
submitted a memo to the Carter campaign suggesting that "only a more comprehensive and a more
reciprocal détente can enhance peace and promote change within the Communist system”…”The
abandonment of the policy of benign neglect toward Eastern Europe is desirable, for the United
States ought to be at least as interested in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union is in
Latin America."
Yet in 1976, at the height of America’s “crisis of confidence,” the Helsinki Final Act was
increasingly being berated by the GOP right wing as a Soviet triumph along the lines of Yalta.
Indeed as Brzezinski had long noted the hard right wing rarely moved beyond rhetoric in
expressing its outrage toward the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Brzezinski believed that
the nascent campaign of Jimmy Carter could move beyond rhetoric and utilize the Helsinki Final
Act to accelerate the process that would finally end the Cold War division of Europe. Brzezinski’s
role in advising the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter would be instrumental in changing
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the interpretation of Helsinki from a Yalta-like “sell out” to a rallying call for the emerging civil
societies the would one day lead the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe.
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CHAPTER SIX: CAMPAIGN ‘76
Zbigniew Brzezinski assumed command of the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter’s campaign
in late 1975. Henceforth Carter made it clear that any memo pertaining to foreign policy first had
to first pass through Brzezinski. Any staff member who tried to short circuit the system was
invariably met with a hand wave from Carter with instructions to “clear it with
Zbig.”’ Brzezinski’s most immediate task was to convince the nation and the foreign policy
establishment that a former one-term governor from Georgia was capable of running the foreign
affairs of the world’s most powerful nation.
In the early stages of the campaign, Carter’s deliberately “populist” approach to foreign
policy often came across as naïve to news reporters who had become accustomed to listening to
Henry Kissinger explain U.S. foreign policy for the past seven years. Indeed Carter’s early stump
speeches on foreign policy often involved little more than a robotic listing all of the nations he had
visited in connection with Georgia’s trade missions. In doing so Carter would invariably recite the
name of the country in addition to the city. “I’ve been in Paris, France, Bonn, Germany, Brussels,
Belgium, Tokyo, Japan, Sao Paulo, Brazil….”
The speech was designed to point out that Carter as far more than a provincial governor.
Yet by the middle of 1975 it had produced the opposite effect. According to journalist Jules
Witcover, Carter’s pitch came across “like a Georgia country boy mentioning far off places of his
dreams. One could never be certain whether Carter did this guilelessly, or whether it was a clever
way of reminding listeners that for all his world travels he was essentially a Georgia country boy.”
Witcover would find out just how mechanical the speech was when he got a chance to speak with
Carter informally at a candidate’s dinner in New Hampshire. Witcover noted that George Wallace
was about to embark on his first trip to Europe, and then jocularly suggested that Carter, as the
self-proclaimed “anti-Wallace candidate,” might have to follow suit. “No,” interrupted an
unsmiling Carter, “in the last two years, I’ve been to Paris, France, Bonn,
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Germany, Brussels, Belgium….”3
Brzezinski understood that while Carter’s trade missions might be enough campaigning
against the likes of Birch Bayh and George Wallace, he would require a more comprehensive
foreign policy if he hoped to present a viable alternative to the grand design of Henry Kissinger.
By January of 1976 Carter had taken full advantage of Brzezinski’s previous allowances to
“plagiarize freely.” For the remainder of the campaign the bulk of his foreign policy speeches were
lifted almost verbatim from Brzezinski’s scholarly articles and campaign memos.
If there was one Democratic strategist who was familiar with Kissinger’s strengths and
vulnerabilities it was certainly Zbigniew Brzezinski. Carter’s stump speeches began to attack
3 Ibid. p. 124. Nevertheless Witcover recalled that Carter seemed quite worldly compared to
George Wallace’s six-country, two-week tour of Europe that took place in October 1975. “Aboard
a chartered British jet, Wallace traveled to meet British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Tory
leader Margaret Thatcher, Belgian Prime Minister Leo Tindemans, Italian President Giovanni
Leone and Premier Aldo Moro, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and
French Minister of Industry Michel d’Ornano—but he was pointedly snubbed by West German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Pope Paul VI. It was
perhaps the strangest overseas odyssey made by a prominent American politician. He permitted
no reporters to accompany him—begging, without justification, lack of space on his plane. But he
did find space, however, for a number of old cronies, including two men linked to the John Birch
Society who at first were billed as ‘foreign-policy advisers’ but later, when their identities became
known, as just old friends along for the ride. Throughout, Wallace was on his best behavior, careful
not to make a slip that would cause him to be embarrassed. ‘I hope I don’t commit any ‘foxpaws’
in Europe’ he was overheard saying to a friend as he left a Brussels hotel. And he tried hard to be
a gracious visitor—as in Belgium, which he described as ‘this fine small country, which has sent a
number of people to Alabama.’ During and after the trip Wallace declined to discuss the substance
of any of his talks in detail. ‘What’s good for Western Europe is good for the United States and vice
versa,’ he said repeatedly to questions. He acknowledged at one point that his talks were “mainly
courtesy calls” and that a major reason he was in Europe was simply to be able to say he had been
there. The surprising thing was how little Wallace seemed to enjoy the experience. When he got
back home, I went down to Montgomery to interview him, and I asked how Europe impressed
him. ‘I’ve seen Europe on television,’ he told me. ‘You can learn as much about going abroad by
watching and reading news, and reading books and stories and publications, as you can be seeing
some concrete walls, a few automobiles in traffic jams and some scenery.’” Witcover, Marathon pp.
180-181.
Kissinger’s worldview from both conservative and liberal angles. In the same speech Carter
denounced the “Nixon-Ford-Kissinger obsession with power blocs and spheres of influence,” for
allowing the Soviets to get the best of détente, for being inattentive to the rising turmoil in the
developing world, for alienating the traditional allies in Western Europe and Japan, and for
neglecting the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed by the early
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spring Carter was hitting his mark. As one Kissinger biographer would note, “Hearing Brzezinski's
snide words slung at him each day, not with a slightly embittered Polish accent but a smiling
Georgia accent, drove Kissinger to near distraction."
Jimmy Carter emerged from national obscurity in January 1976 with a surprising win in
the Iowa caucus. Carter’s follow up victory in the New Hampshire primary a few weeks later gave
the once unknown candidate the unlikely status of “front-runner” in a rapidly thinning field of
candidates. Carter’s victory over George Wallace in the March Florida primary marked a turning
point in the campaign. It proved that a racial moderate could win in the South, while partially
negating the GOP “southern strategy” that had been so successful in the previous two elections.
Carter’s victory also made him more appealing the suspicious northern liberals if only because he
had finally removed the stain of Wallace’s racist legacy from the Democratic Party.
Brzezinski’s strategy also made it clear that Jimmy Carter was not another “McGovern”
that Republican operatives could pigeonhole as a liberal weak on issues of national security.
Carter’s triumph in Florida also allowed him to focus more closely on the general election and a
