Word: brzezinski
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...expanded and gone about its business, which to date has included producing about 250 books and publications, a series of presidential administrators, and untold amounts of research on international topics. This week, it will celebrate that anniversary with a gala whose guests will include former National Security Advisor Zbiginiew Brzezinski...
Even in analyzing what he sees as critical mistakes, Brzezinski is quick to blame others, and he is unpersuasive about how he would have done better, despite the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity to pose solutions that cannot be tested against events. The Administration's dithering over the Soviet-Cuban intervention in Ethiopia was, he asserts, a disastrous turning point. The fault, he quickly adds, lay largely with Vance and others who were loath to exert power. If Brzezinski had had his way, the U.S. would have sternly warned the Kremlin about the effect of its Ethiopian gambit...
Nonetheless, Brzezinski's book is a far richer resource for historians than previously published accounts of the Carter period by Hamilton Jordan and Jimmy Carter himself. Cyrus Vance's Hard Choices, to be published June 17, is reported to be rather tame and gentlemanly...
Like most political memoirs, Power and Principle is largely an exercise in self-justification. Brzezinski tries hard to guide future historians in their judgments. His thesis is that the Administration he served got a bum rap from the press and from the voters. Always vigorously, sometimes ingeniously, and with lengthy references to a journal he kept with this book in mind, he seeks to prove some claims and disprove some charges. The result, in both cases, is often the opposite of what he intends...
...Brzezinski believes that journalists overstated the seriousness of the Administration's intramural bickering, particularly between himself and Vance. In fact, this book makes clear that the press underplayed the extent and significance of those divisions. Almost every issue provoked a fight, and almost every fight ended in a jerry-built compromise...