Word: brzezinsky
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zbigniew Brzezinski Farrar, Straus & Giroux 587 pages...
From the moment that rumors of its gossipy contents began circulating along the Potomac, Zbigniew Brzezinski's memoirs of four years as National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration have enlivened Georgetown cocktail parties with outrage and titillation over his putdowns of erstwhile colleagues. He has waved the furor aside, saying that what matters is not whether former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance personifies the decline of the Wasp elite, or whether "the loving way" that Walter Mondale combed his hair betrayed insecurity, but the "substance" of the issues he tackles in these pages...
...Brzezinski has a point. But as so often in the past, he is complaining about a problem largely of his own making. For all his intellectual adroitness and rhetorical flair, he also has a huge blind spot. He does not seem to realize how often his candor, when directed at others, looks like malice and, when directed at himself, looks like shameless egotism...
...contrast with intellectually forceful predecessors like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Clark does not operate a rump State Department in the White House basement. "I don't have my own agenda separate from the President's," says the soft-spoken aide. He has consolidated his authority by bringing a surface placidity and orderliness to the NSC office. Memos flow smoothly...
Muted versions of this idea were born before the Reagan Administration. Kissinger feared that détente, if oversold, might undercut support for defense. He oversold it nonetheless, but the result was more the undercutting of detente itself. Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, noted in his journal in 1978 that he and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown "both worried that SALT will be used to generate such euphoria about American-Soviet relations that it will be difficult to face realistically either the Soviet military or the Soviet regional challenge...