Zbig Deal: Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist: President Carter: The White House Years.

• Author: Serfaty, Simon
• Position: President Carter: The White House Years - Book review

Justin Vaisse, Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 505 pp., $35.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years, Foreword by Madeleine Albright (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 2018), 999 pp., $40.

Justin Vaisse's Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist is the first biography of its kind published in the United States. Why it took so long is surprising. The author, too, is a surprise--a talented French historian turned practitioner who has been the director of foreign policy planning at the French Quai d'Orsay for the past several years. By his account, it is while he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution that he met Brzezinski in 2008 and developed "a relation of trust" with him. Vaisse was given access to Brzezinski's papers, though not his personal White House diaries, and thus the book was born. It is not an authorized biography, but Brzezinski must have been pleased by what he knew of the work (first published in French shortly before his death). The readers, too, will be pleased. This is a solid account of Brzezinski's absorbing journey. But it is not a whole life story. In a sense it starts late, with not enough said of Brzezinski's formative years when he became the person he was, and it ends early, with not enough said of his closing decades during which he grew into "America's grand strategist."

Vaisse's intention was to give "particular attention to the four years Brzezinski spent at the White House," but Stuart Eizenstat's authoritative Jimmy Carter: The White House Years offers a fuller account of them. Unlike Vaisse, Eizenstat is a natural for such a book. A core member of Carter's Georgia Mafia, he knew his subject and shared his history. His narrative relies not only on the president's papers but also on thousands of pages of his own handwritten notes and hundreds of interviews held with the most significant participants from those years. The revisionist assessment of the Carter presidency he offers is overdue on issues of national policy, and it is pointedly timely on questions of presidential character. This is not just a good and informative book: it is a necessary read, even though the writing is occasionally tedious and some conclusions overstated. Indeed, next time you belittle Carter, think again and look around.

We all have our stories," wrote "Madam Secretary" Madeleine Albright, whose own "inconceivable" career--her word--got its delayed start under Brzezinski forty years ago. The very concept of a biography begins as a dialogue between the author and his subject, with the reader as a passive participant. The dialogue must somehow combine what the narrator chooses to ask with what the subject is prepared to share and what the reader wishes to know. "I am an American, Chicago born" says Saul Bellow's Augie March, as if that introduction was sufficient as a reminder that history begins at birth. But there is no one to tell what sort of a tale the future will tell. Only over time does the past build up, a big leap or a small step at a time, until the historian reconstructs it, a word and a chapter at a time--and, borrowing again from Albright's memoirs, "describe not just what happened but also why and how events were influenced by human relationships" which cannot all be related or even remembered. T. S. Elliot put it thusly: "The historical sense involves not only the perception of the pastness of the past, but its presence," or at least its rendition.

The late Tony Judt distinguished between "the facts on the ground" and "the facts inside"--those that fill the readers with knowledge and those that speak to their soul. Vaisse's Brzezinski provides mainly the former, including bits of marginal or undigested research, like his salary history as a younger professor at Colombia University, and other odd references or characterizations, overlooked by the editor, like Brzezinski's "solid" scholarship and his "light" foreign accent, both later corrected. More significant, though, are the missing "facts inside"--emotions, memories, a sense of place and an idea of self--all those things past that remain present long after much of everything else has been forgotten.

Thus, Brzezinski grew up rather extraordinarily, at a time which Brzezinski later called one of mega deaths and mega myths, and which left, he told Vaisse, a "deep" and "enormous impression" on him as a young boy. But little is said about what those impressions were, why he "often" was "stressed" over "how different he felt from the WASP elite," what he wrote in his "detailed diary of the war's daily developments" and which he "discussed at length with his father." More is said about his early years at Harvard, Brzezinski's first stop in the United States, where he "began to feel like an American, and, even more strikingly, to be treated like an American." But how did that come about? To become an American was "easier" than to be American, confided Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs--always "a complex fate," added historian Henry Steele Commager, whether one "came from England and Scotland, from Holland and Baden and France," let alone Warsaw, or Furth for Kissinger and Prague for Albright.

To be sure, Brzezinski barely lived in Poland: only three years, as...