Word: brzezinski
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...