National security adviser to Carter and reformed hawk
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the combative, visionary foreign policy intellectual who helped bring Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976 and then guided him through a series of international crises that contributed significantly to Mr. Carter’s defeat at the polls four years later, died Friday night. He was 89.
“My father passed away peacefully tonight,” his daughter, Mika Brzezinski said on her Twitter account.
The Polish-born strategist became a lightning rod for criticism over the roles he played in the Iranian hostage crisis, a broad but unrewarding diplomatic confrontation with the Soviet Union, and Mr. Carter’s innovative but unevenly implemented human-rights policy.
Mr. Brzezinski’s admirers focused on achievements that included the full normalization of U.S. relations with China, an expanded American role in the Middle East that produced an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, and skillful involvement behind the scenes that kept Poland’s 1980 Solidarity revolt against Communist rule alive and effective.
The author of more than 30 books, Mr. Brzezinski gradually moved away from the strident advocacy of military power and the need to show resolve that made his reputation as an anti-Soviet hawk during his tenure as Mr. Carter’s national security adviser.
But Mr. Brzezinski maintained that there was more continuity in his thinking than was apparent. “I didn’t have the time to correct distortions or misunderstanding of complex ideas,” he said in a 2014 interview.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw on March 28, 1928. When he was 10, his father, Tadeusz, a diplomat from an aristocratic Catholic family, was posted to Montreal as Poland’s consul general.
The temporary assignment turned into extended refuge for the Brzezinski family as Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union, partitioned, and then absorbed into the Soviet empire after the war.
After obtaining a master’s degree in political science from McGill University in 1950, he enrolled in Harvard and received a doctorate in government three years later.
Becoming an American citizen in 1958, Mr. Brzezinski was active in the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and later the Trilateral Commission, private groups of U.S. business executives, intellectuals and politicians who work to strengthen American ties abroad through dialogue.
His books, journal articles and television appearances propelled him to the fore of Democratic Party foreign policy circles.
He proposed “peaceful engagement” with the Soviet Union and made that phrase a dominant theme after joining the Policy Planning Council of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State Department.
Mr. Brzezinski’s stock rose after Johnson used “peaceful engagement” in a foreign policy speech, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey made him a principal adviser to his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1968.