An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.
“Deeply and meticulously researched . . . a highly readable reminder of how US and global politics looked and felt before the Cold War ended. Brzezinski is portrayed vividly, warts and all.” —Guardian
“Zbig is a brilliant study of an American statesman, a compelling biography of both a man and a moment, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. What Kissinger, his friend and rival, was to Republicans in the 1970s, Brzezinski was to the Democrats—a formidable intellect and advocate who saw the Soviet threat more clearly than most in the upper echelons of power in Washington. This is history that matters more than ever today, given the resurgent threat from Russia, powerfully rendered by the great Ed Luce.” —Susan Glasser, coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers, The Man Who Ran Washington and The Divider
“Edward Luce’s Zbig is not only the definitive biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a crucial figure in the history of the Cold War, but also a book with real insights into the nature of power—especially the ways in which intellectual valor and good faith can come into conflict with the ugly realities of the world. For anyone who wants to understand the history of America and the world, this is a useful and important book.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.
“A brilliant architect of the American Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski deserves a brilliant biography, and Ed Luce has given us just that: a sensitive, deeply researched, and fair-minded portrait of a man who had a remarkable journey and has left America, and the world, the most significant of legacies.” —Jon Meacham, author of And Then There Was Light
