‘Zbig’ Review: Kissinger’s Chief Rival
That Zbigniew Brzezinski would be a force was visible early. As a child, he recorded his main interest as ‘Europe (foreign affairs).’
May 13, 2025
Since the creation of the position of White House national-security adviser, more than two dozen people have filled the position. The two men best known for the job, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, held it in the 1970s. Both seemed straight from Hollywood central casting. They were foreign-born, Harvard-trained academics with elaborate geostrategic theories. Both dominated the administrations in which they served, and both outshined the secretaries of state with whom they worked. Kissinger has been the subject of dozens of books, but Brzezinski, his great rival, has received markedly less biographical attention.
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Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet
Edward Luce, an editor and columnist with the Financial Times, corrects some of this disparity with “Zbig.” There is a lot of ground to cover, and Mr. Luce does so ably in 560 tightly packed pages. Born in Poland, Brzezinski moved to Canada when his father, a diplomat, was posted to Montreal in 1938. Brzezinski published his first major work in 1960—“The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict”—and he was continually on the foreign-policy scene in one way or another from then until his death in 2017.
Mr. Luce is a regular guest on the show MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which features Joe Scarborough and his wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, Zbig’s daughter. The father appeared frequently on the program, showing off his quick and biting wit. In his first on-air encounter with Mr. Scarborough, on the subject of Israel, Brzezinski told the host, “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.”
That Brzezinski would be both talented and difficult was foreseeable from his childhood. While Brzezinski’s Canadian classmates listed as their interests “Hollywood,” “Eating,” “Telling tales” and “Yawning”—Zbig, age 10 or 11, wrote “Europe (foreign affairs).” His rough edges also manifested early. Brzezinski’s own mother wrote in her diary when he was 6, “Zbysio, my son, why must you be so mean, so prickly.”
It was at Harvard that Brzezinski first encountered Kissinger, several years ahead in his graduate studies. Brzezinski once attended a Kissinger lecture—and walked out. Still, according to Mr. Luce, the rivalry didn’t begin for another two decades, on Nov. 30, 1968. On that day, Kissinger was named national-security adviser for the incoming Nixon administration. “Brzezinski went to a store in downtown Washington that sold stationery,” Mr. Luce records. “There he bought a small notebook in which he wrote down the names of his future national security team.” Most of the names he wrote down would serve under Brzezinski in the White House.
The sparring with Kissinger continued for decades. When Kissinger heard that Brzezinski was critical of his actions, he fumed to his aides, “Brzezinski is a total whore. He’s been on every side of every argument. He wrote a book on ‘Peaceful Engagement’ and now that we are doing most of what he said in the book, he charges us with weakness.” The remark reveals anger but also deep knowledge of Brzezinski’s work. As for Brzezinski, when he heard of Kissinger’s complaint years later, he laughed it off, saying, “Henry is a friend of mine—he must have meant ‘bore.’ ”
When Brzezinski was in power, Kissinger had no qualms about criticizing him directly to Zbig’s boss, Jimmy Carter. Once, after Kissinger had a private meeting with Carter, Brzezinski asked about their talk. Carter said: “He came to complain about you, how you are saying that he is critical of our foreign policy and how embarrassing this is to him.” Brzezinski assumed that the laughing Carter was joking, so he asked again about the nature of the conversation. Carter replied, “I just told you.”
Mr. Luce observes that except for accidents of history, Kissinger could have served in a Democratic administration and Brzezinski in a Republican one. Ronald Reagan, in fact, twice considered Brzezinski for national-security adviser. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski had minor roles in the Kennedy and Johnson years. Brzezinski’s ideas populated Kennedy’s big speech in Berlin on June 26, 1963. That speech—in which the U.S. president criticized the Soviet Bloc but expressed support for its people—was overshadowed by Kennedy’s earlier “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” appearance at the Rudolph Wilde Platz. But the June 26 address shows the degree to which Brzezinski’s work was influencing foreign policy long before the Carter years.
As national-security adviser, Brzezinski was staunchly anti-Soviet, as he had been throughout his life. Carter was less so, at least until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the sharp-elbowed Brzezinski had an internal opponent in Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The two men—and their teams—clashed throughout the administration.
Brzezinski had been skeptical of the State Department for years, and his time in government did nothing to diminish that skepticism. In 1978 a reporter asked why State would object to the president pressing human-rights concerns with the Soviets. Brzezinski’s cutting reply: “Because they are concerned that the Soviets might become so irritated that they will be unwilling to accept our concessions.”
In the end, it was neither the Soviets nor the State Department but an inability to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis that brought about the end of the Carter administration and, apart from some consulting roles, the end of Brzezinski’s time in government. Brzezinski continued to opine on foreign policy. As Mr. Luce points out, however, he did so without being closely affiliated with either political party. Mr. Luce speculates that this independent approach is both why he never returned to government and why he never received “his full due.” That is probably right, but it’s also true that Brzezinski’s elbows were very sharp.
Mr. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former senior White House aide. He is the author, most recently, of “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.”
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Appeared in the May 14, 2025, print edition as 'Kissinger’s Chief Rival'.