Zbig by Charles Gati

Author:Charles Gati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Working Hard, Having Fun at the NSC

ROBERT HUNTER

Council on Foreign Relations, talk by ex-President Jimmy Carter, 1981

(Hostile questioner): “Mr. President, why did you always show preference to Dr. Brzezinski over Secretary of State Vance?”

(President Carter): “Because Zbig sent me 10 ideas a night, and I was lucky to get a single idea a month out of the State Department.”

These quotations bookend a milestone in the history—or the histrionics—of the struggle between the National Security Council (NSC) staff led by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the State Department led by Cyrus Vance, perhaps forever unresolved and unreconciled. I am not impartial in this contest. I witnessed Zbig during our ill-fated effort to make Hubert H. Humphrey president in 1968, and also as one of his NSC staffers dealing with Western Europe and then the Middle East for all but two hours and twenty minutes of the Carter administration. True, I later worked closely with Cy Vance, whom I also greatly admired.

Jimmy Carter’s summary comment, above, is a major reason for my partiality: Zbig valued and actively sought out talent, wherever it was to be found, in and out of government (while disdaining ignorance and suffering no fools). We were thus, perhaps, the most eclectic lot in NSC history. Over many years, Zbig had built up his mental Rolodex of people who might, one day, help him serve the nation at a president’s right hand—as opposed to the motley that since those days has so often dominated the NSC staff. Indeed, the standard judgment is that Brzezinski’s NSC team was rivaled only by Kissinger’s—each team very small, very professional, very committed and competitive, and each adept at long-term, strategic thinking. They were the class acts of the White House national security apparatus throughout America’s top days as superpower.

Equally important, Brzezinski respected others’ opinions and judgments, once tested in the crucible of his pointed, often withering cross-examination. The surest test of his fair-minded approach to issues and ideas was found in the results of a staff member’s debate with Zbig, in which he had to win not only the argument but every point in it, producing great frustration and a shaking of the head on leaving his office. Then a day or so later, insight set in for us, when Zbig would play back, even word for word, the colleague’s “tested-to-destruction” analysis for the benefit of the president, a senator, or a foreign statesman—imitation as the highest compliment! Over time, he also developed enough confidence in us to forward our memos directly to the president with little blue-penciling—and this was a president who read every sentence, every word put in front of him (and who was as merciless on punctuation as on logical error).

Each night we had to report to Zbig by memo (no e-mail then!) our day’s activities, along with ideas that he might use with the president. We had to report in detail all of our foreign contacts and our talks with journalists, but we were never told “don’t talk with thus and so; don’t do that again.

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