Zbig-Think

By Strobe Talbott

POWER AND PRINCIPLE: MEMOIRS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, 1977-1981

by Zbigniew Brzezinski Farrar, Straus & Giroux 587 pages; $22.50

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.

Brzezinski believes that journalists overstated the seriousness of the Administration's intramural bickering, particularly between himself and Vance. In fact, this book makes clear that the press underplayed the extent and significance of those divisions. Almost every issue provoked a fight, and almost every fight ended in a jerry-built compromise.

Even in analyzing what he sees as critical mistakes, Brzezinski is quick to blame others, and he is unpersuasive about how he would have done better, despite the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity to pose solutions that cannot be tested against events. The Administration's dithering over the Soviet-Cuban intervention in Ethiopia was, he asserts, a disastrous turning point. The fault, he quickly adds, lay largely with Vance and others who were loath to exert power. If Brzezinski had had his way, the U.S. would have sternly warned the Kremlin about the effect of its Ethiopian gambit on arms-control talks. He would have perhaps even sent an aircraft carrier to show the flag off the Horn of Africa. Brzezinski's response might have been tougher than Vance's, but he does not demonstrate how such actions could have been more effective.

Carter's adviser also argues that the Administration knew what it wanted and knew what it was doing in foreign policy.

The aim was to champion American values like human rights while at the same time demonstrating American might, as in the dispatch of an aircraft carrier to some far-off trouble spot. Brzezinski sums up that goal in the title phrase, the reconciliation of power with principle. But this is just the sort of slogan that the author constantly mistook for practical wisdom when advising his President. He indulges his love affair with what he describes as "code" words that might make sense in a political science textbook but that defied translation into workable policies.

Brzezinski still thinks he improved on his rival and predecessor Henry Kissinger by insisting that detente with the Soviet Union be "increasingly comprehensive and genuinely reciprocal." He italicizes the phrase, almost as though typographical emphasis could reinforce its truth. But neither five years ago nor in Brzezinski's retelling now do these words mean much in the real world. It is the problem of the blind spot again; Brzezinski does not realize how often his theorizing appears as glibness or gobbledygook.

Another objective he seeks to advance but succeeds only in undermining is the rehabilitation of Carter, who is one of the few people treated generously. But the impression created here is of a Chief Executive hopelessly concerned with minutiae, mechanics and abstractions of foreign policy and very much enthralled by Zbig's bigthink. Brzezinski records numerous flattering notes and calls from his boss: "After my appearance on the Sunday talk shows he would phone me, as sometimes did Rosalynn, to tell me how well I had done."

Having placed himself prominently in the big picture, Brzezinski concludes that "President Carter will be appraised more generously by posterity than he was by the electorate in 1980." Posterity's judgment will have to wait, but a favorable appraisal would scarcely be substantiated by this book. --By Strobe Talbott This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.