My father passed away peacefully tonight. He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life. I just knew him as the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have. I love you Dad❤️ #HailToTheChief

A post shared by Mika Brzezinski (@mikabrzezinski) on May 26, 2017 at 7:09pm PDT</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, has died, his daughter announced on social media.

“My father passed away peacefully tonight. He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life. I just knew his as the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have. I love you Dad #HailToTheChief,” his daughter Mika, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” wrote on Instagram.

He died Friday at the age of 89.

Brzezinski served as Carter’s principal foreign policy adviser during the 1976 campaign and as national security adviser from 1977-1981. In his role, he was involved in brokering the Camp David Accords, the signing of the SALT II treaty and wrestling with Iran’s transition from a US ally to an anti-Western Islamic republic.

Carter described Brzezinski as brilliant, dedicated, and loyal.

“Rosalynn and I are saddened by the death of Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was an important part of our lives for more than four decades and was a superb public servant,” the former president said in a statement.

Carter asked Brzezinski to join his team during his first presidential campaign after he studied Brzezinski’s “impressive background and his scholarly and political writings.”

“I liked him immediately, and we developed an excellent personal relationship. He was inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor when I became president,” Carter said in the statement.

Brzezinski helped Carter set “vital foreign policy goals” and became a “source of stimulation” for the departments of defense and state, the former president wrote.

“He was brilliant, dedicated, and loyal, and remained a close advisor to my work at The Carter Center. I will miss him,” Carter said.

Brzezinski, a U.S. international relations scholar, studied at McGill University in Montreal and earned a doctorate degree in political science at Harvard University.

He also served as foreign affairs adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1981, Brzezinski was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of US-China relations and his contributions to the country’s human rights and national security policies.

Brzezinski was remembered by his daughter’s co-host, Joe Scarborough.

“Dr. Brzezinski fought tirelessly to bring freedom to his homeland of Poland. He was a fierce Cold Warrior against Russian aggression,” Scarborough wrote on Twitter.

More recently, Brzezinski was senior research professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a counselor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In 2016, Brzezinski received the US Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award, the agency’s highest civilian honor.</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and father of MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, died Friday at a hospital in Falls Church, VA. He was 89.

“My father passed away peacefully tonight. He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life. I just knew his as the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have. I love you Dad #HailToTheChief,” she wrote.

Brzezinski served as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser from 1977 to 1981 after serving as Carter’s principal foreign policy adviser during the 1976 campaign. Major foreign policy events during his tenure include the normalization of relations with China, along with the severing of ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan, the signing of the SALT II treaty, brokering of the Camp David Accords and Iran’s transition from U.S. ally to to anti-Western Islamic Republic.

In recent years, he would often phone in to his daughter’s MSNBC show Morning Joe to weigh in on folicy policy issues and discuss the issues of the day.

In 1981, Brzezinski was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of US-China relations and his contributions to the country’s human rights and national security policies.

Brzezinski also was remembered by Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough.

Brzezinski recently was a senior research professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a counselor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 2016, he received the US Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award, the agency’s highest civilian honor.</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the tumultuous years of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, died Friday at a hospital in Virginia. He was 89.

His death, at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, was announced Friday by his daughter, Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”

Like his predecessor Henry A. Kissinger, Brzezinski was a foreign-born scholar (he in Poland, Kissinger in Germany) with considerable influence in global affairs, both before and long after his official tour of duty in the White House. In essays, interviews and television appearances over the decades, he cast a sharp eye on six successive administrations, including that of Donald Trump, whose election he did not support and whose foreign policy, he found, lacked coherence.

Brzezinski was nominally a Democrat, with views that led him to speak out, for example, against the “greed,” as he put it, of a U.S. system that compounded inequality. He was one of the few foreign policy experts to warn against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But in at least one respect his rigid hatred of the Soviet Union — he had stood to the right of many Republicans, including Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon. And during his four years under Carter, beginning in 1977, thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost guided much of U.S. foreign policy, for better or worse.

He supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He tacitly encouraged China to continue backing the murderous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, lest the Soviet-backed Vietnamese take over that country.

He managed to delay implementation of the SALT II arms treaty in 1979 by raising objections to Soviet behavior in Vietnam, Africa and Cuba; and when the Soviets went into Afghanistan late that year, “SALT disappeared from the U.S.-Soviet agenda,” as he noted in a memoir four years later.

Brzezinski, a descendant of Polish aristocrats (his name is pronounced Z-BIG-nyehv breh-ZHIHN-skee), was a severe, even intimidating figure, with penetrating eyes and a strong Polish accent. Washington quickly learned that he had sharp elbows as well. He was adept at seizing the spotlight and freezing out the official spokesman on foreign policy, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, provoking conflicts that ultimately led to Vance’s resignation.

Where Vance had endorsed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of a “triangular” power balance among the United States, China and the Soviet Union, Brzezinski scorned such “acrobatics,” as he called them. He advocated instead what he called a deliberate “strategic deterioration” in relations with Moscow, and closer ties to China.

By his own account, he blitzed Carter with memos until he got permission to go to Beijing in May 1978, over State Department resistance, to begin talks that would lead to full diplomatic relations seven months later. Immediately after the trip, he appeared on “Meet the Press,” unleashing a slashing attack on the Soviet Union that Vance deplored as “loose talk.”

Brzezinski was also a prime mover behind the commando mission sent to rescue the U.S. hostages held by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary forces in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi a disastrous desert expedition in April 1980 that claimed eight lives and never reached Tehran. Vance had not been informed of the mission until a few days before. It was the final straw: He quit, “stunned and angry,” he said.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)Brzezinski’s rationale for the rescue attempt was, perhaps inevitably, rooted in his preoccupation with Soviet influence. He contended that trying to gain the release of the hostages through sanctions and other diplomatic measures “would deliver Iran to the Soviets,” although many thought that outcome improbable, given the fundamentalism of the clerics running the country. Besides, he said, success would “give the United States a shot in the arm, which it has badly needed for 20 years,” a reference to the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

Soviet aggression in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America was by no means a figment of Brzezinski’s imagination. But his strict adherence to ideas in which virtually every issue circled back to the threat of Soviet domination was remarkable even for those tense times, when many in the foreign policy establishment had come to regard détente a general easing of the geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States — as the best course.

In his scholarly certitude, Brzezinski sometimes showed a tendency to believe that any disagreement between theory and reality indicated some fault on the part of reality. In his 1962 book “Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics,” for example, he asserted that the Communist bloc “is not splitting and is not likely to split” just as Beijing and Moscow were breaking apart.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski allowed that it would make sense for the United States to engage with Russia, although cautiously, as well as China, “to support global stability.” And although he condemned Russian meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, he thought the effects were only marginal relative to the underlying problems shaking up Western societies.

In any case, aside from his ideological principles, he had both personal and historical reasons for abhorring the Soviet system.

Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw on March 28, 1928. His father, Tadeusz, was a diplomat who took the family along to France, then to Germany during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and, fortuitously, to Canada on the eve of World War II. When the Russians took over Poland at the end of the war, Tadeusz Brzezinski chose to retire in Canada rather than return home.

The younger Brzezinski graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1949 and earned a master’s degree there in 1950. Then it was on to Harvard, which granted him a doctorate in political science in 1953 and appointed him as an instructor. He and Kissinger were among the candidates for a faculty position; when Kissinger won an associate professorship in 1959, Brzezinski decamped to Columbia University.

He was not always consistent in his positions as he moved between one situation and another. When he was appointed to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council in 1966, he had already become an outspoken defender of U.S. engagement in the Vietnam conflict.

In 1968, after riotous anti-war protests at Columbia and elsewhere, he wrote in The New Republic that students should not be allowed to “rally again under the same leadership,” meaning they should be tried and incarcerated.

“If that leadership cannot be physically liquidated, it can at least be expelled from the country,” he wrote.

That same year, however, he resigned from the planning council as a protest against expanded U.S. involvement in the war in Indochina under President Lyndon B. Johnson.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)Then he became a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who defended the expansion in his 1968 presidential campaign.

His bond with Jimmy Carter developed through the Trilateral Commission, the group David Rockefeller created in 1973 as a forum for political and business leaders from North America, Western Europe and Japan to consider the challenges facing industrialized countries. Brzezinski was the commission’s first director. (Rockefeller died in March.)

In 1974, Brzezinski invited Carter, then the governor of Georgia and a rising Democratic star, to become a member. Two years later, Carter was the Democratic nominee for president, and he hired Brzezinski as a foreign affairs adviser.

From the start of his tenure as Carter’s national security adviser, Brzezinski jockeyed for power. He reserved for himself the right to give Carter his daily intelligence briefing, which had previously been the prerogative of the CIA. He frequently called journalists to his office for what he called “exclusive” not-for-attribution briefings in which he would put his own spin on events, to the annoyance of Vance.

And although he was familiarly called Zbig and could be very engaging, he was quick to smack down reporters who dared to challenge his ideas. “I just cut off your head,” he told a journalist after one such retort.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)A prolific author, Brzezinski published a memoir in 1983 about his White House years, “Power and Principle,” in which he recalled a range of policy objectives that went beyond containing the Soviets. “First,” he wrote, “I thought it was important to try to increase America’s ideological impact on the world” to make it again the “carrier of human hope, the wave of the future.”

He also said that he had aimed to restore America’s appeal in the developing world through better economic relations but acknowledged that he had concentrated too much of his attention on those countries that he felt were threatened by Soviet or Cuban takeovers.

More recently, in opposing the invasion of Iraq, he predicted that “an America that decides to act essentially on its own” could “find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war’s aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad.”

In “Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower,” published in 2007, he assessed the consequences of that war and criticized the successive administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for failing to take advantage of the possibilities for U.S. leadership from the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He considered George W. Bush’s record, especially, “catastrophic.” And in the 2008 presidential campaign, he wholeheartedly supported Barack Obama.

Four years later, he once again assessed the United States’ global standing in “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.” Here he argued that continued U.S. strength abroad was vital to global stability but that it would depend on the country’s ability to foster “social consensus and democratic stability” at home.

Essential to those goals, he wrote, would be a narrowing of the yawning income gap between the wealthiest and the rest, a restructuring of the financial system so that it no longer mainly benefited “greedy Wall Street speculators” and a meaningful response to climate change.

A United States in decline, he said one “unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal reasons, worthy of its engagement” — could lead to a “protracted phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers.”

Brzezinski, who had homes in Washington and Northeast Harbor, Maine, was married to Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, with whom he had two children in addition to Mika Brzezinski: Mark Brzezinski, a lawyer and former ambassador to Sweden under Obama, and Ian Brzezinski, whose career has included serving as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. All survive him. He is also survived by a brother, Lech, and five grandchildren.(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)Into his 80s Brzezinski was still fully active as a teacher, author and consultant: a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent expert commentator on PBS and ABC News.

He was, in short, a man who could be counted on to have strong opinions and a boundless eagerness to share them. Once, in 1994, he even put forward a sort of disarmament program to solve the problem of breaking ties in the final game of the soccer World Cup.

“In the event of a tie,” he wrote to the sports editor of The Times, “the game should be resumed as a sudden-death overtime, but played with only nine players on each side, with each team compelled to remove two of its defensive players. That change increases the probability of a score and places more emphasis on offensive play. If after 10 minutes of play there is still no score, the game continues with four defenders removed from each team.”</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, who helped topple economic barriers between the Soviet Union, China and the West as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, died Friday. He was 89.

His death was announced on social media Friday night by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. She called him “the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have.”

Earnest and ambitious, Brzezinski helped Carter bridge wide gaps between the rigid Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, leading to the Camp David accords in September 1978. Three months later, U.S.-China relations were normalized, a top priority for Brzezinski.

Born in Warsaw and educated in Canada and the United States, Brzezinski was an acknowledged expert in Communism when he attracted the attention of U.S. policymakers. In the 1960s he was an adviser to John F. Kennedy and served in the Johnson administration.

In December 1976, Carter offered Brzezinski the position of national security adviser. He had not wanted to be secretary of state because he felt he could be more effective working at Carter’s side in the White House.

Coverage of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter:

Brzezinski often found himself in clashes with colleagues like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. For the White House, the differences between Vance and Brzezinski became a major headache, confusing the American public about the administration’s policy course and fueling a decline in confidence that Carter could keep his foreign policy team working in tandem.

The Iranian hostage crisis, which began in 1979, came to dramatize America’s waning global power and influence and to symbolize the failures and frustrations of the Carter administration. Brzezinski, during the early months of 1980, became convinced that negotiations to free the kidnapped Americans were going nowhere. Supported by the Pentagon, he began to push for military action.

Carter was desperate to end the standoff and, over Vance’s objections, agreed to a long-shot plan to rescue the hostages. The mission, dubbed Desert One, was a complete military and political humiliation and precipitated Vance’s resignation. Carter lost his re-election bid against Ronald Reagan that November.

READ MORE: Former U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, helping build homes in Winnipeg

Brzezinski went on to ruffle the feathers of Washington’s power elite with his 1983 book, “Power and Principle,” which was hailed and reviled as a kiss-and-tell memoir.

“I have never believed in flattery or lying as a way of making it,” he told The Washington Post that year. “I have made it on my own terms.”

The oldest son of Polish diplomat Tadeus Brzezinski, Zbigniew was born on March 28, 1928, and attended Catholic schools during the time his father was posted in France and Germany.

The family went to Montreal in 1938 when the elder Brzezinski was appointed Polish consul general. When Communists took power in Poland six years later, he retired and moved his family to a farm in the Canadian countryside.

At his new home, the young Brzezinski began learning Russian from a nearby farmer and was soon bitten by the foreign policy bug.

Brzezinski’s climb to the top of the foreign policy community began at Canada’s McGill University, where he earned degrees in economics and political science. Later at Harvard, he received a doctorate in government, a fellowship and a publishing contract – for his thesis on Soviet purges as a permanent feature of totalitarianism.

Frequent trips to Eastern Europe and several books and articles in the 1950s established Brzezinski as an expert on Communism, and by the 1960s he’d begun to attract the interest of policymakers. Throughout his career, he would be affiliated with moderate-to-liberal groups, including the Rand Corp., the Council on Foreign Relations, Amnesty International and the NAACP.</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, has died. He was 89.

His death was announced on social media Friday night by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. She called him "the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have."

Brzezinski helped topple economic barriers between the Soviet Union, China and the West. And he helped Carter bridge wide gaps between the rigid Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, leading to the Camp David accords.

But the Carter years were also defined by the Iranian hostage crisis, which came to symbolize the administration's failures and frustrations.

In recent years, Brzezinski took part in proceedings designed to bring the former Soviet republics into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, who helped topple economic barriers between the Soviet Union, China and the West as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, died Friday. He was 89.

His death was announced on social media Friday night by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. She called him "the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have."

Earnest and ambitious, Brzezinski helped Carter bridge wide gaps between the rigid Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, leading to the Camp David accords in September 1978. Three months later, U.S.-China relations were normalized, a top priority for Brzezinski.

Born in Warsaw and educated in Canada and the United States, Brzezinski was an acknowledged expert in Communism when he attracted the attention of U.S. policymakers. In the 1960s he was an adviser to John F. Kennedy and served in the Johnson administration.

In December 1976, Carter offered Brzezinski the position of national security adviser. He had not wanted to be secretary of state because he felt he could be more effective working at Carter's side in the White House.

Brzezinski often found himself in clashes with colleagues like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. For the White House, the differences between Vance and Brzezinski became a major headache, confusing the American public about the administration's policy course and fueling a decline in confidence that Carter could keep his foreign policy team working in tandem.</s>Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, has died at age 89. His death was announced on social media Friday night, May 26, 2017, by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. (Source: AP Photo) Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, has died at age 89. His death was announced on social media Friday night, May 26, 2017, by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. (Source: AP Photo)

Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who established himself in the Carter administration as a hard-liner on foreign policy, died on Friday, his family said. He was 89. Brzezinski’s daughter Mika said on social media that her father died peacefully, but did not give the cause of his death.

For all the latest World News, download Indian Express App now</s>Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to former President Jimmy Carter, has died, according to an announcement from his daughter, MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski.There was no word of the cause of death."He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life," Mika wrote on Instagram.Brzezinski served as President Carter's national security advisor from 1977 to 1981 and continued to hold influence in foreign policy issues. A registered Democrat once considered to be the answer to Republicans' favored Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski also served on former President Ronald Reagan's Chemical Warfare Commission and held other roles in the administration until 1989.He was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1928. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1958.Brzezinski was involved in the normalization of US-China relations, the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), and the brokering of the Camp David Accords.Brzezinski was an advocate of arming Mujahideen fighters against the Afghan government, convincing Carter that it was going to "induce a Soviet military intervention" in Afghanistan."We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would," he said in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. "The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially:"That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" he told the interviewer. "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"Less than four years later, those "agitated Moslems" would destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, setting off the endless "war on terror" that continues to this day.Brzezinski wrote in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard.However, in one of his latest articles in the American Interest journal the Polish-born diplomat asserted the US is "no longer the globally imperial power" and "can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China."</s>(WASHINGTON) — Jimmy Carter had been impressed with the views of foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski well before he won the presidency in 1977. That he immediately liked the Polish-born academic advising his campaign was a plus.

"He was inquisitive, innovative and a natural choice as my national security adviser when I became president," Carter said in a statement following Brzezinski's death Friday.

"He helped me set vital foreign policy goals, was a source of stimulation for the departments of defense and state, and everyone valued his opinion," Carter said. "He played an essential role in all the key foreign policy events of my administration."

Earnest and ambitious, Brzezinski helped Carter bridge wide gaps between the rigid Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, leading to the Camp David accords in September 1978. Three months later, U.S.-China relations were normalized, a top priority for Brzezinski. He also had a hand in two other controversial agreements: the SALT II nuclear weapons treaty with the Soviet Union and the Panama Canal treaties ceding U.S. control of the waterway.

"He was brilliant, dedicated and loyal," said Carter, who awarded Brzezinski the Presidential Medal of Freedom days before leaving office in 1981.

Brzezinski's death at age 89 was announced on social media Friday night by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. She called him "the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have." Also surviving Brzezinski were his wife, Emilie, and their sons Ian and Mark.

Born in Warsaw and educated in Canada and the United States, Brzezinski was an acknowledged expert in Communism when he attracted the attention of U.S. policymakers. In the 1960s he was an adviser to John F. Kennedy, served in the Johnson administration and advised Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign. He was the first director of the Trilateral Commission, an international discussion group, serving from 1973 to 1976.

In December 1976, Carter offered Brzezinski the position of national security adviser. Brzezinski had not wanted to be secretary of state because he felt he could be more effective working at Carter's side in the White House.

Brzezinski often found himself in clashes with colleagues like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. For the White House, the differences between Vance and Brzezinski became a major headache, confusing the American public about the administration's policy course and fueling a decline in confidence that Carter could keep his foreign policy team working in tandem.

The Iranian hostage crisis, which began in 1979, came to dramatize America's waning global power and influence and to symbolize the failures and frustrations of the Carter administration. Brzezinski, during the early months of 1980, became convinced that negotiations to free the kidnapped Americans were going nowhere. Supported by the Pentagon, he began to push for military action.

Carter was desperate to end the standoff and, over Vance's objections, agreed to a long-shot plan to rescue the hostages. The mission, dubbed Desert One, was a complete military and political humiliation and precipitated Vance's resignation. Carter lost his re-election bid against Ronald Reagan that November.

Brzezinski went on to ruffle the feathers of Washington's power elite with his 1983 book, "Power and Principle," which was hailed and reviled as a kiss-and-tell memoir.

"I have never believed in flattery or lying as a way of making it," he told The Washington Post that year. "I have made it on my own terms."

The oldest son of Polish diplomat Tadeus Brzezinski, Zbigniew was born on March 28, 1928. He attended Catholic schools during the time his father was posted in France and Germany.

The family went to Montreal in 1938 when the elder Brzezinski was appointed Polish consul general. When Communists took power in Poland six years later, he retired and moved his family to a farm in the Canadian countryside.

At his new home, the young Brzezinski began learning Russian from a nearby farmer and was soon bitten by the foreign policy bug.

Brzezinski's climb to the top of the foreign policy community began at Canada's McGill University, where he earned degrees in economics and political science. Later at Harvard, he received a doctorate in government, a fellowship and a publishing contract — for his thesis on Soviet purges as a permanent feature of totalitarianism.

He made frequent trips to Eastern Europe and wrote several books and articles on Communism in the 1950s. Throughout his career, he would be affiliated with moderate-to-liberal groups, including the Rand Corp., the Council on Foreign Relations, Amnesty International and the NAACP.

Cautioning in lectures of fractures within the Communist movement, Brzezinski emerged in the mid-1960s as a defender of the American presence in Vietnam. Unless the United States put up an effective resistance there, he argued, communist nations such as China would be emboldened to engage the West by fomenting trouble in politically unstable regions.

Still, Brzezinski characterized himself as a "dawk," suggesting that he might have had reservations about other aspects of American policy in Southeast Asia.

Impressed nonetheless, the Johnson administration appointed him to the State Department's Policy Planning Council in 1966. Though he was low on the White House totem pole, the position gave Brzezinski entre to the highest circles of White House decision-making.

After Carter left office, Brzezinski returned to lecturing, writing and serving on commissions, boards and task forces. He took part in the long-awaited reunification of Europe as a delegate to proceedings designed to bring the former Soviet republics into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

It was a triumph for the allies, he said, over a brutal secret non-aggression deal hatched during World War II — "the final undoing in Europe of the legacies of the Stalin-Hitler pact."

He remained engaged and opinionated, tweeting for the last time early this month: "Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse."
Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson (1966–1968) and President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor (1977–1981), dies at the age of 89.