Night after night on the drive from the White House to the family home in McLean, across the Potomac in Virginia, Zbigniew Brzezinski would recall the events of the day into a recorder as he watched the city slip by from the rear window. He couldn’t have known it then, but he was speaking to an unlikely future lunch companion and a collaboration he would not live to see.
Edward Luce, now the Financial Times’ US national editor and columnist, was a schoolboy in England when Brzezinski was at the peak of his influence as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter during the crowded, significant four years between 1977 and 1981 of international crisis and diplomacy.
“I got a radio for Christmas in 1979,” recalls Luce when we meet. “And I remember running into my parents’ bedroom on Boxing Day and telling them the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I had a pretty bad impression then of Brzezinski as an ultra-hawk, which was not a rounded impression of him. I knew of him, but not in the way people knew about Kissinger. I mean, John Cleese was referencing Kissinger in Fawlty Towers.”
Brzezinski was a counterweight to Henry Kissinger in the fraught cold war decades: never as famous, not as quotable, but just as consequential. He and Kissinger passed through Ellis Island within six weeks of one another, as adolescents, in 1938. It was the beginning of what Luce describes as a “frenemyship”, with a cinematic arc covering seven decades. The Brzezinski family gave Luce the transcriptions of those recordings when their father died, in 2017, aged 89. To the end, Brzezinski, a precocious Polish emigrant who arrived in Washington via Harvard to become the pre-eminent Sovietologist of the era, remained a fiercely independent thinker – and a Washington outsider.
Fortunately for Luce, he was an immaculate keeper of records. Part of him always mourned his Warsaw childhood, and he developed an intense friendship with Pope John Paul II. Brzezinski’s children also gave Luce full access to their father’s letters and papers and their blessing to write an unauthorised biography. Luce was hooked, and understood that as well as immersing himself in contemporary histories, he was, as he writes, in “a race against the actuarial clock” with Madeleine Albright and president Carter among the 100-odd interviewees he sat with in the twilight of their lives.
“It is obsessional,” says Luce, hopping on to the couch in his livingroom on a dazzling Saturday afternoon. Luce is a sprightly 56, quick to find humour and slightly bleary from a Friday evening book-publishing party held in his honour. His wife, Niamh King, who is Irish and director of the Aspen Strategy Group, says the most dedicated guests drifted back here, to their home in Georgetown, to prolong the night. She makes coffee and sets down a plate of Cadbury’s Fingers, a treat she correctly predicts an Irish guest will appreciate – and shares the name of the store that stocks them. In the acknowledgments, Luce includes an exchange that became an in-joke during his four years spent on the book: at the dinner table, Niamh asks him to pass the salt. “SALT 1 or SALT 2?″ comes the absent-minded reply. The term – referencing the strategic arms limitations talks – is a useful metaphor for the vanished world of high geostrategy to which Luce returned.
“It is apocryphal,” he says of the dinner table story.
“But what does Trump call it? Truthful hyperbole. Yeah, it is obsessional. Any other reading is an opportunity lost. It is a vast subject covering about 90 years. You need to include the rivals to Brzezinski and what their Sovietology was: you can’t understand him without understanding his context. But it is inexhaustible. You either write a biography properly or not at all. And I felt it was not irrelevant to what happens today.”
The subtitle to Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski is America’s Cold War Prophet. Brzezinski’s steadfast view- that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its distinct internal nationalities – was borne out. But his reputation was welded to that of Jimmy Carter. The men could hardly have been more different – the laconic southern Baptist and the bright, abrasive son of Polish aristocrats. They shared an intellectual hunger, a thriftiness that one reviewer described as “comical tightfistedness” and, perhaps, too, an aloofness that did not go down well in Washington.
“That was a big mistake,” says Luce of the Carters’ decision to keep their distance from Washington society events.
“Carter thought the people he was shunning were snobs – but they thought he was being snobbish by spurning them. And there was a sort of preachiness about Carter that really rubbed them up the wrong way. Carter was the first real modern outsider president. The way to fix that was to dive in and immerse yourself. There was a bit of Obama there, too – an impression of being supercilious and above-you-people. Which is not good politics.”
After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter found himself, as Luce writes, “an orphan of history, disavowed by his party”. But Brzezinski also found himself in the wilderness through the 1980s.
“Yeah. He was really cast out. And he did a lot to get himself cast out. He was extremely rude to people. And his memoirs were ill-advised. He really did lionise himself and take down everybody else – except for Carter,” says Luce, laughing.
“And it was strange – he was actually very generous intellectually with people he thought were worth it. He usually attacked arguments, not people. But that memoir did him an enormous amount of damage. And he was a pariah amongst Democrats for years. The fall of the Soviet Union redeemed him. He was a superstar again. But he was a very restless soul. He was at his best having battles. So he didn’t bask in any glory. In the 1990s he got very involved in Bosnia, and that is where Clinton used him. He was very pro-Nato. He really saw through Putin post-9/11 and was a really incisive critic of what was the establishment view. He was not part of the establishment – even in his grandest, most vindicated autumn years, he never was. And I think that is a good thing.”
By then, Luce had moved from India, where he was a correspondent with the Financial Times, to Washington, where his weekly columns are frequently scathing of the current administration. He occasionally met Brzezinski for lunch in various haunts and came to like the senior man, who was generous with what Luce calls a “deep fund of historical memory”.
[ No limits? Why the United States could be on the verge of a constitutional crisisOpens in new window ]
So Luce has had a busy May, double-jobbing as both guest at the recent FT Spring Festival, where he spoke with the newspaper’s editor, Roula Khalaf, about his biography, before turning public interviewer to Steve Bannon. That event closed the show in front of a packed auditorium. The crowd was giddy: evening drinks loomed and Bannon excels at provocation, drawing murmurs of polite outrage when he cheerfully declared the recent papal conclave rigged and predicted that Trump would run for – and win – a third term (the constitutional limit is two terms). Luce has lived in the US for two decades and has travelled enough of the country to understand the reasons why the Maga faithful have come to see Trump as a messianic figure.
“Yes, I can. And as I said to Bannon: I agree with half of what you are saying. The diagnosis is good. But ... habeas corpus being suspended does not follow ‘this is a plutocracy’. He is correct. It is a plutocracy. And the Left is too much a part of it. They are the cognitive and managerial elites who don’t want to upset their part in the firmament. And until they get fire in their belly – and it has to be populist – then Trump or Trump-like figures are going to win or have a really good chance, assuming the system is free and fair next time. But Bannon understands that people hate the establishment in America and have pretty good reason to. And with Trump, it is not that people believe what he says. It is that him lying to them sounds more authentic and truthful than the Democrat blow-dried, focus group-tested, risk-averse talking points that so many of them campaign on.”
Recently, Luce and Niamh found themselves chatting about the sense of unease they both detect in Washington now. His first experience of the city was as a speechwriter for Larry Summers, who was an avid FT reader, in the carefree 1990s. “Summers and Greenspan and Rubin and these people – what were they called? “Masters of the Universe” by Time magazine. When I came back here, the Pentagon was the department, not the treasury. It was a fortress mentality, and a very different town to the one I left. Less pleasant. But nothing like today. Trump has been the real change. Ten years ago, when your plane touched down in Dulles or DCA [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], you were coming home. Because we had been here for so long. And you would relax. Now I just tense up wherever I am coming in from. There is a menace, an edge to life. Not just in Washington, but in America, that just wasn’t there before. And the possibility of dark stuff. I guess what schoolkids must feel when they do shooting drills. You are suddenly aware of something.”
If Kamala Harris won ... in some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down
For the first time, he finds his “heart skips a beat” going through emigration as a green-card holder. It is just six months into the new administration. It is impossible to predict the state of the nation in 2028. And there are no heavyweight strategic thinkers of Brzezinski’s ilk to be found in government in Washington any more. Luce’s biography, which has received uniformly dazzling notices, is a salute to a vanished age of intellectual and moral rigour.
Luce’s daughter Mimi, in a welter of school exam study, pops in to say hello. Luce describes his family background as “privileged, quite posh ... not moneyed”. His father, Baron Richard Luce, was lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth. During the royal funeral, Ed and his father were guests on the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-hosted by Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski’s daughter, Mika: the hosts are a couple. Luce walks across to the bookcase and finds a photo-still of the television appearance. He had advised his father about video-link decorum.
“Just: please don’t put the iPad up your nose.”
His father paid no heed and then delighted in telling the hosts that Ed had been expelled from school in his younger days. “It was excruciating,” says Luce cheerfully.
“But it was good television.”
London will always be home, even if Britain, post-Brexit, feels “very Lilliputian and kind of grey”. But still, there were times last year, with the political atmosphere truly poisonous and the election forecasts see-sawing between Trump and Kamala Harris, that the family “were seriously considering, if Kamala Harris won, we could actually move to London”.
“In practice, it would have been the Weimar Republic on steroids,” he explains.
“In some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down. So, the Trump victory was the least-bad outcome in terms of social stability and the worst in governance. There would have been violence.”
Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet is published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Ed Luce will appear at the Dalkey Book Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 13th and 14th
