Zbigniew Brzezinski Will Give Public Talk at Yale

March 30, 2009. New Haven, CT — Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, will give the George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture in International Studies at Yale on April 9.

His talk, entitled A Historically Relevant Foreign Policy, will be held at 4 p.m. in Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. Sponsored by the MacMillan Center and the Center for the Study of Globalization, it is free and open to the public

Brzezinski is counselor and trustee of the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and co-chairs its advisory board. He is also the Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C. He was a member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968; chair of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign; director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976; and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign.

He was national security adviser to Carter from 1977 to 1981. In 1981 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of U.S.-China relations and for his contributions to the human rights and national security policies of the United States.

He was also a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987-1988), and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987-1989). In 1988, he was co-chair of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he cochaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach.

His many books include America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy (2008); Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (2007); The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (2004); The Geostrategic Triad: Living with China, Europe, and Russia (2001); The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997); and The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century (1989).

George Herbert Walker III, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, established this lecture series in 1986 in memory of his father, a graduate of the Yale Class of 1927. Previous George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecturers in International Studies have included Jesus Silva-Herzog, David Lange, Bruce Gelb, Paul Wolfowitz, Edward Jaycox, George Schultz, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Madeleine Albright, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III, George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke, Carla Hills, Richard Haass, John Lukacs, Strobe Talbott and Christopher Hill.

Contact Information:

Marilyn Wilkes

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale

(203) 432-3413