Vaïsse’s account of an “indecisive” president overly “immersed in the technical details of all the issues” and “often unable or unwilling to prioritize among the various foreign policy objectives” is not unusual but it does not fit Eizenstat’s first-hand account. That the president liked and was overly reliant on Brzezinski is beyond doubt. Meeting several times a day, the two men formed an odd but comfortable couple, and each respected the other for who he was and had become—more like Truman and Acheson than Nixon and Kissinger. “Next to members of my family,” Carter later wrote, “Zbig would be my favorite seatmate on a long-distance trip; we might argue, but I would never be bored.” After his election, the president-elect resisted those who attempted to talk him out of appointing Brzezinski who, Robert Lovett had said, was “not really an American.” But by then, Vaïsse explains, the country was already moving beyond its narrow idea of an American America: and it was Brzezinski, the scholar from Poland who, past Kissinger, had become the establishment point man, and Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia who, post-Nixon, was the out-of-Washington alien.

While the Harvard-trained Brzezinski was a brilliant geostrategic thinker, he was not as good as a practitioner—but Carter was not the reason. Brzezinski the academic connected things past with things future remarkably well but as a strategist he did not apply his foresight to things present as effectively. As Carter told Eizenstat, he had ignored 90 percent of Brzezinski’s ideas during his presidential campaign, many of which, writes Vaïsse, were “at once logical, bold and unrealistic.” Indeed, when Brzezinski graded the administration first six months in office, Carter’s own professorial comment was skeptical—“you’re too generous,” Carter responded, “we must have (a) clear goals and (b) be tenacious.” And his notations on Brzezinski’s weekly reports appear to have often been more realistic than those of their author who indulged in geopolitical flights of fancy.

Eizenstat would agree: Carter certainly ran most things by Brzezinski, but he did not turn his foreign policy over to him. As noted by Vaïsse, Brzezinski was “not a key player” at Camp David, and for Panama, the region he knew least, “his role was secondary.” Unlike or at least more than “his” president, writes Eizenstat, Brzezinski “saw every issue of foreign policy through the anti-Soviet lens of a true Cold War warrior.” His views, adds Eizenstat, “were more heavily colored by the geopolitics [of the Soviet Union] than by the justice of either side’s claims”—with China, which Vaïsse describes as Brzezinski’s “personal success,” in Afghanistan where he allegedly set a “trap” for Moscow, and in the Gulf where, still according to Vaïsse, the Carter doctrine was “really a Brzezinski doctrine.” Indeed, it took all the more time for President Carter to get used to Brzezinski the hard liner—“a dyed in the wool anti-Soviet,” had warned W. Averell Harriman—as earlier, candidate Carter had been previously seduced by a more dovish Brzezinski whose writing then explored alternatives to partition for a new trilateral world order in which the Soviets were “not even a rival.”

“FEW ADMINISTRATIONS,” writes Vaïsse, from Brzezinski’s perspective but in the context of the administration he served, “have known so many tangible successes . . . in only four years.” Eizenstat goes even further: Carter, he writes, “bent the arc of history away from a Soviet power that seemed to be growing without restraint when he took office.” Both authors insist that the majority of the ten foreign policy priorities which Carter and Brzezinski set at the start of the Carter administration were met or on the way to being met by the time the administration had ended. These claims, however, are a matter of calendar. Consider: in January 1981, alliance relations, especially with Europe, were not yet “more active and more solid,” as it is claimed, but frankly in disarray. Instead of a network of global alliances with the so-called “new influential,” there was still renewed talk of a “new Cold War” with the Soviet Union. North-South relations were hardly cooperative and “calmer” yet in Central America, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. Afghanistan was just getting started, arms control negotiations were at a dead end again, and the arms race clearly on the upswing. The Camp David momentum had been stalled and that of Iran rising, and worldwide arms levels remained on an ascending curve, with new technologies to be sold, more money to buy them and fewer human rights to be defended. What can be said for most of these issues is that progress was indeed to come steadily throughout the 1980s, with Reagan and eventually Bush’s finishing touch. There is no need to deny Carter some credit, but don’t neglect the presidents who came after either. If anything, the Reagan foreign policy began in January 1980 and the Carter-Brzezinski foreign policy ended in November 1989.

Still, two vital issues can be singled out as the central parts of the Carter legacy. For one, there are the Camp David Accords, whose historic significance is beyond dispute: they could not have been attempted and would not have gotten done without Carter, and no other president who attempted a Camp David II (including Clinton and Bush-43) fared well. After the early fiasco of the Brzezinski-inspired comprehensive plan for the Middle East forced an embarrassing U-turn and left the National Security Advisor hitchhiking on his road map to Geneva, a desperate Sadat took the road to Jerusalem and Carter that of Camp David. Forty years later, Eizenstat’s account of the “thirteen brutal days and nights of negotiations” between the Egyptian President and the Israeli Prime Minister is gripping. Follow Carter going “back to his bed room, kneel down, and pray” before putting on suit and tie for more formality on his way to Sadat’s room as a last-minute attempt to save the collapsing negotiations with Begin. This is high drama: Eizenstat’s plain writing fits such moments especially well, and his book details many others that remind us of the best and the worst in Carter and his administration (including the negotiations with Congress for ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty and over SALT II, the internal debate over the so-called malaise speech, and the debate over the most appropriate reaction to Afghanistan).

Carter’s Camp David shows presidential leadership at its best, when only a few key actors are involved, with a single war-and-peace issue to solve over a short, do-or-die period of time. Every president faces at least one such decisive test during his years in office—Truman with the Berlin blockade, Eisenhower over Quemoy and Matsu, Kennedy during the missile crisis and so forth. That is the time when the president’s role is decisive: his history and his sense of the moment, his convictions and his sense of himself, his idea of the nation and of the world—the time when it can be said unequivocally that no other president could have acted the way he did, knowing what was known at the time.

No less certainly, Iran remains the administration’s main and most lasting failure. For that debacle at least, all would agree that no one comes out well, least of all Brzezinski, described by Eizenstat as a hardliner to the end, and in an increasingly open conflict with Cyrus Vance—a conflict that proved conclusive when Vance resigned a bit later. The Carter administration may have lost the Shah but it did not lose Iran and “certainly did not cover itself with glory,” according to Eizenstat. Where Brzezinski was right on—perhaps the only thing—was, as he told Carter, that “no one in Washington really understood Iran well enough to provide a hardheaded analysis.” But that neither started nor ended with Carter, and the confusion lingered long past the Shah’s departure from Iran: over his return, about the hostages and after their release, during Iran’s war with Iraq and past the 1991 Gulf War, after September 2001 and past the U.S. war in Iraq, whether the analysis got better or not the policies did not; and after they finally seemed to do so over the nuclear issue, new generations of ghosts left behind since Carter have come back to haunt us.

“A JOURNEY is called that because you cannot know what you will discover,” wrote James Baldwin, “what you will do, what you will find or what you will find will do to you.” With Nixon, Kissinger became all he could be and more but that was not enough and after his White House years he still thought of himself as one of history’s privileged interlocutors-in-waiting. More modestly or realistically, past Carter, four more decades of check-to-cheek dancing with history satisfied and even completed Brzezinski. Unlike Kissinger, he never struggled to remember and adapt what he used to say and do or forget what he used to do and argue. With Kissinger, you could never leave or ignore the “world restored,” meaning, the post-Napoleonic Europe which had been the focus of his doctoral thesis. To that extent, Kissinger’s prose was “timeless,” writes Vaïsse, but it was also repetitive, meaning that it never escaped the moment (the nineteenth century) and the Old World (Europe) that defined him as an academic and a person no less than a strategist. With Brzezinski, on the other hand, the discourse was more dynamic, and there was always a new world to discover, a new order to engineer, a new issue to unveil, a new concept to propose.