“Pioneers” and “Allies”: William E. Griffith as Colleague and Adviser to Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski and William E. Griffith, close friends and confidants, coauthored a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1961 titled “Peaceful Engagement in Eastern Europe” that subsequently influenced official policy during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. After working together on two more projects in the mid-1960s, Brzezinski and Griffith united once again in 1977 when Brzezinski was chosen as national security adviser to head President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council (NSC). On this occasion Brzezinski asked Griffith to serve as a senior consultant to the NSC. Although Brzezinski had become a well-known figure before his death in 2017, Griffith, by contrast, died in 1998 as a relatively obscure individual. To help redress this imbalance, the discussion here begins by unveiling Griffith's work at Radio Free Europe and his travel throughout Eastern Europe in the 1950s that played a role in shaping the peaceful engagement strategy. The article concludes with three sections devoted to Griffith's very notable contribution to the National Security Council during a series of foreign policy crises faced by the Carter administration. According to Brzezinski, he and Griffith were “pioneers” and “allies” in opposing Soviet Communism during the Cold War era.