National Security Advisor (Brzezinski Material, NSA 7 - Subject File)

Office of the National Security Advisor

The Office of the National Security Advisor is headed by a senior official in the Executive Office of the President who serves as the chief advisor, stationed in the White House, to the President of the United States on national security issues. This person also participates in the meetings of the National Security Council. The NSA office is based in the West Wing of the White House. The advisor is supported by the National Security Council staff that produces research, briefings, and intelligence for the advisor to review and present either to the National Security Council or directly to the President. Records of the Office of the National Security Advisor The Office was headed by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski from 1977-1981. Some of the major foreign policy events during Brzezinski’s term of office included the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China; the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II); the brokering of the Camp David Accords; the Iran Hostage crisis; the overthrow of the Shah of Iran; the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan; and the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties relinquishing U.S. control of the Panama Canal after 1999.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew K. Brzezinski was born on March 28, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. He attended McGill University in 1950. In 1953, Brzezinski immigrated to the United States and earned his PhD from Harvard University. From 1953-1956, he was an Instructor of Government and research fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He authored The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism in 1956.

From 1956-1960, Brzezinski was an Assistant Professor of Government and Research Associate, Russian Research Center and Center of International Affairs at Harvard. In 1960, he authored The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict followed by Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union in 1962, Alternative to Partition in 1965, Between Two Ages: America in the Technetronic Era in 1970, and The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan in 1972.

From 1960-1977, Brzezinski worked at Columbia University as an Associate Professor and Professor of Public Law and Government and the Director of the Research Institute on International Change. Among political scientists, Brzezinski was an early supporter of the concept of Trilateralism as an important aspect for progress in advanced and developing countries. From 1973-1976, Brzezinski served as Director of the Trilateral Commission, a private organization founded to promote closer cooperation among North America, Western Europe and Japan. As director, Brzezinski supervised the work of the various Task Forces founded by the Commission; worked with regional chairmen to identify and invite relevant participants and experts from each region to join the Commission; and directed the publicity campaign for the Commission, especially in Europe and Japan. He presided over the Executive Committee meetings and coordinated the first full Commission meeting in Kyoto, Japan in May 1975. Concurrent with directing the Trilateral Commission, Brzezinski continued his association with the Council on Foreign Relations, Freedom House and Amnesty International; published articles in Foreign Policy, Journal of International Affairs, and Studies in Comparative Communism. He participated in several conferences and lectures at various organizations and college campuses and appeared before the Congressional Commission on the Organization for the Conduct of Foreign Policy and before Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s Committee on Critical Choices. By 1975, Brzezinski had returned to his teaching career at Columbia University and reduced his work at the Trilateral Commission to part-time.

In December 1976, President-elect Jimmy Carter, who met Brzezinski while a member of the Trilateral Commission, chose him to be his Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA). Brzezinski served in this position until the end of the Carter Administration in 1981 and was instrumental to the President throughout the four years of service as an advisor on all international relations issues. In 1981, Brzezinski returned to Columbia University as a Professor within the School of Government. He continued to author books during his post-White House career including his memoir, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977-1981, in 1983.

David Aaron

David Laurence Aaron was August 21, 1938, in Chicago. He is an American diplomat, and international expert and writer who served in the Jimmy Carter administration. He graduated from Occidental College with a BA and from Princeton University with an MPA. He later received an honorary Ph.D from Occidental College.

Aaron entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962, where he served as a political and economic officer in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In 1964 he was assigned to the NATO desk at the Department of State. He subsequently served as a political officer to NATO where he worked on the Nuclear Planning Group and on the Non Proliferation Treaty. He then joined the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency where he served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT, during which Aaron was a key negotiator of an agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce the risk of nuclear weapon accidents.

He was then recruited to serve on Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff during the Nixon administration, from 1972 to 1974. During that time, Aaron drafted NSSM 242 on Nuclear Strategy, which came to be known as the Schlessenger Doctrine. In 1974, on the recommendation of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Aaron became Senator Walter Mondale's legislative assistant. The following year, Aaron was task force leader of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the principal architect of the Committee's recommendations. Aaron would later follow Mondale to the Jimmy Carter Presidential campaign.

In 1977, Aaron was asked by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been appointed the National Security Advisor, to become Deputy National Security Advisor in the administration of Jimmy Carter. Aaron was one of several former Kissinger aides appointed by Jimmy Carter to foreign policy and defense positions.

William Odom

William Eldridge Odom was born June 23, 1932 – May 30, 2008. He was a retired U.S. Army 3- star general and former Director of the NSA under President Ronald Reagan, which culminated a 31-year career in military intelligence, mainly specializing in matters relating to the Soviet Union. After his retirement from the military, he became a think tank policy expert and a university professor and became known for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq War and warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970.

From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was appointed as the military assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He served as Military Assistant to the APNSA and Crisis Coordinator. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked upon strategic planning, American-Soviet relations, including the SALT nuclear weapons talks, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran hostage crisis, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. From 1981 to 1985, Odom served as the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army’s senior intelligence officer. He served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988. He died of an apparent heart attack on May 30, 2008, at his vacation home in Lincoln Vermont.

Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer, and Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals. His grandfather was publisher. He graduated with distinction from Yale University at age 18, served in the U.S. Army, earned his Master's degree from the University of Chicago, and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University where he began teaching at age 23.

He was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure in 1959. From 1959 to 1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia University where he was also deputy director of their Institute of War and Peace Studies. Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure in 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshelco-founded and co-edited Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.

His first major book was The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, (1957) which was highly controversial when it was published, but today is regarded as the most influential book on American civil-military relations. He became prominent with his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), a work that challenged the conventional view of modernization theorists, that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries. As a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in an influential 1968 article in Foreign Affairs, he advocated the concentration of the rural population of South Vietnam as a means of isolating the Viet Cong. He also was co-author of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission in 1976. During 1977 and 1978, in the administration of Jimmy Carter, he was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

William Quandt

William Quandt was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA in International Relations from Stanford University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 1968. He has received several research grants, including ones from the Social Science Research Council (1966–1968), and the Council on Foreign Relations (1972– 1973). He was also an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, worked at the Rand Corporation in the Department of Social Science from 1968–1972, and taught at UCLA and MIT.

Quandt served as a staff member on the National Security Council in the Nixon and Carter administrations between 1972–1974 and 1977–1979. He was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty.

Between 1979 and 1994, Quandt was a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, where he conducted research on the Middle East, American policy toward the Arab–Israeli conflict, and energy policy. Quandt's involvement and the institution are noted in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, saying: "Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former National Security Council official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. From 1987 to 1988, William Quandt was President of the Middle East Studies Association, a learned society. He joined the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia in 1994, where he holds the departmental Edward R. Stettinius chair. He teaches courses on the Middle East and American Foreign Policy. From 2000 to 2003, he also served as their Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Michel Oksenberg

Michel Oksenberg was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1938. He earned his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1960, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1963 and 1969 respectively. Oksenberg began his career at Stanford University in 1966, moved to Columbia University in 1968, and then to the University of Michigan in 1973, where he was on the faculty for twenty years. He served as president of the East-West Center in Honolulu from 1992 to 1995.

After teaching political science at Stanford, Oksenberg worked at Columbia from 1968 to 1974 and then spent two decades on the faculty at the University of Michigan. From 1977 to 1980, Oksenberg took a leave of absence from Michigan to serve as a senior staff member on the National Security Council, with special responsibility for China and Indochina. In 1978, he began the process of helping to bring about the normalization of U.S. relations with China. President Richard M. Nixon had started the thaw with his groundbreaking visit in 1972 but, by 1978, the United States still recognized the government of Taiwan as the legitimate representative of China. Oksenberg helped the U.S. government take the politically difficult step of allowing a mutual defense treaty between Taiwan and the United States to expire and recognizing the leadership in Beijing as the legitimate government of China.

Michael Armacost

Michael Hayden Armacost was born April 15, 1937 in Ohio. In January 1977 he was selected as a member of the National Security Council to handle East Asian and Chinese affairs under the Carter administration until July 1978. Later he was appointed to be the U.S Ambassador to Japan from 1989 to 1993, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 1984 to 1989, and Ambassador to the Philippines from 1982 to 1984, during a critical period of political upheaval during the Marcos presidency.

On January 20, 1989, he was the designated survivor at President Bush's inauguration. He also served as Acting Secretary of State from January 20, 1989 to January 25, 1989. In the interval between 1995 and 2002, Armacost served as president of Washington D.C's Brookings Institution, the nation's oldest think tank and a leader in research on politics, government, international affairs, economics, and public policy.

Christine Dodson

Christine Dodson was born in Athens, Greece in 1935 to politician Panayiotis and his wife Eva Sifneos. Exposed early to diplomacy, she had a passion for world affairs and political deliberations. She grew up speaking English, French and Greek and later studied Arabic and Russian.

She attended the University of Athens Law School from 1953 to 1956, followed by a year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she studied political science and journalism on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1958 she earned a Masters degree from Columbia University's School of International Affairs. She married her classmate Richard Dodson of Springfield, Ohio on January 1, 1958.

After graduation, she worked at Columbia's Research Institute on International Change as professor Zbigniew Brzezinski's administrative assistant. Ambitious and eager to expand her professional skills, Christine studied computer programming at night, and was hired as the project leader at the university's computer center. In 1976, Brzezinski was appointed National Security Advisor for President Jimmy Carter, and he invited Christine to join him in Washington, where she became the NSC's chief of staff.

Following Carter's presidency, Christine started a new career at the United Nations. She spent four years as head of recruitment in New York, then moved to Iraq from 1986 to 1988 as chief of administration with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, a posting she remembered fondly before the country devolved. In 1988, she returned to New York as the UN's head of training service, then became chief administration officer at the United Nations Special Commission, overseeing efforts to ensure Iraqi compliance in destroying its weapons of mass destruction. Her final UN job was head of personnel, a position she held from 1993 until she retired in 1998. Following her retirement she volunteered as the chief financial officer at the Council for Refugees in Athens, and later volunteered for the Greek Annunciation Church in Manhattan.

Christine Dodson passed away in New York City on November 15th, 2023.