Passport to Life

The formidable Polish name (pronounced bru-zhin-ski) is a Beltway staple. It was introduced to Americans by Zbigniew (known as “Zbig”) Brzezinski, a legendary Poland-born statesman, who served as President Carter’s national security advisor and remained a lion of the foreign policy establishment until his passing in 2017. Zbig’s son Ian is a foreign policy expert who served in a senior position in George W. Bush’s Defense Department. A daughter, Mika, greets Americans every morning as co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Sundry Brzezinski spouses dot the DC think-tank landscape.

But perhaps it’s Zbig’s second son Mark — serving as American ambassador to Poland since 2022 — who best encapsulates the unlikely story of this Polish-American diplomatic dynasty. That’s because his own career mirrors that of his heroic — now mostly forgotten — grandfather Tadeusz.

A prewar Polish diplomat who risked his own government’s displeasure to assist Jews trying to flee 1930s Germany, and who continued his work in Canada, Tadeusz was stranded in North America after Poland’s dismemberment at the hands of Nazi Germany and the USSR. He raised his family with no money in Montreal, refusing to seek support from the Jews he’d saved. It was Menachem Begin who plucked the elder Brzezinski out of obscurity, thanking Zbig for his father’s actions at a Washington press conference in 1978.

That unique moment in both countries’ history was part of a longer diplomatic process that led to the historic Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt that paved the way for the détente with the Arab world that is still unfolding today. The process played out with mutual suspicion between the Carter administration — including National Security Advisor Brzezinski — and the pro-settlement Begin government. As a young boy, Mark witnessed the protagonists — President Jimmy Carter, Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat — up close.