The Roots of a Conservative Transformation Agenda: Brzezinski and Huntington in the 1960s

Abstract

This article reassesses the crisis in the 1960s in the United States from the perspective of two political scientists who were critics of the social movements and had a prominent role in the political debate during the 1970s: Zbigniew Brzezinski (founder of the Trilateral Commission and President Carter’s National Security Advisor) and Samuel Huntington (founding editor of Foreign Policy magazine and coordinator of the National Security Council during Carter administration). Based on documents accessed in historical archives along with books and articles written by them, I examine their point of view on the crisis, Vietnam War, and the Democrats’ intra-party conflicts. The records show that they opposed those move-ments, but they tried to absorb some of their demands. In post-1968, Brzezinski and Huntington helped to promote an agenda of reforms, but the original demands have been reformulated and restrained, inaugurating a project that represented simultaneously the transformation and conservation of the pre-existing order.