Zbigniew Brezezinski, President Carter’s national security assistant, is getting his lumps in the press. While he holds the same position that Henry Kissinger did under President Nixon, Brezezinski shows no signs of being able to parlay it into comparable influence.
Zbigniew Brezezinski (pronounced Zuh-big-nyeff Bre-zin-ski) has many of the same assets that Kissinger started with. Kissinger’s patron was Nelson Rockefeller; Brezezinski’s patron was the even more powerful David Rockefeller. Brezezinski put together the Trilateral Commission for David, one of whose members (Jimmy Carter) became U.S. President. Many others turned up in Cabinet-level posts.
Brezezinski is clearly not as skillful as Kissinger in dealing with the press. Reporters found Kissinger erudite and witty, but now describe Brezezinski as boring and pedantic. As one senior correspondent described it, “A Brezezinski
briefing is a lecture. … Worst of all, it is a freshman lecture.”
The difference between Kissinger and Brezezinski, however, is in form not in substance. The overall goal of both is accommodation with the Communist bloc from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean to Moscow.
The “freshman lecture” that would be highly worthwhile for Brezezinski himself to hear would be the recent CBS television film on Simas Kudirka. That two-hour pregram is a good lesson in what Soviet Communism is all about and what’s wrong with the vacillating and humiliating U.S. response.
Simas Kudirka was the Lithuanian seaman who leaped from the deck of a Soviet fishing trawler to the U.S. Coast Guard ship the Vigilant on November 23, 1970, and asked for political asylum. The two ships were then anchored side by side in American waters off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to participate in fishing rights negotiations.
The Russians demanded that the U.S. Coast Guard return Kudirka. To their everlasting shame, Coast Guard officers allowed Soviet crew members to board the Vigilant, search it until they found and captured Kudirka, beat him into unconsciousness, and carry him back to the Soviet ship. He was subsequently sentenced to ten years in a slave labor camp.
The Lithuanian-American community rallied to Kudirka’s defense and kept demanding his release from Russia. In their investigations they discovered one of history’s strangest coincidences. Simas Kudirka turned out to be an American citizen because his mother, although she lived in Lithuania, had been born in Brooklyn.
According to U.S. laws then in effect, although Kudirka had never been to the United States and had lived behind the Iron Curtain all his life, he is nevertheless an American citizen. U.S. Passport Chief Frances Knight issued Kudirka an American passport.
Grassroots American freedom-lovers intensified their demands that our Government pressure the Soviets to release Kudirka. Finally the Soviets concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble to keep a prisoner holding an American passport, and they released him.
Simas Kudirka is a living reminder of how much men will endure to escape from Communist tyranny and reach a free country. His case is dramatic proof that terrorist tactics did not die with Stalin, but are part and parcel of the Soviet system today.
The Simas Kudirka case should motivate us to resolve to build whatever weapons are necessary, at whatever price, in order to deter Soviet aggression, lest we ultimately have to fight with our bare hands as Kudirka did.
