Earlier, and especially after 1968 when he made of “a position of responsibility” his “single goal,” there had been a nagging sense that he adopted too easily the fashions of the moment, however “very flimsy or very derivative” these might be, just “to stay in the stream” and “have an impact,” complained Stanley Hoffmann, a former Harvard colleague of Brzezinski and a bit of a mentor for Vaïsse. In the end, though, it is that fluidity that made him most challenging after his White House years, as he remained a reliable chronicler of the future, some of which he forecast well and some poorly—but so what? Mao said of Stalin that he was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. Well, even reversing these numbers to fit the expectations of Western democracies, over a lifetime of intensive scholarship—Vaïsse’s biography of Brzezinski’s work includes more than 150 significant items of published work—that sort of performance would add up into a strong A.

According to Brzezinski, he had become a scholar “simply because Harvard gave [him] the opportunity to become a scholar.” But his ambition, he told Vaïsse, was not to “merely contribute material useful to others for footnoting.” Raised in an educated and urban Polish diplomatic family, he wanted to teach the Soviet Union and Communist affairs to the country he had adopted at the relatively advanced age of thirty, and along the way help free his native country which he had left for Canada at the age of ten. Throughout, Brzezinski’s will to do thus motivated his will to be: replacing Cyrus Vance like Kissinger had replaced William Rogers was not the point of his clash with the Secretary of State. To be the president’s thinker-in-chief was, he felt, more satisfying than being his negotiator-in-chief—he wanted to be Bismarck rather than Talleyrand. In 1981, he welcomed his return to academia “100 percent” and his subsequent journey was not of a money-seeking variety. Zbig remained immune to the consulting bug. He had a monastic sense of his duties.

That thirty-five-year closing period of Brzezinski’s life—his “age of authority”—is badly shortchanged by Vaïsse, and it is narrated almost like an afterthought. Teaching was important to him, and during much of that time he was quite good at it. To be sure, his reputation added to his professorial charisma, and his odd eloquence to his pedagogical skills, including a flair for the catchy and decisive phrase, as if his non-native English entitled him to let his newly-acquired foreign words move on their own, each sentence a paragraph and each paragraph a challenging argument. The books he wrote during that period are dutifully mentioned by Vaïsse, but with quick and frankly superficial takes that understate Brzezinski’s contributions and passions during three decades of national transformation and global mutation. Yet that is the time when he fully became America’s grand strategist. There was still much fluidity, but there was also a new strategic acumen and moral consistency, which extended to the way the United States views its role in the world and conducts its external relations. Along with Kissinger and the New Mandarins the two of them inspired, he “Europeanized” America’s foreign policy and exposed it to the complexities of historical and geopolitical thinking, but without compromising his own idea of what America is and what it does. Sadly, Brzezinski is no longer here to make his case.

“I AM not concerned by the verdict of history,” wrote a “disturbed and frustrated” Dean Acheson, a Cold War ago, to Louis Halle, a former staff member-turned-scholar, “there ain’t no such thing.” Acheson was thinking of Truman no less than of himself—Truman, an “ordinary provincial” like Carter who did not have the social and political savoir-faire of the Georgetown set which Brzezinski learned to endure. But ultimately history does render a final verdict, however long it takes, and Truman’s, we know now, was eventually reversed in appeal. At last, Carter is getting the second look he always deserved—which just shows that history, too, likes to give time the time to take its time. To that extent, Eizenstat’s “what-ifs” on behalf of the second term Carter never got are neither necessary nor convincing. One-term presidents can also be consequential, just ask George H. W. Bush.

Still, by now there has been enough time. Yes, Carter (and Brzezinski) made tons of mistakes which Eizenstat (and Vaïsse) readily acknowledge, and yes, the country felt despondent and was troubled at the close of the Carter presidency. Yet, whatever difference Carter made during his four years in office, he can now remind us most helpfully of the ways in which we used to think of the presidency. That is not the least of Eizenstat’s most useful contributions—a reminder of the days when the president was someone Americans could be proud of irrespective of the ways they thought of his policies. No, there was nothing wrong for a presidential candidate to want a government as good as the people; yes, once elected Carter paid a heavy political price for what many viewed as sheer provincial simplicity, but how refreshing it is now to read about a president whose “lack of political sensitivity was sometimes breathtaking.” Nor was it bad for the U.S. president to allow his personality and personal values toward right and wrong, in America and in the world, to be seen and heard; yes, that made him look a bit weak both domestically and abroad, but how comforting it is now to be reminded of a future that was meant to be worth building. Sure, Carter’s attention to details was unnerving—a president should have better things to do than trying to “know as much about every issue as the expert he had chosen to guide his decisions.” But in a moment of presidential insouciance to facts, Carter’s “insatiable curiosity” is missed. And at a time when reading is not fashionable in the Oval Office, it is with indulgence that we read about his early tendency to return White House–staffers’ memos with “circled typographical errors and grammatical mistakes” he found—tweeting does not offer many such opportunities. And most of all, how good it is to be told, as Eizenstat does, of a president whose character gave him a humbling respect for the office about which he claimed no pre-ordained entitlement during his first term let alone about an eventual second term.

Was that “high drama” or a “calamitous farce,” asks Eizenstat about some of the events that gave the Carter administration a bad name? Our answer is sad: it was high drama then but it has turned into a calamitous farce now. Read both books, therefore, and be attentive to the drama, but don’t be amused by the appearance of a farce.

Simon Serfaty is Professor and Eminent Scholar in U.S. Foreign Policy at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia. He is also the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair (emeritus) in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategy & International Studies (CSIS).