Malinowski in the World

As I say in my introduction, Tom Malinowski has had a long and varied career: in the State Department, the White House, Congress, and elsewhere. I hugely enjoyed my hour of talking with this fellow. I think you will as well.

He began life in Poland, in 1965. Is he related to Bronisław Malinowski, the great anthropologist—indeed, a founder of that field? Yes: the anthropologist was Tom’s great-great-uncle.

Before deciding on a college, Tom visited the University of Chicago. (UC was a seat of anthropology.) “I found, to my surprise and delight, that one of the main intro freshman classes was ‘Marx, Freud, and Malinowski.’ I’m, like, ‘Hello!’”

At some point, Tom visited a place that few of us have ever been to: Papua New Guinea. There, “Malinowski” is a very important name.

When he was six, Tom moved with his mother and stepfather to America—to New Jersey. Still, he would be caught up in the drama of Poland—the Solidarity movement, martial law, etc.—as I was. (I am two years older than Tom.)

In the summer of 1981, he was in Poland and actually met Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity leader. A Polaroid picture was taken of the two of them, and signed by Wałęsa. Tom still has it.

“I was always politically connected,” he says. “I had an awareness of communism and what it was and why it needed to be resisted, and why the United States of America had a special role in the world.”

“That is kaput, apparently,” I remark. Malinowski is a little more generous or philosophical.

“People grow up with different experiences,” he says. We are far removed from the World War II and early Cold War generations. They had experiences that were “eye-opening and ass-kicking.” Young people are living through their own times. May they, too, have their eyes opened and their asses kicked, in a good way.

Young Malinowski went to Berkeley and then, as a Rhodes Scholar, to Oxford. He studied with, among others, Timothy Garton Ash, “the great chronicler of Eastern Europe and the struggles for democracy,” as Malinowski puts it.

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, went to Oxford on a George Soros scholarship. (I’m not sure he mentions that much.) This was a little before Malinowski, but they met once.

Malinowski is not at all surprised that Orbán became what he became.

In our Q&A, Malinowski and I talk a little party politics: R’s and D’s. I say to him, “You may think this is bad of me, Tom, but I’m a little surprised that you became a Democrat. I was, and am, a roaring Reaganite, and you became a Democrat, which you’re allowed to do. It’s a free country. But why, and when?”

Malinowski gives a good and interesting answer, having to do with family and other things.

He worked for tough-minded Democrats—men and women who were tough-minded about foreign policy in particular. He was an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Senate. “He could be a jerk,” says Malinowski, “but he was brilliant, and he expected a lot of the people who were working for him,” in a way you could respect and admire.

Malinowski regards his stint in Moynihan’s office as his graduate school, “even more than my time at Oxford.”

In the State Department, he worked for Clinton’s two secretaries of state: Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright. Christopher was a canny lawyer and negotiator—a problem-solver and dealmaker par excellence. He was not one for the “stage,” however.

Albright, on the other hand, was one for the stage. She enjoyed representing the United States ’round the world. She was big on promoting American values. Malinowski notes that he and she “had the East Europe thing in common.” (Albright was born in Prague, in 1937.)

In the White House, Malinowski worked as senior director of the National Security Council. He then worked for Human Rights Watch. Later, he was an assistant secretary of state.

And in 2018 he ran for Congress, winning. He served two terms. He was defeated in 2022 and again last month, in a primary. That was a weird one. AIPAC came in to portray him as pro-ICE and pro-Trump. Again, a weird one.

We talk about politics both narrow and broad. I myself am not much of a believer in “American exceptionalism”—not anymore. I think we’re vulnerable to the same ills as everyone else. The same temptations, the same extremisms. The same fevers.

How can the human material differ from place to place, and time to time? We Americans aren’t extraterrestrials.

But leadership matters of course—for good or ill. Lincoln spoke of appealing to “the better angels of our nature.” Demagogues appeal to the worse.

Malinowski points out that the technology of social media is designed to appeal to our worse angels—our worst. This technology has had a terrible effect, on Americans and everyone else.

“So, we’re not exceptional in that way,” says Malinowski, “but we’re still the only country in the world that has the power and occasionally the predilection to do unselfish things for the common good.”

Eventually, we talk about the Iran war (the current one) and the Ukraine war. Malinowski met Volodymyr Zelensky before the war began (the full-scale war). He was not filled with confidence. That is, Malinowski was not confident about Ukraine’s leadership.

But Zelensky was put to the test, as few statesmen are. And “he’s the leader of the Free World right now,” says Malinowski. I agree.

“The stakes in Ukraine remain astronomical,” says Malinowski. “This is the fight for the survival of the international system. And this is a fight where a great power invaded Europe, and the Ukrainians have been literally putting their bodies between us and arguably our most dangerous adversary in the world, protecting us, protecting our European allies, making it so that all we have to spend is money, as they spend their lives.”

We are incredibly lucky, if we only knew it.

Tom Malinowski and I close our Q&A with memories of John McCain, whom we both admire and whom Tom knew well. This podcast is for—well, lovers of history from the mid–20th century on. My thanks to Malinowski for doing it.

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