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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axfiles, with your host David Axelrod.

If the Senate concurres as expected, Tony Blinken will be our next Secretary of State.

He's also my friend and a former fellow at the Institute of Politics, where I sat down with him in 2017 for this very rich conversation about his remarkable family story and career, his insights into the man who would become our 46th President Joe Biden, and their shared vision of American foreign policy. Here's that conversation.

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I've done a lot of these by now, and there are all kinds of different stories, and there are the sort of Horatio, Alger, stories.

Yours is not that. You're not from the wrong side of the tracks.

You grew up in New York. Your dad was prominent in the investment banking business. Your mom in the arts.

What really interested me was the middle of your childhood, and the time you spent in France, your mother got remarried.

First of all, tell me about your stepfather, who seems like a fascinating character. Well, he was, and he passed away recently, but he was an extraordinary man.

He was born in Bialystok, Poland, and was in a school with 900 kids, and he's the only one to survive, because this was just before World War II, and he was a Jew in Poland.

And so he spent the war in Auschwitz, Dachau, Midanik, the greatest hits of concentration camps in labor camps, and was his only immediate family member to survive.

But then he went on to build an extraordinary career wound up after the war.

First in France, then in Australia, where he had relatives who found him and brought him there, made his way to Harvard Law School, finished at the top of his class, and had an extraordinary career as an international lawyer.

But also a writer of some prominence in Europe and in the United States, and was one of the earliest proponents of detente between the Soviet Union and the United States wrote a book that was really at the heart of that thesis.

So he had an extraordinary life, but as you said, one of the divorces, not usually a good thing, and it's disruptive in so many ways, but because my parents handled it so well, and because it gave me an opportunity as a result of my mother remaring to live and spend formative years in France, it gave me a whole new perspective on my own country.

Anyone who has the opportunity, especially at a young age, to be able to see their own country through a different set of eyes by living somewhere else, that's an extraordinary benefit.

Let me ask you, what was your stepfather's name was Samuel Pizarre?

What were they doing in France?

So my stepdad had a law practice in France, and my mom, as you said, was very involved in the art. She had been in New York, the head of the music program of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, way back in the day in the 1960s, ran a modern dance company, verse Cunningham, who was not just any dance company.

It was very prominent dance company. So it was indeed, and then she went on to run something called the American Center in Paris, which brought together some of the most remarkable artists, Americans brought them to France, connected our countries and our cultures in that way.

I was just given a tremendous benefit of this experience living abroad, seeing my country through different eyes, and you know, this was the early 1970s, we were still in Vietnam.

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