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Summary
Summary
As President Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves.
The result is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. "I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations," he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping its prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump's Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy--and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.
He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton's telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. "The differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning," writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal--about personal relationships, made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place.
Bolton's account starts with his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria's chemical attack on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the opening pages, "If you don't like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk--all the while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer amount of work--and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description, try something else."
The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there--from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea's Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.
Author Notes
John Bolton is the former National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump. He served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. He has spent many years of his career in public service and held high-level positions in the Administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Ambassador Bolton is also an attorney, and was in private practice in Washington, DC, from 1974 to 2018, except when he was in government service. Ambassador Bolton was born in Baltimore in 1948. He graduated with a BA, summa cum laude, from Yale College and received his JD from Yale Law School. He currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former national security advisor Bolton (Surrender Is Not an Option) harps on his foreign policy pet peeves (Iranian aggression in the Middle East, North Korea's nuclear threat), critiques former colleagues (Jim Mattis, Nikki Haley), and defends his decision not to testify in the House impeachment inquiry in this lacerating yet tiresome slog through his time in the Trump administration. Readers eager to hear what Bolton has to say about the Ukraine pressure campaign (namely, that Mick Mulvaney probably came up with the idea of using security assistance as leverage against Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky, and that the policy was "baked in" to White House dealings with Ukraine) will have to skip ahead to the last 50 pages. First, Bolton runs down seemingly every meeting, meal, phone call, and international summit of his 18-month tenure, touting his own achievements, such as pushing Trump to finally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, and blaming failures on a lack of policymaking structure within the White House and on Trump's vindictiveness, erraticism, and habit of forming competitive "bromances" with authoritarian leaders. The book's most serious allegations, including that Trump offered to "take care of things" when Turkish president Recep Erdogan complained about a U.S. Justice Department investigation, are buried within the avalanche of details. The bombshell to chaff ratio in this well-informed yet self-serving account is tilted punishingly in the wrong direction. (June)
Guardian Review
Any hairdresser could have told them it wouldn't work. Trump initially refused to hire John Bolton because he disliked his moustache. That walrus brush, which looks like a grizzled version of the cow-catching guard rails on an ancient locomotive, annoyed the elderly combed-over dandy. Trump's spun-sugar plumage starts behind one of his ears, circles round his scalp, hardens under a toxic rain of spray, then tapers into a jaunty duck tail above his collar: did he envy a man who brandished such stiff bristles on his upper lip? But the Fox News sex pest Roger Ailes recommended Bolton as "a bomb thrower", so Trump, avid for explosions, made him national security adviser. They resolved to play good cop and bad cop, although the partnership turned out to be more like bad cop and worse cop. After a mere 18 months it fell apart. Bolton says he resigned, Trump claims to have fired him; I'm content to contemplate what nuclear theorists would call their mutually assured destruction. Now Bolton declares Trump unfit for office and accuses him of appeasing foreign despots in return for an electoral leg-up, smiling on Chinese concentration camps for Muslims and wanting American journalists executed. Trump, incapable of answering the charges, has instead defamed Bolton as a "wacko" and a "sick puppy". In American parlance, the first means that he's mad and should be locked up, the second that he's disgusting and ought to be put down. Politics is the continuation of warfare by other means; it also prolongs into adulthood the name-calling of schoolboys in the playground. Yes, such superannuated adolescents hold the world's fate in their bunched fists. Bolton's macho facial hair advertises his mettle as a cold warrior. His book sneers at the peaceable protocols of "international governance" and disparages Europeans as weak-kneed ninnies. Juggling phone calls at a G7 meeting, he bizarrely boasts "I felt like the Light Brigade", and in an epigraph he echoes the Duke of Wellington's rallying cry to his troops at Waterloo. Yet when Bolton says "my scar tissue had scars", the cicatrices are merely metaphorical. Although he enjoys sending others into battle, in 1969 he avoided service in Vietnam by joining the non-combatant national guard. His excuse? He disdained participation in a losing war. Trump, another draft dodger, at first appears to be thrillingly keen for conflict. "Holy fuck!" he yelps when the vixenish Melania shafts one of Bolton's aides. "Hit 'em, finish 'em," he grunts during a dispute with the Turks. "Kick their ass," he orders an envoy to China. But his rampages are mostly rhetorical, no different, as Bolton says, from the way that Obama "graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out", a comment that incidentally reveals what Trump and Bolton hate about Obama: they can't forgive his grace under pressure. While Bolton pleads for a "kinetic response", Trump frustrates him by cancelling war games to placate North Korea and calling off a strike on Iran because a paltry 150 casualties are predicted. When Trump reconsiders his initial wheeze of invading or annexing Venezuela, Bolton diagnoses "a case of the vapours", that affliction of sensitive 19th-century females. Could the famed pussy-grabber be a wuss? Even Mike Pence, that stalwart Christian soldier, lapses into campy lingo when he reports on Trump's jockeying with the Ukrainian president. "Just between us girls," pouts Pence as he whispers an update into Bolton's ear. Trepidation gets the better of Bolton just once: he admits he never asked what Trump thought of Putin because he was "afraid of what I might hear". Despite the promise of the book's title, Bolton was not in the room during Trump's extended confab with Putin in Helsinki, from which Putin emerged as cockily as a strutting bantam while Trump stumbled out like a trodden hen with ruffled feathers. Nor, in further blows to Bolton's bravado, did the unspecific "it" invoked by the title always happen. For the most part, this memoir compiled from bureaucratic memos lists Bolton's failures to incite what he calls "existential" showdowns with Nato and the EU or Syria and Iran. He missed his best chance to change history when, reluctant to spoil his eventual book sales, he declined to speak up during Trump's impeachment. He did offer to let the Senate subpoena him, confident that the Republican majority would not want to hear from witnesses for the prosecution. In an epilogue, he offers a variant of his unrepentant apology for sitting out Vietnam: why bother, since impeachment was a lost cause. When it's not tallying Trump's offences, Bolton's book is a monument to his own grandiosity. One chapter title quotes Antony's threatening prediction about "the dogs of war" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and the Caesarism of Trump and his authoritarian buddies in Turkey, Brazil, Russia and China is a recurrent theme. Institutionally and even architecturally, Washington DC models itself on republican Rome, where right-minded senators reined in or struck down aspiring emperors. We get a glimpse of this latter-day Roman ethos when General John Kelly, enraged by a tiff with Trump, says: "I'm going out to Arlington." At serious times, Bolton remarks, Kelly drove to the national cemetery to calm down by brooding at the grave of his son, a marine killed in Afghanistan. Bolton defers to the same lofty standards. To explain why he refused the first jobs Trump dangled before him, he quotes Joseph Addison's neoclassical tragedy Cato - a play much admired by George Washington because it traces the conscientious resistance of a stoic who defended the republic against Caesar's tyranny. "When vice prevails and impious men bear sway," declares Cato in stately pentameters, "the post of honour is a private station." But where Addison's hero finally recognises that "the world was made for Caesar" and kills himself in despair, Bolton chose to collude with a vicious and impious man. Now, rather than attitudinising on a pedestal in a post of honour, he will forever be a footnote in the annals of infamy.
Kirkus Review
The latest tell-all--or, at any rate, tell-some--indictment of a dysfunctional presidency. Bolton, a foreign policy hard-liner, writes that Donald Trump first courted him to serve as deputy secretary of state. Nothing doing, Bolton responded: "State could not be run successfully from that level." It took back and forth before Bolton finally got to be in charge of something, named national security adviser. Given Trump's contempt for the intelligence community, it stands to reason that Bolton's job would be fraught, but he lasted a surprisingly long time--17 months, several lifetimes in the Trump administration. Bolton found allies and foes, but mostly the latter: He mistrusted Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster from the beginning while he suspects Mike Pompeo of negative leaks at the end of his tenure. But the author directs most of his ire toward Trump, and the book, while thoroughly self-serving--where was this information during impeachment proceedings?--delivers a damning portrait of a man quick to suck up to despots and seek their aid in holding onto his office. Instead of begging for China's help in the coming election, as many media outlets portrayed a meeting with Xi Jinping, Bolton writes that Trump "stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome." Such muted statements, he writes, resulted from the government's pre-publication review, which often amounted only to a directive to "take out the quotation marks." Readers who supply the missing punctuation will find a Trump who is whiny, self-absorbed, unprepared, and spectacularly ill-informed at every turn--hardly breaking news. Notes Bolton in closing, though, it's worth considering that a second-term Trump might be an unintended boon: "Democrats will find themselves far more pleased substantively with a 'legacy'-seeking Trump…than conservatives and Republicans," whose political coffins Trump would nail shut. More confirmation of malfeasance than fresh news, but the message is clear: Voter, beware. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
If you've been paying attention, there aren't a lot of surprises in former National Security Advisor John Bolton's book, at least as far as headline stories go. Trump's blackmailing of Ukraine for personal political gain before finally dispensing congressionally approved funding to that country, our president's affection for dictators, and his bright idea to invite the Taliban to Camp David days before September 11--all these have all been deeply reported, the latter having been tweet-leaked by Trump himself. Still, it's enlightening to read about these shocking decisions with voice-over commentary from an eyewitness. In addition, though, there are a few depressing surprises: President Trump taking advantage of the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to divert attention from Ivanka's use of a personal email server (Hello, Hillary!), and his giving support to Chinese leader Xi Jinping to build concentration camps for the minority Muslim Uighurs. When it comes to Trump, Bolton barely needs to point out the inconsistencies and inadequacies; he mostly just reports. Yet Bolton himself hardly comes off well. Trump once said, "I alone can fix it," and Bolton gives off the same preening vibe. He mocks the "axis of adults"--Rex Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, and James Mattis--for whom he has particular disdain; he eviscerates former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley as a self-promoting lightweight; and he is contemptuous of those who disagree with him on policy inside and outside the administration. He clearly admires his own prose, writing in drill-down detail past the point most readers need or want to go (see chapter 9, "Venezuela Libre"). Yet one place where he's woefully short on detail is the epilogue, which discusses why he didn't testify during the impeachment trial. His primary excuse, that the House's inquiry was too narrow in scope and limited in time because of the election calendar, seems weak at best. The committee couldn't even entice--or force--Bolton to testify. He offers no real reasons why a wider, longer investigation would have produced different results. His second bit of reasoning is that his testimony would have made no difference because the impeachment was partisan. Perhaps so. But Bolton obviously fancies himself as a truth teller. He should know that it's never too early to tell truth to power, especially if you're in the room where it happened.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 The Long March to a West Wing Corner Office | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Cry "Havoc!" and Let Slip the Dogs of War | p. 43 |
| Chapter 3 America Breaks Free | p. 61 |
| Chapter 4 The Singapore Sling | p. 77 |
| Chapter 5 A Tale of Three Cities-Summits in Brussels, London, and Helsinki | p. 127 |
| Chapter 6 Thwarting Russia | p. 159 |
| Chapter 7 Trump Heads for the Door in Syria and Afghanistan, and Can't Find It | p. 183 |
| Chapter 8 Chaos as a Way of Life | p. 223 |
| Chapter 9 Venezuela Libre | p. 247 |
| Chapter 10 Thunder Out of China | p. 287 |
| Chapter 11 Checking into the Hanoi Hilton, Then Checking Out, and the Panmunjom Playtime | p. 319 |
| Chapter 12 Trump Loses His Way and Then His Nerve | p. 363 |
| Chapter 13 From the Afghanistan Counterterrorism Mission to the Camp David Near Miss | p. 423 |
| Chapter 14 The End of the Idyll | p. 445 |
| Chapter 15 Epilogue | p. 483 |
| Notes | p. 495 |
| Index | p. 543 |
