John Bolton, who served as national security advisor the Trump administration from April 2018 until September 2019, has since produced a tell-all book, 'The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,' which has Trump and his loyalists threatening Bolton with prosecution for disclosing classified national security information. Pc-ware laptops & desktops driver download for windows.
Clearly, Bolton came into the Trump administration with some trepidation. Trump's White House is notorious for its chaos and rapid turnover of Cabinet members and other high government officials. Trump has viciously attacked the integrity and intelligence of many of his initial appointees, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had been the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. It seems that few officials will come out of this regime unscathed.
Former national security adviser John Bolton, seen in February, is scheduled to publish a memoir of his time with the Trump administration on June 23, and the Justice Department is trying to block. 11 results for Books: Biographies & Memoirs: john bolton. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. By John Bolton Jun 23, 2020. 4.3 out of 5 stars 24,685. John Bolton writes in his coming memoir that Trump didn't know Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia, according to The New York Times. In the book, Bolton is vague about the targets themselves, though it was later reported that he wanted one of them to be the Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, killed on Jan. Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies.
For his part, Bolton was born in 1948, just two years after Trump himself, and his first involvement in politics was as a volunteer in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, when Bolton was a teenager. Bolton graduated from Yale University and Yale Law School, where he knew Bill and Hillary Clinton, and practiced law within the D.C. Beltway when he was not serving in the government.
Trump initially considered Bolton for a Cabinet post, but may have passed over him because he was too much a product of the East Coast Republican establishment. Bolton noted that 'Trump despised both Bush Presidents and their administrations, leading me to wonder if he had missed my almost ten years of service in those presidencies.' (Bolton, p. 40) By his own account, Bolton had been contemplating resigning for months before he actually did, and had written his resignation letter months before he delivered it. His timing was strategic; the scandal that led to Trump's impeachment, involving improperly withholding military aid from Ukraine to pressure that country's regime to provide damning allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, was boiling over when he left. For what it's worth, Bolton only acknowledges a minor role in the administration's dealings with Ukraine.
Much of Bolton's ultimate disgust with Donald Trump has to do with his chaotic style of governance, his refusal to read and assimilate information, and his erratic and unpredictable decision-making. Bolton documents many instances where the last person who spoke to Trump on a pending controversy controlled his decision. But when it comes to basic philosophy, Bolton consistently complains that Trump has not been sufficiently aggressive, that he is ultimately too soft.
George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, both Yale graduates like Bolton, certainly pursued an aggressive military policy in the Middle East. The elder Bush went to war against Iraq in 1990-91 after that country invaded neighboring Kuwait. The boundaries of both nations had been set, perhaps irrationally, by the British after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War One.
America arguably had a strategic interest in protecting Kuwait's sovereignty, since it is a huge exporter of oil. George W. Bush is remembered for his muscular response to the attacks on America by al-Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001. Bush quickly invaded Afghanistan, a move that enjoyed wide popular support since the ruling Taliban had been harboring al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden. He ultimately invaded Iraq as well, claiming that Saddam Hussein's regime had 'weapons of mass destruction,' a claim that later proved to be false.
While bin Laden was ultimately hunted down and killed during the Obama administration, support for our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has declined as they have continued for decades, and Trump has made it clear that he wants to withdraw American military from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, a stance that appalls the more interventionist Bolton.
Bolton and Trump were in total agreement about cancelling the nuclear deal with Iran, which had the support of our European allies and was painstakingly negotiated by President Obama. Bolton wanted to strangle the Iranian economy with stiff sanctions against oil exports, arguing that Iran finances terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. He was also convinced that Iran was still moving forward with development of nuclear weapons, and argued within the Trump administration for military action against Iran. He met resistance within the federal government, partly out of a fear that an embargo would cause world oil prices to spike, since other Middle East countries would not increase production enough to meet the demand.
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Trump was certainly bellicose with his rhetoric concerning Iran. In a May 2019 tweet, he threatened that 'If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,' which was not his only implied threat to start a nuclear war. He also threatened to destroy Iran's much revered cultural sites, such as Persepolis; if taken seriously, this would be internationally condemned as a war crime. Essentially, Bolton's complaint with Trump was that his actions did not measure up to his threats.
Trump enlisted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as an emissary to the Iranian regime; while Abe was visiting Tehran, the regime attacked several ships in the Gulf of Oman, one of which was Japanese. During the same period, Iran shot down an American drone which was worth at least $120 million. Initially, Trump vowed to strike back, and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu pressured him to get tough, but ultimately Trump waffled and decided against a retaliatory strike, partly because Iran had attacked military hardware, but not soldiers. Bolton was disgusted by Trump's lack of resolve.
When John Kerry, who had served as secretary of state under President Obama, worked to persuade Iran to stay in the nuclear deal even though it had been repudiated by the Trump administration, perhaps holding out for a Democratic administration after this year's election, Trump vowed to prosecute Kerry for violating the Logan Act. This law, which was enacted in 1799, prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. Bolton points out that the Logan Act is probably unconstitutional and has seldom been enforced over the last 220 years.
Another source of Bolton's angst was the failed effort to overthrow Venezuela's socialist strong man, Nicolas Maduro. While Trump clearly wanted to oust Maduro, and even threatened to take military action against him, Bolton felt that he 'vacillated and wobbled' during the time when Maduro was most vulnerable. In this instance, Bolton opposed outright military action, but wanted to work skillfully with the leader of the opposition, Juan Guaido, who had been designated as Venezuela's interim president by the largely moribund legislative branch of government.
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Trump was getting contrary advice from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a man whom Bolton evidently holds in low regard. Mnuchin apparently worried that tough sanctions against the Venezuelan regime would hurt American corporations; one similarity between Iran and Venezuela is that both countries are major oil exporters. For his part, Trump was unimpressed with Guaido, whom he thought to be 'weak' because his wife did not wear a wedding ring, a detail that meant nothing to Bolton.
Even with benefit of hindsight, it is hard to discern whether Maduro could have been overthrown if the Trump administration had employed a more unified and coherent effort in that direction. To Bolton, the missed opportunity in Venezuela is yet another failure by the unhinged and amateur President for whom he worked.
Donald Trump did shower Bolton with praise while he was his national security advisor, but Bolton clearly wasn't his kind of guy. In the month that Bolton came to work for Trump, former first lady Barbara Bush passed away. Trump conspicuously refused to attend her funeral, which was attended by four former presidents. One would expect Bolton, the ultimate Bush loyalist, to be profoundly annoyed by that breach of decorum. It was not the last time that John Bolton was appalled by the erratic and unpleasant behavior of the president he thought he could steer in the right direction.
Jay Davis is a Rapid City attorney
Five Takeaways From John Bolton's Memoir
Overview
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 their 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.