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The Room Where It Happened
OverDrive Inc.  Ebook
2020
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Trade Reviews
Publishers 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)
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.
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.
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.
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