The Room Where It Happened; A White House Memoir
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [12], 577, [1] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. John Robert Bolton (born November 20, 1948) is an American attorney, diplomat, Republican consultant, and political commentator. He served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019. Bolton served as a United States Assistant Attorney General for President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. He served in the State Department as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1989 to 1993, and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005. He was an advocate of the Iraq War as a Director of the Project for the New American Century, which favored going to war with Iraq.
He was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. Bolton served as the National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019. He called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal, from which the U.S. withdrew in May 2018. He wrote a best-selling book about his tenure in the Trump administration, The Room Where It Happened. Bolton is widely considered a foreign policy hawk and is an advocate for military action and regime change by the US in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, & North Korea. A member of the Republican Party, his political views have been described as American nationalist and conservative. He is a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Fox News Commentator. Derived from a Kirkus review: The latest tell-all—or, at any rate, tell-some—indictment of the Trump 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 suspected 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 delivers a 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.” More confirmation of malfeasance than fresh news. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Diplomat, National Security, Cold War, Donald Trump, Counterterrorism, Joseph Dunford, Recep Erdogan, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, Kim Jong Un, Jared Kushner, Emmanuel Macron, James Mattis, Steven Mnuchin, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Ukraine, Venezuela
ISBN: 9781982148034
[Book #84980]
Price: $35.00