The Room Where It Happened

A White House Memoir

John Bolton

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781982148041
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982148058
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Chapter 1: The Long March to a West Wing Corner Office
• Chapter 2: Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Dogs of War
• Chapter 3: America Breaks Free
• Chapter 4: The Singapore Sling
• Chapter 5: A Tale of Three Cities—Summits in Brussels, London, and Helsinki
• Chapter 6: Thwarting Russia
• Chapter 7: Trump Heads for the Door in Syria and Afghanistan, and Can’t Find It
• Chapter 8: Chaos as a Way of Life
• Chapter 9: Venezuela Libre
• Chapter 10: Thunder Out of China
• Chapter 11: Checking into the Hanoi Hilton, Then Checking Out, and the Panmunjom Playtime
• Chapter 12: Trump Loses His Way, and Then His Nerve
• Chapter 13: From the Afghanistan Counterterrorism Missionto the Camp David Near Miss
• Chapter 14: The End of the Idyll
• Chapter 15: Epilogue
• Photographs
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright