The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982148034
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/23/2020
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	203,682
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Long March to a West Wing Corner Office 1

Chapter 2 Cry "Havoc!" and Let Slip the Dogs of War 43

Chapter 3 America Breaks Free 61

Chapter 4 The Singapore Sling 77

Chapter 5 A Tale of Three Cities-Summits in Brussels, London, and Helsinki 127

Chapter 6 Thwarting Russia 159

Chapter 7 Trump Heads for the Door in Syria and Afghanistan, and Can't Find It 183

Chapter 8 Chaos as a Way of Life 223

Chapter 9 Venezuela Libre 247

Chapter 10 Thunder Out of China 287

Chapter 11 Checking into the Hanoi Hilton, Then Checking Out, and the Panmunjom Playtime 319

Chapter 12 Trump Loses His Way and Then His Nerve 363

Chapter 13 From the Afghanistan Counterterrorism Mission to the Camp David Near Miss 423

Chapter 14 The End of the Idyll 445

Chapter 15 Epilogue 483

Notes 495

Index 543

Editorial Reviews

06/29/2020

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)

Publishers Weekly

I can’t believe I’m saying this: it’s worse than I even imagined.” – Stephen Colbert

“As much as you think you know about the arrogance, vanity and sheer incompetence of Trump’s years in the White House, Bolton’s account will still astonish you... No wonder the White House was so determined to block this book.” – David Ignatius, Washington Post

"A scathing and revelatory account... indispensable, jaw-dropping, and specific...what a truth he offers us." – The New Yorker

“Bolton's bombshell book shows it's still possible to be shocked by Trump's presidency” – The Guardian

“Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.” – The New York Times

“The most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider... lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders.” – Washington Post

“A book full of damning details” – The Economist

“Explosive” – Business Insider

“Devastating portrait” – Telegraph

“Eye-popping” – CNN

"Jarring" – Jake Tapper, CNN

"Shows the scale and depth of Trump’s depravity and corruption." – The Atlantic

"A service to the nation... There is no question that this book contains explosive revelations that could well have an impact on the election." – Thomas Wright, The Brookings Institute, The Atlantic

“The details are damning.” – Fareed Zakaria

“The most devastating indictment yet.” – Nicolle Wallace

“A harrowing portrait” – Mother Jones

"Absurdly entertaining" - Ben Domenech, The Federalist

“A riveting read” - Trevor Noah, The Daily Show

"The most important White House memoir yet to emerge from the Trump administration" – National Review

From the Publisher

2020-06-23
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.

Kirkus Reviews

"John Bolton's tell-all audiobook on Donald Trump's presidency is one of the most scathing rebukes to have come from a former member of Trump's staff. Doubtless, his behind-the-scenes revelations would be powerful enough to cripple any politician in the pre-Trump era. In the authoritative and comforting tones of a news anchor, Robert Petkoff narrates the countless inadequacies of Trump and the yes-men that surround him, along with the author's eventual conclusion that Trump is unfit for the job. Petkoff's seamless delivery of the 20-hour audiobook is a perfect listening companion. . . . As astounding as the numerous accounts of Trump's ineptitude, arrogance, and poor judgment is the backstabbing intrigue that permeates the White House."

AudioFile Magazine