John R. Bolton - Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations

CHAPTER ONE
Early Days

CHAPTER TWO
The Reagan Revolution and the Bush 41 Thermidor

CHAPTER THREE
Cutting Gulliver Loose: Protecting American Sovereignty in Good Deals and Bad

CHAPTER FOUR
Following the Yellow Cake Road on North Korea

CHAPTER FIVE
Leaving the Driving to the EU: Negotiations ber Alles with Iran

CHAPTER SIX
Why Do I Want This Job?

CHAPTER SEVEN
Arriving at the UN: Fear and Loathing in New York

CHAPTER EIGHT
Sisyphus in the Twilight Zone: Fixing the Broken Institution, or Trying To

CHAPTER NINE
As Good as It Gets: The Security Council

CHAPTER TEN
Electing the New Secretary General: Ban Ki-moon Is Coming to Town

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Security Council Successes on North Korea

CHAPTER TWELVE
Iran in the Security Council: The EU-3 Find New Ways to Give In

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Darfur and the Weakness of UN Peacekeeping in Africa

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Israel and Lebanon: Surrender as a Matter of High Principle at the UN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Recessional

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Free at Last: Back to the Firing Line

E lection night in 1964 found me at the local Goldwater for President headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. I had done volunteer campaign work there during the summer after the Republican Convention, and on weekends. Having obtained permission to be absent from high school on Election Day to hand out Goldwater leaflets at a nearby precinct, I was in Catonsville when Marylands polls closed to await the national returns. Although Lyndon Johnson seemed to have a large lead going into the election, I remained optimistic that Barry Goldwater would run well, and might even pull off an upset.

So much for the early signs of a promising political career. Goldwater was crushed, in what was then the worst presidential election defeat in American history. At the Catonsville office, which had become quite crowded, many of the adult volunteers (I was just about the only teenager there) were weeping, something I had never seen before in public. I was somewhat puzzled by this display of emotion, but I was more puzzled by the election results, which were going from bad to worse. Dean Burch, Goldwaters chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, As the sun sets in the West, the Republican star will rise. I believed that for a while, until it became ever more obvious that down was the only direction in which Goldwater was headed.

It took weeks for the extent of the defeat to penetrate fully into my befuddled brain. When a few brave souls, just weeks afterward, printed bumper stickers that read AuH2O 68, I was ready to sign up again. After all, the American people could not really vote in overwhelming numbers for a candidate who said things like, I want yall to know that the Democratic Party is in favor of a mighty lot of things, and against mighty few. I had read Goldwaters Why Not Victory? and The Conscience of a Conservative, and fiercely admired the Arizonans philosophy and candor. He was an individualist, not a collectivist, who said without reservation, My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. He was against the Eastern Establishment, which conservatives saw as a major source of our misguided statist policies at home, and what Barry called drift, deception, and defeat in the international struggle against Communism. I cheered when Barry said we should cut off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea, even though my own state of Maryland would have been drifting out there as well. Later, after he returned to the Senate, Goldwater began a letter to the CIA director, Dear Bill: I am pissed off. (How many times in my own government career did I long to write a letter like that, although I never did.) In my heart, I knew Barry was right.

While I thought the 1964 presidential election was a no-brainer, I was obviously part of a distinct minority, even though others would bravely say of Goldwaters popular vote total that twenty-six million Americans cant be wrong. It would have been entirely logical after 1964 to give up politics as completely hopeless, and go on to a career, say, in the Foreign Service, as I seriously contemplated. Or I might have drifted off to the left in college, as so many of my contemporaries did. But like many others whose first taste of electoral politics came in the Goldwater campaign, I had exactly the opposite reaction. If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine mans philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in the country, overwhelmingly supported by the elite academic institutions, to the tune of negative advertising like Johnsons famous daisy commercial, which accused Goldwater of being too casual about nuclear war, and slogans like Goldwater for Halloween, it was time to fight back. If the United States was in such parlous condition that people who showed off their appendectomy scars in public and held up beagles by their ears could get elected president, something had to be done. Surrender was not an option.

Thirty-six years later, election night 2000 was a very different affair. Beginning in 1968, Republicans had dominated American presidential politics. Only the unfortunate elections of two failed southern governors had intervened, and the objective in 2000 was to prevent the second Democratic interruption from being extended. Unlike 1964, however, the 2000 election was excruciatingly close, and I didnt stay around to await the outcome. I left for Seoul the morning after the election to participate in a conference on Korea-related policy issues at Yonsei University, which was cohosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I was senior vice president. When I checked into my hotel in Seoul late on Thursday, Korea time, the Florida outcome remained up in the air. After a long day on Friday, I turned on the television in my hotel room and found that chaos still reigned in Florida, with no final result.

Most significantly for me, Governor George W. Bush had named Jim Baker, my former boss at the State Department during the previous Bush administration, to lead his effort to salvage Floridas electoral vote. No one at that point had the slightest idea of what might be involved, or how long it would take to decide the evolving contest. Before I collapsed into bed early that Friday evening in Seoul, I left a voice message for Baker at his Houston law firm. I explained that I was in South Korea, but offered to fly to Florida to help. At about 2:00 A.M. Seoul time, the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear Bakers unmistakable Texas twang saying, Get your ass on a plane and get back here.

Just a few days later, I was in West Palm Beach, part of the great chad exercise. I stopped first in Tallahassee, but Baker immediately dispatched me to Palm Beach where he thought a heavyweight lawyer should be added to the team already diligently at work. Ken Mehlman, later Republican Party chairman, called me the Atticus Finch of Palm Beach County, but there were many, many people volunteering. Hour after hour we sat, psychoanalyzing ballot cards. This was the process Democrats hoped would produce a change in Floridas popular vote totals and award them the states electoral vote, and therefore the national election. One of my AEI colleagues, Michael Novak, a former Democrat, feared the worst, as he watched on television a battle between the street fighters and the preppies. It turned out we won despite our rosy cheeks. I tried to go home for Thanksgiving, but I was called back to Palm Beach just as I arrived in Washington. My family couldnt face weeks of eating turkey without me, so I returned ours to the local grocery store on Thanksgiving morning, which was certainly a first for me, and flew back to Palm Beach. On the evening of December 12, the Supreme Court ended the struggle in Bushs favor, and quite correctly, as a matter of law, I might add. I was in Bakers office when he called Texas to tell the candidate the good news, saying to Bush, for the first time legitimately, Congratulations, Mr. President.