Bolton - The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

ALSO BY JOHN BOLTON

Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations

How Barack Obama Is Endangering Our National Sovereignty

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by John Bolton

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2020

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-4803-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-9821-4805-8 (ebook)

For Gretchen and Jennifer Sarah

Hard pounding, this, gentlemen. Lets see who will pound the longest.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON,

RALLYING HIS TROOPS AT WATERLOO, 1815

O ne attraction of being National Security Advisor is the sheer multiplicity and volume of challenges that confront you. If you dont like turmoil, uncertainty, and riskall while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and the sheer amount of work, and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond descriptiontry something else. It is exhilarating, but it is nearly impossible to explain to outsiders how the pieces fit together, which they often dont in any coherent way.

I cannot offer a comprehensive theory of the Trump Administrations transformation because none is possible. Washingtons conventional wisdom on Trumps trajectory, however, is wrong. This received truth, attractive to the intellectually lazy, is that Trump was always bizarre, but in his first fifteen months, uncertain in his new place, and held in check by an axis of adults, he hesitated to act. As time passed, however, Trump became more certain of himself, the axis of adults departed, things fell apart, and Trump was surrounded only by yes men.

Pieces of this hypothesis are true, but the overall picture is simplistic. The axis of adults in many respects caused enduring problems not because they successfully managed Trump, as the High-Minded (an apt description I picked up from the French for those who see themselves as our moral betters) have it, but because they did precisely the opposite. They didnt do nearly enough to establish order, and what they did do was so transparently self-serving and so publicly dismissive of many of Trumps very clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy) that they fed Trumps already-suspicious mind-set, making it harder for those who came later to have legitimate policy exchanges with the President. I had long felt that the role of the National Security Advisor was to ensure that a President understood what options were open to him for any given decision he needed to make, and then to ensure that this decision was carried out by the pertinent bureaucracies. The National Security Council process was certain to be different for different Presidents, but these were the critical objectives the process should achieve.

Because, however, the axis of adults had served Trump so poorly, he second-guessed peoples motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government. The axis of adults is not entirely responsible for this mind-set. Trump is Trump. I came to understand that he believed he could run the Executive Branch and establish national-security policies on instinct, relying on personal relationships with foreign leaders, and with made-for-television showmanship always top of mind. Now, instinct, personal relations, and showmanship are elements of any Presidents repertoire. But they are not all of it, by a long stretch. Analysis, planning, intellectual discipline and rigor, evaluation of results, course corrections, and the like are the blocking and tackling of presidential decision-making, the unglamorous side of the job. Appearance takes you only so far.

In institutional terms, therefore, it is undeniable that Trumps transition and opening year-plus were botched irretrievably. Processes that should have immediately become second nature, especially for the many Trump advisors with no prior service even in junior Executive Branch positions, never happened. Trump and most of his team never read the governments operators manual, perhaps not realizing doing so wouldnt automatically make them members of the deep state. I entered the existing chaos, seeing problems that could have been resolved in the Administrations first hundred days, if not before. Constant personnel turnover obviously didnt help, nor did the White Houses Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). It may be a bit much to say that Hobbess description of human existence as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short accurately described life in the White House, but by the end of their tenures, many key advisors would have leaned toward it. As I explained in my book Surrender Is Not an Option, my approach to accomplishing things in government has always been to absorb as much as possible about the bureaucracies where I served (State, Justice, the United States Agency for International Development) so I could more readily accomplish my objectives.

My goal was not to get a membership card but to get a drivers license. That thinking was not common at the Trump White House. In early visits to the West Wing, the differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning. What happened on one day on a particular issue often had little resemblance to what happened the next day, or the day after. Few seemed to realize it, care about it, or have any interest in fixing it. And it wasnt going to get much better, which depressing but inescapable conclusion I reached only after I had joined the Administration.

Former Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, a mentor of mine, liked to say, In politics, there are no immaculate conceptions. This insight powerfully explains appointments to very senior Executive Branch positions. Despite the frequency of press lines like I was very surprised when President Smith called me, such expressions of innocence are invariably only casually related to the truth. And at no point is the competition for high-level jobs more intense than during the presidential transition, a US invention that has become increasingly elaborate in recent decades. Transition teams provide good case studies for graduate business schools on how not to do business. They exist for a fixed, fleeting period (from the election to the inauguration) and then disappear forever. They are overwhelmed by hurricanes of incoming information (and disinformation); complex, often competing, strategy and policy analyses; many consequential personnel decisions for the real government; and media and interest-group scrutiny and pressure.