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tome15 's review for:
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir
by John R. Bolton
Bolton, John R. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened has received quite a few well-deserved negative reviews, but not all of them are fair. Some of them seem to be the sorts of assessment one could write of Bolton’s personality and policy preferences without looking into this book at all. The book has many faults that have nothing to do with whether Bolton is right or wrong in his approach to foreign policy. The question on everyone’s mind when the book was announced was what Bolton would have said if he had testified in Trump’s impeachment trial. Bolton says nothing about it, except that he does not think his testimony would have changed the outcome. He offers no clarity on the quid pro quo question. Did Bolton resign over Ukraine? It was one reason among many, he says. About the other reasons he leaves us guessing. Nor does he offer any insight into Trump’s bromance with Putin, except to say he never asked about it because he feared that the answer would not be one that he could live with. You would think a security adviser would need to know, whatever the answer. Bolton does do a good job of detailing the inconsistent, self-interested vacillation of Trump’s decision-making and the chaos of White House operations. Sadly, he offers little analysis of its motives or development. My own view is that it exists because Trump hires aides who are true believers or simple sycophants, or people like himself who use the government to pursue their own personal or policy interests, Bolton among them. Bolton does have a policy agenda that not all of his colleagues share. He does make a convincing case that Trump was not up to the task of negotiating with the leaders of North Korea and China, but I am not sure that Bolton or Pompeo would have done a better job on their own. Finally, one must note that the book is poorly written. It reads like a rushed job. It needs a rewrite to add necessary explanations, eliminate distracting detail, and add clarity and precision to its thesis, assuming that there is one. There is not much light in this picture of the room where it happened.
John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened has received quite a few well-deserved negative reviews, but not all of them are fair. Some of them seem to be the sorts of assessment one could write of Bolton’s personality and policy preferences without looking into this book at all. The book has many faults that have nothing to do with whether Bolton is right or wrong in his approach to foreign policy. The question on everyone’s mind when the book was announced was what Bolton would have said if he had testified in Trump’s impeachment trial. Bolton says nothing about it, except that he does not think his testimony would have changed the outcome. He offers no clarity on the quid pro quo question. Did Bolton resign over Ukraine? It was one reason among many, he says. About the other reasons he leaves us guessing. Nor does he offer any insight into Trump’s bromance with Putin, except to say he never asked about it because he feared that the answer would not be one that he could live with. You would think a security adviser would need to know, whatever the answer. Bolton does do a good job of detailing the inconsistent, self-interested vacillation of Trump’s decision-making and the chaos of White House operations. Sadly, he offers little analysis of its motives or development. My own view is that it exists because Trump hires aides who are true believers or simple sycophants, or people like himself who use the government to pursue their own personal or policy interests, Bolton among them. Bolton does have a policy agenda that not all of his colleagues share. He does make a convincing case that Trump was not up to the task of negotiating with the leaders of North Korea and China, but I am not sure that Bolton or Pompeo would have done a better job on their own. Finally, one must note that the book is poorly written. It reads like a rushed job. It needs a rewrite to add necessary explanations, eliminate distracting detail, and add clarity and precision to its thesis, assuming that there is one. There is not much light in this picture of the room where it happened.