The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

John Bolton

Jun 2020 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

The discordant mutterings of a disgruntled ex-employee. He was honored to be placed in the highest level of government, failed to perform, and now he blames the boss. Only America makes heroes out of failures and cowards. Selling out his country for a couple of million dollars reveals Bolton's (lack of) character. Releasing a salacious 'tell-all' book during the run-up to the election demonstrates his malicious intent. John and Mitt would be a perfect match on Tinder. Bolton's profession is writing. His always being on the public payroll is just for access and material. I'm sad I bought the book because the money was not only wasted, it went to a pimp.

I couldn't put this book down. This is due to John Bolton approving the CIA nailing the book to my hands. Just a little light torture joke to get you in the mood for reading Bolton's excretable tome. If this book proves one thing, it's that it kills the old adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". In fact it does more than kill it. It illegally abducts it, renders it to a CIA black site in Poland and then rapes it to death. The fact that Bolton is furious that he was unable to goad Trump into murdering thousands of Iranian children oozes from each page. I would recommend this book as an insight into a diseased mind. A man who determines manliness by how many people he can send into war to die but who would never fight himself. One hopes that excerpts from this book will one day be read out loud. As evidence for the prosecution at Bolton's war crimes trial.

Anyone that gets removed from a job & then proceeds to bad mouth his boss has very little credibility. It's his viewpoint, after all. Why should we believe his version any more than we should believe Trump ? Writing a book, giving interviews is a money making enterprise for this guy. If he said anything nice about Trump, no one would be interested. He has to dish the dirt in order to be in demand & sell books. He didnt walk away from an unscrupulous boss, he was kicked out. What does that tell you !

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.