The Room Where It Happened (pdf epub)
      A White House Memoir, by John Bolton, June 23, 2020



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.

Please keep seeding this torrent, as long as possible. :-)