Last edited Sun Jun 21, 2020, 06:45 PM - Edit history (1)
He thinks he saved America from the internationalists and the weaklings at NATO. All the other officials were stupid and doing it wrong; Trump was just the stupidest and weirdest. Only Bolton was smart enough to save America (at the time) from the rest of them, but he's still super disappointed that Trump never blew up Iran. The reviews are not good. NYT said: "The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged" and containing "clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/books/review-room-where-it-happened-john-bolton-memoir.html
He didn't like anybody:
A veteran bureaucratic infighter, Bolton dishes dirt about everyone he doesn’t like, and it’s a very long list. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley was “untethered” and a “free electron”; former national security adviser Michael Flynn was “inadequate” and “self-destructed”; senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was a meddler who was “doing international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing (along with the never-quite-ready Middle East peace plan)”; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was secretive, too willing to make concessions that Trump wanted and so overly subservient to the boss that a pushback on arms control was “a rare occasion of Pompeo’s being explicitly critical of something Trump did.” One intriguing note is how often Pompeo (like Bolton) talked of resigning.
But it’s Jim Mattis who’s Bolton’s favorite punching bag. Every dozen pages there’s another shot at the former secretary of defense. He’s “looking for excuses not to do much of anything” in retaliating against Syrian chemical weapons use; he would “predict gloom and doom when he didn’t get his way” on policy; he used “spite” as a common tactic, prompting Bolton to observe “they didn’t call him ‘Chaos’ for nothing.”
Mattis’s resignation in December 2018 appears to have gratified Bolton. He quotes Trump’s parting line: “He’s leaving . . . I never really liked him.” And Trump’s bizarre claim: “He’s a liberal Democrat, you know that, don’t you?”...
Bolton is the hero of nearly every anecdote in the book. Indeed, for a memoir that is startlingly candid about many things, Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings. Nearly every policy discussion is an opportunity for Bolton to say that he was right, people should have listened to him, he knew it would never work, he was vindicated. His only problem is that, having burned so many bridges with this book, Fox News may not give him a future platform to explain how right he is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/john-boltons-book-is-full-of-startling-revelations-he-should-have-told-us-sooner/2020/06/17/beac5bb6-b0e5-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html
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