All (garbled) sound and (little) fury

Except for those recently returned from outer space, everyone has heard of John Bolton and his new book.  He has had his 15 minutes of fame even in these times when the pandemic has relegated everything else to the back burner. That is no small achievement for a fringe player (mostly) in Republican administrations of the United States starting with that of Ronald Reagan. He was George W Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and Donald Trump’s national security adviser.  These assignments lasted 17 months each, coincidentally, and neither of them was marked by any notable achievement.

Still, a “tell-all” book by a self-proclaimed insider in any administration has the reading public excited about some unknown and possibly damaging details about the writer’s master, the presumed leader of the free world.  Mr Bolton’s book created a pre-publication hype as expected, and the Trump administration’s ham-handed efforts (are they ever any different?) to block its publication only heightened it.

This reviewer, no admirer of the walrus-moustached lawyer and a member of the Beltway Republican set, was also taken in.  The case of John Dean’s testimony which did an enormous amount of damage to the Nixon presidency came to mind.  But sad to report, Mr Bolton’s meandering book, full of details of no particular value to anyone except its author, is not in the same class.  It does not even have a toy gun, leave alone a smoking one.

Mr Bolton is a self-confessed hawk, most notably on Iran.  Not surprisingly, it is ever present in these memoirs, if not quite front and centre.  His major regret is that Mr Trump reneged on his proposition of bombing Iranian “nuclear” facilities in June last year.  

 

The room where it happened, A White House Memoir 

Author: John Bolton

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 577

Price: Rs 899

 

Mr Bolton seems to have thought that this was his “zero-dark-thirty” moment (when Barack Obama sat in the White House Operations Room throughout the mission to capture Osama bin Laden in 2011).  Imagine his distress when Mr Trump cancelled the plan because he thought the likely casualties represented a disproportionate response.  The real surprise is that Mr Trump would actually think that way and say so.

In his tenure, Mr Bolton was the president’s faithful companion on all the president’s sojourns and meetings with world leaders — Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, Kim Jong-un all figure in what is essentially an extended travelogue.  But there is little evidence that he was Mr Trump’s Sherpa in these trysts, not that the delusional president would have ever tolerated a Sherpa!  Contrast this with the role of Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House or Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration. 

Mr Bolton dutifully records all these meetings at length, including details of the times of trips and names of hotels, but these are of little consequence.  He does say that 

Mr Trump sought the support of not just Messrs Xi and Putin but also Mr Erdogan for his re-election campaign.  That confirms the long-held suspicion that Mr Trump’s major motivation for his supposed diplomatic overtures was not so much furthering America’s interests but his own narrow personal ones.

As an Indian, I tried to understand how our country figures in these memoirs.  Sanjaya Baru had counted 10 mentions of India, but I could find only nine in the index.  The rude shock is that despite his high-profile courting of the United States, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rates only a single mention, and that too in the context of waivers of sanctions against Iran to facilitate our buying oil from that country.

Mr Bolton was very much a part of the team that was involved in the imbroglio that saw Mr Trump trying to coax the newly elected Ukrainian president in efforts to implicate, first Hilary Clinton and then Hunter Biden, son of the putative Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in sordid deals.  These formed the basis of the Trump impeachment. 

Mr Bolton played no role in them.  He explains lamely that he would have testified had he been subpoenaed, knowing full well that the Republican-controlled Senate would never do that.

Mr Trump has had by now a long list of high-level hirings and firings, including secretaries of state and defence, chiefs of staff and sundry advisers.  The only constants in his entourage seem to be his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.  

So Mr Bolton never had much of a chance to make any significant contribution or impact.  But that should not make us feel sorry for him, because when he accepted the appointment in April 2018, these Trump traits were quite well known.  Mr Bolton should have been well aware of his fate in this administration — yet another pawn misused, discarded and forgotten.

But Mr Bolton thinks he is not the one to go gentle into that good night. He tries to rage, produce turgid and at times unreadable prose, hold extended media interviews (including to an Indian TV channel) and all, but the book is a sad waste of time.