Surrender Is Not an Option

Defending America at the United Nations

John Bolton

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416575573
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With no-holds-barred candor, Donald Trump's new National Security Adviser and former ambassador to the United Nations takes us behind the scenes at the UN and the US State Department and reveals why his efforts to defend American interests and reform the UN resulted in controversy. He also shows how the US can lead the way to a more realistic global security arrangement for the twenty-first century and identifies the next generation of threats to America. In this revealing memoir, John Bolton recounts his appointment in 2005 as Ambassador to the United Nations, his headline-making Senate confirmation battle, and his sixteen-month tenure at the United Nations. Bolton offers keen insight into such international crises as North Korea's nuclear test, Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, the genocide in Darfur, the negotiation that produced the controversial end of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, and more. Chronicling both his successes and frustrations in taking a hard line against weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferators, terrorists, and rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, he also exposes the operational inadequacies that hinder the UN's effectiveness in international diplomacy and its bias against Israel and the United States. At home, he criticizes the bureaucratic inertia in the US State Department that can undermine presidential policy.This fascinating chronicle of the career of one of America's outstanding statesmen who has fought to preserve American sovereignty and strength at home and abroad now contains a new afterword, "Challenges for the Next President."

CHAPTER ONE

EARLY DAYS

De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace, et la patrie sera sauvée.

—GEORGES JACQUES DANTON, SEPTEMBER 2, 1792

Election night in 1964 found me at the local Goldwater for President headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. I had done volunteer campaign work there during the summer after the Republican Convention, and on weekends. Having obtained permission to be absent from high school on Election Day to hand out Goldwater leaflets at a nearby precinct, I was in Catonsville when Maryland’s polls closed to await the national returns. Although Lyndon Johnson seemed to have a large lead going into the election, I remained optimistic that Barry Goldwater would run well, and might even pull off an upset.

So much for the early signs of a promising political career. Goldwater was crushed, in what was then the worst presidential election defeat in American history. At the Catonsville office, which had become quite crowded, many of the adult volunteers (I was just about the only teenager there) were weeping, something I had never seen before in public. I was somewhat puzzled by this display of emotion, but I was more puzzled by the election results, which were going from bad to worse. Dean Burch, Goldwater’s chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, “As the sun sets in the West, the Republican star will rise.” I believed that for a while, until it became ever more obvious that “down” was the only direction in which Goldwater was headed.

It took weeks for the extent of the defeat to penetrate fully into my befuddled brain. When a few brave souls, just weeks afterward, printed bumper stickers that read “AuH₂O ’68,” I was ready to sign up again. After all, the American people could not really vote in overwhelming numbers for a candidate who said things like, “I want y’all to know that the Democratic Party is in favor of a mighty lot of things, and against mighty few.” I had read Goldwater’s Why Not Victory? and The Conscience of a Conservative, and fiercely admired the Arizonan’s philosophy and candor. He was an individualist, not a collectivist, who said without reservation, “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”1 He was against “the Eastern Establishment,” which conservatives saw as a major source of our misguided statist policies at home, and what Barry called “drift, deception, and defeat” in the international struggle against Communism. I cheered when Barry said we should cut off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea, even though my own state of Maryland would have been drifting out there as well. Later, after he returned to the Senate, Goldwater began a letter to the CIA director, “Dear Bill: I am pissed off.” (How many times in my own government career did I long to write a letter like that, although I never did.) In my heart, I knew Barry was right.

While I thought the 1964 presidential election was a no-brainer, I was obviously part of a distinct minority, even though others would bravely say of Goldwater’s popular vote total that “twenty-six million Americans can’t be wrong.” It would have been entirely logical after 1964 to give up politics as completely hopeless, and go on to a career, say, in the Foreign Service, as I seriously contemplated. Or I might have drifted off to the left in college, as so many of my contemporaries did. But like many others whose first taste of electoral politics came in the Goldwater campaign, I had exactly the opposite reaction. If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine man’s philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in the country, overwhelmingly supported by the elite academic institutions, to the tune of negative advertising like Johnson’s famous “daisy commercial,” which accused Goldwater of being too casual about nuclear war, and slogans like “Goldwater for Halloween,” it was time to fight back. If the United States was in such parlous condition that people who showed off their appendectomy scars in public and held up beagles by their ears could get elected president, something had to be done. Surrender was not an option.

Thirty-six years later, election night 2000 was a very different affair. Beginning in 1968, Republicans had dominated American presidential politics. Only the unfortunate elections of two failed southern governors had intervened, and the objective in 2000 was to prevent the second Democratic interruption from being extended. Unlike 1964, however, the 2000 election was excruciatingly close, and I didn’t stay around to await the outcome. I left for Seoul the morning after the election to participate in a conference on Korea-related policy issues at Yonsei University, which was cohosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I was senior vice president. When I checked into my hotel in Seoul late on Thursday, Korea time, the Florida outcome remained up in the air. After a long day on Friday, I turned on the television in my hotel room and found that chaos still reigned in Florida, with no final result.

Most significantly for me, Governor George W. Bush had named Jim Baker, my former boss at the State Department during the previous Bush administration, to lead his effort to salvage Florida’s electoral vote. No one at that point had the slightest idea of what might be involved, or how long it would take to decide the evolving contest. Before I collapsed into bed early that Friday evening in Seoul, I left a voice message for Baker at his Houston law firm. I explained that I was in South Korea, but offered to fly to Florida to help. At about 2:00 A.M. Seoul time, the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear Baker’s unmistakable Texas twang saying, “Get your ass on a plane and get back here.”

Just a few days later, I was in West Palm Beach, part of the great “chad” exercise. I stopped first in Tallahassee, but Baker immediately dispatched me to Palm Beach where he thought a “heavyweight lawyer” should be added to the team already diligently at work. Ken Mehlman, later Republican Party chairman, called me “the Atticus Finch of Palm Beach County,” but there were many, many people volunteering. Hour after hour we sat, psychoanalyzing ballot cards. This was the process Democrats hoped would produce a change in Florida’s popular vote totals and award them the state’s electoral vote, and therefore the national election. One of my AEI colleagues, Michael Novak, a former Democrat, feared the worst, as he watched on television a battle between “the street fighters and the preppies.” It turned out we won despite our rosy cheeks. I tried to go home for Thanksgiving, but I was called back to Palm Beach just as I arrived in Washington. My family couldn’t face weeks of eating turkey without me, so I returned ours to the local grocery store on Thanksgiving morning, which was certainly a first for me, and flew back to Palm Beach. On the evening of December 12, the Supreme Court ended the struggle in Bush’s favor, and quite correctly, as a matter of law, I might add. I was in Baker’s office when he called Texas to tell the candidate the good news, saying to Bush, for the first time legitimately, “Congratulations, Mr. President.”

After more than a month in Florida, one of the great emotional roller-coaster rides of my professional life, I flew back to Washington on a private plane with Margaret Tutwiler, a long-time Baker aide. We agreed it had been a completely different experience from our time in the State Department during the first Bush administration. It was only a matter of time, however, before both of us found ourselves back at the State Department, where Chad was a country in Africa, not a tiny bit of meaningful paper.

Between the 1964 and 2000 elections, a lot had happened to me, demonstrating in my own experience the definition of “history” as “one damned thing after another,” with a few preliminary events before 1964 to get me to that unhappy Goldwater election headquarters in Catonsville.

I started out in Baltimore on November 20, 1948, a baby boomer by any definition of the term, the son of a Baltimore firefighter, Edward Jackson Bolton (“Jack” to everyone) and his “housewife,” as we used to say, from Wilmington, Delaware, Virginia Clara Godfrey, or “Ginny.” Neither had graduated from high school, but I have no doubt that my own academic record was based on the genes I inherited from them, since it certainly did not come from our social contacts or standing in society. All four of my grandparents, who were mostly Scotch-Irish or Irish, emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, so my parents were first-generation Americans who had grown up during the Depression and been steeled by World War II. They didn’t need anyone to tell them that they had been through tough times, and they were determined, like most in their generation, that their children were not going to repeat their experiences.

Jack lied about his age to join the Coast Guard once World War II started, eager to go to sea, not a surprising aspiration for a Baltimore boy, living in the East Coast’s second-largest port after New York. Unfortunately, first assigned to land duty, he made it to sea by dropping a pan of fried eggs on the shoes of an officer who had pushed him a little further than he wanted to go. The ships on which he’d served looked like big hunks of ice, escorting cargoes across the North Atlantic, or so I thought years later when my father showed me the tiny photographs he’d kept. Wounded on D-Day off the coast of France, Jack spent the rest of the war recuperating in Florida, tending to the morale of the stateside female population, or at least that’s how he described it. Back in Baltimore, after 1945, he knocked around for a while, and then got married, starting out as a plumber. The union rules, which resulted in what seemed to him to be endless hours of sitting around, finally prompted him to seek something more exciting, perhaps never having shaken the peculiar hold of wartime experience. He became a firefighter for the city of Baltimore, a decision that did not thrill his wife, Ginny, and certainly did no wonders for the family finances.

Shortly after taking his new job, Jack also decided to register to vote, which he did, listing himself as a Republican. The City Hall clerk, reviewing the registration form, said there must be some mistake because Jack was a city employee, and yet he had registered Republican rather than Democrat. When my father said there was no mistake, the clerk explained to him again that city employees registered as Democrats, which my father was still not buying. The story of my father’s response undoubtedly grew with the telling over the years, but suffice it to say that Jack registered as an Independent, and no fried eggs were dropped on the clerk’s shoes, or worse.

Jack loved being a firefighter, was a good union man, became a shop steward, and held other union offices over the years, attending conventions in what for us were exotic places like Puerto Rico. Make no mistake, he was not a “fireman”; they were the people who shoveled coal into locomotive engines, which was not his job. Although he was probably unaware of Calvin Coolidge’s suppression of the Boston police strike of 1919, Jack would have absolutely agreed with Coolidge’s admonition that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Although we all felt that firefighter and police salaries were too low, it was inconceivable to my father that he would ever go out on strike and leave Baltimore’s citizens at risk. When it became fashionable in the 1960s for teachers to strike, he deeply resented it, considering them spoiled for having gone to college and having cushy jobs, which they certainly were compared to his.

We lived for most of my young life, joined by my sister Joni Rae in 1957, in a southwest Baltimore row-house development called “Yale Heights,” just off Yale Avenue, complete with a small baseball field: “Yale Bowl.” Psychologists, I guess, can use this to explain my later disinclination to attend Princeton or Harvard. We lived next to a policeman and his family on one side, and a machinist at Westinghouse on the other. Nearby were roofers, bartenders and waitresses, stevedores, and even a few people who worked in offices. To me, Baltimore was a city of industry and manufacturing. I faithfully watched a weekend television program called The Port That Built a City, hosted by Helen Delich Bentley, a newspaper reporter and later a Republican congresswoman, soaking up its explanation of Baltimore’s trading and seafaring connections with the wider world. The city had benefited greatly from institutions like the Enoch Pratt Free Libraries (which I frequented), the Walters Art Gallery, and the Peabody Conservatory, all created by far-seeing individuals, not by the government.

Whereas Jack was naturally a quiet man, who generally kept his opinions to himself, except when agitated by government officials, Ginny was not a quiet woman. She explained to me that she had been a socialist in her Delaware youth. That notwithstanding, attractive blonde that she was, she’d also dated du Ponts. Ginny decided that I was not going to be educated forever in Baltimore public schools, which she regarded as inadequate, and she focused on getting me into McDonogh, one of Maryland’s most prestigious private schools, in Reisterstown, just outside Baltimore.

As a sixth grader, I sat for the McDonogh scholarship examination, an event so prominent in Maryland at the time that it was advertised on Baltimore television stations. McDonogh then had an eight-hundred-acre campus, luxurious by my standards, and quite a change from city life. I found the day-long exam somewhat lonely and intimidating, but I passed that round and was called in for interviews. My parents were interviewed as well, which wasn’t pleasant for Jack, but Ginny was more than happy for an opportunity to sing my praises. My father worked two jobs at the time in order to earn enough income for an adequate living. After fighting fires on the night shift, and working at his machinist’s job during the day, he was not usually in a talkative mood. Our interviews apparently went well, and I was accepted into the seventh grade on scholarship. I spent the next six years at McDonogh as a boarding student, which all scholarship students were at the time, coming home on weekends and for vacations. That’s why being allowed out of school on Election Day 1964 was so special. Not only was I skipping class, I was off campus on a weekday!

McDonogh had been founded with the legacy of John McDonogh, a Baltimore native who had made a fortune in pre–Civil War New Orleans, and who had divided his wealth between the two cities for the education of the poor. New Orleans used its share to create its public school system, but Baltimore, which already had public schools, and was starting to benefit from the contributions of Pratt, Walters, and Peabody, founded McDonogh in 1873 for orphan boys. So successful was the school that the wealthy wanted their own sons to attend, and paying students were later admitted. By the time I attended, the graduating classes were just under a hundred boys. Typically, between fifteen and twenty boys were on scholarship. McDonogh was a “semimilitary” school, which meant we all wore uniforms and did our share of drilling, but it was not a “military academy” of the southern sort. Two successive headmasters named Lamborn, father and son, were Quakers, and the uniforms originated at McDonogh’s founding when the students didn’t arrive with many clothes. Over the years, the uniforms had mitigated the disparity between the sons of the wealthy and those of us on scholarship because there was no opportunity for competition in clothes or other ostentatiousness, as at many other schools. Competition was in the schoolroom, on the athletic fields, and in extracurricular activities, and it was intense.

Indeed, the competition was sufficiently intense that it enabled me to get into Yale College, where I started in the fall of 1966, still on scholarship. I traveled to New Haven on a Trailways bus because the ever-benevolent Baltimore government would not let my father have the time off to drive me there himself. Yale was also intense, especially in the late 1960s when anti–Vietnam War sentiment was growing around the country. I was just as much of a libertarian conservative at Yale as I had been in 1964, and given the prevailing campus political attitudes, I might as well have been a space alien. By senior year, students at Yale and elsewhere had decided that “striking” by not attending classes was an effective way to protest whatever was the flavor-of-the-day political issue. I didn’t understand or approve of students’ striking any more than my father had liked teachers’ striking, and I especially resented the sons and daughters of the wealthy, of whom there were many, telling me that I was supposed to, in effect, forfeit my scholarship. I had an education to get, and the protesters could damn well get out of my way as I walked to class.

Yale was filled with extracurricular activities, and I spent a lot of time in the Yale Political Union and the Connecticut Inter-Collegiate Student Legislature (CISL). The Political Union, founded in the 1930s, was modeled after the Oxford and Cambridge Unions and brought in prominent speakers and held debates during the school year. I joined the Conservative Party and found the opportunity to listen to Republicans from “outside” a welcome relief from Yale’s relentless, smug, self-satisfied liberalism. The highlight for me was a debate between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Yale’s chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, on the proposition “Resolved: that government has an obligation to promote equality as well as preserve liberty.” Buckley argued the negative, and cleaned the floor with Coffin, although I have to admit that Coffin had the best line of the evening. As he started, Coffin noted that he had been in Yale’s Class of 1949, and Buckley in the Class of 1950. “Back then,” said Coffin, “Bill was only a year behind me.” After graduation, at the start of the Cold War, both Buckley and Coffin had joined the CIA. Those were the days.

The Political Union did have its more frivolous moments. One issue that consumed Yale in the late sixties was whether the college, all male since its founding in 1701, should become coeducational. This debate may have been more intense than the debate over the Vietnam War, although I doubt the antiwar students would ever admit it, because the outcome could have a profound and immediate impact on our lives. I was against coeducation, thinking instead that Vassar should move to New Haven from Poughkeepsie and join with Yale. Many questioned whether Vassar was up to Yale’s academic standards and I suppose at Vassar they had similar concerns. In time, the Political Union addressed this momentous question in a debate on the proposition “Resolved: that in any Vassar-Yale merger, Yale men will always come out on top.” In an unusual display of open-mindedness (or perhaps with other motives), the Yalies invited Vassar girls to participate in the debate, which drew an especially large crowd at the Political Union’s house on fraternity row. One Vassar girl, who said her name was Ophelia Bust,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• CHAPTER ONE Early Days
• CHAPTER TWO The Reagan Revolution and the Bush 41 Thermidor
• CHAPTER THREE Cutting Gulliver Loose: Protecting American Sovereignty in Good Deals and Bad
• CHAPTER FOUR Following the Yellow Cake Road on North Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE Leaving the Driving to the EU: Negotiations Über Alles with Iran
• CHAPTER SIX Why Do I Want This Job?
• CHAPTER SEVEN Arriving at the UN: Fear and Loathing in New York
• CHAPTER EIGHT Sisyphus in the Twilight Zone: Fixing the Broken Institution, or Trying To
• CHAPTER NINE As Good as It Gets: The Security Council
• CHAPTER TEN Electing the New Secretary General: Ban Ki-moon Is Coming to Town
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Security Council Successes on North Korea
• CHAPTER TWELVE Iran in the Security Council: The EU-3 Find New Ways to Give In
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Darfur and the Weakness of UN Peacekeeping in Africa
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Israel and Lebanon: Surrender as a Matter of High Principle at the UN
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Recessional
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Free at Last: Back to the Firing Line
• PHOTO CREDITS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT