The Room Where It Happened

The Room Where It Happened is a nonfiction memoir published in 2020 by American diplomat John Bolton. A New York Times best-seller, the book chronicles Bolton’s 17-month tenure as national security advisor under President Donald Trump. Between April 2018 and September 2019, Bolton was party to some of the most important events in Trump’s presidency, including two summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the US’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and the 2019 Ukraine affair that led to the president’s impeachment. Even before its release, the book drew controversy across the American political spectrum. Republicans loyal to Trump characterized it as dishonest in its largely negative portrayal of the president. Democrats, meanwhile, objected to Bolton’s decision to publish his recollections of the Ukraine scandal as part of a $2 million book deal, rather than testify in House impeachment hearings on the matter.

This study guide refers to 2020 edition published by Simon & Schuster.

After the 2016 election, Bolton seeks an appointment as secretary of state in Donald Trump’s administration. Although the job goes to Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, Bolton acts as an informal advisor to Trump throughout the president’s first year. He characterizes this period as deeply dysfunctional as Tillerson, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis work against the president on key issues, including the Iran nuclear deal. By the end of March 2018, Trump forces out McMaster and Tillerson—the latter following news reports that he called the president “a fucking moron” (25). Trump names Bolton his new national security advisor and names then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo his new secretary of state.

Immediately upon his arrival, Bolton faces a crisis. On April 7, 2018, two days prior to his start date, the Syrian army carries out a chemical warfare attack in Douma, killing up to 50 people, many of them civilians. In a National Security Council meeting of the Principals Committee, Bolton is bureaucratically outmaneuvered by Mattis, who recommends a significantly weaker military response than Bolton believes is necessary to deter future chemical attacks. Trump ultimately agrees to Mattis’s proposed strike, which is only enough to buy 13 months of deterrence before the Syrian army attacks civilian populations with chemical weapons again.

Shortly thereafter, Bolton and Mattis clash again over withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. This time, however, Bolton prevails, convincing Trump to abandon the agreement less than a month after arriving at the White House. Meanwhile, Bolton faces a far more daunting task as he attempts to dissuade Trump from meeting Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea. Against Bolton’s recommendations, Trump holds a summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12, 2018. At a dinner attended by Trump, Kim, and delegates from each nation, Bolton is mortified by how easily Kim manipulates Trump’s weakness for flattery. While no deal on denuclearization is reached, Trump makes what Bolton views as a dangerous concession when he vows to end US-South Korea joint military exercises on the Korean Peninsula.

The following month, Trump attends a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. By this point, Bolton increasingly views his role in such meetings as one of damage control. With no major concessions made in Trump’s meeting with Putin, Bolton initially believes the summit is a success. Yet during the press conference following the summit, Trump sides with Putin against the US intelligence community with regard to claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Bolton writes, “Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki” (158).

Arguably the most newsworthy revelations of the book stem from a June 2019 meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to Bolton, Trump tried to leverage the purchase of American-grown soybeans in a plea for Xi to help him win the 2020 election. Trump also allegedly encouraged Xi to continue building concentration camps to detain Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in China. Here, Bolton writes of Trump’s inability to distinguish between foreign policy that benefits US interests and foreign policy that benefits Trump, personally and electorally.

This distinction is also lost on Trump during the 2019 Ukraine scandal, which comes in the final weeks of Bolton’s tenure as national security advisor. While Bolton naturally wants to work with Ukraine on strategic issues that benefit the United States with respect to Russia, Trump is fixated on a series of baseless rumors spread by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Without evidence, the rumors accuse Ukraine of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the 2016 election and allege vague wrongdoing by Joe Biden pertaining to his son’s involvement in a Ukrainian energy firm. This obsession culminates in a July 25 phone call in which Trump is said to have implied to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that military aid to Ukraine is contingent on investigations that could benefit Trump in a potential presidential matchup with Biden. Amid enormous pressure from inside and outside the administration, Trump finally releases the aid on September 11, 2019. That’s two days after Bolton resigns over a range of issues, including Trump’s impulsive last-minute decision to stop a retaliatory strike against Iran the previous June.

In an epilogue Bolton defends his decision not to testify in the impeachment hearings against Trump over Ukraine. He characterizes the House’s proceedings as “impeachment malpractice” (484) in that they prioritized speed over comprehensiveness. Citing similar pressure campaigns involving Turkey and China, Bolton argues that impeachment proceedings would have been far more successful had the House established a pattern of Trump making foreign policy concessions designed to benefit the president politically. Bolton writes, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations” (485).