The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Any number of commentators have observed that the government’s pre-clearance review process is riddled with constitutional deficiencies; the potential for obstruction, censorship, and abuse; and harmful to timely debate on critical public policy issues. You can add my name to the list of critics, especially when the process is in the hands of a President so averse to criticism that the idea of banning books comes to him naturally and serenely. There is one other point worth addressing, not related to the clearance process but to the idea of writing a book like this immediately after leaving government service. A number of critics, having of course not read the book, denounced it as a tell-all that was unseemly at best, and, in the words of Trump himself, traitorous. I addressed precisely these issues in 2014, in writing a review of Robert Gates’s memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,8 addressing criticisms of Gates similar to those now directed at me: “Gates’s critics have made two basic points, one political, one ethical. First, they say, it was inappropriate for him to write about an administration still in office, with the Afghanistan war (a major aspect of the book) still under way, and, more amusingly, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ramping up her expected 2016 presidential campaign. “Second, they argue that Gates betrayed the trust of President Obama and other senior Defense and Administration colleagues by revealing their conversations, positi...