The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Personnel management issues, also critical to policy development, portended a series of dramatic changes following the November 2018 congressional elections. Jim Mattis and his staff, for example, had a masterful command of press relations, carefully cultivating his reputation as a “warrior scholar.” One story I was sure the media hadn’t heard from Mattis was one told by Trump on May 25, as Marine One flew back to the White House from Annapolis after Trump’s graduation speech to the Naval Academy. He said Mattis had told him, regarding Trump’s appearing in a scheduled presidential debate with Clinton just days after the Access Hollywood story broke in the press, that “it was the bravest thing he had ever seen anyone do.” Coming from a career military man, that was indeed something. Of course, Trump could have been making it up, but, if not, it showed Mattis knew how to flatter with the best of them. There was no doubt Mattis was in troubled waters by the summer of 2018, and he grew steadily weaker as the year unfolded. At about nine forty-five p.m. on Sunday, September 16, Trump called me to ask if I had seen a prominently displayed New York Times article about Mattis3 and “read it carefully,” which I said I had. “I don’t like it,” said Trump. “Mattis is always doing this kind of thing.” I said I thought the article was very unfair to Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel, brought on by the enmity she had earned from Mattis in her early days at the White House, wh...