The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

“Indeed, if Gates is subject to criticism on timing, it is precisely that he did not publish before the 2012 election, where exposing Barack Obama’s views on Afghanistan and his lack of interest in the global war on terrorism could have been significant. For example, voters could well have benefited from knowing what Gates was thinking during a March 2011 National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room, listening to the Commander in Chief: ‘The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him it’s all about getting out.’ “The harder, more important question is whether Gates violated the implicit confidences of the president and other senior colleagues. In some respects, this criticism parallels the justification for ‘executive privilege,’ namely, that the president must be able to receive candid advice from his subordinates, and that such candor is simply impossible if people expect to read about it thereafter. Since the integrity of Executive Branch decision-making is under siege from virtually every direction imaginable, it is no small matter if it is vulnerable from the very people directly advising the president. “But the executive-privilege analogy is only superficially accurate. All histories pose a threat to executive privilege, and insiders have been leaking internal administration battles since Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson propagandized aga...