The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.40 Thus, responding to the coronavirus, the NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the chair behind the Resolute desk that was empty. And fundamentally, after all the human and economic costs of the coronavirus are reckoned, there are two chilling conclusions. First, we must do everything possible to ensure that China, and its contemporaneous disinformation campaign about the origin of the virus, will not succeed in proving that the Big Lie technique is alive and well in the twenty-first century. We must tell the truth about China’s behavior, which Trump was consistently loath to do, or we will suffer the consequences and the risk well into the future. Second, after decades in which biological (and chemical) warfare have been belittled as “the poor man’s nuclear weapon”—given what the likes of North Korea, Iran, and others have just seen happen worldwide—we must treat these other two weapons of mass destruction with at least the vigilance we now afford to nuclear weapons. And, in fact, by combing the biosecurity directorate with the Directorate responsible for weapons of mass destruction, I intended to do j...