Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad

Bolton, John

3.5

178 ratings by Goodreads

9780743569705: Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad

ISBN 10: 0743569709 ISBN 13: 9780743569705

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2007

A former ambassador to the United Nations explains his controversial efforts to defend American interests and reform the U.N., presenting his argument for why he believes the United States can enable a greater global security arrangement for modern times. Simultaneous.

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About the Author:

John Bolton was appointed by President George W. Bush as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 2005, and served until his appointment expired in December 2006. He was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for playing a major role in exposing Iran's secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. An attorney who has spent many years in public service and held high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Bolton is currently a Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a commentator for Fox News Channel. He lives outside of Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.

Chapter One

EARLY DAYS

De l'audace, et encore de l'audace,
et toujours de l'audace, et la patrie sera sauv�e.
-- Georges Jacques Danton, September 2, 1792

Election night in 1964 found me at the local Goldwater for President headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. I had done volunteer campaign work there during the summer after the Republican Convention, and on weekends. Having obtained permission to be absent from high school on Election Day to hand out Goldwater leaflets at a nearby precinct, I was in Catonsville when Maryland's polls closed to await the national returns. Although Lyndon Johnson seemed to have a large lead going into the election, I remained optimistic that Barry Goldwater would run well, and might even pull off an upset.

So much for the early signs of a promising political career. Goldwater was crushed, in what was then the worst presidential election defeat in American history. At the Catonsville office, which had become quite crowded, many of the adult volunteers (I was just about the only teenager there) were weeping, something I had never seen before in public. I was somewhat puzzled by this display of emotion, but I was more puzzled by the election results, which were going from bad to worse. Dean Burch, Goldwater's chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, "As the sun sets in the West, the Republican star will rise." I believed that for a while, until it became ever more obvious that "down" was the only direction in which Goldwater was headed.

It took weeks for the extent of the defeat to penetrate fully into my befuddled brain. When a few brave souls, just weeks afterward, printed bumper stickers that read "AuH2O '68," I was ready to sign up again. After all, the American people could not really vote in overwhelming numbers for a candidate who said things like, "I want y'all to know that the Democratic Party is in favor of a mighty lot of things, and against mighty few." I had read Goldwater's Why Not Victory? and The Conscience of a Conservative, and fiercely admired the Arizonan's philosophy and candor. He was an individualist, not a collectivist, who said without reservation, "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them."1 He was against "the Eastern Establishment," which conservatives saw as a major source of our misguided statist policies at home, and what Barry called "drift, deception, and defeat" in the international struggle against Communism. I cheered when Barry said we should cut off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea, even though my own state of Maryland would have been drifting out there as well. Later, after he returned to the Senate, Goldwater began a letter to the CIA director, "Dear Bill: I am pissed off." (How many times in my own government career did I long to write a letter like that, although I never did.) In my heart, I knew Barry was right.

While I thought the 1964 presidential election was a no-brainer, I was obviously part of a distinct minority, even though others would bravely say of Goldwater's popular vote total that "twenty-six million Americans can't be wrong." It would have been entirely logical after 1964 to give up politics as completely hopeless, and go on to a career, say, in the Foreign Service, as I seriously contemplated. Or I might have drifted off to the left in college, as so many of my contemporaries did. But like many others whose first taste of electoral politics came in the Goldwater campaign, I had exactly the opposite reaction. If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine man's philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in the country, overwhelmingly supported by the elite academic institutions, to the tune of negative advertising like Johnson's famous "daisy commercial," which accused Goldwater of being too casual about nuclear war, and slogans like "Goldwater for Halloween," it was time to fight back. If the United States was in such parlous condition that people who showed off their appendectomy scars in public and held up beagles by their ears could get elected president, something had to be done. Surrender was not an option.

Thirty-six years later, election night 2000 was a very different affair. Beginning in 1968, Republicans had dominated American presidential politics. Only the unfortunate elections of two failed southern governors had intervened, and the objective in 2000 was to prevent the second Democratic interruption from being extended. Unlike 1964, however, the 2000 election was excruciatingly close, and I didn't stay around to await the outcome. I left for Seoul the morning after the election to participate in a conference on Korea-related policy issues at Yonsei University, which was cohosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I was senior vice president. When I checked into my hotel in Seoul late on Thursday, Korea time, the Florida outcome remained up in the air. After a long day on Friday, I turned on the television in my hotel room and found that chaos still reigned in Florida, with no final result.

Most significantly for me, Governor George W. Bush had named Jim Baker, my former boss at the State Department during the previous Bush administration, to lead his effort to salvage Florida's electoral vote. No one at that point had the slightest idea of what might be involved, or how long it would take to decide the evolving contest. Before I collapsed into bed early that Friday evening in Seoul, I left a voice message for Baker at his Houston law firm. I explained that I was in South Korea, but offered to fly to Florida to help. At about 2:00 a.m. Seoul time, the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear Baker's unmistakable Texas twang saying, "Get your ass on a plane and get back here."

Just a few days later, I was in West Palm Beach, part of the great "chad" exercise. I stopped first in Tallahassee, but Baker immediately dispatched me to Palm Beach where he thought a "heavyweight lawyer" should be added to the team already diligently at work. Ken Mehlman, later Republican Party chairman, called me "the Atticus Finch of Palm Beach County," but there were many, many people volunteering. Hour after hour we sat, psychoanalyzing ballot cards. This was the process Democrats hoped would produce a change in Florida's popular vote totals and award them the state's electoral vote, and therefore the national election. One of my AEI colleagues, Michael Novak, a former Democrat, feared the worst, as he watched on television a battle between "the street fighters and the preppies." It turned out we won despite our rosy cheeks. I tried to go home for Thanksgiving, but I was called back to Palm Beach just as I arrived in Washington. My family couldn't face weeks of eating turkey without me, so I returned ours to the local grocery store on Thanksgiving morning, which was certainly a first for me, and flew back to Palm Beach. On the evening of December 12, the Supreme Court ended the struggle in Bush's favor, and quite correctly, as a matter of law, I might add. I was in Baker's office when he called Texas to tell the candidate the good news, saying to Bush, for the first time legitimately, "Congratulations, Mr. President."

After more than a month in Florida, one of the great emotional roller-coaster rides of my professional life, I flew back to Washington on a private plane with Margaret Tutwiler, a long-time Baker aide.We agreed it had been a completely different experience from our time in the State Department during the first Bush administration. It was only a matter of time, however, before both of us found ourselves back at the State Department, where Chad was a country in Africa, not a tiny bit of meaningful paper.

Between the 1964 and 2000 elections, a lot had happened to me, demonstrating in my own experience the definition of "history" as "one damned thing after another," with a few preliminary events before 1964 to get me to that unhappy Goldwater election headquarters in Catonsville.

I started out in Baltimore on November 20, 1948, a baby boomer by any definition of the term, the son of a Baltimore firefighter, Edward Jackson Bolton ("Jack" to everyone) and his "housewife," as we used to say, from Wilmington, Delaware, Virginia Clara Godfrey, or "Ginny." Neither had graduated from high school, but I have no doubt that my own academic record was based on the genes I inherited from them, since it certainly did not come from our social contacts or standing in society. All four of my grandparents, who were mostly Scotch-Irish or Irish, emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, so my parents were first-generation Americans who had grown up during the Depression and been steeled by World War II. They didn't need anyone to tell them that they had been through tough times, and they were determined, like most in their generation, that their children were not going to repeat their experiences.

Jack lied about his age to join the Coast Guard once World War II started, eager to go to sea, not a surprising aspiration for a Baltimore boy, living in the East Coast's second-largest port after New York. Unfortunately, first assigned to land duty, he made it to sea by dropping a pan of fried eggs on the shoes of an officer who had pushed him a little further than he wanted to go.The ships on which he'd served looked like big hunks of ice, escorting cargoes across the North Atlantic, or so I thought years later when my father showed me the tiny photographs he'd kept. Wounded on D-Day off the coast of France, Jack spent the rest of the war recuperating in Florida, tending to the morale of the stateside female population, or at least that's how he described it. Back in Baltimore, after 1945, he knocked around for a while, and then got married, starting out as a plumber. The union rules, which resulted in what seemed to him to be endless hours of sitting around, finally prompted him to seek something more exciting, perhaps never having shaken the peculiar hold of wartime experience. He became a firefighter for the city of Baltimore, a d...

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