Man vs. Machine

John Bolton did not have a formal role in policymaking on torture, but if he had, he would have spoken with authority born of firsthand experience. He had been a conservative at the State Department and an American at the United Nations. No one chooses to be tortured, of course, but Bolton actually sought these positions of pain and agony.

If one definition of masochism is “a willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences,” then Bolton qualifies. He was a Goldwater Republican as a teenager in Baltimore and, later in the Vietnam decade, a right-wing campus agitator at Yale. All of that–and he picked a profession that requires him to talk to journalists on a regular basis. Masochist, indeed.

But there are many reasons to be grateful that Bolton has chosen to subject himself to such discomfiture, and they fill the pages of Surrender Is Not an Option. This thick volume overflows with the acerbic wit and blunt critiques that have made him the bane of the Washington Establishment, and something of a cult figure among conservatives. (A photograph on the back of the dust jacket shows Bolton smiling broadly with his arms raised in triumph, taking in the cascading applause that he received at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.)

John Bolton grew up in working-class Baltimore; his father, a fireman, worked two jobs so that his son could attend a well-regarded private school outside the city. It paid off. Bolton enrolled at Yale in 1966, the first member of his family to go to college. Already a conservative, he was active in the Yale Political Union and, during graduation week, shoehorned his way into giving a speech at the Class Day ceremony so that he might scold his classmates and the faculty for their aggressive liberalism. When he was heckled, he heckled back.

“What you have over there,” he said, gesturing to his tormentors, “is a typical example of liberal ‘tolerance.'” He declared: “The conservative underground is alive and well here; if we do not make our influence felt, rest assured we will in the real world.”

Bolton collected his law degree at Yale before venturing out into that real world, and after spending some time in private practice, took a job as the top lawyer at the Agency for International Development at the beginning of the Reagan administration. After another stint in the private sector, he returned to government as an assistant attorney general, where he became a close adviser to Attorney General Edwin Meese. When George H.W. Bush was elected president, Bolton served as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, and he returned to Foggy Bottom with George W. Bush as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

In that role, and out of the spotlight, Bolton helped expedite U.S. withdrawal from the “Cold War relic” that was the 1972 ABM treaty with the then-Soviet Union. More important, he served as a check on the accommodationist tendencies of the State Department bureaucracy in dealings with Iran and North Korea.

Finally, in 2005, President Bush nominated Bolton to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, the job that would make him famous to the America outside of the conservative movement and the insular world of arms control. The political left thought that nominating Bolton, a longtime critic of the U.N., was yet another example of the to-hell-with-you diplomacy of the Bush administration.

“This is just about the most inexplicable appointment the President could make to represent the United States to the world community,” Senator John Kerry sputtered.

Conservatives who did not choose to ignore the U.N. altogether believed Bolton was the perfect choice. After all, Bush had gone there in 2002, after a decade of Iraq’s defiance of U.N. resolutions and international appeasement of Saddam Hussein, and asked: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” When the Security Council passed a resolution threatening “serious consequences” for continued Iraqi intransigence, and then stood by while Iraq (once again) defied the international community, we seemed to have an answer. But Bush’s willingness to take the U.N. seriously, despite the taint of the growing Oil-for-Food scandal, made it relevant once more. If the United Nations was going to remain relevant, better to send someone like John Bolton to whip it into shape.

He tried. Bolton was successful where he could be (pushing the Security Council on North Korea, for example) and less successful where the weight of the international community prevented progress (Iran, U.N. reform). Perhaps the most important contribution of Surrender Is Not an Option will come from the light it shines on the Department of State and its permanent bureaucracy. Unlike many other memoirs written by former government officials, Bolton manages to give readers a real sense of the internecine battles and day-to-day drudgery of working inside a vast federal bureaucracy. He sometimes does this unintentionally–by including the most trivial details of sniping between agencies and relying so heavily on bureaucratic acronyms–but, more often, his anecdotes and observations serve to illuminate the disconnect between President Bush and the professional diplomats paid to serve him:

For some elements of the bureaucracy, success meant blocking the president’s policies. Bolton writes:

Not surprisingly, Bolton is unafraid of throwing sharp elbows. He writes that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were “obsessed by their own press coverage” and suggests that President Bush sometimes does not understand what is happening to his own administration’s foreign policy: “The lesson of North Korea policy under George W. Bush is fundamentally the lesson of the Risen Bureaucracy. .  .  . The bureaucracy’s persistence prevailed so overwhelmingly that Bush himself did not even realize it.”

By the end of his book, Bolton has made it clear that the bureaucracy’s victories include far more than just North Korea. And George W. Bush’s kinder, gentler foreign policy has generated rare praise from the Washington media establishment and those people Bolton calls “the High Minded.” Meet with Iran? Terrific. Directly engage North Korea? Outstanding. Restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?

True leadership.

Of course, Bolton sees things differently. He offers his assessment almost in passing, but expresses it in a characteristically blunt manner so that it remains in your head long after you finish reading: The triumph of the bureaucracy, he writes, means that Bush “administration foreign policy is in something like a free fall.”

Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President.