The Room Where It Happened
58 pages • 1-hour read
John BoltonThe Room Where It Happened
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “From the Afghanistan Counterterrorism Mission to the Camp David Near Miss”
Bolton’s reasons for maintaining a troop presence in Afghanistan are simple: to prevent a resurgence of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and to monitor nuclear weapons in programs in Pakistan and Iran. Meanwhile, Pompeo and Zalmay Khalilzad, special representative to Afghanistan, are involved in negotiations with the Taliban toward eventually achieving Trump’s campaign promise to lower the troop numbers in Afghanistan to zero. To Bolton, the only terms of an agreement that would be acceptable are ones dictating that terrorism is effectively eliminated from the country and that there are strong mechanisms to continually verify this.
As Dunford and Bolton make the case to maintain a counterterrorism force on the ground in Afghanistan, Trump tosses out a litany of his greatest hits, confusing former Afghan President Hamid Karzai and current President Ashraf Ghani, and complaining that it costs more to fight the Afghan War than to rebuild the World Trade Center.
Eventually, Pompeo and Khalilzad present a troop-withdrawal deal to Trump in a Situation Room meeting. As usual, Trump’s primary concern is how the deal will play politically, in Congress and across the country. Trump impulsively suggests hosting the Taliban for a summit at Camp David. Stunned by the suggestion yet incredulous that such a meeting would occur, Bolton advises Trump to plan the meeting, if for no other reason than that it will delay the Pompeo-Khalilzad deal.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The End of the Idyll”
In March 2019 Trump calls Bolton to complain about Marie Yovanovitch, the US ambassador to Ukraine. He accuses Yovanovitch of bad-mouthing Trump and Bolton, adding that he wants her fired that very day. The matter slips Bolton’s mind until a few days later when he sees two of Trump’s personal lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, saying similar things about Yovanovitch. This leads Bolton to believe that Giuliani is the source of the rumors.
Bolton calls Pompeo, who says there are no facts supporting the allegations against Yovanovitch. Furthermore, Pompeo believes that some of Giuliani’s clients in Ukraine may be targets of Yovanovitch’s efforts to reduce corruption in the country, hence the smear campaign. Nevertheless, Trump refuses to drop the issue. The breadth of the narrative Giuliani’s been feeding Trump is now expanded to include allegations that Yovanovitch is protecting Joe Biden from criminal investigations related to a Ukrainian energy company where Biden’s son Hunter served on the board. Furious that Yovanovitch is still employed, Trump instructs Pompeo to order her back to Washington, which he does with a sense of resignation.
Concerned about Giuliani’s influence, Bolton consults White House lawyers John Eisenberg and Pat Cipollone. While they agree that Giuliani’s tactics are “slimy,” Eisenberg and Cipollone stop short of calling them ethical violations under the lawyers’ Code of Professional Responsibility. Bolton also confers with Attorney General William Barr about Trump’s pattern of interfering or attempting to interfere with criminal investigations on behalf of favored dictators, including Erdogan and Xi. Bolton writes, “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life” (458). Barr, however, seems more worried about the appearance of these efforts than the acts of interference themselves.
Perhaps emboldened by the election of the young and untested President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, Giuliani’s efforts in that country intensify. Giuliani wants to meet Zelensky to discuss opening investigations into Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on vague and confusing grounds. Moreover, Giuliani convinces Trump that Ukraine is responsible for meddling in the 2016 election, a full-fledged conspiracy theory pushed by Russia.
Giuliani is eager to join a May 20 delegation to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration, but Bolton refuses. Instead, the delegation will be led by Energy Secretary Rick Perry. When finalizing the list of delegates, Bolton is confused to see US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland included. Believing that Sondland has no reason to be there, Bolton removes him from the list. Mulvaney later countermands him, insisting that Sondland attend.
Bolton is in Tokyo when Trump is debriefed about the Ukraine trip. According to his deputy, Charles Kupperman, Trump rejected Perry’s efforts to convince Trump of Ukraine’s strategic value with relation to Russia. Trump simply repeats variations of the line “I don’t want to have any fucking thing to do with Ukraine” (462) and rants about Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, and the DNC server.
The following month, during a National Security Council meeting, Trump is enraged about the $250 million Congress earmarked for weapons assistance to Ukraine. Bolton is now seriously worried that fever-swamp conspiracy theories will cause real damage to US strategic interests.
On July 10, a delegation led by Bolton’s Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Danylyuk, visits the White House. Sondland organizes a meeting on his own with the delegation, which Bolton tells NSC specialist Fiona Hill to attend. She reports back that the meeting was held to press for a Trump-Zelensky summit to address the “Giuliani issues.” Referring to Hill’s testimony during impeachment hearings, Bolton sums up his feelings on the matter at the time:
[Hill] quoted me accurately as saying, ‘I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.’ I thought the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior. Was it a factor in my later resignation? Yes, but as one of many ‘straws’ that contributed to my departure (465).
At 9:00 a.m. on July 25, Bolton briefs Trump on an upcoming call with Zelensky, which he expects will be a fairly bland conversation to congratulate Zelensky on his presidential victory. Bolton learns that 90 minutes earlier, Sondland spoke with Trump at Mulvaney’s behest. Bolton’s recollection of the call itself is consistent with the call record made public after a whistleblower’s complaint, which in turn leads to Trump’s impeachment. The key point is that Trump strongly implies to Zelensky that Ukraine will only receive military assistance if it initiates Giuliani’s dubious investigations into Hunter Biden and the DNC server.
Joined by Pompeo and Esper, Bolton’s chief objective over the coming weeks is to convince Trump to release the $250 million in security assistance before the fiscal year ends on September 30. Meanwhile, Bolton takes pains to say as little as possible about the proposed Biden and DNC investigations in discussions with Ukrainian officials, hoping that he can signal America’s real interests to them.
On September 9, Trump calls Bolton into his office to upbraid him about the negative press related to the aborted Taliban summit at Camp David. He accuses Bolton of being a leaker, even though Trump himself leaked the details of the meeting on Twitter before anyone in the press got wind of it. As Bolton quietly seethes at the accusation, Trump tears into him over his use of military aircraft for official trips, even though this is consistent with the policies of this administration and previous ones. At that, Bolton gets up and says, “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave.” Trump replies, “Let’s talk about it in the morning” (481). Bolton returns to his office, gives his prewritten resignation letter to his assistant, and goes home a free man.
Two days later, amid increasingly loud backlash from congressional Republicans over security assistance to Ukraine, Trump finally releases the aid.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Epilogue”
As the House moves to impeach Trump in late 2019 over the Ukraine affair, Bolton ponders his moral and constitutional responsibilities. That Trump’s behavior was deeply troubling to him is without question. Yet he also respects the office of the president’s constitutional authority over the executive branch. Further reluctance to participate in impeachment hearings stems from Bolton’s view that House Democrats committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting the proceedings to the Ukraine scandal. Had the House offered a comprehensive case revealing a pattern of behavior—with regard to Halkbank, ZTE, Huawei, and Ukraine—its case would have been far more persuasive. Furthermore, it in its zeal to impeach Trump as quickly as possible, the House failed to challenge Trump’s “testimonial immunity” demands in the courts, which prevented witnesses like Kupperman from answering House subpoenas. Had Bolton himself been subpoenaed, he too would have surely had to deal with this legal question, one that the House refused to settle in court. Finally, Bolton believes that had he testified, it would have made no material difference to the outcome in the Senate, where a majority comprised entirely of Republicans voted to acquit Trump.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
By the time Bolton reaches Trump’s wrangling over withdrawing from Afghanistan and negotiating with the Taliban, he has already established the guiding principles of Trump’s foreign policy approach, all of which are on display here. There’s the desire for the big headline-making deal, which causes Trump to potentially alienate Republican allies by inviting the Taliban to Camp David. There’s the president’s lack of focus in Situation Room meetings, which causes him to wildly careen from one topic to the next. There’s a lack of basic understanding of even the principal players involved, as Trump repeatedly confuses Presidents Karzai and Ghani. And in Bolton’s telling, there’s a wanton disregard for human life, reflected in Trump’s complaint that it costs more to fight in Afghanistan than to rebuild the World Trade Center, “inconveniently ignoring the loss of life in the 9/11 attacks, not just the cost of rebuilding” (426).
Meanwhile, Trump’s infamous July 15 phone call is both indicative of his approach toward foreign policy and a departure from that approach. Like other dealings with heads of state, Trump prioritizes his personal and electoral interests over that of the nation, which to Bolton is the overarching theme of the president’s foreign policy doctrine. It also constitutes a corruption of law enforcement by prioritizing investigations into flimsy allegations instead of championing true opponents of corruption like Yovanovitch.
In other ways the Ukraine gambit differs from other incidents Bolton identifies as scandalous. For example, Zelensky is not an authoritarian strongman like Xi or Erdogan, two other heads of state with whom Trump sought unseemly deals. This positions Trump less as a hapless negotiator desperate for a deal and more as a bully, strong-arming the newly elected leader of a country caught in a precarious position with respect to Russia. One of the most striking ways that the Ukraine affair differs from other incidents Bolton highlights is that it lacks the impulsiveness that marks so many of Trump’s interactions with world leaders. Rather, it was consistent with what Trump—spurred on by Giuliani—had long wanted to do with regard to Ukraine. Bolton writes,
Nor, at the time, did I think Trump’s comments in the call reflected any major change in direction; the linkage of the military assistance with the Giuliani fantasies was already baked in. The call was not the keystone for me, but simply another brick in the wall (466).
The fact that, in Bolton’s telling, the so-called quid pro quo was no Trumpian flight-of-fancy but rather the planned execution of official foreign policy arguably makes the Ukraine scandal more insidious than many right-leaning media commentators depicted it to be.
This is one reason why many observers expressed outrage at Bolton’s decision not to testify in impeachment hearings against Donald Trump. While most of the empirical details of Bolton’s recollections were covered by other witnesses—particularly Bolton’s subordinate Fiona Hill—the author’s proximity to Trump throughout the Ukraine scandal arguably gave him a broader view of how the pieces of the affair fit together. Instead, House Representatives and observers watching the impeachment hearings on television were forced to piece together the narrative through a series of witnesses, each of whom were only privy to a small part of the affair. Moreover, Bolton’s status as a cabinet member would have added extra weight to his testimony.
In considering Bolton’s reasons for not testifying on their own merits, some important questions arise. For example, Bolton famously writes that House Democrats are guilty of “impeachment malpractice” by limiting the hearings to the Ukraine affair. He goes on to say that Trump’s actions involving Halkbank, Huawei, and ZTE are equally disturbing and would have established a pattern of the president placing his personal interests above the national interest and the law. Yet one may wonder if the hearings would have presented a perfect opportunity for Bolton to lay out the details of these very incidents before House representatives and the American people, instead of publishing them in a book months after Trump was acquitted.
Furthermore, Bolton’s argument that legal concerns prevented him from testifying also bears scrutiny. By publishing the details in a book, Bolton already courted legal trouble from the Trump administration. Indeed, Trump’s Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in June 2020 shortly before the book’s release date in an effort to prevent The Room Where It Happened from being published. Trump himself even threatened Bolton with “criminal problems” if the book was released. (Shortell, David, Kaitlan Collins, and Jeremy Diamond. “Trump administration sues Bolton over book dispute.” CNN, 17 June 2020.) In Bolton’s defense, he likely felt he was on stronger legal ground with regard to the lawsuit than he was with regard to Trump’s directive that he not testify in impeachment hearings. Yet if Trump is as dangerous and vindictive as Bolton suggests, one might think the president’s invocation of “criminal problems” would be taken at least as seriously as his directive not to testify.
Like so much of Bolton’s book, the contentious nature of the author’s decision not to participate in impeachment hearings is an extraordinarily divisive issue about which readers will inevitably make up their own minds.
Unlock all 58 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs