Man vs. Machine

...When George H.W...

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

...Unlike many other memoirs written by former government offi cials, Bolton manages to give readers a real sense of the internecine battles and day-to-day drudgery of working inside a vast federal bureaucracy...

...Conservatives who did not choose to ignore the U.N...

...True leadership...

...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...

...While not exactly scintillating to outsiders, surviving and fl ourishing in a federal bureaucracy is often the difference between failure and success, which I defi ne as implementing the president’s policies...

...Of course, Bolton sees things differently...

...Outstanding...

...When he was heckled, he heckled back...

...resolutions and international appeasement of Saddam Hussein, and asked: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant...

...No one chooses to be tortured, of course, but Bolton actually sought these positions of pain and agony...

...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...

...If the United Nations was going to remain relevant, better to send someone like John Bolton to whip it into shape...

...Meet with Iran...

...John Bolton grew up in workingclass Baltimore...

...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...

...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...

...But Bush’s willingness to take the U.N...

...if we do not make our infl uence felt, rest assured we will in the real world...

...Jim Kelly [East Asian and Pacifi c Affairs], assistant secretary, announced that his bureau would be preparing press guidance explaining that Bush’s speech did not represent a change of policy on North Korea...

...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...

...But there are many reasons to be grateful that Bolton has chosen to subject himself to such discomfi ture, and they fi ll the pages of Surrender Is Not an Option...

...If one defi nition of masochism is “a willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences,” then Bolton qualifi es...

...All of that—and he picked a profession that requires him to talk to journalists on a regular basis...

...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...

...reform...

...Not surprisingly, Bolton is unafraid of throwing sharp elbows...

...Bolton enrolled at Yale in 1966, the fi rst member of his family to go to college...

...Masochist, indeed...

...By the end of his book, Bolton has made it clear that the bureaucracy’s victories include far more than just North Korea...

...He tried...

...Terrifi c. Directly engage North Korea...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...It paid off...

...In that role, and out of the spotlight, Bolton helped expedite U.S...

...This thick volume overfl ows with the acerbic wit and blunt critiques that have made him the bane of the Washington Establishment, and something of a cult fi gure among conservatives...

...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...

...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...

...After all, Bush had gone there in 2002, after a decade of Iraq’s defi ance of U.N...

...altogether believed Bolton was the perfect choice...

...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...

...Since the bureaucracy defi nes success differently— who sat where at the daily morning staff meeting, whose name appeared fi rst on the “from” line of a memo to the secretary, who went on what trip, and other such weighty questions—I often got what I wanted by giving the bureaucracy what they wanted...

...Actually, it was not just the speech, but also the reaction to it at the State Department staff meeting...

...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: Bolton is not afraid to throw sharp elbows...

...seriously, despite the taint of the growing Oil-for-Food scandal, made it relevant once more...

...When the Security Council passed a resolution threatening “serious consequences” for continued Iraqi intransigence, and then stood by while Iraq (once again) defi ed the international community, we seemed to have an answer...

...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...

...his father, a fi reman, worked two jobs so that his son could attend a well-regarded private school outside the city...

...Bolton writes: At the outset, I was willing to be accommodating to the bureaucracy, but Bush’s January 29, 2002, ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union speech convinced me to take a harder line...

...He had been a conservative at the State Department and an American at the United Nations...

...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 foreign policy...

...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...

...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 fi nish reading: The triumph of the bureaucracy, he writes, means that Bush “administration foreign policy is in something like a free fall...

...Machine John Bolton battles the bureaucracies BY STEPHEN F. HAYES Surrender Is Not an Option Defending America at the United Nations by John Bolton Threshold, 496 pp., $27 John Bolton did not have a formal role in policymaking on torture, but if he had, he would have spoken with authority born of fi rsthand experience...

...The bureaucracy’s persistence prevailed so overwhelmingly that Bush himself did not even realize it...

...Restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process...

...He was a Goldwater Republican as a teenager in Baltimore and, later in the Vietnam decade, a right-wing campus agitator at Yale...