Bolton, John R.
Born: November 20, 1948, Maryland
Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.
When President George W. Bush nominated John R. Bolton to the position of American ambassador to the U.N., on March 7, 2005, most political observers predicted that Bolton’s controversial attitudes toward the U.N. would provoke heated exchanges during the hearings of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee but that eventually Bolton would receive Senate confirmation. The hearings turned out to be even more bitter than predicted. While Bolton’s admirers hailed him as a dedicated and clear-headed reformer, unafraid to challenge a U.N. bureaucracy that is corrupt, profligate, and reflexively hostile to the U.S.—the country that provides the organization with its single largest annual financial contribution—detractors called him a rude, reckless ideologue, an enemy rather than a reformer of the U.N., and a neoconservative determined to throw over decades’ worth of international agreements in a shortsighted display of American power. Former employees and co-workers of his came forward to accuse Bolton of being vindictive and throwing temper tantrums, while his most recent supervisor, former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, reportedly conducted a behind-the-scenes campaign against the confirmation of Bolton, who had been only a few rungs lower than Powell on the Department of State ladder. With the controversy threatening to delay Bolton’s appointment indefinitely, or possibly derail it, President Bush gave Bolton the position on August 1, 2005, during a congressional recess, as the Constitution entitles him to do. If the Senate does not approve his appointment on or before January 3, 2007, his post will become vacant again.
The debate about Bolton’s personality and ideology notwithstanding, almost everyone agreed that President Bush’s confidence about his qualifications and work ethic was well founded. During the past four decades, Bolton has served all but one Republican administration, distinguishing himself as an unusually intelligent, direct, and hardworking political appointee. The product of a blue-collar neighborhood, he helped to argue a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court not long after he earned a law degree from Yale University. In the last 25 years, he has held many positions associated with foreign relations, most recently that of undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, the fourth-most-powerful position in the State Department. Many foreign-policy commentators have said that Bolton is not really a neoconservative, as he has often been labeled, but rather a “realist” or an “aggressive nationalist,” since he lacks the enthusiasm for spreading democracy abroad that is said to be a hallmark of neoconservatives. He does share with them, however, a firm belief that the U.S. must embrace a strong, proactive approach to self-defense and a refusal to shrink from military engagement. “I’m pro-American,” Bolton told Caroline Daniel for the London Financial Times (December 19, 2002). “That means defending American interests as vigorously as possible and seeing yourself as an advocate for the US rather than as a guardian of the world itself.”
John Robert Bolton was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1948, the first of Edward Jackson Bolton and Virginia (Godfrey) Bolton’s two children. His father was a professional firefighter who had been wounded in Normandy, on June 6, 1944 (D-Day), at the start of the Allied invasion of France during World War II. Some have attributed John Bolton’s intense work ethic to his family’s lack of social connections or wealth and to his childhood surroundings, a working-class neighborhood called Yale Heights. Beginning in seventh grade Bolton boarded during the week at a private, all-male military academy, the McDonogh School, in Owings Mills, a Baltimore suburb, which he attended on a scholarship. At the McDonogh School (which dropped its military curriculum and became co-educational in the decade after Bolton’s graduation), he was conspicuous for his outstanding academic performance and his clear commitment to conservative principles. In 1964 he led a student group in support of the ultimately unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, and in 1966, the year he graduated, he wrote for the school newspaper (which he helped to edit) an essay strongly defending the U.S. military presence in Vietnam.
In the fall of 1966, Bolton enrolled at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, where he majored in political science. He was a member of the Yale Young Republicans all through his undergraduate years and in at least one year served as the editor in chief of the Yale Conservative. By all accounts he and his fellow conservatives felt relatively isolated and powerless on the Yale campus, where left-wing political voices were then in the majority, but he expressed confidence that the Republican Party would someday dominate American politics. As he said in an often-quoted part of the speech he gave at his graduation ceremony, in 1970, “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 earned a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude and was elected to membership in the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He then entered Yale’s law school, where, for one year, he held the prestigious position of editor of the Yale Law Journal. Around that time he began a six-year-long stint in the National Guard, which, as he later acknowledged, he joined in order to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam, despite his steadfast support for the war. “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” he wrote for a book commemorating the 25th reunion of Yale’s class of 1970, according to Ross Goldberg and Sam Kahn in the Yale Daily News (April 28, 2005, on-line). “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
On May 6, 1972 Bolton married his first wife, Christina. That same year he began an internship in the office of the U.S. vice president, Spiro Agnew (who served under President Richard Nixon until the following year). After he earned a J.D. degree, in 1974, he became as an associate with the firm Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. Bolton entered the national political sphere a year later, acting as one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in a case known as Buckley vs. Valeo, which addressed the constitutional validity of limits on campaign spending. The lead plaintiff in the case was Senator James L. Buckley of New York; its lead defendant was Francis R. Valeo, a member of the newly formed Federal Elections Commission. When the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, in January 1976, and established the far-reaching precedent that campaign spending was a form of free speech, Bolton became a recognized expert on the legalities of American elections.
In 1976 Bolton lent his legal expertise to Ronald Reagan, a former governor of California, in Reagan’s unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan won the nomination four years later, and after his election Bolton was immediately named to the president-elect’s transition team. A few months later, in March 1981, he was sworn in as general counsel for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Later that year he was promoted to USAID assistant administrator, in which job he helped to develop American foreign-assistance policies. The loyalty and dedication Bolton showed to Reagan throughout his term at USAID prompted colleagues to give him a bronzed hand grenade with an inscription calling him “the truest Reaganaut.”
Bolton’s tenure at USAID ended in 1983, when he returned to Covington & Burling, this time as a partner. At around the same time, he began to work for the Republican National Committee (RNC). In 1984 he played a central role in the RNC’s efforts to construct a broadly popular and unified platform for that year’s national convention. After Reagan’s reelection to the presidency, Bolton again left Covington & Burling and became an assistant attorney general for legislative affairs under Attorney General Edwin Meese. Bolton’s work at the Department of Justice ranged from an unsuccessful pursuit of a means for indicting the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat (who was thought to have been involved in the murders of two American diplomats in the Sudan in 1973) to a failed attempt to block the payment of reparations to Japanese Americans whom the U.S. government had forcibly held in internment camps during World War II. Bolton was also involved in 1986 and 1987 in the response of the Department of Justice to congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra affair. (The term refers to an illicit program of the Reagan administration in which money gained from arms sold to Iran was used to fund insurgents fighting the Communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua, as part of the U.S. government’s larger Cold War strategy to prevent the spread of communism in Central America.) Bolton opposed, on constitutional grounds, congressional appointment of an independent counsel to investigate that or any other possible presidential misdeeds. In 1986 Bolton’s work on behalf of Republican electoral candidates came under fire when an organization that he and Brice Clagett, a Covington & Burling lawyer, had helped form was fined $10,000 for evading campaign-finance laws. Called Jefferson Marketing, the firm aided a political action committee called the Congressional Club, which was associated with U.S. senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican.
In 1988, while still an assistant attorney general, Bolton became the head of the Justice Department’s civil-law division. Bolton’s job changed in May 1989, under President George Herbert Walker Bush, when he was named the assistant secretary of state for international organizations under Secretary of State James Baker III. Bolton had first worked with Baker in 1978, when Baker made an unsuccessful bid for attorney general of the state of Texas; their association reportedly helped make possible a number of Bolton’s career moves. At the Department of State, Bolton chaired an interagency task force on Afghanistan, where a series of internal military conflicts had led to widespread suffering among the populace. He also offered stern criticisms of the management and politics of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), from which the United States had withdrawn in 1984, partially as a result of Bolton’s lobbying, and which still was not functioning to Bolton’s satisfaction. In 1991 he successfully led a joint U.S. and Israeli effort to repeal United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, a motion dating from 1975 that equated Zionism (a political movement and ideology that led to the creation of Israel as a homeland for Jews, in 1948) with racism; 111 nations voted for repeal and only 25 voted against. In 1992 Bolton urged the U.N. to act to stop what was to become a massive human rights crisis in the states that formerly made up Yugoslavia. On August 13, 1992, at an unusual two-day-long meeting of the U.N. commission on human rights, Bolton—in a comment widely quoted afterward—described the U.S. as “appalled at the unspeakable, immoral savagery being unleashed” in Bosnia and neighboring regions.
In 1993, after Bill Clinton succeeded George H. W. Bush in the White House, Bolton became a partner in the law firm Lerner, Reed, Bolton & McManus, where he remained until 1999. From 1994 to 1996 he served as an adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law, and in 1995 and 1996 he was the president of the National Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. In 1997 he became the senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), a conservative think tank with which he had been associated at least since 1977; according to its Web site, the AEI is committed to “preserving and strengthening the foundations of freedom—limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense—through scholarly research, open debate, and publications.” At AEI Bolton published and spoke widely on national and international issues, often returning to themes that had long dominated his thinking—problems with campaign-finance reform, for example, or the dangers of a simplistically multilateral approach to U.S. foreign policy—while also applying his ideology to specific issues that emerged at the time, such as plans for an international criminal court or the importance of independence for Taiwan, an island off mainland China that was once a territory of China and whose claims to administrative autonomy China does not recognize. Concurrently, in 1999 Bolton became a senior fellow at another conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute.
Bolton’s knowledge of election laws and his loyalty to both former president Bush and former secretary of state Baker brought him into the thick of the dispute that erupted in Florida after the November 2000 presidential election. That election, in which Governor George W. Bush of Texas (running on the Republican ticket with Richard B. Cheney, a former government official) opposed Vice President Al Gore (running on the Democratic ticket with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut), failed to produce a clear victor. While attending a vote-counting session in the Leon County Library in northern Florida, Bolton told the assembled officials and workers, according to Newsweek (December 18, 2000): “I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the vote.” (The count was stopped on December 12, 2000 by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, which effectively made Bush the winner.) Cheney was later reported to have said at an AEI event that he was sometimes asked what job Bolton should have in the new administration. “My answer is, anything he wants,” Cheney said, according to Carla Ann Robbins in the Wall Street Journal (July 19, 2002).
On February 21, 2001 Bush nominated Bolton for the post of undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Bolton’s frequently expressed disapproval of many arms-control agreements immediately made him the object of sharp criticism. “It’s like putting the wolf in the hen’s house,” Don Kraus, a former executive director of the Campaign for U.N. Reform and currently the executive vice president of the left-wing group Citizens for Global Solutions, told Bill Nichols for USA Today (March 29, 2001). “This is a guy who, as best I can tell, has never seen a multilateral agreement that he liked.” Bolton’s supporters were equally vehement. “John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, for what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil in this world,” Jesse Helms was widely quoted as telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (which he then chaired) on March 29, 2001, when it met to discuss Bolton’s nomination. “John is a patriot. He is a brilliant thinker and writer. And, most importantly, he is a man with the courage of his convictions. John says what he means and means what he says.” Although Bolton received more nays in the full Senate than any other person nominated by President George W. Bush up to that date, he was confirmed as an undersecretary of state. He was sworn in on May 11, 2001.
During the next two years, Bolton was influential in the Bush administration’s decision to withdraw from both a 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the U.S. and what was then the Soviet Union and a Clinton-era treaty, never ratified by Congress, that established the International Criminal Court. With the expressed goal of creating more effective and realistic foreign-relations policies, Bolton also demanded radical changes to an agreement to limit the international sale of small arms and to a 1972 biological-weapons agreement—changes so extreme that they prevented further negotiations because the gulf between the U.S. position and the position of most other negotiating states was too wide to be bridged. While critics have cited those actions as proof that Bolton takes a dangerously unilateral approach to national security, Bolton and his supporters have argued that the above-cited agreements and various others are either unenforceable or threaten the national sovereignty of the U.S. Moreover, while at the Department of State, Bolton and others worked out dozens of bilateral agreements, including one with Russia that even Bolton’s critics acknowledge has led to reduced stockpiles of nuclear weapons. A number of those agreements exempted Americans from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. Other agreements have emerged from the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which allows signatories to intercept ships thought to be carrying weapons of mass destruction or the components that might allow countries to build them. Bolton told Rich Lowry for the Wall Street Journal (December 18, 2001), “We’ll undertake obligations only when it’s in our interest. But if we sign a treaty, we’ll abide by it.”
Meanwhile, reports had surfaced of tensions between Bolton and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and of efforts by Powell and others among Bolton’s superiors to tone down his uncompromising rhetoric. When President Bush, two months after his second inauguration, nominated Bolton to serve as the American ambassador to the U.N., Bolton’s inability or unwillingness to maintain the calm, measured speaking style associated with diplomats again came under severe criticism. Democrats and other critics of Bolton claimed that such a fierce critic of the U.N. could not function effectively as a U.N. ambassador. Among other pieces of evidence, they noted that in 1994, at an event called the Global Structures Convocation, Bolton had told the audience, “There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interest, and when we can get others to go along, and I think it would be a real mistake to count on the United Nations as if it’s some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own.” Speaking metaphorically of the United Nations’ bureaucracy, Bolton added, “If the U.N. secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” What seemed to dismay less-partisan senators more than such decade-old remarks were repeated accusations from former subordinates of his that Bolton often lost his temper and acted vindictively. On August 1, 2005, after a five-month-long debate within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that failed to end in a vote, President Bush used his constitutional power to make temporary appointments during Congress’s annual recess to install Bolton at the U.N. until January 3, 2007.
Bolton arrived in New York in August 2005, weeks before a U.N. summit meeting on global security, nuclear disarmament, and nonproliferation. Bolton had an integral part in shaping the final edition of the 35-page document that the summit produced; notably, he deleted passages that referred to disarmament, because he believed that the language empowered the U.N. to regulate the defense strategy of the U.S. Douglas Roche, writing for the Catholic New Times (October 9, 2005), described Bolton’s actions as “bullying” but also as helpful in reinforcing “the dominance of the U.S. in international relations.” Since January 2006 Bolton has worked to negotiate a plan to reform the U.N. The plan, no parts of which had been adopted as of late October 2006, falls short of the ideal, as he told members of Congress, but has still won his support. He has actively resisted attempts by countries less powerful than the U.S. to expand the U.N. Security Council, a body composed of 15 of the organization’s 191 member nations. Bolton has remained stubborn in his goals and ideology, and his conduct has been alternately described as fiercely patriotic or obstinately unilateral. As an example of his negotiating ability, his supporters have pointed to his orchestration of a unanimous vote in the Security Council in October 2006 on a U.S. resolution that imposes limited sanctions on North Korea; others see his lack of success in the General Assembly, a more difficult arena for establishing a consensus, as evidence of his inability to build coalitions and of his commitment to a unilateral, uncompromising approach to diplomacy. His failed efforts at U.N. management reform and his handling of the matter of the U.N. Human Rights Council—the U.S. was one of only four nations to vote against the establishment of the council, and it later refused to nominate a candidate for membership on the council—are widely cited as examples of Bolton’s ineffectiveness.
Among Bolton’s strongest supporters is U.S. senator Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota. “What John offers is what the U.S. needs at the U.N. today,” Coleman told Warren Hoge for the New York Times (July 23, 2006). “John is the right kind of change agent in a universe that is resistant to change. In order to get reform done, you’re going to have to push, you have to be assertive.” Bolton’s critics include Edward C. Luck, the director of the Center on International Organization of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who said to Hoge, “I actually agree with Bolton on what has to be done at the U.N., but his confrontational tactics have been very dysfunctional for the U.S. purpose. . . . [I]f you take unilateral action the way Bolton has, you’re isolated, and if you’re isolated, you can’t achieve much.” More generally, Bolton has made it clear that the Bush administration will pursue international multilateral diplomacy by means other than the United Nations if the organization fails to adopt adequate reforms. “We look at [the U.N.] in a kind of cost-benefit way,” he said, according to Beth Gardiner, a reporter for the Associated Press (October 15, 2005). “If it’s not solving problems, what do we do to fix it? And if we can’t fix it, where else can we look to have those problems solved?”
Bolton and his first wife divorced in 1984. In 1986 Bolton married Gretchen Louise Brainerd, with whom he has one daughter, Jennifer.
Suggested Reading: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists p24+ July/Aug. 2005; Legal Times p7 Nov. 23, 1987; Los Angeles Times A p1 May 1, 2005; New Republic (on-line) Mar. 29, 2004; New York Times p1+ May 1, 2005, p1+ July 23, 2006; USA Today A p10; Wall Street Journal A p14 Sep. 17, 2005; Yale Daily News (on-line) Apr. 28, 2005
Citation:
Original
source: Current Biography (Bio Ref Bank)
Original publication date: 2006
Original publication type: Print
Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database publisher: The H.W. Wilson Company
Database: Biography Reference Bank
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Source: Current Biography (Bio Ref Bank), 02/01/2006
Accession Number: 203087968