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    The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir
    The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir
    The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir
    Audiobook21 hours

    The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

    Written by John Bolton

    Narrated by Robert Petkoff

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    JOHN BOLTON READS THE EPILOGUE!

    As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves.

    The result is a “scathing and revelatory” (The New Yorker) White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping its prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.

    He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. “The differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning,” writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships, made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place.

    Bolton’s “first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official” (The New York Times) starts with his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria’s chemical attack on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk—all the while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer amount of work—and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description, try something else.”

    The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there—from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.

    Editor's Note

    An explosive tell-all…

    The tell-all book that the Trump Administration didn’t want published. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton never testified in President Trump’s impeachment trial, but now his new memoir reveals his firsthand experiences inside a dysfunctional White House.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJun 23, 2020
    ISBN9781797112404
    Author

    John Bolton

    John Bolton is the former National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump. He served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. He has spent many years of his career in public service and held high-level positions in the Administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Ambassador Bolton is also an attorney, and was in private practice in Washington, DC, from 1974 to 2018, except when he was in government service. Ambassador Bolton was born in Baltimore in 1948. He graduated with a BA, summa cum laude, from Yale College and received his JD from Yale Law School. He currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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    Reviews for The Room Where It Happened

    4/5

    143 ratings20 reviews

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    • 1/5
      John Bolton’s autobiography is disappointing because as much as he reveals Trump’s controlling and obsessed view of power, he himself displays the same. For example, he did not testify in the House because he didn’t like the way it was conducted - not yours to conduct John Bolton.

      6 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Could not finish this book. It is a book about Bolton. Pointing out all of his important positions in government and his brilliant activities. He still has plenty of room left to bash Obama and Democrats. If you are interested in knowing what Bolton thinks of Bolton, waste your money on it.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      It opened my eyes to political matters of US foreign policy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      A good that shows the inner workings ofnthe White House. Therenwillnat somentimenyou shall feel that Mr. Bolton in towing Republican Party line?. But later he shows his unbiased style and candor.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is not perfect, and one must take into account that the Mr. Bolton (like any other person who would write about his own actions) lights himself positively, and very badly most of the others. Still, the book is fascinating and in my opinion very well written. Also, John Bolton's political views makes a lot of sense and clearly proved to be the right ones.
      On top of all that, Robert Petkoff's reading is superb.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Riveting, with lots of great stories, twists and subplots deep inside the whitehouse. This book not only shines a bright light on the trump administration, but also the challenges all administrations face. I was hesitant to start this book because of Bolton’s unfavourable reputation, and views that are contrary to mine. I’m so happy I did read it. I quickly gained a much deeper appreciation for the challenges, strategies, and complexity it takes to make the world a better and peaceful place. I also gained a better nuts and bolts understanding for why some international treaties can be so dangerous by creating the illusion of peace, and the enormous pressure all elected governments are under to sign bad deals. But by far the most startling parts of this book are the first hand stories about trump. I actually felt sorry for many in the whitehouse, struggling to keep our planet upright, something I would never thought I would feel. Would make a great movie, but the book is even better.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Pretty interesting but nothing like what the media built it up to be.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It was well written and it kept my attention the whole time. It's nice to see substantive criticism instead of the typical emotional rhetoric

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Nothing new here. Entirely self-serving, he is his own fan-boy

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      This guy is everything wrong with the modern political system

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Overall interesting, but Bolton can be very rambly at times and if you aren't careful this book will put you to sleep in some chapters.
    • 4/5
      It clearly offer a sufficient account of most of the pressing questions that the media keeps bringing up on several affairs relating to Trump administration.
    • 5/5
      Ambassador Bolton stated during the Impeachment that he would testify, if subpoenaed. Perfectly proper!
      If the House hadn't been so hasty, and so sloppy, we wouldn't be living through the Trumo coup right now.
    • 3/5
      The author presented a fair view into his time at the White house. His style of writing is tedious and requires a good amount of background knowledge. For Trump enthusiasts a must read.
    • 4/5
      Great book. Very useful and unbiased source of insight into 4 years of Trump identity politics.
    • 4/5
      An interesting look at the inner workings of the Trump white house. His description of Trump is pretty consistent with the other books about him: impulsive and unorganized. However, it's from the perspective of a flawed narrator. The author is quite biased and you can tell he is pretentious and power hungry himself. Lacks the self awareness that he posseses the same flaws he points out in others, such as catering to the media. And it's clear that he thinks he knows everything about policies while others don't and can't see the pitfalls of his own ideology. Was hard to sit through
    • 5/5
      John Bolton is what I didn’t like. He is an A hole.the book was fine.
    • 5/5
      This is eye-opening to the malfeasance called Trump, both as a person and the head of the Executive arm of government.
    • 5/5
      Great insight to how stupid, self-centered and child-like this current president really is. Not easy to digest, but even more eye-opening than what you get from the media. And coming from his own party.
    • 5/5
      So many details of those meetings and trips make what Bolton is saying quite credible.