Sixteen months: John Bolton serves as U.S. ambassador to the U.N

National Review, Dec 31, 2006 by Jay Nordlinger

IN all honesty, it was amazing that John R. Bolton ever became U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the first place. He was a committed conservative, a hawk, a skeptic of international organizations. (It might be better to call him a realist about them.) His personality was thought of as mercurial, even hot. Newspapers and magazines liked to refer to him as "Lightning Bolton." But President Bush wanted him at the U.N., and he wanted him so much that he even gave him a recess appointment, when the Senate refused to confirm him--that is, when Democrats blocked a vote on his nomination. Understandably, Bush wanted someone at the U.N. who actually supported his foreign policy. Such partners and aides seem few on the ground.

And it was not the first time that Bush had turned to someone "controversial." After he was sworn in, he nominated Otto Reich to be assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. The Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee blocked that nomination, so Bush gave Reich a recess appointment. After a year, he did not resubmit the nomination, however, the obstacles in the Senate remaining. Bush also welcomed Elliott Abrams, but bypassed the Senate altogether. Abrams has served on the National Security Council staff since the beginning of the administration.

And when Bolton resigned as ambassador to the U.N., because the Senate was impossible, it was Bush who expressed the most sorrow, and a portion of bitterness. "You're looking at a man who is deeply disappointed," he told an interviewer, and he also blasted the "shallow politics of the Senate." He knew he had lost a good and valuable man, and that the country had, too. Bolton wound up at the U.N. for 16 months. And you would probably have to go back to the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, in Reagan's first term, for an ambassador so interesting, so effective, and so--there is no better word--exciting.

He was born in Baltimore in 1948, and went to Yale: both the college and the law school. In that first Reagan term, he served in the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the second one, he was an assistant attorney general. When the first Bush was elected, he went to the State Department, where he was assistant secretary for international organizations (the same job a very young Elliott Abrams had had in the first Reagan term). In 1990, NATIONAL REVIEW published a piece on Bolton called--believe it or not--"Jim Baker's Right-Hand Man." Secretary Baker was no favorite of conservatives, then as now. The piece asked, "How does a man who wears Adam Smith ties survive in a Bush administration?" Answer: Pretty well, even darn well. And we learned this charming bit of color: Bolton had in his office a dummy grenade, a gift from his former colleagues at USAID. It bore the words, "John R. Bolton, Truest Reaganaut."

During the Clinton years, Bolton practiced law and worked at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank in Washington. And when George W. Bush was elected, Bolton went back to the State Department, this time as undersecretary for arms control and international security. His most notable achievement was to lead the diplomatic effort to establish the Proliferation Security Initiative, which has been useful in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons. (It got Qaddafi in Libya, for example.) Bolton is often faulted for being a diplomat lacking in diplomacy; repeatedly, his record contradicts that impression. What trips people up is Bolton's strict pursuit of American interests; they think of diplomacy as multilateralism for its own sake.

So, when President Bush nominated Bolton to be ambassador to the U.N., in March 2005, there was something like panic: mainly among Democrats and their allies in the media. They contended that Bolton was utterly unfit to work at the U.N. A reporter for the Washington Post said a lot when he said that Democrats had "assailed Bolton's knack for making enemies and disparaging the very organization he would serve." Many of us responded that that was exactly the problem: These Democrats thought that the purpose of the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was to serve the United Nations; in fact, his job was to serve the United States, in the arena of the U.N. Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, said of Bolton, "He's been contemptuous of the U.N." Many of us pointed out that there was much to be contemptuous about: Saddam Hussein's chairmanship of the nuclear-disarmament committee; Bashar Assad's chairmanship of the human-rights committee. The presence of the Cuban, Sudanese, and other monstrous regimes on that committee. And so on. Democrats clearly wanted the U.S. ambassador to be a U.N. advocate; they also clearly cherished the international body as a check on Bush foreign policy.

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The way they attacked Bolton, principally, was to attack his character. They said that, while at the State Department, he had manipulated intelligence findings. The Bolton camp neatly dispatched that charge. They further said that he was a stack-blower, temperamentally unsuited. This, too, was easily countered. Not that Bolton could ever be mistaken for a violet, of course. President Bush spoke up for his nominee this way: "John Bolton is a blunt guy; sometimes people say I'm a little too blunt. [He] can get the job done at the United Nations." And "if we expect the United Nations to be effective, it needs to clean up its problems."