ID DATA
John Bolton
US Ambassador to United Nations
Nicknames: anti-diplomat, treaty killer, guided missile.
He is known as the "undersecretary for chads" after helping halt the recount of the 2000 Presidential election.
Personal Life
John Bolton was born November 20, 1948, in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1986 he married the former Gretchen Brainerd; they have one child, Jennifer
Bluntly Conservative
He is a walking history book of the right-wing movement; his moves and career reveal much about the players and policies of conservatives in the late 20th century.
His bluntness has earned him many enemies. Bolton is a militarist who embraces the “peace through strength” philosophy of international affairs.
Yale Clubs and Friends
At college, he became friends with current Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and other rightists who were among the first members of the conservative Federalist Society. He was editor-in-chief of the Yale Conservative and a four-year member of the Yale Young Republicans.
Fuzzy Math
He rejects the legitimacy of international law—at least when international conventions, treaties, and norms constrain what he regards as U.S. national interests. Bolton also has a record of questionable legal and ethical dealings at home.
Bolton, and some of the people and organizations he has worked with several times over the years, have been involved in illegal political action committee financing and money laundering
Highlights
Bolton is a former contributing columnist at the Taipei Times.
In law school and throughout his legal and political career, Bolton has gained a reputation as being abrasive, astute, humorless, and relentless in the pursuit of his political agenda.
Bolton also led the Bush administration's opposition on constitutional grounds to the International Criminal Court, placing heavy pressure on many countries to sign agreements with the US to exempt Americans from any possible prosecution by the Court; around 70 have signed such agreements so far.
Confirmation Hearing
Republican committee chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana criticized Bolton for ignoring the "policy consequences" of his statements, threatening diplomacy "simply to score international debating points to appeal to segments of the U.S. public opinion or to validate a personal point of view."
Bull in China Shop
The committee's top Democrat, Joe Biden of Delaware compared sending Bolton to the UN to sending a "bull into a china shop," and expressed "grave concern" about Bolton's "diplomatic temperament" and his record: "In my judgment," Biden said, "your judgment about how to deal with the emerging threats have not been particularly useful."
Russ Feingold, a Democrat on the committee from Wisconsin, asked Bolton about what he would have done had the Rwandan genocide occurred while he was ambassador to the United Nations, and criticized his answer – which focused on logistics – as "amazingly passive."
Even his Boss was against him.
On April 22 the New York Times and other media reported that Bolton's former boss, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is personally opposed to the nomination and had been in personal contact with Republican Senators Chafee and Hagel. This development was interpreted as a further rift between Powell and the Bush Administration. Reuters reported, also on April 22, that a spokesman for Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said that the Senator felt the committee "did the right thing delaying the vote on Bolton in light of the recent information presented to the committee."
Work Background
| 2005 Aug 1 | US Ambassador to United Nations. Following Senate filibuster, President Bush installed Bolton as Ambassador to United Nations on August 1, 2005, using a recess appointment that expires when Congress convenes in January 2007. Bush said, "This post is too important to leave vacant any longer, especially during a war and a vital debate about U.N. reform." |
| 2005 Jul 28 | Discovery of perjury on forms submitted to Senate. Bolton indicated that in the prior five years he had not been questioned in any investigation. After insisting for weeks that Bolton was right, the State Department reversed itself stating that Bolton had simply forgotten about the investigation. |
| 2005 May 11 | Newsweek reported allegations that the American position at the 7th Review Conference in May 2005 of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty had been undercut by Bolton's "absence without leave," due to the fight over his nomination to be Ambassador. |
| 2005 Mar 7 | Nominee, US Ambassador to United Nations, nominated by President George W. Bush on Mar 7, 2005, and his nomination became the subject of a long filibuster in the Senate. |
| 2004 Jun | Provided false testimony in congressional hearing, claiming that Iran was lying about enriched uranium contamination, when it was later determined from detailed isotope analysis that the uranium contamination was from imported contaminated Pakistani equipment. |
| 2003 Jul 18 | Interviewed by State Department Inspector General, as part of an investigation into the sources of pre-war claims of weapons of mass destruction evidence in Iraq. |
| 2003 Feb | Bolton said that once regime change plans in Iraq were completed, “it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea afterwards.” |
| 2003 | Participant, State Department's delegation to six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear program. He described Kim Jong-il as a "tyrannical dictator" of a country where for many, "life is a hellish nightmare." North Korea responded in kind, saying that “such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks…. We have decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer nor to deal with him.” The State Department sent a replacement for Bolton to the talks. |
| 2002 | Bolton is said to have flown to Europe to demand the resignation of Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and to have orchestrated his removal at a special session of the organization. The United Nations' highest administrative tribunal later condemned the action as an "unacceptable violation" of principles protecting international civil servants. Bustani had been unanimously re-elected for a four-year term—with strong US support—in May 2000, and in 2001 was praised for his leadership by Colin Powell. |
| 2001 Apr 9 | Washington Post article: Bolton was on the payroll of the Taiwan government before joining the Bush administration. Bolton received $30,000 for “research papers on UN membership issues involving Taiwan” at the same time he was promoting diplomatic recognition of Taiwan before various congressional committees. |
| 2001 | Member, Advisory Board, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). |
| 2001 | Assisted in derailing a bio-weapons conference in Geneva convened to endorse a UN proposal to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. |
| 2001 May-2005 May | Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security; supposedly a key area of his responsibility was the prevention of proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. |
| 1999-2001 | Commissioner, U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom |
| 1998-2001 | Member, Board of Directors, Project for the New American Century (PNAC) |
| 1998 Jan 26 | One of the signers of the PNAC Letter, sent to President Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power using US diplomatic, political and military power. The letter also stated "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council." |
| 1998 | Member, Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf |
| 1997-2001 | Senior Vice President, Public Policy Research, American Enterprise Institute (AEI). |
| 1997-2000 | Pro Bono Assistant to James Baker, in Kofi Annan's personal envoy to the Western Sahara |
| 1995-1996 | President, National Policy Forum |
| 1994 | Anti-UN statement made at Global Structures Convocation hosted by the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions). "There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States." |
| 1993 | Senior fellow, Manhattan Institute |
| 1993-1999 | Partner, law firm of Lerner, Reed, Bolton & McManus. |
| 1991 | Played central role at the State Department, leading the successful campaign to repeal the 1975 General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism; Bolton refers to it as "one of his most important achievements." |
| 1989-1993 | Assistant Secretary, International Organization Affairs, Department of State |
| 1985-1989 | Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice |
| 1983-1985 | Associate, Covington & Burling law firm in Washington, D.C. |
| 1982-1983 | Assistant Administrator, Program and Policy Coordination, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) |
| 1981-1982 | General Counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) |
| 1980 | Participated in Republican Party efforts to beat back the voter registration campaigns organized by labor and black organizations. |
| 1974-1981 | Associate, Covington & Burling law firm in Washington, D.C. |
| 1974 | J.D. from Yale Law School |
| 1970 | B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University; wore National Guard uniform in 1970 yearbook. (Photo: Uniform 12k.) |
| 1966 | Graduated, McDonogh High School in Owings Mills, Maryland |
| 1964 | Volunteer, Goldwater’s presidential campaign. |
Memberships
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
Center for Security Policy
Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG)
Council on Foreign Relations (since 2001)
Federalist Society
Heritage Foundation
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
Manhattan Institute
Move America Forward
National Policy Forum
New Atlantic Initiative
Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
Project on Transitional Democracies
Republican National Committee (former executive director, Committee on Resolutions)
U.S. Committee on NATO
Interesting Quotes
Praising Bolton in a speech he delivered on January 1, 2001 at the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Jesse Helms, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said, “John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.”
But Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, called Bolton's recess appointment an "abuse of power."
"It's bad enough that the administration stonewalled the Senate by refusing to disclose documents highly relevant to the Bolton nomination," he said. "It's even worse for the administration to abuse the recess appointment power by making the appointment while Congress is in this five-week recess."
