[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17227-17229]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       NOMINATION OF JOHN BOLTON

  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, at this moment in history our Nation faces 
enormous challenges from terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel 
and the occupied territories, Sudan's Darfur region, Iran, North Korea, 
Syria, HIV/AIDS, global health generally, climate

[[Page 17228]]

change, energy security, and the list seems endless. These are all 
important issues that call out for important action and leadership from 
the United States.
  America's capacity to respond to this global clarion call has been 
seriously circumscribed, in my view, by the Bush administration's 
preemptive war of choice in Iraq--circumscribed militarily, 
politically, and economically. The options have become fewer since 
March 19, 2003, as the world has become more dangerous, and the 
reputation and global standing of the United States has become weaker.
  Our friends know this. More importantly, so do our adversaries, 
apparently.
  That is why it is imperative that we make the most of the options 
still available to respond to these challenges. Diplomacy is one of the 
few options that remain available with a reasonable political and 
minority pricetag. As John Kennedy said so eloquently more than 45 
years ago, this Nation should never fear to negotiate but never 
negotiate out of fear. It is going to take effective and pragmatic 
diplomacy to build the kinds of international partnerships and 
coalitions to address the challenges that confront us so that America 
can feel safe and be safer and more secure.
  While the United Nations isn't the only forum for the conduct of that 
diplomacy, it is very clear that President Bush has placed much more 
reliance on the United Nations Security Council in his second term in 
office than he certainly did in the first. Be it Iran, North Korea, 
Darfur, or Lebanon, the United States has turned to the Security 
Council to respond to humanitarian crises and other threats to 
international peace and stability.
  That is why, more than at any other time in recent years, since the 
founding of the United Nations, that it matters who sits in the United 
States chair on that Council. In my view, Mr. John Bolton does not fit 
the bill.
  Based on information developed by the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee last year from unprecedented committee testimony by former 
Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford and more than 30 staff 
interviews of then-current and former colleagues of Mr. Bolton in the 
Bush administration--in the Bush administration, I might add--the 
Senate made the decision not to act on that nomination.
  Carl Ford and 12 of those interviewed were extremely critical of Mr. 
Bolton, including retired COL Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to 
Secretary Powell; Thomas Fingar, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State 
for Intelligence and Research; former Deputy Director of the CIA, 
Stuart Cohen; and Robert Hutchings, former acting head and head of the 
National Intelligence Council, respectively; and Jamie Miscik, former 
Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA.
  These are not light people; these are serious people, all of whom 
served in the Bush administration. Here is what some of them had to say 
about this nomination. Again, these were Bush appointees, people who 
served in the Bush administration. Listen to Carl Ford, the Assistant 
Secretary of State for Intelligence in his testimony before the Senate 
Foreign Relations Committee:
  Mr. Bolton is a ``quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.''
  Mr. Bolton has ``a bigger kick and it gets bigger and stronger the 
further down the bureaucracy he's kicking.''
  Mr. Bolton is a ``serial abuser.''

       I have never seen anyone quite like Secretary Bolton--
     doesn't even come close. I don't have a second and third or 
     fourth in terms of the way that he abuses his power and 
     authority with little people.
       I consider myself to be a loyal Republican and conservative 
     to the core. I'm a firm and enthusiastic supporter of 
     President Bush and his policies, and I'm a huge fan of Vice 
     President Cheney, who I worked with when he was Secretary of 
     Defense.

  With respect to the Bolton's treatment of Westermann, Mr. Ford went 
on:

       The attitude, the volume of his tone, and what I 
     understand, the substance of the conversation, he was so far 
     over the line that he meets--he's one of the sort of 
     memorable moments in my 30-plus-year career [in public 
     service for the Federal Government.]

  Again, this is a Bush appointee about whom we are talking.
  Listen further. Larry Wilkerson, lieutenant colonel, chief of staff 
to Secretary of State Colin Powell in a telephone interview, Lieutenant 
Colonel Wilkerson said:

       Do I think John Bolton would make a good ambassador to the 
     United Nations? Absolutely not.
       He is incapable of listening to people and taking into 
     account their views.
       He would be an abysmal ambassador.

  Listen further to Mr. Wilkerson:

       I differ from a lot of people in Washington, both friend 
     and foe of Under Secretary Bolton, as to his ``brilliance.'' 
     I didn't see it.
       I saw a man who counted beans, who said ``98 today, 99 
     tomorrow, 100 the next day,'' and had no willingness--and, in 
     many cases, no capacity--to understand the other things that 
     were happening around those beans. And that is just a recipe 
     for problems at the United Nations.

  Lastly, Mr. McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA, responding to a 
question as to whether other policymakers had sought to remove CIA 
analysts:

       No. This is the only time I had ever heard of such a 
     request . . . I reacted strongly to it. I didn't think it was 
     appropriate.

  I will return to that particular point in a few minutes, this idea of 
attempting to fire intelligence analysts.
  These are just some of the quotes, again, of people who served in the 
Bush administration commenting on the nomination of John Bolton to be 
our ambassador to the United Nations.
  There have been some excellent U.S. representatives to the United 
Nations over the years: Henry Cabot Lodge, Adlai Stevenson, Daniel 
Patrick Moynihan, our former colleague Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Richard 
Holbrooke, just to name a few. Each and every one of these individuals 
possessed a certain skill and ability to work with others, our 
adversaries as well as our friends, in order to stretch the U.N. as an 
institution in ways that supported U.S. interests. None of them were 
shrinking violets, to put it mildly.
  It is very clear that Mr. Bolton does not possess that skill set. 
Over the years, Mr. Bolton evidenced great skepticism and disdain for 
the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy generally.
  Nothing he has said or done since assuming his current position in 
New York suggests that he has altered his views on the United Nations 
or on multilateral diplomacy generally.
  Once again, it is those who have worked most closely with him who are 
his biggest critics. More than 30 ambassadors with whom Mr. Bolton 
serves at the United Nations--all supportive of U.N. reform--questioned 
his leadership abilities.
  In a July 21, 2006, New York Times article, one U.N. colleague 
characterized Mr. Bolton as ``intransigent and maximalist.'' Another 
suggested that Mr. Bolton's ``high ambitions are cover-ups for less 
noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at 
belittling and weakening it.'' A third has essentially written off 
working with Mr. Bolton. ``He's lost me as an ally now, and that's what 
many other ambassadors who consider themselves friends of the United 
States are saying.''
  Mr. Bolton's response to a question posed by Senator Coleman at his 
July nomination hearing was stunning to me. Our colleague, Norm 
Coleman, asked the following question:

       Mr. Coleman. You knew the organization, you were involved 
     in it, then you were on the outside. Now you're there. Is 
     there--has your impression of the U.N. changed? Has there 
     been anything that surprised you in the last year?
       Mr. Bolton. Not really.

  That is a response of an individual who is so entrenched in his views 
that he is incapable of the kind of openness and flexibility that I 
think most in this Chamber believe is essential if the United Nations 
Security Council is going to be made to work to serve our interests 
around the globe.
  Mr. Bolton clearly has an aversion to being diplomatic. He has even 
been called a bully by some of his harshest critics. Mr. Bolton's 
personality is really not the issue as far as I am concerned. There are 
a lot of bullies in this town, and I suspect in New York as well. My 
objection isn't that he is a bully, but that he has been an ineffective 
bully. He can't win the day for the

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United States when it really counts. He isolates the United States 
rather than builds consensus around U.S. positions.
  Mr. Bolton showed his colors, in my view, as soon as he arrived in 
New York after receiving his recess appointment last August 2005. After 
the U.S. mission had worked for months to negotiate a 2-year reform 
effort that was to be endorsed by President Bush and other heads of 
State 2 weeks later, Mr. Bolton almost destroyed the consensus around 
the document by tabling 705 separate amendments to the text. It took 
the involvement of the President of the United States and the Secretary 
of State to cobble the agreement back together at the last minute at a 
price of losing some of the provisions that the United States had 
sought be included with respect to management reforms.
  The Bush administration has made the ongoing crisis in Darfur a key 
concern. Yet when in June of this year members of the Security Council 
visited the Sudan to send a signal to the Government of Khartoum that 
it was on the wrong track, Mr. Bolton thought it more important to 
travel to London to deliver a U.N. bashing speech to a private think 
tank rather than join his colleagues on a visit to Sudan and carrying 
on a message of how important we think the genocidal behavior is.
  On another occasion, prior to a vote last July on a U.N. Security 
Council resolution intended to sanction North Korea for its provocative 
Fourth of July missile launches, Mr. Bolton publicly assured anyone who 
would listen that he could get support for a resolution with teeth, 
with the so-called chapter 7 obligations. It turns out he couldn't. The 
resolution adopted by the U.N. Security Council fell far short of that.
  Last September, Mr. Bolton told the House International Relations 
Committee that the negotiation of an effective Human Rights Council was 
a key objective of the United States and that it was a ``very high 
priority, and a personal priority of mine.''
  There were 30 negotiating sessions held to hammer out the framework 
of this new Human Rights Council, and Ambassador Bolton managed to 
attend just one or two of those sessions.
  In the end, the United States was one of four countries to vote 
against the approval of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
  When the tally is taken on how effective Mr. Bolton has been at the 
U.N., in my view he gets a failing grade overall.
  These are key positions that help to strengthen the United States, 
and yet in case after case, from reform, to Darfur, to North Korea, to 
the U.N. Human Rights Council--critical issues to strengthen the United 
States--our ambassador has failed in getting the kind of results that 
are critically important.
  But there is more.
  On the basis of those issues, I urge my colleagues to vote against 
Mr. Bolton, but I am going to go a step further because I believe other 
actions taken by Mr. Bolton are so outrageous that Mr. Bolton does not 
even deserve a vote, in my view.
  There is Mr. Bolton's well-documented attempts to manipulate 
intelligence to suit his world view and seek the removal of at least 
two intelligence analysts who wouldn't play ball. When these analysts 
refused to support intelligence conclusions not supported by available 
intelligence, Mr. Bolton mounted a concerted effort to have them fired. 
The fact they were not removed does not excuse his actions.
  I don't mind a heated debate. I don't mind people having serious 
disagreements with conclusions. But when you attempt to fire lower 
level employees who are responsible for gathering intelligence for the 
United States because you don't like their results, that is dangerous 
business indeed.
  I do not care in which administration you may serve. Any individual, 
in my view, who attempts to doctor evidence to fire people whose 
conclusions they disagree with when it comes to intelligence gathering 
does not deserve to be promoted to the high position of ambassador to 
the United Nations.
  His behavior, in my view, endangers our national security because it 
goes to the very heart of what we depend upon to protect that 
security--unbiased professional intelligence collection and analysis. 
Mr. Bolton stepped away and he stepped over the line and committed an 
offense so grievous, in my view, it warrants that this Senate deny him 
an up-or-down vote on his nomination.
  In concluding, Mr. President, I return to the point I made earlier; 
namely, that Mr. Bolton has largely burned his bridges with his 
colleagues in New York and is not likely to be an effective diplomat 
when his diplomacy is increasingly becoming the coin of the realm in 
protecting and advancing U.S. interests at this very unstable moment in 
this country.
  Fifty-nine former U.S. Ambassadors and diplomats who have served in 
five administrations, Democratic and Republican, agree. Yesterday, they 
sent a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee strongly 
opposing this nomination--59 former U.S. Ambassadors.
  I mentioned earlier the number of people in the Bush administration 
who are outspokenly critical of this nomination. What more do we need 
to hear, what more do we need to hear that this is a bad nomination and 
one that is going to jeopardize the interests of the United States? 
Those Ambassadors recognize, as do I, that at this critical moment in 
our Nation's future, the President should put the Nation's interests 
first and nominate an individual with strong diplomatic skills who 
believes in diplomacy rather than placating his conservative base by 
continuing to push for the nomination of an unsuitable nominee.
  I believe it is time for the Senate to send that message loudly and 
clearly to the President by rejecting efforts to ramrod this nomination 
through in the closing days of this session.
  I urge my colleagues to join me in strongly opposing this nomination.
  Mr. President, I yield floor.

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