John R. Bolton

John Robert Bolton II was born November 20, 1948, and built a career shuttling between government posts and think tanks, always pressing for harder lines abroad. He served as assistant attorney general under Reagan from 1985 to 1989, then moved to State - first handling international organization affairs from 1989 to 1993, later running arms control policy from 2001 to 2005 while advocating for the Iraq invasion as a director of the Project for the New American Century. George W. Bush made him UN ambassador in 2005 via recess appointment; he left in December 2006 when Senate confirmation looked impossible after Democrats took control. A decade later Donald Trump named him national security advisor in April 2018, and Bolton spent seventeen months pushing to scrap the Iran deal - achieved in May 2018 - and calling for regime change across a list that stretched from Syria to North Korea. Trump dismissed him in September 2019; Bolton published The Room Where It Happened the following year, a bestseller built on what he'd seen inside. In October 2025 he was indicted on eighteen counts tied to the unlawful handling of national defense information between 2018 and 2025.