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Bolton Did His Job, Angered Underlings

Jimmie | April 18, 2005 | Comments (0)

Well, since the Democrats have broken their promise to hold a vote on UN Ambassador John Bolton, we’ve seen the first phase of the attack on him.

That phase paints Bolton as a horrible subordinate-eating ogre whose pugnacious hands-on-hips stances made career diplomats tremble in their cubicles.

Now we see the next phase in the attempt to bring down the nomination: the charge that he held back documents his superiors while he was the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security.

Unfortunately, this story fais to mention that choosing which documents to forward to the Secretary of State and his (or her) second in command was part of Bolton’s job.

Of course, Bolton’s refusal to forward documents that his underlings felt should have been forwarded didn’t stop them from doing it anyway. They just went behind his back in a touching display of loyalty and professionalism.

I don’t need to tell you that it’s an important part of a boss’ job to filter the information he receives so that only what he believes is important, given his experience and training, gets to his bosses. That’s commonplace in every business that’s big enough to have a multi-layered hierarchy. I’d think, though, that it would be something that might be nice to know, in the context of this story.

Without that element, we’r eleft with a picture of a man who was capricious and perhaps even dangerous in not forwarding important information to the Secretary of State.

With it, we might just get a story of a man who felt that the information he was being asked to forward wasn’t worth forwarding, for whatever reason. As it happens, the only people the story can produce who felt the information was important were the people who developed the information in the first place. Of course you’d expect them to complain. They developed the information and they woldn’t take kindly to being told it wasn’t all that important or valid.

This strikes me as another non-story distorted by the omission of the one story element that makes it a non-story.

Oh yes. And it’d be nice if the Democrats kept their promise and voted on Bolton. It wouldn’t change the fact that they lied, but it would help.