John R. Bolton - Early Public Policy Career

Early Public Policy Career

Before joining the George W. Bush administration, Bolton was senior vice president for public policy research at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, from 1997 to 2001. Between 1997 and 2000, Bolton also worked pro bono as an assistant to James Baker in Baker's capacity as Kofi Annan's personal envoy to the Western Sahara.

During the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, he worked in several positions within the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He was a "protege" of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.

His Justice Department position as an assistant attorney general required him to advance Reagan administration positions, including opposition to financial reparations to Japanese-Americans held in World War II–era internment camps; the insistence of Reagan's executive privilege during William Rehnquist's chief justice confirmation hearings, when Congress asked for memos written by Rehnquist as a Nixon Justice Department official; and the framing of a bill to control illegal immigration as an essential drug war measure. He was also involved in the Iran–Contra affair and shepherding the judicial nomination process for Antonin Scalia.

Bolton's government service included such positions as:

• Assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs at the Department of State (1989–93), where he led in the successful effort to rescind the United Nations resolution from the 1970s that had equated Zionism with racism, and also played a major role in obtaining UN resolutions endorsing the use of force to fight Iraq's invasion of Kuwait;
• assistant attorney general, Department of Justice (1985–89);
• Assistant administrator for program and policy coordination, USAID (1982–1983); and
• General counsel, USAID (1981–1982).

Bolton is also the former executive director of the Committee on Resolutions in the Republican National Committee.

Between 1999 and 2001, he served on the board of the Committee for International Religious Freedom.

During the George W. Bush administration, Bolton has been the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security (2001–05) and ambassador to the UN (2005–2006).

Bolton has been a prominent participant in some neoconservative groups such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG). But Bolton disputes the label "neo-conservative" attached to him, pointing out that he was a conservative since high school, when he worked on the 1964 Goldwater campaign.

Bolton was formerly involved with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Federalist Society, National Policy Forum, National Advisory Board, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, New Atlantic Initiative, Project on Transitional Democracies.