Lola wrote:. . . lefties are pretty upset about what we perceive to be a rapidly diminishing protection of our civil rights, and it is Bush and his puppeteers who are behind this terrible loss. ).
So are quite a few of us somewhat to the right of center, Lola.
To his supporters, Mr. Bolton is a truth teller, a policy innovator who is liberated enough from the department's clubby confines to speak his mind, even at the risk of upsetting diplomatic strategies. He is also said to be a favorite of the president.
"He loves to tussle," said Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former ambassador to the United Nations and an admiring former co-worker. "He may do diplomatic jobs for the U.S. government, but John is not a diplomat."
To his detractors, Mr. Bolton is a policy zealot who runs roughshod over the rules of diplomacy and undercuts his colleagues.
Mr. Bolton, 54, would be at home in Donald H. Rumsfeld's Pentagon or in the Bush White House. But the State Department is under the command of the more moderate and circumspect Colin L. Powell.
Some friends suspect that Mr. Bolton may be there as a representative of the president's more unilateralist impulses and perhaps as a check on Mr. Powell's authority.
"I don't think the president intended to turn over the State Department to the secretary of state," Dr. Kirkpatrick said.
To one House Republican aide, Mr. Bolton is a breath of fresh air. "State Department functionaries are oftentimes gripped by a fear of doing something wrong," the aide said. "John Bolton isn't like that."
But a Senate Democratic aide views him as a subversive force against diplomacy. "It's Orwellian to me that he's in the position he's in," the aide said. "He's the antithesis of who you'd want in that job."
Mr. Bolton, who has been in and out of government for two decades, most recently emerged from the ranks of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center with ties to the White House. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he struck up a friendship with Clarence Thomas, the future Supreme Court justice.
Mr. Bolton's induction into politics occurred when, as a teenager, he worked for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964. After law school, Mr. Bolton established a relationship with Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican. In the 1980's he worked on a campaign to counter voter registration efforts that were undertaken on behalf of blacks and organized labor.
He worked for the Agency for International Development under President Reagan, then was named assistant attorney general under Edwin Meese, where he struggled to beat back inquiries into matters including the Iran-contra scandal.
Then, as the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, Mr. Bolton in 1989 blocked Palestinian admission to the World Health Organization and Unesco.
On at least two other occasions, intelligence services have stepped in to quiet Mr. Bolton, in one case saying testimony he was preparing was unverifiable.
Mr. Bolton seems undeterred and appears to revel in his role as outsider on the inside.
In an interview last year with The New York Times, he was asked about conflicting signals from the administration on North Korea. He strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called "The End of North Korea," by an American Enterprise Institute colleague.
"That," he said, "is our policy."
