Bolton Is U.N. Envoy as Bush Bypasses Senate

NPR | By Don Gonyea

Published August 1, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

President Bush installed John Bolton as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations early Monday, making a recess appointment to circumvent the Senate, where Democrats blocked approval of the nominee.

Bolton was first nominated to that job five months ago by the president. But his confirmation process sparked months of struggle in the Senate as Democrats and a few Republicans insisted that he was wrong for the job.

The recess appointment, bypassing Senate confirmation, means that Bolton will serve only until the next Congress convenes, in January 2007.

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Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

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