Opinion: John Bolton bolts for Chicago. Wanna make something of it?

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John Bolton, the aggressive, outspoken former Bush administration official and conservative critic of the United Nations, who was among the least likely people to get along as U.S. ambassador to the world body, has now run off to Chicago.

He’s joining the Kirkland & Ellis law firm as a senior adviser.

Bolton worked as a senior arms-control policymaker in the State Department and became known for his hawk-like views toward Iraq, Iran and North Korea and a belligerant personal style. His nomination by Pres. Bush as United Nations ambassador in 2005 became a highly charged affair, largely because Bolton had expressed such tremendous antipathy toward the U.N.

He was once quoted as saying, ‘The Secretariat building in New York has....

38 stories. If you lost ten stories today, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.’ Ultimately, he was never confirmed as U.N. ambassador but made a recess appointment by Bush and again drew criticism for an abrasive manner while in New York, which takes some doing in that city.

But Bolton also earned praise for some hardline stances. In 2006, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to expose Iran’s alleged program to obtain nuclear weapons. (Good thing he didn’t win because American intelligence reports have since rebutted Bolton’s conclusions.) He left government service in 2006 and joined the American Enterprise Institute as a senior fellow.

Kirkland & Ellis has long been known as a comfortable environment for prominent conservatives on their way to or back from somewhere else. It still employs former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, now dean of the law school at Pepperdine.

And many former and current legal luminaries in the Bush administration worked there at some point in their careers. The current solicitor general of the United States, Paul Clement, was a Kirkland lawyer, as was Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House lawyer who now sits on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

At last report the U.N. Secretariat building is not a bit different, still standing at 38 stories.

--James Oliphant

James Oliphant writes for The Swamp from the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.