True Appointments Stories.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Fred Barnes tosses in an anecdote about John Bolton's efforts to finagle an offer from Colin Powell of a high-ranking position in the State Department early in the Bush administration. As Barnes tells it, Bolton got quite a lot of help from his friend, Sen. Jesse Helms: "As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Helms invited Mr. Powell to his office and pointed on a State Department organizational chart to exactly the job he wanted for Mr. Bolton--undersecretary for arms control and national security affairs. Don't come back until Mr. Bolton gets that job, he told Mr. Powell. Mr. Bolton got it." It certainly wouldn't surprise me if something approaching this scenario actually unfolded, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that it did so in this straight-out-of-Hollywood fashion.