HERE, RIGHT MATTERS

The former National Security Council officer and Army lieutenant colonel recounts the grave political and professional fallout from calling out Donald Trump on his impeachable “quid pro quo” regarding Ukraine.

In February 2020, Vindman became an unlikely celebrity for revealing Trump’s outrageous strong-arming of President Volodymyr Zelensky, by which the former president offered him necessary aid only if he promised to publicly declare an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump’s call to Zelensky on July 25, 2019, shocked Vindman, who was then the point man at the NSC for all things Ukraine and Russia and a duty-bound, much-decorated military officer who hailed from a family of Ukrainian Jewish refugees who fled to America in 1979. The call prompted Vindman to reveal his alarm about withholding the approved $400 million aid to Ukraine at a critical moment in its struggles with Russia; the move clearly demonstrated Trump’s “wholly improper effort to subvert U.S. foreign policy in order to game an election.” The complaint to his superiors leaked to a Pentagon whistleblower, who made the ordeal public, resulting in a Congressional investigation and the eventual impeachment of the president as well as the administration’s vilification of Vindman and his essentially forced retirement from the military. This work is a spirited and heartfelt defense of his actions, which were guided in part by lessons he learned from his family’s early repudiation of the corrupt and sinister Soviet system. The author alternates his nightmarish experience at the NSC—witnessed along with his twin, Eugene, a high-placed lawyer there—with memoir: growing up in a hardworking immigrant family in Brooklyn, rigorous military training, awakening to the rigors of political maneuvering. In the end, despite the bullying and retaliation, “Good actors did their duty, obeyed their oaths, and defended the Constitution.” The author is clearly a deeply ethical American who risked everything to stand up to significant malfeasance in the White House.

An important book from a true patriot whose oath to the Constitution could not allow him to look away.