FDR Had His Own Bolton

"He tells All – naming names, incidents and events, and draws on personal and outside source material. Whether it is good taste and political loyalty will be questioned, but there's no doubt of its being political history."

The words could easily be applied to John Bolton and the former national security adviser’s controversial new book about his time in the Trump White House.

But they are not. 

Rather, the words were published Sept. 20, 1939 and are from the Kirkus Review’s critique of onetime Roosevelt insider Raymond Moley's just-released book entitled "After Seven Years."

In the last week, several historians have concluded, before Bolton, the last former top White House official to come out with a critical book on the President he served while he was still in the White House was Moley.

An economist and Columbia University professor, Moley is best-known for assembling the group of academics known as the "Brain Trust" who advised Democrat Roosevelt after he was elected president in 1932.  Moley himself wrote many of FDR's major speeches, and served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of State and at the Justice Department before growing disillusioned with his boss’s big spending agenda and resigning.

"I can see the analogy between Moley and his book and Bolton and his book," historian Irwin Gellman, author of two critically acclaimed volumes in a biography of Richard Nixon, told Newsmax.

Gellman noted, both had broken with the presidents they served and both wrote books that fueled the flames of the enemies of their former boss.

But there were major differences between Moley and Bolton.  Moley was genuinely an intimate of FDR before and after he became president. Trump did not know Bolton well when he hired him and the two were never close in the White House. 

Well before he wrote "After Seven Years," Moley made clear his disagreement with Roosevelt. By the time of its publication, he was an active Republican and a decidedly conservative columnist.

Moley also disclosed few personal or "inside" secrets from the White House, except for the fact, in all his time around the president, "I never knew him to read a serious book."

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.