On January 19, I went to the Oval Office to say goodbye to President Bush and then handed in my White House pass, my diplomatic passport, and my White House Blackberry and secure phones. I signed a statement promising to keep classified information secret and agreed to run any manuscript (including this one) by the NSC for approval so that it did not inadvertently reveal classified information. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, my wife and I flew off to California for a much-needed vacation. Now the Middle East would be someone else's job, and the question was what to make of the Bush years – what lessons to learn from our successes and failures.

A key conclusion, one that I have tried to illustrate in the preceding chapters, is that every president should organize the White House staff to keep the key decisions in his own hands. The National Security Council staff should be instructed not to homogenize policy disputes and seek a consensus. The president should keep in mind Margaret Thatcher's famous 1981 comment: “To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.” Too often I had heard officials who were confronting a dispute among cabinet principals say, “We can't go to the president like this; we have to work this out.” On the contrary, just as the Supreme Court does not review all court of appeals decisions but does take those where the various circuit courts have come out with conflicting decisions, so the president should insist on knowing of and on deciding the issues where his principal advisers are in conflict.