Mr. Bush does not grapple with the role that his deregulatory, free market policies played in fueling the economic meltdown at the end of his second term. Nor does he take any responsibility for the fierce partisanship and political divisiveness that took root in his administration.

Image Credit... Jake Guevara/The New York Times

Several times in the book Mr. Bush uses the term “blindsided” to describe his feelings about a crisis that his advisers and cabinet seem not to have filled him in on. He says he felt “blindsided” over Abu Ghraib: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “had told me the military was investigating reports of abuse at the prison, but I had no idea how graphic or grotesque the photos would be,” he writes. “The first time I saw them was the day they were aired on ‘60 Minutes II.’ ”

Mr. Bush says he told advisers he “never wanted to be blindsided like that again,” after a showdown between the White House and the Justice Department over a secret surveillance program. And he says “we were blindsided by a financial crisis that had been more than a decade in the making”: his focus, he writes, “had been kitchen-table economic issues like jobs and inflation. I assumed any major credit troubles would have been flagged by the regulators or rating agencies.”

Many books by reporters and former insiders have delineated the Bush administration as given to improvisatory decision making, wary of the traditional processes of policy review and inclined to favor loyalty over expertise. In “The Assassins’ Gate,” the New Yorker writer George Packer quoted Richard N. Haass, a former director of policy planning in the State Department, saying that a real weighing of pros and cons about the Iraq war never took place. And in “The Next Attack” Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that planning efforts for the war were often not coordinated, that many officials were working out of channels, “issuing directives without ever having their plans scrubbed in the kind of tedious, iterative process that the government typically uses to make sure it is ready for any contingency.”

In many respects this volume ratifies such observations. Mr. Bush, famous for being a “gut player,” writes that in assessing candidates for administration jobs, he looked at “character and personality” in an effort to create a culture that “fostered loyalty  not to me, but to the country and our ideals.” In 2006 an aide told him that “several people had spontaneously used the same unflattering term to describe the White House structure,” he writes. “It started with ‘cluster’ and ended with four more letters.” And he writes about “squabbling within the national security team” and how “nothing worked” to cool these turf battles, including his own talks with Mr. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Despite the eagerness of Mr. Bush to portray himself as a forward-leaning, resolute leader, this volume sometimes has the effect of showing the former president as both oddly passive and strangely cavalier.