Unilateralism in secret is sometimes necessary at the height of a crisis, and Cheneyism was effective in the short run. But it is disastrous over the medium and long term. The president cannot accomplish much over time without the assistance of his bureaucracy and the other institutions of government. And he cannot garner that assistance through mere commands. He must instead convince these institutions that his policies are good and lawful ones that they should support.

Cheney’s book expresses contempt for such soft power. He complains about pesky government lawyers, a weak-kneed Congress, activist justices and a treasonous press that exposed, rejected or changed nearly all of the Bush counter­terrorism policies. What he does not say is that his insistence on circumventing these institutions was often responsible for their blowback. The surveillance confrontation resulted when Justice Department lawyers discovered that prior legal opinions were filled with factual and legal errors caused by an absence of deliberation about the complicated program. And damaging leaks about the surveillance program resulted from the perception of illegitimacy inside the government caused by Cheney’s corner-cutting unilateralism.

More broadly, the unilateralism of the early Bush years led Congress to claim ownership over military prerogatives that in previous wars were the president’s. It also led courts to reject claims of presidential wartime authority in decisions that constrained military and intelligence operations. “Looking back,” says Rumsfeld, the unilateral approach “may have contributed to an outcome the administration hoped to avoid: encroachment on the president’s powers.”

Rumsfeld’s comment comes from a chapter titled “The Road Not Traveled,” in which he regrets not working more with Congress. Unilateralism, he says, “may not have taken fully into account the broader picture — the complete set of strategic considerations of a president fighting a protracted, unprecedented and unfamiliar war for which he would need sustained domestic and international support.” Bush expressed similar regrets in his memoir, “Decision Points.” “In retrospect,” he wrote, “I probably could have avoided some of the controversy and legal setbacks by seeking legislation on military tribunals, the T.S.P., and the C.I.A. enhanced-interrogation program as soon as they were created.”

Cheney has not warmed to this view. “I’m not inclined to make any mea culpas,” he recently said. He has instead deflected the failures of his philosophy by maintaining that Barack Obama embraced his policies. Obama did continue many of the Bush administration counterterrorism policies as they stood in January 2009. But the 2009 policies Obama inherited were not Cheney policies. They were the products of a four-year pushback against those policies, and the theory of power on which they rested, by courts, Congress and the rest of the Bush administration.