“As time passed,” he added, “the president seemed to me to become more isolated, more insulated from those outside the in-group, less engaged with others.”

Still, he did not let fellow Republicans off the hook. Mr. LaHood clearly felt disconnected from the “ideological rigidity” of his party’s new generation, who “inhabit a different world from mine,” as he put it. “Many of them do not want Congress to pass bills. Any government action is, by their definition, bad for the country.”

That was never Mr. LaHood’s philosophy. Mr. LaHood was literally the proverbial politician from Peoria, elected to the House from Illinois in 1994 along with a wave of Republicans led by Newt Gingrich. The Lebanese-American son of parents who ran a working-class restaurant, Mr. LaHood believed in getting things done and was a popular figure with friends on both sides of the aisle.

One of those friends was Rahm Emanuel, then a Democratic congressman from Illinois. When Mr. Obama was elected in 2008 and tapped Mr. Emanuel as his White House chief of staff, Mr. Emanuel helped bring Mr. LaHood into the cabinet.

While Mr. Gates was held over from a Republican administration, Mr. LaHood was the only Republican in the first cabinet who had been elected to public office. In his second term, Mr. Obama appointed former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, as defense secretary, although he did not last long.

In the interview and the book, Mr. LaHood recounted his excitement at joining the new administration — and his quick disappointment at its opening gambits. In the interest of passing an economic stimulus package quickly to counter the deep recession he inherited, Mr. Obama agreed to a strategy of allowing Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who then served as House speaker, to pass it without Republicans.

“I think they felt like they need to push this through quickly to get the economy moving,” Mr. LaHood said in the interview. “And, boom, they made a decision that they were going to pass economic stimulus with just Democratic votes. That was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship.”