Like Ben Bernanke, a student of the Great Depression brought in to lead the Federal Reserve immediately prior to the Great Recession, McMaster comes to his job having carefully studied and criticized the national-security decision-making process for which he will now be responsible.

I have known McMaster for over a decade and cannot imagine a more decent man in his position today. This job is going to drive him crazy, because he does not suffer fools gladly. Unless he has been given some assurances about both staffing and process, he will struggle in a competition to influence the president—to be the last man in the room when the president makes a key decision.

But as Nick Schmidle observed in his very smart profile of Mike Flynn in The New Yorker this week, Flynn went into his job wanting to reduce the influence of the national-security staff but soon discovered that the staff and its processes gave him enormous leverage within the U.S. government. McMaster already understands that, and he will use it to his advantage.

The biggest challenge for any adviser to this president, however, is not other advisers but the president himself. Swedes weren’t the only ones scratching their heads this weekend about the way in which this president receives information and makes decisions. The vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were all in Europe and the Middle East trying to reassure allies over the long weekend—but were met with justifiable unease about the president’s temperament and prior statements.

I fear this president and his known weaknesses will be too much for even as great a public servant as McMaster. But—and again, this is not hyperbole—I will tuck my sons into bed tonight feeling a little better about the country in which I am raising them.

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