No presidency in history has generated anything like the volume of memoirs, histories and exposes describing life in the government over which George W. Bush presided.

Bradley Graham's new work is among the handful of books likely to stand above mere topicality. The author, a veteran Washington Post reporter, covered Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as secretary of defense as the paper's Pentagon correspondent.

He's supplemented that experience with a wealth of on-the-record interviews with Rumsfeld, his friends, family members and colleagues going back to his earliest days in Congress.

What emerges from all this is a kind of diptych -- one side illuminating a complex, often contradictory man undone by his own tragic flaws; the other showing a relentless ambitious political archetype that increasingly has dominated our national public life in recent decades.

What's particularly remarkable about the qualities Graham brings to this project is his extraordinary fair-mindedness.

There's a sturdy, old-fashioned quality to Graham's approach to his subject and this material, and the match works brilliantly. It's a major and important American political biography.

When Rumsfeld left the Pentagon late in Bush's second term, he'd been both the youngest and oldest secretary of defense and had served 2,585 days under two presidents. Only Robert S. McNamara served longer.

Both departed as essentially tragic figures, although there the comparison stops. When McNamara left office, he understood his tenure had been a personal, as well as national, tragedy. Rumsfeld gives no evidence, not even to a reporter as probing as Graham, of any such self-awareness.

In fact, what emerges from this book is the odd specter of a gifted and relentlessly intelligent politician who willfully substituted the bromides of self-help and dime-store paperback self-improvement for genuine introspection. In other words, banality with a high IQ.

In his final interview with Graham, he "ascribed much of the negative perception of him and the Bush administration to distorted media coverage." He told the author that "the intellectual dishonesty on the part of the press is serious." Journalists, Rumsfeld said, have a "strong incentive to be negative and dramatic. ... It's a formula that works. It gets Pulitzers; it gets promotions; it gets name identification on the front page above the fold."

Actually, Rumsfeld's great failure as a Cabinet secretary was to fundamentally misunderstand the dual nature of the Defense Department's role. We rely on our secretary of defense to order the country's military affairs in such a way that potential enemies are deterred from aggression.

Sometimes, though, no matter how firm your deterrence, real combat is unavoidable. At that point, the secretary of defense reverts to his pre-1947 role and becomes "secretary of war."

As Graham's reportage documents in a convincing way, Rumsfeld's performance in that capacity both in Afghanistan and Iraq was abysmal.

What's ultimately most rewarding about Graham's outstanding work of contemporary history is that the author never falters in the kind of balanced, fair-minded reconstruction of events and personalities that leaves readers free to form their own, similarly nuanced appraisal of a complex and confounding public figure.