Washington ? Every change of administrations brings a new cast of characters to Washington. I have been through nine such changes, dating back to 1960, and in all that time I have never known a Cabinet official who was more of a straight shooter than Paul O’Neill, the first treasury secretary in the Bush administration.

I take seriously the point made by an alumnus of a previous Republican White House — a man who admires O’Neill but says that George Bush put him in the wrong job. O’Neill would have made a great secretary of health and human services, this man says, had Bush granted Tommy Thompson, the man he put into that job, his wish to be secretary of transportation.

At HHS, O’Neill could have exercised his managerial talents in a giant bureaucracy and given full expression to his intellectual range as a policy innovator. Treasury secretaries are, by nature, meant to be pillars of reliability and reassurance, and part of that means sticking to the script, as O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, does to the point of being boringly predictable.

O’Neill was totally unscripted — and immune to “spin.” In this view, George Bush was simply correcting his own error — or, really, Vice President Cheney’s, since it was Cheney who had worked with O’Neill and recommended him for the job — when he fired O’Neill less than two years after he began.

But the very outspokenness and independence that marked O’Neill’s tenure at Treasury (and earlier as CEO of Alcoa) is what makes the newly published volume on his experiences in Washington an important document. Written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill,” draws heavily on the papers and the reminiscences of the former treasury chief.

While the headlines flowed to O’Neill’s account of an early determination by Bush to remove Saddam Hussein, what I found more persuasive was O’Neill’s account of the futile effort — in which he says he was joined by Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan — to restrain Bush’s penchant for tax cutting before it produced the massive deficits the government now faces.

Greenspan disputes one specific quotation Suskind puts in his mouth, saying he never termed Bush’s first big tax cut “irresponsible.”

But the public record shows that Greenspan shared O’Neill’s strong belief that the later years of that 10-year tax reduction should be contingent on the achievement of the healthy budget surpluses that were projected when Bush lobbied Congress in 2001 to reduce revenues by $1.6 trillion.

And Greenspan does not dispute that he and O’Neill were meeting privately during the winter and spring of 2001 to counter the arguments Bush heeded from his political staff and from then-economic counselor Larry Lindsey to go for the biggest possible tax cut. O’Neill mourned — and so, he says, did Greenspan — when the Senate voted 50-49 against an amendment, sponsored by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, that would have halted the tax cuts if the budget surplus failed to materialize.

Instead, Bush chose to add more tax cuts in 2002 and 2003, even as the promised surpluses disappeared and the current massive deficits replaced them.

The country will pay a high price for that failure. And if O’Neill is to be believed, the failure resulted largely from the intellectual passivity of the president himself, combined with a policy process that discouraged the airing of competitive views and lacked the kind of rigorous analysis of probable consequences that such vital decisions demanded.

Bush did not have the “hard factual analysis that allows you to make informed judgments about the worth of various proposals, about what you can reasonably expect, about what is known,” O’Neill told the author. “You just can’t balance the competing ideas of how to govern a country this size without that.”

Speaking of a meeting of economic and political advisers, where Bush made the fateful decision to go for yet more tax cuts, O’Neill reminisced: “I think of a meeting like that, with so much at stake. It’s like June bugs hopping around on a lake.”

Considering the source, those are words to weigh carefully in this election year.

David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.