When Ms Rice ran the National Security Council (NSC), it was hopelessly dysfunctional torn asunder by disputes between the hawks (Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld) and the doves (then secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage).Dealing with a feud between such big political beasts was probably too much for anybody, let alone a relatively inexperienced newcomer.
Despite securing interviews with several key Bush administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, Mr Rothkopf simply rehashes the view that Ms Rice was usurped by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who built up a mini-NSC on his own staff and used his allies on the NSC to magnify his power.
Founded in 1947 by Harry Truman, the NSC was in 1949 placed in the executive office of the president, who chairs its meetings.
And major shifts are common, for the NSC reflects the ideology and management style of the White House far more than other agencies do.Mr Rothkopf may be a Democrat, but he is bipartisan when it comes to rating the quality of America's national security co-ordination.
With luck, it will be able to do this for a century.Baba Yaga's hutEven now, so long after the explosion, too much radioactivity streams through the sarcophagus from the reactor's ruined core to allow the NSC to be built in situ.
In fact, the secretary wanted the confidential memo made public, just to prove his point.Ms Rice's tenure at the NSC has been marked by a certain ceding, or losing, of authority to the Departments of State and Defence.
The NSC is therefore being built with several internal, remotely operable cranes, and the plan is, one day, to use these and robots to do the job.But that will not be easy.
It will even mean that the NSC has a role in economic policymaking.
It all sounded very transatlantic, a conscious attempt to create a British version of America's NSC, the powerful body first formed in 1947 that operates from the West Wing of the White House.
The result was some poor decisions; critics suggested the NSC was guilty of concentrating too much on the present war and not enough on longer-term threats.But, at least according to one NSC member, things would have been much worse without it.
The NSC has made a reasonable if patchy start, but it has a lot to prove.
