So, What's Not to Like About Amiable Advisor?

Hadley said: "The president is very, very smart .... He can listen to a set of facts, assimilate it, figure out which is the really important fact and pull on that fact, quicker, faster, better than almost anyone I've ever seen.... It's very important that you get him good information, because he remembers it and uses it, and you don't want to get a bad fact into his head."

Like many national security advisors before him, Hadley said that what a president wanted was an "honest broker" who would present Cabinet secretaries' views in a fair and balanced way and then make sure decisions were carried out.

Hadley discounted the perception that the national security advisor controlled access to the president and thus tended to have disproportionate influence.

He said people underestimated the extent to which the president set the framework for the debate preceding decision-making, rather than choosing among views presented by his advisors.

"He sets the direction," Hadley said. "He has his own ideas and principles that come out of his experience and his faith and his character. Many times, yes, he takes advice from his senior advisors but the course we plot is really his own."

James Mann, author of "Rise of the Vulcans," a book about Bush's war Cabinet, said every national security advisor had promised to be an honest broker, but none entirely achieved it.

History shows that "even the most self-effacing manages to assert himself once in a while," Mann said. "Even though there seem to be fewer fights between State and Defense [departments] now, there are bound to be some, and he's going to be the main guy advising Bush on how to reconcile these fights."

The balance of power in the second Bush term has so shifted toward Rice's State Department that "Hadley goes to staff meetings [Rice] has at State -- something that hasn't happened since at least the mid-1980s," said Daalder of the Brookings Institution. He said Hadley wouldn't be able to act as an honest broker "because he's seen as being subservient to one of the players."

Several others raised similar concerns but refused to speak for attribution either because they said they liked Hadley too much to appear to be publicly criticizing him, or because they feared political or professional retribution.

Many questioned whether Hadley would take on the 800-pound gorillas surrounding Bush: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice.

True to form, Hadley listened to the criticism and, like a lawyer summing up his case to the jury, replied without a trace of bristle.

"Those 800-pound gorillas -- Rumsfeld, Cheney and Dr. Rice -- one of their great strengths is that they are great supporters of the president and great supporters of the principle that it is the president who was elected to make decisions for this country.

"As long as I run a process by which issues can get to the president, and they all have their say, I don't have to take them on."

Besides, he says: "I work for the 2,000-pound gorilla."

*

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.