Not that I didn’t get frustrated with the president on occasion. He never gave me a reason to doubt his strategic judgment in eight years of close-up observation. And there was rarely any daylight between us in matters of policy. But sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault. “Just trust your instincts, Mr. President,” I would say to him. On major decisions that had to be made fast, I had learned over the years, a president was never going to have more than about 70 percent of the information needed. So once you have checked the experts, statistics, data, and intelligence, you have to
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