Former senator Lincoln Chafee, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans that haven’t yet been rounded up and moved to the reservation in Maine, writes about the first year of W’s Presidency with fascinating candor.

When the meeting ended, I felt worse about him than when I arrived. I was shaken. I admire old-fashioned virtues, chief among them honesty. Even at this early date in his tenure, the president had demonstrated an undeniable capacity for mendacity. America took him at his word when he said that he was a uniter, not a divider; that our foreign policy would be humble; that he would address climate change by regulating carbon dioxide. In the first months of his administration he had already turned his back on these bedrock campaign pledges.

My visit with the new president did nothing to assuage my apprehensions. The man—and by that I mean the inner man, the essential man—seemed unequal to the awesome powers entrusted to him. I was worried about the damage he might do over the next few years, never mind in a second term, which seemed unthinkable at the time.

Read on in the Brown Alumni magazine.