Old Parliament House might learn a lesson from some landmarks of modern history, and employ those who once walked its halls as tour guides. The survivors of terms as chiefs of staff to ministers could confide in people visiting the Museum of Australian Democracy what actually occurred behind locked doors, late at night, down obscure corridors, between a beer, a grudge, a leak and a profanity.

Were the same principle applied to the White House, a retirement career might beckon for John Bolton, US President Donald Trump's former National Security Adviser. Mr Bolton could recount stories about "turmoil, uncertainty and risk". (I suspect he enjoys the third best.) He could show off a conference room where discussions (on Syria particularly) were "like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine". Mr Bolton could then move along to another room where sessions on trade "more closely resembled college food fights than careful decision-making". He might pause at the chair designated for a cabinet colleague who "never saw a negotiation where he couldn't make enough concessions to strike a deal".

Mr Bolton would not need to bother explaining his own ideas; those have been documented, pungently and trenchantly, in dozens of columns and interviews. That dossier may not have been ingested by Mr Trump, certainly not in a job interview when the President was impressed that Mr Bolton sounded just like he did on Fox News. In Washington jargon, that meeting was "just circle and sniff". Although Mr Bolton does highlight his own resilience ("my scar tissue had scars"), he still seems bemused why his preferred policies - on North Korea, say, or Iran, NATO, China, the Taliban and so on - never gained his President's support.

Mr Bolton's memoir, The Room Where It Happened, notoriously excoriates President Trump, but the sombre, sobering conclusions he draws about governance apply well beyond one room, the Oval Office, or one US administration. The first lesson a former boss (James Baker, then Secretary of State) taught Mr Bolton. "The guy who got elected doesn't want to do it." Or, as we put that point in our system, there is only room in a ministerial office for one minister. Here President Trump repeatedly exercises his prerogatives, whether to rely on whim and impulse, or simply to insist on having the last word. Mr Bolton consistently deplores such dependence on instinct, personal relations with leaders and made-for-television showmanship. He endorses the hard slog.

Mr Bolton did encounter one leader who could genuinely dominate a meeting or intimidate an opponent, a man who was patient, well-briefed, tactically deft and truly tough. Regrettably, that was Vladimir Putin rather than President Trump. Oddly, Mr Bolton never asked his boss for his opinion of Mr Putin, "perhaps afraid of what I might hear". Does that imply secrets about President Trump's past, the reasons for an illogical infatuation with strong leaders, a recognition of superior talent, or something else again?

Mr Bolton is evidently an intelligent patriot, albeit one with conspicuous flaws. He complains frequently that policy under President Trump lacked continuity, coherence, and co-ordination, all those positive "c" words that tick the boxes in management texts. He might have deprecated unduly the merits of improvisation, flair, imagination or even showmanship. Installing good process is not always the right answer. Mr Bolton regards the word "gauzy" as a serious insult; it presumably means showy but flimsy to him. Nonetheless, vaudeville - both gauzy and gaudy - fits into a politician's repertoire. Perhaps good might have flowed from Mr Trump's plan to give Kim Jong Un an autographed copy of Elton John's "Rocket Man".

Mr Bolton might have recalled some perennial lessons from serving the great and good. Be mentally prepared to be sacked any day. Have another job to which to retreat. When confronted with disaster, remember that tomorrow is another day. If there are too many balls in the air, do not lose sleep over dropping one once in a while. Try to learn something every day about the politics of politics. Never condescend to those who have mastered that dark art.

Another elementary lesson is the need to ensure you keep and cherish a few mates. Abraham Lincoln is now thought to have appointed a "team of rivals", balancing competences while counterbalancing ambitions. By contrast, Mr Bolton's version of the Trump White House seems to possess no notion of team work, team spirit or team goals.

Mr Bolton astringently criticises President Trump's original staff for being self-serving, failing to create order and publicly dissociating themselves from some of the President's policy objectives. Those may be merely venial sins.

Reviewers have rightly focused on how Mr Bolton pillories Mr Trump, but the collateral damage he inflicts on other senior officials is prodigious. One is seen as back-stabbing, another untethered, a third displays "a high opinion of his own opinion", one more is isolated with a few trusted aides, with a final one resigned to failure. Mr Bolton is more colourful again when weirdly characterising G7 meetings as "self-licking ice-cream cones".

When Iranian officials denounced all their numerous neighbours, I would silently wonder if they ever considered what those countries made of them. A similar thought exercise in self-criticism might have benefited Mr Bolton.

You need folk to help you on bad days and miss you when you are gone. Those minding the high and mighty could also use this cautionary tale to re-visit two classic studies of the follies inherent in ambition, Balzac's Lost Illusions and Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier.