In 2012, an Indiana man named Eric Hartsburg got a tattoo of Mitt Romney’s campaign logo on his face. That was weird at the time. Now, more than a decade removed from Romney’s turn as the Republican nominee for president, it seems completely unthinkable. Romney bore the standard of a party whose adherents have gone from inking their faces for him to turning their backs on him with surprising speed.

In Romney: A Reckoning, Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins gets an inside look at former Massachusetts governor and current Utah senator, including access to Romney’s journals from those heady years on the campaign trail and interviews with the man himself. What emerges is a portrait of a man who honestly means to do good in the world without any consistent answer to what “good” means. He believes he has a special role to play, a responsibility to help the country that has been so good to him and his family. But what is meant by “help” seems mostly to mean just being the one in charge, the adult in the room, and does not necessarily include any particular set of policy prescriptions or goals.