Jack Ward Thomas is the most misunderstood chief to hold the U.S. Forest Service’s highest office. Reviled by the right for his chairmanship of several spotted owl scientific review panels and embraced by the left for the same reason, Thomas was equally misunderstood by both. In a new memoir, The Journals of a Forest Service Chief, published by the Forest History Society and the University of Washington Press, Thomas lets down what’s left of his hair, at least a little.

The memoir, which consists of excerpts from his diary, begins in 1990 after the release of the report on the spotted owl by the Interagency Scientific Committee, which Thomas chaired. And that’s my first frustration with this book. It leaves out the most significant part of his career. The scientific, economic and policy debates within the committee shaped the future management of 19 million acres of federal land, but he isn’t talking about what went on in that well-guarded room.

Nor does Thomas let us inside his head during his riveting testimony in front of Judge William Dwyer in 1991. The Forest Service had, grudgingly, been forced to adopt the Interagency Scientific Committee’s plan, but for an undefined interim period, and without complying with legal processes. Thomas was the Forest Service’s most compelling witness at the trial, where he and Dwyer engaged in a colloquy about risk, economics, law and policy. Those privileged to watch the exchange knew that the heavyweights were deciding, then and there, the future direction of federal forestry in the Northwest and perhaps the nation. But this memoir omits any mention of those days.

The preponderance of this book details the endless meetings Thomas attended as Forest Service chief. It is not only lonely at the top; it’s boring, too. A typical entry begins, “I met today with …” His tenure as chief is notable for the vitriol with which western Republican senators attacked him during endless congressional hearings and for the tortured relationship with the man who talked a reluctant Thomas into the job, Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons.

The book confirms Thomas’s oft-stated contempt for “professional gladiators,” especially lawyers, who he believes brought the Forest Service to its knees and devastated the timber-dependent communities that had Thomas’s true sympathy (I once saw Thomas fight back tears during a speech describing the plight of a jobless millworker). Thomas has little respect for most politicians and political appointees, and even less for the political process of give and take, horse-trading and compromise. All that political stuff is not his cup of tea, and the people who do it are not his kind of folk.

Thomas’s loyalty to the Forest Service is apparent. His agency could do no wrong — notwithstanding the contrary views of malcontent whistleblowers (in a recent article, Thomas said that as in the navy, “disloyalty should be dealt with in summary fashion, i.e., punishment or dismissal”). To Thomas, the Forest Service is a victim of ill-informed and contrary congressional directives, meddling political appointees and, again and again, those damn gladiators. When the Forest Service lost a lawsuit, Thomas was quick to blame anyone or anything but his own agency.

His view of environmentalists and timber industry proponents is especially revealing. Like the Forest Service, Thomas had no personal rapport with environmentalists. They are, to be sure, a force to be reckoned with, but not people with whom he’d share a cold one. But he can relate to the timber industry, even in light of occasional disagreements over policy. Former timber industry lobbyist and current Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey receives Thomas’s respect and admiration for his smarts and dedication to advancing industry’s cause.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, are barely mentioned by name. They are lumped together as a sometimes well-intentioned but ultimately misguided force of nature. During the spotted owl portion of his narrative, Thomas predicts that the environmentalists have finally “gone too far this time,” only to miss the point when they prevail.

The right wing never understood that Thomas’s unabashed loyalty to the Forest Service could have made him their ally. He had always been a reluctant player in the spotted owl war, handpicked by an anti-environmental Republican administration to limit damage to the federal timber sale program. But the science and pressure from other scientists demanded more cuts in logging levels than Thomas had ever imagined would be necessary or desirable.

Environmentalists were equally wrong in believing that Thomas was their man. He never was, didn’t want to be and bent over backward during his tenure to prove that he wasn’t. Rey, however, wasn’t confused about where Thomas stood. In his last days as chief, Rey feted Thomas with champagne, as he had Thomas’s predecessors Max Peterson and F. Dale Robertson, but, revealingly, not his successor, roadless rule proponent Mike Dombeck.

His loyalty to the agency and its people and his antipathy to his political masters led Thomas to resign as chief under pressure when he refused to reassign two high-ranking Forest Service officials whom Lyons suspected of insurrection against Clinton’s policies. Thomas showed no regrets, writing that he “wanted no more of dealing with equal employment opportunity, civil rights, sexual harassment, employee complaints, whistleblowers, appeals, downsizing, rightsizing, reinvention, budgeting, micromanagement, political correctness, hearings, audits, investigations, reviews, etc.”

Thomas never wanted to be chief in the first place. His career as the Forest Service’s highest-paid wildlife researcher, which would have been the better choice for his memoirs, had left him ill prepared for the rough-and-tumble of politics. Too bad Lyons didn’t take Thomas’s no as his final answer to the question of whether he would be chief.