Honor.

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, uttered that word or a derivative of it, “honorable,” five times in his interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening.

Mr. Tenet had stated that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk case.” This statement was then leaked to a reporter.

Now, Mr. Tenet says that his comment was misinterpreted and has become the scapegoat for failed intelligence prior to the Iraq war. He claims he really was saying, “We can put a better case together for a public case.” Whatever that means. The important point is that Mr. Tenet feels his strong sense of personal honor was tarnished by the discussion around his comments.

“Men of honor don’t do this,” Mr. Tenet told the White House’s then-chief of staff, Andrew Card, after the Washington Post reported his “slam dunk” comment. “You don’t do this. You don’t throw people overboard. … You’re gonna throw somebody overboard just because it’s a deflection? Is that honorable? It’s not honorable to me. You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. … All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor.”

Mr. Tenet has an interesting conception of honor: With the diminishing popularity of the war and the spirit of the American people waning, Mr. Tenet has determined that this is the right time for him to release a controversial and self-serving memoir, “At the Center of the Storm.”

His sense of outrage over the “slam dunk” leak was absent on December 14, 2004, when President Bush draped the Medal of Freedom around his neck. This illustrious moment, when Mr. Tenet stood with fellow recipients of the award who are also associated with the Iraq war, the former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and General Tommy Franks, came seven months after Robert Woodward reported Mr. Tenet’s slam dunk comment in his book, “Plan of Attack.”

Honor, it seems, would dictate that Mr. Tenet should have declined to accept the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. At the ceremony Mr. Tenet called President Bush “a great man who supports and appreciates” what the CIA does.

By his current telling, Mr. Tenet was skeptical of a post-September 11 war with Iraq. “It never made any sense,” he told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes.” If Mr. Tenet is telling the truth, that the prospect of a war with Iraq made no sense to him, then as the nation’s leading intelligence official he ought to have done what most would consider the “honorable” thing, and resigned.

Indeed, if Mr. Tenet had stepped down as the director of the CIA after almost four years in that position during the Clinton administration, it would have been understandable.

Mr. Tenet’s revision of the facts calls to mind the 1995 memoir of the former defense secretary, Robert McNamara, “In Retrospect.” Mr. McNamara recorded that he had grown “increasingly skeptical, of our ability to achieve our political objectives in Vietnam through military means” but nonetheless remained in the Johnson administration to help plan an American troop build-up there.

“I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Diem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam. But Mr. McNamara did not resign then. Like Mr. Tenet, Mr. McNamara also accepted the Medal of Freedom from a president he served. Mr. McNamara did not resign from his service to President Johnson until 1967. With his reputation temporarily preserved, he went on to head the World Bank.

During his interview with Mr. Pelley of “60 Minutes,” Mr. Tenet also spoke of a plan he had prepared to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks, one that may have prevented that dreadful day. Mr. Tenet maintains that the national security advisor at the time, Condoleezza Rice, buried the plan. So why, asked Mr. Pelley, didn’t Mr. Tenet raise it directly with the president with whom he met each day? “Because the United States government doesn’t work that way,” Mr. Tenet explained. “The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security advisor.”

That answer is, in polite terms, a cop out. If the president had rejected such a plan, Mr. Tenet’s career may have been harmed. For a man of “honor,” Mr. Tenet allowed bureaucratic priorities to supersede the concerns of national defense.

The record demonstrates that the former CIA director is something other than what he perceives himself to be. He is not a man of honor, but a company man capable of heading up a large and important agency under two different presidents of opposing political parties. America and honor would be better served by acts of courage more profound than memoirs written after the fact.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.