The resignation of Andrew Card as White House chief of staff reminds me of the words of Charles de Gaulle: “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” The French leader was cold-blooded in his detachment, but he was dead right.

That is, you can be center stage – and then, one day, you’re not. The challenge, in any line of work, is to figure out how to make a graceful exit; that’s a lot better than sticking around so long that you suffer the indignity of being carried off by your rivals and replacements.

During his six decades in public service, de Gaulle survived two wars, several assassination attempts and several rises and falls. He was the soul of postwar France, and yet he was pushed out of power in 1969 by noisy protests in the streets of Paris – how little things change across the decades – and died the following year. I have been to his grave; it’s a great place to reflect on the swift passage of the glory of the world.

Andy Card was never a grandiose figure. In fact, he was a very nice guy – and yet smart, too, in his niceness. We worked together in the White House of President George H.W. Bush, when he was the deputy chief of staff and I was a lower-ranking domestic policy aide. On one occasion, the then-chief of staff, John Sununu, was mad at me, and let me know it in a furiously four-letter-worded phone call. Understandably, I was a little shaken.

A little while later, Andy called to say, “Don’t worry about it. It’ll blow over.” It was a nice thing for him to do. Yet, at the same time, it was a smart thing to do; it was part of his job to keep the peace inside the White House.

Indeed, Card proved to be valuable in three different Republican White Houses. He spent four years working for Ronald Reagan, three years working for Bush 41 (plus a stint as secretary of Transportation), and then another five years in the Bush 43 White House. That’s a lot of years.

But eventually, over the passage of time, your number comes up. On Wall Street successful traders have good streaks, but ultimately, in the parlance of the biz, they “blow up.” Perhaps those “masters of the universe” had persuaded themselves that they had cracked open the secrets of financial alchemy – but, in fact, there was a lot of luck in their equation.

That’s true in politics, too: If you stay too long, you “blow up.” And that’s sort of what happened to Card. After a great run, he suffered a modified blowup.

Card had let it be known he wanted to set the record as the longest-serving chief of staff in White House history. That’s an OK objective – everybody wants to be in the “Guinness World Records” book for something – but he kept on saying it, even after the debacles of Harriet Miers, Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

Big mistake. In publicly meditating about the length of his tenure, he made it seem as if his own “iron-man” career ambitions came before the well-being of the president, or the country.

So last Tuesday, one more indispensable man became dispensable. The media were kind enough, in the sense of capturing his likeability, but the overall story line was still cutting to Card: The president, finally responding to pressure from critics and seeking to reverse falling poll numbers, saw that it was time for new blood in his White House. And the old blood, of course, was Card’s.

Nobody need shed tears for Andy Card. He was on top for a long time, and he’ll hardly suffer now, at least not financially. But the lesson is this: If you don’t know when it’s time to fold your hand, they will eventually fold it for you.