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"FacebookPinterest\n\nCan I just take five minutes to tell you about the president nobody knows\" said one of George W. Bush's top advisers as we sat in his West Wing office. \"I don't think people get him at all. He uses very simple words, and you think, 'There's not much going on here.' You've got to listen to him carefully. He's very economical, he does it only once, it's very linear as he marches through\u2014and the language and simplicity of sentence structure hides very insightful commentary. People don't see that.\"\n\nThe adviser knew he was on shaky ground\u2014it being October 20, 2006, just two and a half weeks before the midterm elections that would effectively cut the Bush presidency off at the knees. But he was just getting started. Bush was big picture. He was bold\u2014\"Way out there. Everyone in the priesthood is like, 'Oh, my God, you can't do that! It's the cowboy president!' At the end of the day, people see he's right.\" Above all, Bush was \"incredibly strong,\" unafraid of political fallout.\n\n\"I'll bet you think all that's hype,\" concluded the adviser. \"But that's the guy I see.\"\n\nThe number of people who still see that guy can and do fit in a single house on Pennsylvania Avenue. This has been a hard presidency to live through. Only an idiot, or Karl Rove, would claim otherwise. But as the Bush years dwindle in America's rearview, I'm struck by a certain irony\u2014which is that Bush's early detractors never imagined him capable of having such a jarring impact on American life. Remember The incoming forty-third president was widely suspected of being a slight, apathetic, and drearily predictable figure. The sort of White House occupant you would barely notice. Well, history may very well condemn Bush, but not for irrelevance.\n\nThroughout my three-year reportorial odyssey inside the Bush White House, I heard numerous testimonials from uniformly sane, intelligent individuals who gushed with praise about one of the most unpopular presidents in recorded history. At times their admiration reminded me of the Beltway dupes in the movie Being There who elevated the vapid utterances of an idiot gardener to Moses-like sagacity. At other times, I understood exactly what they meant. Casual and smirky but also highly self-disciplined and a peerless listener; at times bullying and snappish but also gracious, self-deprecating, and ultimately humble\u2026simple and not at all simple\u2014but definitely, memorably compelling. That's the guy I see.\n\nThe first time I met Bush was in 1996, at an editorial meeting with Texas Monthly, where I was a staff writer. The 49-year-old Texas governor had just concluded a wildly successful first legislative session, fulfilling all of his campaign pledges, and his cockiness was on full display. He interrupted questions, belittled our political editor, and crowed more than once (hardly for the last time in his political career), \"I've got political capital, and I intend to spend it!\" On those subjects that interested him\u2014 education, property tas, juvenile justice\u2014he was astoundingly cogent. When one of the writers brought up his environmental record, Bush became edgy and dismissive. On balance he struck me as a jerk. But when I ran into him at a party a few months later, we argued nose-to-nose for a half hour about his prison board, which I believed to be hopelessly corrupt\u2014Bush affably kicking my ass in the exchange, and me coming away convinced that he possessed insidious qualities that could not be explained by pedigree and circumstance alone.\n\nDuring the summer of 1998, I spent a lot of time with Bush for a GQ profile of the presidential aspirant. To say that he was a work in progress would be charitable. When I asked him which leaders he most admired, he blurted out, \"Reagan.\" When I asked the same question about judges, he replied, \"Scalia and Thomas.\" The man seemed to have no grasp of history that predated 1980, the year his father was elected vice president. His words tumbling out as if from a gumball machine, Bush was palpably restless as the next grand act of his career loomed in the near distance. This was his moment. And as it developed, all he needed was Scalia, Thomas, and three other judges to deliver that moment to him.\n\nI never set out to make a cottage industry of writing about Bush, but as his presidency went on, I found myself waiting for someone to deliver a biography that captured the rough-hewn and incurious but unexpectedly charismatic figure I'd gotten to know in Austin. Then I got tired of waiting. In late January 2005, I showed up at the West Wing office of Bush's counselor Dan Bartlett to discuss a project that would become Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Bartlett was wary if not thoroughly discouraging. He suggested I interview chief speechwriter Mike Gerson and a couple of midlevel staffers. The air in the White House that winter was thick with hubris. Bush had again earned political capital with his '04 reelection, and he couldn't wait to spend it.\n\nLater that same year, I was among a group of reporters invited to Bush's ranch in Crawford for an off-the-record catfish fry. While Laura Bush melted under the summer sun, stoically counting down the minutes till we would be chased off the property, her Bushie carried on about steroids in baseball, his zeal for biking, and\u2014while pounding back at least four nonalcoholic beers\u2014how drinking could distort a pilot's vision. There was a jut-jawed edginess to his behavior that afternoon. He taunted a New York Times reporter, suggesting that she would probably prefer to be in Martha's Vineyard right then. Leaving the ranch, one of the journalists commented with disgust, \"He didn't even try to use the time to make the case for his policies!\"\n\nBut that was because Bush didn't care what we thought. It was August 27, 2005, two days before Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans landfall, and the president had no way of knowing that his levees were about to collapse.\n\n\"So why should I cooperate with you How's your book any different than the others\"\n\n Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, with Dan Bartlett seated to his left, me to his right, and chief of staff Josh Bolten behind us on the couch. It was now a year later, August 2006, and two things had happened since I'd last seen the president at the Crawford catfish fry.  The first was that I had spoken to pretty much every senior official in the White House except the president. Karl Rove had sat for about a dozen such sessions\u2014on one occasion, while he was autographing a stack of White House photographs. Dick Cheney had spoken to me for an hour, and then, when I concluded by asking him if we could do a follow-up at some point, he consulted a schedule in his jacket pocket before grunting, \"How 'bout three hours from now\" (Cheney was surprisingly voluble, unlike his wife, Lynne, who received me at their sumptuous Naval Observatory home but then seemed affronted by my every question\u2014except for the ones that gave her an opportunity to say what an asshole John Edwards was.) Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and I conducted one of our sessions over margaritas; Bartlett and I, over enough wine to paralyze a rhinoceros. Josh Bolten quaintly served midafternoon snacks in his office. Condi Rice: cheerfully unforthcoming, but great legs. Colin Powell: sorry, off the record. Deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin: best storyteller in the White House. Harriet Miers: the opposite. (But great legs!) Don Rumsfeld, whom I interviewed in a semi-abandoned Pentagon annex after his resignation: flawless impersonation of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. (Bush later asked me about the interview, saying, \"I'm worried about Don. I hear he's gonna write a settling-scores book. It's not me I'm concerned about\u2014hell, I went out on a limb for the guy!\u2014but others.\")\n\nIt had taken me twenty months of unglamorous legwork to gain that level of access, and Bush seemed impressed that I had pulled it off without waiting around for his blessing. In the meantime, something else had happened: The president's political capital was badly depleted from Katrina, Iraq, rising gas prices, and other blows to his public standing. His approval rating had plunged into the thirties. The present tense was no longer his domain; it was already evident that our forty-third president would depart office as a deeply unpopular man. Unlike the defiantly ignorant Bush of 1998, this Bush was now reading numerous history books\u2014perhaps taking comfort in how Truman and Churchill had been acquitted over time. And there I was, a fellow Texan who remembered him from back when he was a much admired politician, asking to write the first draft of his presidency's history.\n\n\"Fifty years from now,\" I told him, \"no one's going to give a damn what Bob Woodward or Fred Barnes or Ron Suskind or me or anyone else thinks about you. What they'll give a damn about is: Who was that guy, fifty years ago, that basically unsuccessful Midland oilman, who somehow changed the world Who the hell was he and how the hell did that happen All I'm trying to do in this book is to capture you. I don't judge you. But I do think I get you. And I think that's the value my book will have.\"\n\n\"Well, let me reflect on it,\" he finally said.\n\nAnd reflect he did, for nearly four more months, while soliciting opinions from those he trusted. Bartlett and Mark McKinnon (Bush's media adviser and an old friend of mine from back in Austin) suggested he cooperate. Rove and Laura counseled him not to\u2014the former based on his belief that I belonged to a cabal of Texans who plainly missed the good ol' bipartisan Governor W., the latter out of her customary sense of caution. During a meeting with his speechwriters one afternoon in 2006, Bush suddenly said, \"All right, let me see a show of hands. Who thinks I should talk to Draper\"\n\nFinally, in early December, I received a typically terse e-mail from Bartlett: \"He'll do one and see how it goes.\"\n\nThe first interview was scheduled for December 12, 2006.\n\nThe two of us, plus Bartlett, ate lunch in the small and sunny room adjacent to the Oval Office, where Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had gotten to know each other. Bush ordered comfort food: a hot dog followed by ice cream. He was in a pissy mood. Earlier that morning, he'd postponed a major address announcing a new strategy in Iraq, for the simple reason that he did not yet know what that strategy would be.  \"Robert, you can't possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency\u2014until I'm dead,\" he began as soon as I sat down.  \"And I don't presume to figure it out, sir,\" I said. \"That's the right answer,\" he acknowledged gruffly. \"Well, I've been saying all along to people that\u2014\" \"You've been saying that all along, but you haven't been saying that all along to me.\" Over the course of that first hour, he talked at length about the trajectory of his political career, about his father (\"I don't call him up and say, 'What are the five things you would do if you were me' \"), about Iraq (\"I am immersed in this war,\" he said, looking a thousand years old), about his drinking problem (\"I still remember the feeling of a hangover\")\u2014and, most expansively, about his leadership style: \"I don't know what the fancy word for it is, but I argue a lot. In the process of arguing, I'm really testing the argument. And I listen. And I'm open-minded\u2014much more so than people may think until they look at some of the decisions I've made. I mean, Bartlett plenty of times has come in [to see me]\u2014and it's a test, sometimes because I'm irritable.\"\n\n\"Like setting this up,\" Bartlett grinned.\n\nAs lunch concluded and Cheney and Condi Rice filed in for a meeting, Bush announced, \"Okay, we'll do another.\"\n\nHe abruptly strode off, only to stop in midstride, turn to me, and say, \"You know, if you really are going to try to do an objective book, The New York Times is gonna kill you. You know that, don't you\"\n\n\"I'm confident history will acquit me,\" I replied.\n\n\"That's the right answer,\" said Bush.\n\nBush received me twice more that December, during the lightly scheduled Christmas season. He was sick with the flu during one of the interviews\u2014\"I'd shake your hand, but I've got puke all over mine,\" he said\u2014but he was increasingly warming to our sessions. Again he sought to add shading to his decision-making: \"Look, Robert, my management style is decisiveness. However, I do think it's important for people to express different opinions. I like the policy being driven when people don't necessarily agree\u2026 A lot of times, people homogenize the product before it gets to me. An experienced president will know the difference between a cooked policy and honest debate.\" At the end of that second interview, Bush said, \"You should come back. Set it up. What's good Tomorrow\"\n\nDuring those December sessions, we talked about Paul Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army and about the administration's failure to anticipate an insurgency in Iraq. But he also discussed his reading list (lots of books on Lincoln recently\u2014\"I'm fascinated by the guy\") and how he envisioned spending his retirement (Bush volunteered, \"I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers\"). It was during these sessions that I also unearthed the crucial scoop that Bush's dog Barney sleeps on his and Laura's bed with them. (Bush: \"Thanks for asking.\" Me: \"Well, it's important.\" Bush: \"He's a really important little guy.\")\n\nAt the end of our third interview, on December 21, Bush wanted to know what I would be doing for the Christmas holidays. I replied that I would be vacationing in Italy. At the time, I'd been spending some time with an attractive half-Brazilian lobbyist.\n\n\"You taking that Italian lobbyist with you\" Bush wanted to know. \"McKinnon tells me she's a real looker.\"\n\nThe president frequently grilled me about the \"Italian lobbyist\" after that.\n\nIt was a strangely casual routine. The interviews always began ahead of schedule\u2014sometimes as much as twenty minutes early. Bartlett would stride up, say, \"You ready\" and then lead me past the Roosevelt Room and into the room occupied by Bush's glamorous if badly overworked assistant, Karen Keller. Before Bartlett could finish asking Karen if \"the boss\" was free, a familiar voice would bellow out, \"Draper! Get in here!\" (The president always called me by my last name, mercifully discarding the nickname he'd bestowed on me years ago: GQ Dude.)\n\nThe Oval Office was sunny and ample but\u2014after I'd seen so many TV and movie replicas\u2014oddly familiar and never intimidating. Neither was Bush. He usually had his feet on the desk and was scowling at some briefing paper or other, tending not to look up when I entered. Then would come his wiseass appraisal. By way of greeting, the president usually commented on my scuffed shoes or poorly chosen necktie. Whatever. It was important for him to establish dominance, and I was only too happy to make him feel comfortable. Early on, Bush had confessed to having a very poor memory\u2014\"I literally have trouble reconstructing events two weeks ago\"\u2014and so I had learned that little was to be gained by hammering him on specific matters. Instead, I tended to throw out a couple of topics\u2014his relationship with al-Maliki, the Katrina flubs, immigration, the midterm \"thumpin'\"\u2014and let Bush free-associate, guided by my occasional intrusions. More than once, Bush prefaced his answer to a question by asking me when my book was coming out. \"Turn that thing off,\" he would say on the handful of occasions that he preferred to speak off the record.\n\nSometimes Bush was tart. \"Whoever informed you of this secret meeting, make sure you've got the facts straight,\" he admonished me at one point, when I asked him about a recent Iraq meeting. When I told the president that Steve Hadley had suggested I ask him to name the individual who had recommended Robert Gates as Rumsfeld's replacement, Bush said with exasperation, \"I'm gonna kill Hadley. It was a guy I went to Yale with named Jack Morrison. Are you gonna call him Don't call him, because it'll freak him out. It'll end up in the newspapers.\"\n\nI was ever mindful that the president's time is the most valuable commodity on earth. What gratified me was that Bush seemed equally intent on making these sessions worth my while. Though he has never been one for introspection, and frequently ercises his privilege as Interrupter in Chief, Bush's greatest talent is personal diplomacy. Conversation with him feels like a physical experience. He listens acutely, relishes argument, and is just as quick to concede a point as he is to pummel a specious one. His ruminations are famously mind-twisting\u2014until, suddenly, he wraps up his point of view in a hot little rhetorical fist, and then he's done, eyeing you with impatience as you fumble for the next discussion topic.\n\n\"You're gonna get a lecture\u2014get ready for it,\" Bartlett said to me one day just before we walked into the Oval. The prior evening, Bush's counselor and I had been at dinner, and I had said that I believed the president was not leveling with me about the reasons for Rumsfeld's abrupt resignation. Bush had told me that the SecDef had dictated the terms of his own departure. But I knew that wasn't the case. Through other interviews, I'd learned about a meeting at the White House residence in April 2006, during which the president asked several advisers for a show of hands as to whether Rumsfeld should go.\n\n\"Okay, message received,\" Bartlett had said, and then duly reported our discussion to his boss.\n\nAs promised, Bush lit into me.\n\n\"You're presuming to know how I make my decisions,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm not, sir. I just know you didn't make this particular decision the way you told me you did.\"\n\n \"And this meeting,\" he went on. \"I don't even remember it. But\u2014I mean, you think I make my decisions by a show of hands\"\n\n\"No, sir. If your presidency were run as a democracy, then Rumsfeld would've been fired that April, because most of the people at that meeting raised their hands to get rid of him.\"\n\nBush simmered down\u2014though in truth I don't think he was really that hot to begin with. He enjoyed testing people, seeing if they would hold their ground. McKinnon called the experience \"walking into the propeller\"; another former senior aide, \"walking into the valley of the shadow of death.\" But it wasn't just a test to see if you were a wuss; this was Bush's way of determining a person's integrity. Was the speaker just trying to sound clever, or did he really believe what he was saying \"Okay, then let's go off the record,\" he said, and thereupon laid out Rumsfeld's demise in a way more in keeping with the facts as I knew them.\n\nBy our fourth or fifth interview, Bush made it clear that I could keep coming back for more. The day arrived, however, when I sheepishly informed him that my publishing deadline was imminent. \"You're kidding,\" the esteemed LBJ biographer Robert Caro later said to me over lunch when I told him about this conversation. \"You had access to a sitting president, and you told him your publishers were making you stop\" But my publishers knew that after late 2007, all attention would turn to the presidential primaries, and reader interest in George W. Bush would utterly cease.\n\nI told Bush about my deadline at the outset of our sixth and final hour-long interview, on May 8, 2007. As always, the range of topics discussed reflected our shared attention-deficit disorder: entertaining the Queen of England (he enjoyed \"bantering with her\"); his opinion of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (\"He wants more authority\u2026He's not ready\"); what he envisioned for ongoing American involvement in Iraq (a continued troop presence \"to remind certain actors that the United States is something to be reckoned with\u2014Iran, for example, if they continue on the course they're doing\"); why he was relying on General Petraeus to be the chief spokesman for Iraq policy (\"Because I've been here too long\u2014every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized\"); the origins of legislative gridlock (\"Big-money special-interest politics, particularly from the left, is having a lot of influence\"); and his emotions (\"I do a lot of crying in this job\"). A fly buzzed around us, and Bush took some vicious swings at it. \"Damn, I woulda had it, Draper,\" he moaned as he missed again.\n\n\"You can't believe the emotional reaction when some people see the president,\" he said at one point. Then, smirking, he added, \"For you, it's old hat, of course.\"\n\n\"I cry after every time I see you,\" I assured him.\n\n\"You'll be crying when I get ahold of that book of yours,\" he said.\n\nWhen the interview was done, he stood in the middle of the Oval Office rug and stared out the window. \"My man Barney,\" he said fondly, nodding in the direction of his dog on the lawn. \"That guy who said 'If you want a friend in this town, get a dog' had it right.\"\n\nHe asked me about how my book was coming\u2014indicating no great enthusiasm for the task of writing his own. He asked about my family. About the Italian lobbyist\u2014who turned out to be, to Bush's disappointment, just a close friend. He seemed, all of a sudden, to have an aching abundance of free time\u2014though I later learned that he had an impending appointment in the residence that he was by no means eager to attend, with a group of House Republicans dissatisfied with his leadership.\n\nWe casually said good-bye.\n\nI'm pretty sure he didn't read it. He'd made a point of saying to me that he had not read any of the other books about him. Though I believe that Dead Certain was an accurate and humane portrait of him, the initial publicity caused the White House great discomfort. I later learned that Bush said to one of his advisers, \"Get Bartlett on the phone. Ask him why we agreed to do this.\"  Until he became president, George W. Bush had spent every day of his life as an exceptionally well-liked individual. Today he's viewed with undiluted loathing. The night that Barack Obama was elected president, a boisterous throng convened at the White House gates to sing: Na na na na / Na na na na / Hey hey hey / Good-bye. \n\nI'm writing this the following day. A few hours ago, President Bush stepped out into the Rose Garden to read a short statement congratulating Obama on his historic victory. It was, dare I say it, a brave and lovely performance. Looking older than I had ever seen him before, Bush stood behind the podium and said: \"It will be a stirring sight to watch President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House. I know millions of Americans will be overcome with pride at this inspiring moment that so many have awaited so long. I know Senator Obama's beloved mother and grandparents would have been thrilled to watch the child they raised ascend the steps of the Capitol\u2014and take his oath to uphold the Constitution of the greatest nation on the face of the earth\u2026Laura and I are looking forward to welcoming them as soon as possible.\"\n\nThen Bush said, \"Thank you very much,\" and turned and quietly walked back into the house that's been his for the past eight years. He would be on his way soon, and like most others, I would be glad to see him and his hard presidency go\u2014though as much for his sake as for ours.\n\nrobert draper is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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