Dead Certain: A Portrait of the Bush Presidency

Okay, now Robert Draper, who is with us this evening with his new book Dead Certain, has been the National Correspondent for GQ magazine for the past decade, prior to that he was the Senior Editor at Texas Monthly. He is also the author of the novel Hadrian's Walls and the biography Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History. Would you please welcome to Books Inc, Robert Draper. Thanks for coming out you all. Well, let's see. In the interest of time I'll try not to do the long winded version of this, but I've as was mentioned that the title of my book is Dead Certain and what the book attempts to be is this sort of literary narrative of a sitting President which to me at the time seemed like the most unoriginal idea imaginable. And and I was really it was a question that I that has been asked over and over in every interview that I have done, but I understand it as a question that's bagged and so I will anticipate it by answering it tonight, the question is "Why you?" And it's been asked of me with varying stage varying degrees of bafflement, bordering at times on hostility from members of the Bellevue Media who had tried for so long to penetrate the Bush Administration and and therefore received my book with some degree of skepticism. I think imagining that there had been some kind of Texas Cobol that had allowed this to take place and that I was toady of the administration and but they got over it rather quickly I think and I have been gratified by the books by the book's reception. But it's a fair question nonetheless. I am from Texas and had covered, then Governor Bush, when I worked for a magazine Texas Monthly and I then worked for a magazine well I still work in GQ and in 1998, did a very lengthy profile of Bush as he was considering running for President. And I sort of seized upon this belief straight away that there had been this caricature about Bush that that it served Bush well and that Bush had really done nothing to disavow, to disabuse one of and that was this notion of him as kind of a simpleton who view the black and white and was accountable sort of roiling the world by day and then sleeping like a baby at night and didn't read the newspapers and didn't care about what his critics and and a man who was very comfortable in his own skin and I didn't trust it, and believed that if it had served him and I believed that had, I think that he has been as he would put it, mis-understimated by his critics, that he literally made a career out if being viewed that way by people, they did necessarily sort of history. And I glean this largely from these interviews that I have done with him in 1998 for GQ and that profile I think was deemed by him and his people as being largely fair and to the extent that he looked battling, you know, it wasn't my follow, I just quoted him accurately and and so I went about business then and I didn't didn't attempt to make a cottage industry out of Bush. But by the summer of 2004 I sort of looked up and noticed that there had been literally well over 100 books written about this man. But they were all sort of polemic. So they fell into one of two categories. Either they were slices of the pie that going to Iraq or 9/11, or Bush and Faith, The Florida Recount, things of this nature, but not attempting to cover the totality of his presidency, or they were arguments for him or more likely, against him. And I have and so that's why I say I thought at the time that the notion of doing a sort of straightforward narrative of a sitting president was anything but novel, but no one else was up to this gambit. And so I decided sort of appoint myself, Bush's biographer, informed the administration of this and Karen Hughes, who had been Bush's counselor had left the White House and then came back in 2004 to run to help run Bush's campaign, had a respected my work and said I think, you do an excellent job, but I certainly can't guarantee any cooperation, I don't even work for the White House anymore. And so in January 2005 I went to the White House to have a meeting with, Dan Bartlett, Bush's counselor and you will have to remember that at this point, I had gotten the contract to do the book in October in October 2004 we weren't even certain if my book was going to be about a one term or two term President. A month later we did know. But you have to remember that in January of 2005 where Bush was he finally the mandate that had eluded him 2000 now he had in 2004. In a lot of ways the contentious nature of the election 2000 magnified, I think in Bush Administration's view, the nature of their victory, the extent of their victory in 2004. Bush now felt like he had this heaping of political capital and he could not wait to spend it. He gave this very audacious inaugural address you will recall, in which he uncorked the freedom agenda and then a couple of weeks later had the State of the Union address, decided to touch the dreaded Third Rail and announced that he was going to reform social security with personal account or less charitably reviewed viewed as privatization of social security. This is where the Bush Administration was and at the time that I approached them and full of if you will forgive the phrase, "full of piss and vinegar" and believing I think that history would take care of itself and pretty much even write itself. And so what Dan Bartlett told me that day in essence was you know; fat chance. And you can interview a couple of people in West Wing, but the chief speech writer, a couple of other folks, but and we will keep an eye on you and will see how it goes, but this is not really a kind of thing the president likes to do cooperating with the media on books and he is going to write his own book and so you know, lots of luck. I wasn't really dissuaded by this and I think that that's one of two things that happened between January of 2005 and August of 2006 when I did finally get summoned to the Oval Office to have an off the record discussion with President Bush. This first factor was that I have sort of went about my business and there is nothing particularly bedazzling or remarkable about how he went about it. It was just journalism 301, of interviewing one person in the West Wing and then the next and and I was astonished, if delighted, to learn as I I say that I wasn't tripping over any other reporters who were doing this very same thing. Bob Woodward was doing State of Denial, but it was an Iraq book and and for whatever reason I supposed it was that I supposed that other reporters or biographers were cowed by this notion of this very secretive administration and thus they didn't try. But what I learned actually in doing this along the way was that there was an upside to sort of confronting the secretive administration and that's that these people have never talked before. And they actually I don't want to suggest that they all gave away the store right away but but a lot of them have never been approached, I remember in an interview I did kind of early with a guy he was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, his name was Joshua Bolten and Bolten 30 minutes into the interview said you know I just want you to know I am really enjoying this, I have never talked to an author before and you are welcome to come back whenever you want. I came back seven times to see Joshua Bolten, the last four where in he was Chief of Staff of the White House and Bolten do a lot and became really one of my best sources. But this was hardly unique that I heard this over and over again and it did cause me to wonder now and again why isn't anyone else trying this, but in any way I was grateful that they didn't. So that was one thing. I was going about my business and and I think word was percolating up, that the food chain of the West Wing, that this guy seemed to know what he was doing, he was being fairly thorough and didn't seem to have any axe to grind. But there was another thing that was transpiring during this period and that scenario I described to you in January of 2005 had changed a bit by August of 2006. I would never have guessed you know, and you have to understand, and I have been asked this a lot, you know, how could I suspend whatever my political beliefs are and do this book. I have been a magazine writer for a very long time and have written about pedophiles and mass murderers and serial rapists and you know, tried write about them on their own terms and so that the notion of writing about a sitting President who happened be reviled in certain quarters didn't seem to me to be that difficult, in terms of crossing a psychic bridge. But in anyway I did not I would not have guessed that in January of 2005 this this administration which was so full of swagger, you know bordering on hubris, would by the end of 2005 be reeling the way it was and by August of 2006 Bush was a decidedly unpopular president and reckoning with the reality that he would leave office unpopular. And something was happening with Bush that hadn't happened with him in 1998. In 98' when I was doing all these talks with Bush for this GQ profile I am not being uncharitable when I say that he just did not have much of a grasp of history. I remember asking him, what leaders do you most admire and he just said Reagan. And I said, what jurists you know what judges do you most admire and he said, Scalia and Thomas. And so it was clear to me that his breath of history, that his grasp of it really didn't go much further than those administrations in which his father had served, first as VP and then as president and by 2006 that had changed and Bush was now appreciating history, in particular because he was in a way living for history. He was reading books about strong leaders who had made tough decisions and had left office reviled, Churchill and Truman, but had later been acquitted by history and think the president was taking comfort in that notion and believing that this is what leadership is about. You make tough decisions, tough decisions make you unpopular, you leave office unpopular and you are acquitted later. And so as he was reading about history I think as well, he was developing an appreciation for historians and for the notion of cooperating with someone he might not have cooperated with before who was proposing to write sort of a first draft of his history. And I think that set the table, laid the predicate for the conversation that I had with him off the record in the Oval Office in August of 2006, you know, that the since its off the record, I can only just talk with the substance, I would but in essence he wanted to know, you know why me, why my book will be different and I in essence told him that that I wasn't intending to write a book that's for the moment but a book that would have lasting value and a book that did didn't propose to judge the man, that I would leave that up to some guy in a Tweed Suit 50 years from now 50 years from now, no one would care what Ron Suskind or Fred Barnes or Bob Woodward of Robert Draper thought of George W. Bush, what they care about is though who who the hell is this undistinguished Midland Texas oilman and how did he how did he of all people become the person for good or for evil, changed the world. That's the question I wanted to answer, that's the man I wanted to get and I wanted to and so doing provide all this raw material that historians could draw from later. Now he seemed impressed with that, but belying this notion that that's out there of Bush as sort of this guy who acts always on impulse, he said, let me reflect on it and reflect on it he did for quite a long time, several months until December, with the beginning of December when I got a email Dan Bartlett that said, he will do one interview and see how it goes. And that interview was on December the 12th; that was a tough day for Bush. A couple of weeks prior the Iraq Study Group had issued its report labeling the situation in Iraq grave and deteriorating and the President had to do something about this. Obviously his plan the security plan there was failing and failing miserably. But they frankly didn't know what to do and they and so Bush was persuaded by his Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, who believed that Bush didn't have sufficient ownership of Iraq, that Bush had been very deferential, harmfully so to Rumsfeld and needed so to speak, to get his hands on the steering wheel of Iraq, to take sometime to think about exactly what he wanted to do, to take ownership of his own policy. But to deliberate, over the holidays would invite the criticism that while Baghdad burned Bush was sort of you know, having a vacation. So he knew he would take a hit in the press and so he was in a very, very prickly mood that day and and his pungency as a word I think on full display and the prologue of my book, which is virtually a transcript of that interview. It was a real emotional tour de force and I didn't quite know you know, how I was going to fare by the end of it. But in fact by the end of it Bush just simply stood up and said, "Okay, we will do another." And walked away and back into the Oval Office. And that was parlayed then into an interview a second interview a week later and ultimately into six interviews over lasting about a total of six hours. The President had never spoken to a journalist at such length before, which he took pains to remind me at several points. And the interviews are very interesting and I think the revelatory, he was I can assure you that I display no tactical brilliance as a journalist, but however I had done it, I think I had managed to sort of furnish this president with a comfort zone and one in which he felt okay about talking about things and said some things that I think were very revealing. Some that were perhaps a little reckless so that one sort of almost passing comment that got a lot of play and relating to his retirement plans and how he intended to hit the lecture circuit as he put it, replenish the old coffers and which led many to to wonder aloud whether it was a maybe unseemly for this man who was sending people off to die in Iraq to be talking about how much money he would be making from that experience as a wartime president. And but the one thing I had to say, that I didn't see from him in terms of this kind of full emotional range was any kind of regret, any kind of ruefulness, any kind of equivocation. I think that and this goes sort of the title to the title of my book, Dead Certain, it's I think the president's certitude is you know, can be seen at times as steadfast and soon after 9/11 it was a comfort to the nation. At other times it can be seen as native stubbornness that drives people nuts. I think thought that there is an aspect to his certitude that that's not all together real. That sort of the more dubious things are the more he presses on with this certitude, and so its aspect of protesting too much. And I saw a lot of that in my interviews with him the book, it's rife with examples both from his own voice and from the voice of others of that. Its not its not Bush's nature to confess to the degree that he would confess at all to the media of all people. And so he didn't appoint me the person to whom he would say, boy I am really screwed up here and there. But I found that interesting about this man that he said to me that, he didn't even he wouldn't even admit equivocate or show any doubt to the senior most members of his staff. He felt that it was his role in fact and this was kind of at odds with a man who who seems to act like he doesn't care what other people think, that he is acutely self conscious and was aware that everything he says and does in interpreted by others and so he wants to send messages and the messages are not just to to the public, but to Iraqis, to the enemy, to the troops, to grieving widows of those who have died overseas, but also to his senior most members, he told me, he didn't share them any doubt for fear that they would doubt the mission. And so of course you know this there is a certain amount of virtue and thoughtfulness to that that also you know, creates conditions for credibility gap when you are you are saying things in the face of realities that seem to challenge what it is that you are saying. And so that's why called the book Dead Certain, that and I would like to reflect of course the gravity of being a war president, but also that there is this aspect of protesting too much. I was going to read a little bit of the book but I am actually concerned about time and one of if you guys have any questions that you like to ask, I am willing to answer them.