All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Robert Draper

Even for Robert Draper — a writer who sometimes felt his writerly ambition was out of place while living here during Austin’s Reign of Slack — it was no small undertaking: Write a nonfiction narrative about the inner machinations of an ongoing and famously media-phobic presidency.

And, if possible, get the president to sit for interviews.

But that was nothing compared to convincing publishers.

“When I sought to sell the book to publishers, I had to try to sell them on the notion of George W. Bush as a literary character,” Draper said last week from his hotel in New York. “This was not easy. This just in: The publishing industry is a little left of center. They had no trouble viewing Clinton as a Shakespearean character, but Bush they viewed as sort of a simpleton.”

If you saw the news reports and cable discussions this week, you know Draper pulled it off and spectacularly so — “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush” (Free Press, $28) is plump with new revelations and details heretofore unrevealed: That former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally held up the flow of federal troops into a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. That Bush couldn’t recall why his administration disbanded the Iraqi army. (As the searing new documentary “No End in Sight” points out, that move was critical in sparking the ongoing insurgency.) That John Roberts, now U.S. chief justice, suggested that failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers should ascend to the high court. And arguably the biggest news of all:

“This book serves to dispute the notion that George W. Bush is as comfortable in his own skin as he suggests,” Draper said. “I think those interviews reveal a degree of human frailty that Bush is loath to exhibit.”

In the end, Draper got about six hours with the president as well as every major player in the White House since the 2000 election — from Rumsfeld, first lady Laura Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on down.

The unprecendented access led to an uncommonly revealing book that, in a single volume, spans Bush’s time at the Texas Capitol through the spring of this year, as the clock runs out on his second presidential term. Less process-oriented than Bob Woodward’s Bush books and scrupulously fair — unlike a groaning shelf of anti-Bush screeds — Draper’s reportage has already gotten him exposure in The New York Times, on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” CNN, Charlie Rose and more. And late last week the book sat in the top five of Amazon.com’s sales rankings. (Clinton’s new book was at the No. 2 spot.)

“I’d like to say the rollout has gone exactly according to plan, that we hired Karl Rove basically to do the rollout, but no, it’s exceeded my expectations,” said the former senior editor at Texas Monthly and current GQ magazine national correspondent. “I felt like I did a good job and that it was an original book. I certainly felt there was a market for it. I didn’t think the market would be so receptive so soon to it and I’m really gratified by that.”

Why did Draper write the book, and why did he get the access? As he says in his author’s note, because nobody else had attempted what he proposed by the summer of 2004 — when Bush could well have been fading into the sunset of a one-term presidency. (”I would like to thank the Bush administration for supplying so much narrative drama,” Draper half-joked.)

At Texas Monthly, Draper had observed Bush for years. He spent “a great deal” of time with the then-governor and his Texas associates for a long GQ profile in 1998, a piece the Bush camp reportedly regarded as fair. And he maintained the widespread perception of Bush as an unreflective, inarticulate buffoon was way off the mark, even as the president himself at times seemed to cultivate that persona.

“Bush is an appealing character (in) that he seems satisfied largely with his own caricature — a rather simple fellow, prone to see things in black in white, with an aversion to navel-gazing, thoroughly comfortable in his own skin, and one who sleeps like a baby every night after roiling the world during the day,” Draper said this week. “I never trusted that. From my interviews with him for the GQ profile in 1998, I knew that was rather ham-handed.”

As Draper writes, the same qualities that detractors despise in Bush are ones admirers see as strengths: “the quickness as brusque impatience, the plain speech as intellectual laziness, the strategic vision as disrespect for the process, the boldness as recklessness, the strength as unreflective self-certainty.”

But by the time Bush defeated John Kerry in the 2004 election, Draper said, “I think it’s fair to say this administration was stove up with hubris.”

Draper left Austin in 2001, writing a famously cranky kiss-off to the town in GQ before moving to Asheville, N.C., and then to Washington, D.C.

Though the Austin that Draper left was one that deserved parodying, he said, “I also think Austin has changed for the better since I wrote it. I think Austin has developed a little humility since I left.”