Deciphering the enigma

Biography:An insight into the man whose presidency has become a byword for incompetence

Towards the end of Robert Draper's intriguing portrait of George W Bush, the president tells him that he tries to keep things "relatively lighthearted" around the White House and not to wear his worries on his sleeve. "Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency," Bush says. "This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity." A moment later, the president reveals that he cries almost every day, but only "on God's shoulder", before adding that he is truly convinced that he is shaping history for the good.

A national correspondent for GQ magazine and a former editor at Texas Monthly, Draper first wrote about Bush in 1998, when he was governor of Texas. He received unprecedented co- operation from the White House in writing Dead Certain, interviewing 200 current and former administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as First Lady Laura Bush.

Draper conducted six hour-long interviews with the president between December 2006 and May 2007, when Bush's popularity had reached an all-time low after the Republicans' loss of control of Congress and as the war in Iraq looked increasingly hopeless.

Among the hundreds of books written about Bush, most have been frankly polemical, while many accounts of the internal life of the administration have come from disenchanted former officials such as former security adviser Richard Clarke and former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill.

Bob Woodward's three books on the Bush presidency - Bush at War, Plan of Attack and State of Denial - offer the most detailed history of the administration but the picture of Bush that emerges from all the detail is strangely blurred.

Draper set out "to render Bush as a many-shaded literary character" and his book examines policy only insofar as it illuminates the president's personality. Dead Certain includes just one passing mention of Guantanamo Bay and practically nothing about the controversies over domestic surveillance and the torture of suspected terrorists.

Draper comes closer than other biographers, however, to deciphering the enigma that is Bush, a man apparently beset by profound insecurities who is nonetheless possessed by an extraordinary certainty of purpose.

Draper dismisses the most common misconceptions about Bush - that he is stupid and that he has been president in name only, the puppet of Cheney and Rove. He concludes that the president is indeed, as he declared last year to widespread derision, "The Decider", but that Bush is not as simple a figure as he would himself like to be regarded.

"Over time, some of Bush's detractors would see this for themselves, in some close setting that made it impossible for them to dispute. And so okay, he wasn't at all dumb - was clearly in charge, clearly up on things, didn't defer to Cheney or Rove, had a way of getting at the heart of the matter. While over the same timeframe, a very few of his otherwise admiring lieutenants would quietly descend into reassessment. Wondering: was a man really all that secure with himself if he felt compelled to assert, over and over, that he never wavered, never lost a wink of sleep, and harboured no regrets?" writes Draper.

A stickler for punctuality who once locked Colin Powell out of a meeting when the former secretary of state was a few minutes late, Bush entered the White House determined to run a highly disciplined administration. After the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina and the bungling of the Iraq war, however, his presidency has become a byword for incompetence and mismanagement.

Draper portrays an inner circle plagued by dysfunctional relationships, at the heart of which is a president who finds bad news not only unwelcome but positively offensive.

Days before last November's congressional elections, when a White House aide predicted that the Democrats would retake the House of Representatives, Bush accused her of being a pessimist.

"I'm a realist," she said.

"Realist - I like that," he replied. "There's a fine line between realism and pessimism."

Draper quotes Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser before succeeding Powell as secretary of state, describing to a friend her relationship with the president. "People don't understand," she said. "It's not my exercising influence over him. I'm internalising his world".

When he retreats into his own private world, Bush appears, as one aide remarked to Draper, to be like a 12-year-old boy, so passionate about riding his bike that secret service agents have to scout suitable biking trails before he travels anywhere. He enjoys impersonating Dr Evil from Austin Powers and tags his staff with childish nicknames.

Describing the run-up to the decision to invade Iraq, Draper writes that the conviction that Saddam Hussein must be removed by force "began as a kind of communicable agent to which some in the administration had great resistance and others not".

Bush remains convinced that the invasion was not only justified but, as he tells Draper, believes that Congress will develop an appetite for a continued military presence in the Middle East.

"The job of the president is to think over the horizon. I find there are more and more people in Congress who are also thinking over the horizon," he says. "Now we've got a presence in the region - but Iraq creates a different kind of opportunity for a presence".

When Bush leaves the White House, he plans to "replenish the ol' coffers" by following his father and Bill Clinton on to the lecture circuit and hopes to establish a Freedom Institute to train future world leaders. He tells Draper that he expects historians to question some of the decisions he has made but he has no doubt that everything he did was necessary to keep the country safe.

"I made the decision to lead," he says. "And therefore there'll be times when you make those decisions - one, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance. And that may be true. But the fundamental question is: Is the world better off as a result of your leadership?"

Denis Staunton is the Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times

Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush By Robert Draper Simon & Schuster, 463pp. $28