Robert Draper

A portrait of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME

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Robert Draper, author of the just published Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, has been a national correspondent for GQ magazine for the past decade, and before that was a senior editor at Texas Monthly. He lives in Washington, D.C. and is also the author of a novel, Hadrian's Walls, and the biography Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History. TIME talked to Draper to find out what's behind his new book — and how he got President Bush to open up.

TIME: What made you decide to write a book about Bush's presidency?

Draper: By 2004 I was surprised that there really wasn't a comprehensive biography of this president. Instead, there were maybe 100 books written on the subject of George W. Bush that tended to make an argument either for him or against him or focused exclusively on a narrow aspect of his presidency, be it 9/11 or Iraq or the Florida recount. That struck me as an omission and so I appointed myself the task of writing a biography of the presidency.

This book includes interviews with several White House officials, including the President. How did you get the amount of access you did here?

In 1998, after I joined GQ, I did a very lengthy profile of then Governor Bush as he was considering whether or not to run for president. I got an awful lot of access to him and to his family and to his staff. It was a lengthy and I think mutually satisfactory story. But I sort of walked away from the subject thereafter. And I think in a way that may have made a positive impression on Bush and others in the administration, that I was not one of those Texas reporters who was trying to make a living off of Bush.

Nonetheless when I approached [Counselor to the President] Dan Bartlett in January 2005 and told him I was going to do this book and would like to see what kind of access I could get, hopefully including the President, Bartlett was far from encouraging. He said you're welcome to try and talk to a few people in the West Wing, we'll see how it goes, we'll be watching you, but don't count on any cooperation from the President. This really isn't the sort of thing he does, and he's intending on writing his own book anyway. So I went about my business and for 20 months interviewed more and more people in or formerly of the administration and I think that word of my approach, both its thoroughness and its objectivity, got back to the President.

And so he summoned me to the Oval Office in August of last year for an off the record chat to get a sense of what he was up to and why he should talk to me, as opposed to any of the other biographers or writers who he had not spoken with. I guess I must have persuaded him because after a few more months of deliberation, he agreed to one interview in December, just to see how it would go, and at the end of that interview he stood up and said, "Ok, we'll do another." That ultimately led to six interviews, totaling about six hours in length. As the President himself said, he had never given that kind of access before to any other writer. He said he was doing so only because he believed that I was going to be fair and that I didn't have an agenda and this wasn't going to be a book of the moment, but a book that would intend to be a first draft of history rather than just a book for the news cycle.

And how did you get him to open up?

As to the tenor of these interviews and how our rapport developed, it didn't take long before the President, really in the very first interview which constitutes the prologue of the book, the President, I thought, was very revealing and very emotionally honest. What I learned tactically very early on was that it was a waste of time to try to get the President to talk about this or that meeting that occurred in April 2004. His memory was not so great and he tended to behave as if he were trapped when an incisive question like that was asked. It's better instead to let him sort of riff impressionistically, and when I did that he would often reveal himself in very surprising ways.

You mentioned that you wrote a lengthy profile about Bush when he was governor of Texas. How has Bush changed since then?

I found that he changed, principally, in one overarching way. He's matured more. He's matured politically and intellectually. Politically he's much more disciplined. He used to make silly faces all the time and was a great deal more loose lipped. He would ramble and take awhile to get to the point, or would stick to a very tight script knowing that if he didn't it would get him in trouble. By 2007 he's become a lot better at speaking off the cuff without saying things that he'd later regret.

In addition to that, when I was interviewing Bush back in 1998 he didn't know much about history, and his knowledge of it was largely confined to his observation of the first Bush and Reagan presidencies. I remember when I asked him who he admired most as leaders he said Reagan. And when I asked him who he admired as jurists he said Thomas and Scalia. These are rather obvious choices and they indicated to me that the guy just simply wasn't deep into the history books. He is now. He's a voracious reader of them and can speak at length about the Khmer Rouge, the Algerian Revolution and certainly about people like Churchill and Truman about whom I think he knew very little back in 1998.