“…enough wine to paralyze a rhinoceros.”
I missed posting this over the holidays but it’s worth revisiting. Check out what Robert Draper (author of the George Bush biography Dead Certain), had to say in an article for GQ on the interviews that shaped his book. Some highlights:
- Karl Rove had sat for about a dozen such sessions–on 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–except 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;
- [Dan] 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–hell, I went out on a limb for the guy!–but others.”)
WTF is up with Lynn Cheney and John Edwards??
