Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W Bush Robert Draper Simon & Schuster, 480pp, £18.99

"History" is currently fashionable among American leaders. After Vicente Fox's and Fidel Castro's recent memoirs, George W Bush, once dubbed the man "born with a silver foot in his mouth", has allowed a reporter unprecedented access to his own story. Robert Draper had six hour-long encounters with the president between December 2006 and May 2007. Bush may have trusted him because they had familial ties and could do the "Texan-to-Texan thing". However, it also seems the beleaguered president is deeply concerned about how he will be remembered. He is a man who no longer inhabits the present tense.

In Dead Certain, Draper skirts over the well-documented details of Bush's early life - his drinking, his infamous challenge to Poppy Bush: "You wanna go mano a mano right here?" Yet he does pull out some choice gaffes from the early years. As a newly elected governor, Bush told a horrified reporter: "Blacks didn't come out for me like the Hispanics did, so they're not gonna see much help from me."

The substance of the book, however, is devoted to his years in presidential office, and here Draper's research has been exhaustive. In addition to gossipy titbits (such as Laura Bush's dislike of Karl Rove, whom she nicknamed "Pigpen"), he narrates how the business of the administration was paralysed between internal divisions - something Bush "seemed to enjoy" - and how a dangerous bubble emerged around him. As one adviser put it, bearing bad news to the boss was like "walking in the valley of the shadow of death" - so no one did. Hence the commander-in-chief could be "serene" when crises should have brought on a "Nixonian pallor". "I've got God's shoulder to cry on," he explains.

Yet Draper does little to confirm the popular stereotype of Bush as a weak-willed puppet directed by shadowy advisers. Instead, he comes across as authoritative and exacting. When Colin Powell is late for a meeting he locks him out, and when Rove gets too big for his boots he makes him hang up his coat in front of a room of astonished onlookers.

Unfortunately, he does not always demand such high standards of himself. When Draper asked him why Paul Bremer, the first post- invasion US presidential envoy in Iraq, had unilaterally reversed policy and dissolved the Iraqi army, with devastating consequences, Bush's response was: "Yeah, I can't remember." And in one of the most galling passages, Bush, "mellowed by the physical exertion", asked no questions during his pre-Katrina briefing and took the rest of the day off.

This tale leaves an unappealing impression of US politics in general - particularly after the vicious campaign waged by both the Bush and the John McCain camps during the South Carolina primary - and the chasm between soundbites and reality. During a meeting with young offenders in Marlin, Texas, Bush promised one of them that the state of Texas still "loved" him, and "hadn't given up on him". This became his "Big Picture" collapsed into a single human moment, and was a centrepiece of his nomination acceptance speech in 2000 - even though the child to whom it was addressed was later raped in prison, and would eventually say of Bush: "He doesn't care about anything but himself. He's complete trash, a horrible evil person."

Despite all this, Draper is careful to be balanced - arguing that Bush's "virtues and vices were one and the same" - and allowing us to draw our own conclusions. His writing is lively and there are some beautifully evoked details: he notes how Bush's eyes "clenched like little blue fists" during their first lunch meeting at the White House. But his prose soon settles into the tiresome shape of a folksy page-turner, replete with excruciating metaphors ("the toothpaste was already out of the tube") and passages that end with crass dramatic flourishes: "Was the job big enough?"

The president is vague about his own future. When he leaves office he hopes to shave some time off his 90-minute bike ride, and maybe build a freedom institute: "an institute that really, you know, just kind of imparts knowledge and deals with big issues". He's discovered reading, too. When he was governor he was fond of saying that he learned by "doing", not reading, but now he consumes history books voraciously - "I'm on my 87th book this year", although he adds ruefully, "Rove's on, like, 102." Perhaps he's finally come to realise that there are lessons to be learned from the past.

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