The Bush Interview
By Gerard Baker, US Editor
THERE has probably never been a president, there may not have been a human being, who observes punctuality with the sort of fanaticism that President George W. Bush brings to every aspect of his life.
If you are on time for a meeting with the President you are late, we were told as we prepared for our interview in the Oval Office yesterday to preview the G8 summit at Gleneagles next week.
Sure enough, a full nine minutes before the allotted time for our appointment, the door of the most famous room in the world opens and a genial President steps forward to greet us.
In person Mr Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media.
The obligatory trip round the Oval Office is now so much of a ritual that he approaches it with the wry, self-mocking tone of an ersatz tour guide.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-1674668,00.html