First lensman of the Bush years

During the last several weeks of the Bush presidency, White House chief photographer Eric Draper hung some of his favorite photos on a wall inside the West Wing, several feet from the Oval Office.

The 10 pictures were arranged to represent Mr. Bush’s two terms, and the last shot of the president’s first term shows him walking alone on the White House South Lawn minutes after ordering U.S. troops into Iraq on March 19, 2003.

“He just walked through the Oval and walked around, and I knew he was emotional, so I tried to back off,” Mr. Draper said recently, standing in front of the photo inside the West Wing with a Washington Times reporter.

“And I waited. He walked the entire circle of the South Lawn, and so I waited for him to walk right at me, and the expression on his face is pretty telling,” Mr. Draper said.

“I was just trying to get a sharp picture and didn’t really know what his expression looked like until I looked at the film. He walked all the way around. The dogs kind of followed him, like Barney followed him the whole way.”

Mr. Draper’s approach to shooting the president that day is indicative of the way the tall, soft-spoken and reserved former wire photographer has handled his unique role inside the Bush White House for the past eight years.

The Los Angeles native, who is returning to his former home base of Albuquerque, N.M., to begin work on a book of Bush photos, got the job after covering then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas for the Associated Press during the 2000 campaign.

He approached the president-elect at a Christmas party in Texasshortly after Mr. Bush’s victory was confirmed by the Supreme Court’s ruling that stopped the Florida recount wars.

A week later, Mr. Draper got a call and was offered the job, and then he came to work in Washington for the first time in his career, after 15 years in the news business, including eight years at AP.

During the two Bush terms, Mr. Draper has been an eyewitness to many of the most significant moments of the presidency, capturing it all in a series of roughly 3.5 million images, each of which has been saved and placed in a searchable database.

He has not tried to develop a relationship with Mr. Bush, he said, for fear that it would hinder his ability to remain “a piece of furniture.”

“My method is to really step back and fade into the background. There could be days where I don’t talk to [the president] at all. I’m just standing there staring at him all day. It’s kind of weird,” he said. “It’s kind of surreal. Because of the intensity of the situations, sometimes it feels like I’m almost watching a play.”

“Then occasionally he will speak to me, and still, even eight years later, I’m kind of jolted when all of a sudden he’s talking to me directly. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re not supposed to do that.’”

Yet, this being Washington, even the White House photographer has come under fire for his approach. The harshest critic has been David Hume Kennerly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who has photographed eight presidents and was President Ford’s personal photographer.

“The current White House photographer doesn’t have the relationship with the president that I did and has not lifted a finger to help his colleagues. That has been to the detriment of his boss, I think,”Mr. Kennerly wrote in an October article in Photo District News in which several former presidential photographers offered advice to the next administration’s chief picture-taker

Story Continues →