I was looking for something revealing about him and trying to avoid the same thing he’s said to everyone else. You never know where that revealing tidbit is going to come from with George W., but often it’s in the details that don’t make the official transcript. I was told that I’d have 15 minutes. This being the “on-time administration,” as Bush likes to say, I knew that whatever aide was sitting in on the interview would be timing it exactly and either give me a two-minute warning or, worse, shout out, “Last question!”

I knew that the trick wasn’t going to be getting Bush talking but stopping him from talking at length on unrevealing themes. I didn’t want long-winded bromides (W does stand for Windy sometimes, as Bush himself says) to eat away at my precious minutes.

Interviewing George W. Bush can be tricky even without such time constraints. I spend much more time trying to come up with thoughtful questions that he’ll respond to than I do conducting the actual interview. He can be moody, and his mood dictates what kind of interview you have. Fortunately, last week he was upbeat, even playful. Bush was sitting at a desk in his cabin when I was ushered in. He was wearing a blue bomber jacket that said GEORGE W. BUSH on one side and AIR FORCE ONE on the other. A big presidential seal was on the wall to his left. I had never interviewed him as president, but he seemed unchanged. He was his usual bundle of sassy energy.

“How’s your ‘friend?’” he asked, launching right into needling me about my personal life.

“You asked me that last time I interviewed you,” I responded.

“What did you say then?” he asked.

“I said, ‘Don’t ask me that again,’” I joked.

“But that was as a candidate,” he said. “This is as president.”

The whole time this encounter was going I was looking at my watch and getting uptight as the seconds ticked away. I was imagining myself trying to explain to my editors that I never got around to asking Bush about the environment because I spent half my time talking to him about my personal life. Bush noticed me fretting. “This isn’t counting against you,” he reassured me.

When we eventually started talking about him instead of me, he got more serious. He directed his frenetic energy into playing with the wooden coasters on the desk and occasionally popping a grape in his mouth. A couple of times he started going down bromide lane, and I tried to stop him. Bush dismissed my efforts by holding up one index finger, as if to say, Do not interrupt the president of the United States. It worked; I let him go on and on about CO2 and tax cuts.

I felt like I was just getting going, when press secretary Ari Fleischer shouted out, “Last question.” My stomach clenched. While Bush had been very insightful about his frustrations about the style of politics in Washington versus Texas, I had let him feed me unoriginal lines on policy.

But just as I started to get that sinking feeling, Bush threw me a lifeline. Apparently, I had done something right. I had let the president know up front that I wanted to ask him about his mother, whom he was going to see the next day in Houston. So Bush overruled Fleischer. “A couple more,” the president said.

I did eventually ask him about his mother, but not before I slipped in a question about the topic that Bush knows and loves best: baseball. He became animated as he talked about throwing out the first pitch at the Milwaukee Brewer’s home game. He’d thrown the ball in the dirt that night, but he talked about how he’d aced it in practice. He imitated the look on his face when he got on the mound in Milwaukee and saw how far away the catcher was. This time I did not interrupt. I noticed that his aides had stopped looking at their watches and were just enjoying listening to their boss step into his Texas Tale mode. For the first time in those 25 minutes, I knew I’d landed a revealing moment with our president.