The Rove Warrior

There can be an odd sort of solace in the idea that there’s an evil genius behind a President you don’t like. Without the image of a manipulative tactician calling the shots, how could the left live with the fact that the country has elected him again? Even if you’re a conservative who loves the President, the occasional apostasy–like steel tariffs or that election-eve endorsement of gay civil unions–is easier to take if you can convince yourself that it’s not him talking but that unprincipled operative, who has been whispering in his ear. No one knows better than Karl Rove how useful it is to have an easy explanation for George W. Bush when the real one is inconvenient. Being Karl Rove, he even uses a fancy word for it. “Heuristics,” he says. “It’s a shortcut to explaining something complex–or in this case, explaining away something complex.”

That something–the relationship between the President and his friend of 31 years, whom Bush credited in his victory speech as “the architect” of his re-election–has never quite been seen before in Washington, which is why there is much intrigue around it. Modern presidential campaigns have made legends of message men like James Carville and Lee Atwater, pollsters like Dick Morris, imagemakers like Michael Deaver. Earlier ones would not have succeeded without power brokers like Mark Hanna, whose 1896 campaign plan for William McKinley provided Rove with the model for part of Bush’s 2000 strategy, and devoted handlers like Louis Howe, who discerned and nurtured F.D.R.’s political talent when everyone else dismissed him as a lightweight.

But for all the credit they got for putting their chosen ones in the White House, none of those geniuses had anything close to Rove’s influence on how their President went on to govern. Even Bobby Kennedy operated from the Justice Department, not from the White House. Rove “has more bandwidth, I think, than any presidential adviser has ever had in history,” says Bush-campaign media consultant Mark McKinnon. The intentionally banal title “senior adviser” tells you everything and nothing about what Rove does from Hillary Clinton’s old office in the White House. His Office of Strategic Initiatives is responsible for giving coherence to Bush’s domestic agenda and turning it into reality. Rove was once asked to name a domestic issue he doesn’t have a hand in, and his wisecrack answer was not so far off the mark: “Anything involving baseball.”

There is no significant political relationship–with Congress, the G.O.P., Governors, mayors, special-interest groups–that isn’t overseen by the Architect. He has gone around the country handpicking Republican candidates for Governor and Congress and clearing the field of those he deemed less suitable. His chessboard moves sometimes cross party lines. In a creative though unsuccessful maneuver that would have further reduced the Senate’s Democratic minority, he sounded out Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson last month about the possibility of becoming Agriculture Secretary. Democrats are worried that Rove might still find a way to persuade Nelson to switch parties.

The most sinister theories have it that Rove even injects his political calculations into global affairs. After he advised G.O.P. candidates in 2002 to emphasize the new war on terrorism in their campaigns, the New York Times reported that a friend of Colin Powell’s teased the Secretary of State, “Who runs foreign policyyou or Rove?”

That he has so many roles fits the personality of the consummate multitasker. Rove keeps two computers in his office: a PC for government work and a Mac (his preference) for politics and his Amazon.com book-ordering addiction. His BlackBerry has every appearance of being surgically attached to his hand, and he uses color-coded folders to keep track of his business with those who orbit in his universe. The blue one marked POTUS goes home with Rove on Friday because he knows he will talk to Bush several times over the weekend.

That’s probably why he arrives at 7 a.m. each Monday with a new list of things to do after he puts in for a breakfast of creamed chipped beef from the White House mess. Rove returns from presidential trips loaded with paper scraps noting which county Republican chairmen are expecting an autographed photo. He pores over the White House Christmas party’s invitation list to make sure no swing-state legislator who has been helpful (or could be) has been missed. What has a habit of falling by the wayside is his twice-a-week appointment with the personal trainer he shares with Budget Director Josh Bolten at the gym in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

All those around, including the President, are sensitive to the often repeated tagline that Rove is “Bush’s brain.” They are happy to let it be known that the President will cut off one of Rove’s bombasts with a curt “Thank you for that brilliant idea” and that when Bush is feeling cranky or overscheduled, Rove is the one who gets yelled at. When the National Journal put Rove on its cover two years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney told one of its writers, Carl Cannon, that such star treatment by the serious weekly was “grossly excessive.” Ask someone who has seen the dynamic between Bush and Rove to describe it, and the answer always comes back the same. “Karl is incredibly deferential,” says outgoing G.O.P. chairman Ed Gillespie. “It’s a friendly relationship but a subservient one.”

The next thing Bush insiders invariably point out is that Rove is part of an ensemble cast–the most cohesive and tightly disciplined one in memory. Rove has “an encyclopedic mind, and he thinks several steps ahead of anyone else,” says counselor Karen Hughes. “He is the strategist, but there are other important parts of the President’s team as well.”

What makes the pairing of the President and the Architect so intriguing is its allegorical possibilities–the instinctual politician and the political technocrat; the pedigreed C student with degrees from Yale and Harvard and the middle-class intellectual who attended five colleges but never managed to graduate; the self-assured firstborn son whose family turned its humming functionality into a brand and the second son of a broken home that kept its secrets from the children.

That kind of yin-ing and yang-ing tires Rove–almost as much as the insulting suggestion that someone besides Bush does the President’s thinking for him. “If you can think a problem through and have clarity about what you think needs to be done, with a healthy respect that you may be right or you may be wrong, then people will say that it’s anti-intellectual,” says Rove. “I don’t. I see it as he has a practicality about himself that is born out of comfort with ideas, and it is tempered by values that don’t change.”

Of all the stories that are told about the two of them, the one that Rove has fostered into mythos concerns the day in 1973 he first met George W. The budding operative, then working for chairman George Herbert Walker Bush at the Republican National Committee, had been assigned to deliver Dad’s car keys to the son arriving home for Thanksgiving from business school. As Rove tells it, the rush of charisma–That bomber jacket! Those cowboy boots! That sexy stride!–nearly gave him the bends. “Not Brad Pitt. Let’s see–Gary Cooper,” he recalled in the umpteenth telling the other day.

Young Karl’s dorky awe of young George makes for a funny riff, but it’s probably not as important as what Rove saw take over Bush in midlife. “He was a certain way in 1988, and he was significantly different by 1990, 1992, 1994,” Rove recalls. “I think it’s his own life experience, waking up and saying ‘I’m not going to drink because it saps my energy and drains my focus.’ I think it’s the freedom of being, ironically, his own self in the aftermath of his father’s defeat in ’92. I don’t know. You could psychoanalyze it. Clearly, he’s always had incredible abilities, [but] he had a stronger focus and a discipline. He brought all of his many talents to bear after he went through–I suspect like all of us do–something that changed his center of life.”

If you were a Republican in Texas suddenly discovering a political calling, Rove was a handy fellow to know. He arrived in the state from Virginia as a direct-mail whiz in 1977, a time when Republicans held precisely one statewide office. “When I put up the shingle for my company [in 1981], it was a wasteland,” he says, “but it was clearly a place of great potential.” By the time he left for Washington in 2001, Republicans were sitting in all 29 of Texas’ statewide offices. And most of those officials–including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and both Senators–had at one time or another employed Karl Rove & Co.

What Rove saw sooner than most were the political opportunities being created by demographic shifts, such as a wave of corporate relocations from the north and west of the country to places like Collin County near Dallas and the Woodlands outside Houston. He was aware that homegrown Texans, having voted for Ronald Reagan, were noticing for the first time in their lives that there was another side to the ballot. So Rove set about recruiting candidates who could speak to the moderate impulses of suburban voters by emphasizing issues like education, even as they pried conservatives away from the Democrats with proposals like cutting back on lawsuits against business. And Rove knew the moneymen who could give his candidates the resources they needed to pound the opposition.

Media consultant McKinnon, then making ads for Democrats, knew how it felt to be on the wrong end of Rove’s wrecking ball. Like just about everyone else who did politics in Texas back then, McKinnon says the state’s political shift would have come about without Rove but not nearly as quickly. “What Karl did was just accelerate it by a lot, probably by a decade,” McKinnon says.

The time Rove gave to politics killed his brief first marriage, to a Houston socialite, in the late 1970s, but it sparked the one that has lasted 19 years, to Darby Hickson, who was a graphic artist in his direct-mail business. The two have a son Andrew, 15, and friends say she’s a perfect foil and counterweight to a man who demands a strategic plan even for pancakes. (In their struggle for control of the kitchen, she argues that the blueberries are perfectly fine mixed into the batter; Rove, who considers himself an expert cook, insists they should be sprinkled on top after the batter is in the skillet.)

Of all the opportunities Rove discerned before anyone else, there was never one like George W. Bush. When Rove in the late 1980s started touting the President’s son as a future Governor and introducing him around the state, George W. was not yet an owner of the Texas Rangers, and others saw little to recommend the failed oilman beyond his famous name. Still, “he kind of fit the model of what Karl saw as the growth in the party and in politics in the state. A conservative but someone who could appeal to a lot of people,” recalls Reggie Bashur, a longtime G.O.P. strategist in Texas. “I can honestly say with Bush, it was different for Karl. Karl is committed to all the candidates he works for, but this was special.”

Rove insists that Bush’s quality was not that he fit a political formula but that he came up with one. As Bush finally got serious about running for Governor in 1993, he took a few days to consider what kind of race he wanted to conduct and made a list. “I wish I’d kept it. He wrote it down on a yellow pad,” Rove says. “It was like the template for what followed.”

Bush came up with three issues: education reform, welfare reform and juvenile criminal justice. “I remember being particularly struck by the second issue on there, where he said, ‘A dependency on government saps the soul and drains the spirit,'” Rove says, the wonder fresh in his voice nearly a dozen years later. “You know, this was not ‘Welfare is bad because people cheat and drive around in Cadillacs.’ And when he talked about juvenile justice, it wasn’t ‘Lock the little buggers up.’ It was ‘We’re going to lose a generation of children to lives of despair and violence unless we intervene, and our object is to show them love.’ I thought it was very unusual. You had a Republican candidate for Governor talking about criminal justice, and his answer was ‘Show them love.'” That was all the more remarkable at a time when the rest of the Republican Party was falling under the tough-but-no-love sway of Newt Gingrich. Bush’s list became the basis of what would come to be called compassionate conservatism.

Rove insists his only contribution was to add a fourth issue, legal reform, which in Texas is shorthand for cutting down on lawsuits against business, and not incidentally, choking off the income of the trial lawyers who are major contributors to the Democrats. Rove recalls telling Bush, “‘We’ve got a big problem in Texas with our judicial system.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely right.’ And he added it on.”

Even in Texas, their partnership was the subject of intense curiosity and speculation about whether the political consultant was the dark side of a shining politician. Throughout Rove’s career, there had been whispers of dirty tricks, like the suspicion that he engineered the 1986 bugging of his own office to create a distraction in a Governor’s race in which the Democrat was gaining. “He doesn’t fight clean at all,” says Garry Mauro, who claims Rove sicced the FBI on him when he was Texas land commissioner in the 1980s. Rove denies all such charges, occasionally at the top of his lungs. (The Mauro case stayed open for two years, although Mauro was never charged with anything, and Rove’s connection is circumstantial.)

As Governor Bush turned his attention in late 1998 to the prospect of a presidential race, he asked Rove to sell his business and sever his ties with all his other clients. Bush told him, “If I do this, I want you free and clear.” It should have been a hard decision, Rove says, but it wasn’t. So Karl Rove & Co. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Dynasty Inc.

Then again, had Rove ever been meant for anyplace but the White House?

The folklore by now is so established that even Rove’s relatives subscribe to it. Family legend has it that as a 3-year-old, Rove announced he would be President someday, says his younger sister Reba Hammond. And there’s a story of how he had a poster over his bed exhorting, WAKE UP, AMERICA.

Not trueany of it, says Rove, who was the second of five children. “With all due respect to my sister, whom I love dearly, her recollection of these things is a little suspect.” Rove does own up to being a know-it-all who wore a tie and carried a briefcase every day to Dilworth Middle School in Sparks, Nev., in the late 1960s. “I did write my fifth-grade civics paper on the theory of dialectical materialism,” he says. “My son asked me last night what that was, and I told him, and I remember it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”

The family moved around because of Louis Rove’s job as a geologist. Karl was a star debater and the supremely confident student-senate president at Olympus High in Salt Lake City, Utah. His history teacher Eldon Tolman made his class go see the procession of presidential candidates and national hopefuls who came through town in 1968. “In one year, I saw Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey speak,” Rove recalls. “In fact, this is where Humphrey makes his famous speech breaking with Johnson on the war.” Rove fancied Rockefeller enough to get a few posters, was smitten with Reagan but ultimately settled on being “a Nixon man.”

Rove’s tidy world started crashing as the family prepared to follow Louis to yet another job in Los Angeles. On Christmas Day 1969, which happened to be Karl’s 19th birthday, Louis announced he would be leaving alone. “I had a wonderful childhood. I had wonderful parents,” Karl says. “You never really know what goes on in the private lives of your parents. They overcame big things in their lives. My dad would never speak about why the marriage broke up, but it clearly pained him till the end of his days that it did.”

The shock of his parents’ separation, however, didn’t compare with the one Karl got the following fall, when an aunt informed him that the man who had raised him was not his biological father. Louis had adopted his wife’s two oldest children, Karl and his older brother Eric. To this day, Rove says, he doesn’t know the circumstances or even the timing of their adoption. “My supposition is that I was less than 2 and he was less than 4,” Rove says. Karl was the trustee of Louis’ estate but says he found no record that would shed any light on the adoption. The two brothers later met their biological father once, but they have not pursued the relationship.

“You know, you could psychoanalyze this,” Rove says with breathtaking understatement. When Karl asked Louis about it, “he said, ‘It didn’t matter to me, and I hope it didn’t matter to you.’ Here was a guy, at this point they’re now divorced, and he’s sending a check to help me get through school. My father was living on nothing because he was supporting his children. And it turns out he didn’t need to.”

In 1981 a third devastating blow struck what remained of the Rove family. Karl’s mother committed suicide in Reno, Nev. She had surmounted much in her life, Rove says, starting with poverty. Her father had worked on a road crew in the San Juan Mountains and sold knives from the back of his truck to grocery stores in little out-of-the-way towns. “They lived in a house in southern Colorado where, when they finished reading the evening newspaper, they’d take flour paste and slap it on the wall for insulation,” he says.

After persevering through all that, the disintegration of a marriage and the challenge of raising five children by two fathers, why had Reba Wood Rove reached a point where she couldn’t go any further? “Again, it’s hard to figure out,” Rove says. “You can speculate on what demons she just wasn’t able to overcome, but she couldn’t. And it’s very sad for my sisters, who were very close to her.”

As for Rove, he had not considered himself particularly close to either parent. It wasn’t until after his mother’s death that Rove began to seek out a new relationship with the man who had raised him, maybe because the son who had lost so much needed this bond for the first time. “It was in the ’80s that I started seeing my father more, and we ended up vacationing every year in Santa Fe,” Rove says. In 1998 they explored Louis’ roots in Norway together, and in 2001, as the rest of the Bush White House was riveted by California’s energy crisis, Rove was on the phone with his siblings trying to figure out how to keep his emphysema-stricken father’s oxygenator running in Palm Springs. Louis died last July, and Karl keeps a little picture of him in a star-shaped frame in his office. As he studied the beaming image recently, Rove pronounced his father to have been a happy man: “He lived life exactly the way he wanted to live it.”

Did the mysteries and eruptions of his own family draw him to one that never seemed to have a day of doubt about itself? “No, no. I mean, that suggests they’re a substitute,” Rove says. “Look, [the President] is my boss and my friend. I have benefited enormously by my association with him and his father. Both of them are great men. But you know, I had a great father.”

The President and the architect have a jokey little ritual. When Rove comes across a book he thinks Bush might like to read–most recently, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton–Rove lends it to him with the understanding that both will write something in it. Bush’s inscriptions are often wry turns on all the speculation about who’s the real brains of the operation. “He’ll return it to me saying, ‘I heartily recommend that you read this book,’ like he came up with the idea,” Rove says, laughing. “‘I’m happy to loan you this book from my private library. Please return when finished.'” Bush recommends reading material to Rove as well. The latest is Israeli politician Natan Sharansky’s book on democracy. “Being the cheapskate that he is,” says Rove, “he simply told me to get a copy.”

Rove is settling in for a second term, during which he says Bush will achieve big reforms that will fortify the Republican Party’s hold on power well beyond Bush’s presidency. But it’s hard not to wonder what lies ahead for Karl Rove. There’s already talk of a “Rove primary” in which a wide open field of G.O.P. hopefuls would vie for his talents. Rove misses Texas, McKinnon says, “but I don’t know if it’s in the cards for him to ever go back. It’s gravity and physics that keep him here now.”

So is Rove planning to pick a horse in 2008? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t believe I will. I mean, I’m a Bush man.” But there are other Bushes, and the Architect did buy a house in Florida a few years back. Rove says he takes that state’s Governor, Jeb Bush, at his word when Jeb says he isn’t running. But of course, you wouldn’t expect Rove to be closing any options. “I don’t think Marvin is running,” Rove says, a sly smile creeping across his face. “I can’t speak for Neil.” –With reporting by Peta Owens-Liston/Salt Lake City and Stacy J. Willis/ Las Vegas