Karl Rove
Karl Christian Rove is an American Republican political consultant, policy advisor, and lobbyist. He was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration until his resignation on August 31, 2007. He has also headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. Rove was one of the architects of the Iraq War.
Prior to his White House appointments, he is credited with the 1994 and 1998 Texas gubernatorial victories of George W. Bush, as well as Bush's 2000 and 2004 successful presidential campaigns. In his 2004 victory speech, Bush referred to Rove as "the Architect". Rove has also been credited for the successful campaigns of John Ashcroft, Bill Clements, Senator John Cornyn, Governor Rick Perry, and Phil Gramm. Since leaving the White House, Rove has worked as a political analyst and contributor for Fox News, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal.
Early life and education
Rove was born on Christmas Day in Denver, Colorado, the second of five children, and was raised in Sparks, Nevada. His parents separated when he was 19 years old and the man whom Rove knew as his father was a geologist.In 1965, his family moved to Salt Lake City, where Rove entered high school, becoming a skilled debater. Encouraged by a teacher to run for class senate, Rove won the election. As part of his campaign strategy he rode in the back of a convertible inside the school gymnasium sitting between two attractive girls before his election speech. While at Olympus High School, he was elected student council president his junior and senior years. Rove was also a Teenage Republican and served as Chairman of the Utah Federation of Teenage Republicans. During this time, his father got a job in Los Angeles and visited the family during holidays.
Rove's mother suffered from depression and had contemplated suicide more than once in her life. Rove has stated that although he loved his mother, she was seriously flawed, undependable and, at times, unstable. In December 1969, after a heated fight with his wife, the man Rove had known as his father left the family and divorced Rove's mother soon afterwards. It was at this juncture that Rove was finally told that he and his older brother had a different birth father, his mother's prior husband. Rove's relationship with his adoptive father was briefly strained for a few months following the divorce, but they maintained a relationship afterward.
Rove had only infrequent contact with his mother in the 1970s. She frequently withheld child support checks and spent them for herself. She and her second husband lost most of their money due to poor financial decisions on her part and his gambling and overspending. On September 11, 1981, Rove's mother died by suicide north of Reno, Nevada, shortly after she decided to divorce her third and final husband, to whom she had been unhappily married for only three months.
Early political career
Rove began his involvement in American politics in 1968. In a 2002 Deseret News interview, Rove explained, "I was the Olympus High chairman for Wallace F. Bennett's re-election campaign, where he was opposed by the dynamic, young, aggressive political science professor at the University of Utah, J.D. Williams." Bennett was reelected to a third six-year term in November 1968. Through Rove's campaign involvement, Bennett's son, Robert "Bob" Foster Bennett—a future United States Senator from Utah—would become a friend. Williams would later become a mentor to Rove.College and the Dixon campaign sabotage incident
In the fall of 1969, Rove entered the University of Utah, on a $1,000 scholarship, as a political science major and joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. Through the university's Hinckley Institute of Politics, he got an internship with the Utah Republican Party. That position, and contacts from the 1968 Bennett campaign, helped him secure a job in 1970 on Ralph Tyler Smith's unsuccessful re-election campaign for Senate from Illinois against Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson III.In the fall of 1970, Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Democrat Alan J. Dixon, who was running for Treasurer of Illinois. He stole 1000 sheets of paper with campaign letterhead, printed fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing", and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, with the effect of disrupting Dixon's rally. Rove's role would not become publicly known until August 1973 when Rove told The Dallas Morning News. In 1999 he said, "It was a youthful prank at the age of 19 and I regret it." In his memoir, Rove wrote that when he was later nominated and confirmed to the Board for International Broadcasting by President George H. W. Bush, Senator Dixon did not kill his nomination. In Rove's account, "Dixon displayed more grace than I had shown and kindly excused this youthful prank."
College Republicans, Watergate, and the Bushes
In June 1971, after the end of the semester, Rove dropped out of the University of Utah to take a paid position as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee. Joe Abate, who was National Chairman of the College Republicans at the time, became his mentor. Rove then enrolled at the University of Maryland in College Park in the Fall of 1971, but withdrew from classes during the first half of the semester. In July 1999 he told The Washington Post that he did not have a degree because "I lack at this point one math class, which I can take by exam, and my foreign language requirement."Rove traveled extensively, participating as an instructor at weekend seminars for campus conservatives across the country. He was an active participant in Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign. A CBS report on the organization of the Nixon campaign from June 1972 includes an interview with a young Rove working for the College Republican National Committee.
Rove held the position of executive director of the College Republicans until early 1973. He left the job to spend five months, without pay, campaigning full-time for the position of National Chairman during the time he attended George Mason University. Lee Atwater, the group's Southern regional coordinator, who was two months younger than Rove, assisted with Rove's campaign. His campaign was managed by Daniel Mintz, of the Maryland College Republicans. Karl spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of Republican state chairs.
The College Republicans summer 1973 convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri was quite contentious. Rove's opponent was Robert Edgeworth of Michigan. The other major candidate, Terry Dolan of California, dropped out, supporting Edgeworth. A number of states had sent two competing delegates, because Rove and his supporters had made credential challenges at state and regional conventions. For example, after the Midwest regional convention, Rove forces had produced a version of the Midwestern College Republicans constitution which differed significantly from the constitution that the Edgeworth forces were using, in order to justify the unseating of the Edgeworth delegates on procedural grounds, including delegations, such as Ohio and Missouri, which had been certified earlier by Rove himself. In the end, there were two votes, conducted by two convention chairs, and two winners—Rove and Edgeworth, each of whom delivered an acceptance speech. After the convention, both Edgeworth and Rove appealed to Republican National Committee Chairman George H. W. Bush, each contending that he was the new College Republican chairman.
While resolution was pending, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings of several training seminars for young Republicans where a co-presenter of Rove's, Bernie Robinson, cautioned against doing the same thing he had done: rooting through opponents' garbage cans. The tape with this story on it, as well as Rove's admonition not to copy similar tricks as Rove's against Dixon, was secretly recorded and edited by Rich Evans, who had hoped to receive an appointment from Rove's competitor in the CRNC chairmanship race. On August 10, 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Post broke the story in an article titled "GOP Party Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks".
In response, then RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush, had an FBI agent question Rove. As part of the investigation, Atwater signed an affidavit, dated August 13, 1973, stating that he had heard a "20 minute anecdote similar to the one described in The Washington Post" in July 1972, but that "it was a funny story during a coffee break". Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, has been quoted as saying "based on my review of the files, it appears the Watergate prosecutors were interested in Rove's activities in 1972, but because they had bigger fish to fry they did not aggressively investigate him."
On September 6, 1973, three weeks after announcing his intent to investigate the allegations against Rove, George H. W. Bush chose him to be chairman of the College Republicans. Bush then wrote Edgeworth a letter saying that he had concluded that Rove had fairly won the vote at the convention. Edgeworth wrote back, asking about the basis of that conclusion. Not long after that, Edgeworth stated "Bush sent me back the angriest letter I have ever received in my life. I had leaked to The Washington Post, and now I was out of the Party forever."
As National Chairman, Rove introduced Bush to Atwater, who had taken Rove's job as the College Republican's executive director, and who would become Bush's main campaign strategist in future years. Bush hired Rove as a Special Assistant in the Republican National Committee, a job Rove left in 1974 to become Executive Assistant to the co-chair of the RNC, Richard D. Obenshain.
As Special Assistant, Rove performed small personal tasks for Bush. In November 1973, he asked Rove to take a set of car keys to his son George W. Bush, who was visiting home during a break from Harvard Business School. It was the first time the two met. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma – you know, wow", Rove recalled years later.