Genius
He's the wizard of the West Wing, the most powerful political consultant ever, the maker of presidents, the destroyer of Democrats. But how did Karl Rove get that way? Take a little luck, a lot of skill, a few dirty tricks, and a quarter-century of hardball Texas politics, and it all adds up to genius.
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It is hard to understate the importance of this one victory in Karl Rove's career. Not only was it a portentous Republican breakthrough at the top of the Texas judiciary, but it also foreshadowed a fierce, decade-long fight between Republicans, backed by business interests, and plaintiffs lawyers, who by the mid-eighties were providing much of the funding for Democratic candidates. By the end of the decade, all nine Texas Supreme Court justices were Republican. Rove had run the winning campaigns of seven justices—Phillips, Craig Enoch, Nathan Hecht, Priscilla Owen, John Cornyn, James Baker, and Greg Abbott. After the Phillips race, Rove achieved wide recognition as a strategic genius, the man who carried precinct and district maps around with him and could keep a mind-addling volume of election results cross-indexed by race, color, and creed in his head. "He got it down to a science," says Mike Toomey, a former Clements chief of staff who now holds the same title under Rick Perry. "He had a map on his wall showing how many votes they had to get, what counties the votes were in, and how to raise the money." Says Republican consultant Reggie Bashur, another former Clements hand: "He would draw them a picture. 'This is how you are going to become a Supreme Court judge.'" Other consultants, such as Austin's Bill Miller, worked on a few of these winning races. But Rove got most of the credit.
After the Supreme Court races, everybody went to Karl Rove. He became campaign central for statewide races. By 1990 Rove's only real competition came from a Fort Worth consultant named Bryan Eppstein, who could later claim to have run seven hundred races in Texas. But Eppstein worked down-ballot, in legislative races. Rove dominated the top of the ticket.
He worked brutal hours, in his office or dashing around town in his old Mercedes wagon plastered with campaign stickers. He rarely socialized. "Even if Karl is your friend, there is not a lot of chitchat," says Chuck McDonald, a political consultant for Governor Ann Richards who since has become friendly with Rove. Rove's secretary scheduled appointments at ten-minute intervals. Success bred success: He ran Kay Bailey Hutchison's 1990 state treasurer's race and three years later ran her race for the U.S. Senate. Neither victory required the coruscating brilliance for which Rove was becoming famous; the opposition was weak and victory was likely. And yet, with Clements, Gramm, Phillips, and Hutchison, Rove had piled up victory after victory. It was beginning to look to some people that he was unbeatable.
BUT IT WASN'T ONLY BRILLIANCE that defined Karl Rove's reputation. As he rose in power and influence, the conviction grew among Democratic opponents and competing consultants that Rove was playing dirty, that his power was rooted in sleazy politics, that there was a dark side to his genius. The legend of Rove as "evil genius" dates all the way back to 1973, with a Washington Post story that appeared after the Watergate break-in, reporting that Rove had taught "dirty tricks" to college Republicans. According to Bad Boy, a biography of Lee Atwater, these included sifting through opponents' garbage to gather intelligence. The RNC chairman, the elder George Bush, conducted a month-long investigation and cleared Rove, which helps to explain Rove's career-long loyalty to the family. Another story in Bad Boy—Rove acknowledges that this one is true—tells how Rove had once stolen an Illinois state treasurer candidate's letterhead and put out flyers for a party that offered "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time."
But these were mere preludes to the real stuff of Texas political legend. During Clements' 1986 race against White, a bug was discovered in Rove's office. Democrats believed that it had been planted by Rove himself to discredit the opposition. The story made the national news. There was never any proof that he had done it, the culprit was never found, and Rove roundly denied having anything to do with it. Clements' campaign manager, George Bayoud, Jr., says, "The FBI told us that the company that had installed Rove's security system put it there. That's what they told us, and that's what we believed."
The campaign that permanently established Rove's reputation for foul play was Rick Perry's race against Jim Hightower for agriculture commissioner, in 1990. Rove and media consultant David Weeks persuaded Perry, an obscure Democratic legislator from Haskell who had co-chaired Al Gore's 1988 Democratic presidential primary campaign in Texas, to switch parties for the election. West Texas was swinging Republican anyway, and Perry, who was discouraged by his failure to advance in the House leadership and thinking of becoming a lobbyist, had nothing to lose. Hightower was the darling of the liberals, a wisecracking and outspoken populist who had been a big vote-getter for the Democrats in 1986. With Rove and the collective financial muscle of the Texas Republican community behind him, Perry ran a tough, negative campaign, charging that the agriculture commissioner's office was rife with scandal and abuse and using photos of Hightower with Jesse Jackson to paint Hightower as a left-wing activist. Perry even tried to link Willie Nelson's support of Hightower to a Kentucky candidate, also endorsed by Willie, who favored the legalization of marijuana.
A month before the election, Perry alleged that the FBI was investigating Hightower and his department. In the last days of the race, Perry claimed, in TV spots designed by Rove and Weeks, that "there will be people in the Department of Agriculture, going up to possibly its highest levels, who will be indicted." Not only did the negative ads work—Perry narrowly won, 4948—but the information turned out to be eerily accurate. As a result of the FBI's investigation, three high-ranking officials in Hightower's administration were eventually indicted and convicted. But Hightower believes to this day that the FBI agent who investigated his department was really a pawn of Karl Rove's. He also thinks that Rove sent the FBI to investigate the offices of Democratic land commissioner Garry Mauro and Democratic state comptroller Bob Bullock. In other words, he is convinced that Rove had his own personal FBI agent he could use as he pleased.
Rove denies that he had anything to do with starting the investigations. "We had heard rumors that some Democrats were being investigated, not including Hightower," says Rove. "Then it comes out in the Dallas Morning News. Now, if I had met Greg Rampton [the agent], it was as you might meet someone who comes into the governor's office. But I didn't know the guy. After it pops out in the newspaper, Rampton makes an appointment and comes by and says, 'Do you know anything?' I said no."
By this time Rove had won so many races and had played so rough that the Democrats, who still held most statewide offices and enjoyed large margins in both houses of the Legislature, were gunning for him. The FBI episode was brought up in 1991 during a state Senate confirmation hearing for Clements' nomination of Rove as a regent for East Texas State University. A previous Rove nomination, during Clements' first term, as a regent for Texas Woman's University, had been rejected by the Senate on the grounds that Rove was "disruptive" and "abrasive." That this one too was doomed became evident as Democratic senator Bob Glasgow grilled Rove on his relationship with FBI agent Rampton. But at least one prominent Democrat was wary of the perils of taking on Rove. In a story that former lieutenant governor Bob Bullock recounted to Jack Martin, the president of Public Strategies, an international communications firm, Bullock said he had confronted Glasgow during a break in the hearings. "Bobby Joe," Bullock said, "this man Mr. Rove out there—you've made an accusation that he runs the FBI. Now, if that's not true, then you owe that man an apology. But Bobby Joe, you poor bastard, what if it is true?" (Glasgow says he does not recall the conversation.)
Another story—this one acknowledged by Rove—from that era is also used to illustrate Rove's alleged dark powers. In a 1992 battle for railroad commissioner, Rove gave the media the stunning information that incumbent Democrat Lena Guerrero, an Ann Richards appointee, had falsely claimed to have graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. The accusation was true, and Rove's candidate, Barry Williamson, won the race. Rove says he got the information from someone who had worked in the Republican primary for Carole Keeton Rylander (now Strayhorn), whom Williamson had beaten in the primary. Rove had done nothing ethically wrong, but in the eyes of his opponents, he is the man who personally destroyed Lena Guerrero.
Rove gained a reputation for playing hardball with his fellow consultants as well, competing fiercely for clients. Indeed, if there is one aspect of Rove's personality that his friends and enemies agree on, it is his aggressive territoriality. Rival Bryan Eppstein says that, after he ran Senator Bill Ratliff's winning race in 1988, "Rove spent the next four years trying to convince Ratliff that he should use Rove in his reelection." The strategy worked; Rove ran Ratliff's 1992 race (though Eppstein has run subsequent races). Says leading Democratic consultant George Shipley: "Rove fought everybody. He was as much at war with Eppstein and [then- Republican consultant] John Weaver as with the Democrats. He sees the world in black and white terms. Good and evil. Democrats are evil." Rove's feud with Weaver—based on an incident neither man will discuss—was legendary in Texas GOP circles and was a subplot in the race for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, when Weaver was working for Bush foe John McCain.
Rove by now was someone you did not want to cross. "He has a couple of modes," says Bill Miller. "He's got a schmooze gear. He's got a real tough business gear, and he's got blow-the-house-down." Cathie Adams, who heads the conservative Texas Eagle Forum, describes a hostile telephone conversation with Rove in 1995. "There was one phone call that was quite ugly on the workforce-development issue," she says. "I had sent out a flyer and he disagreed with it and the phone call was quite ugly."
Rove's legend could cut both ways. During the 1992 presidential race, he was fired from the Republican state Victory Committee on orders from prominent Republican Rob Mosbacher for leaking a negative story about Mosbacher to commentator Robert Novak. The problem was that Rove was not the source of the leak, as Novak later acknowledged on CNN's Crossfire. Says Rove: "As far as I know, Mosbacher still thinks I am the one who did it."
All of this suggested a ubiquitous, prodigiously powerful political presence, a combination Machiavelli, medieval pope, and Rasputin, with a well-developed mean streak—someone truly, if you swallowed the myth, to be afraid of.
CONTRARY TO WHAT HIS ENEMIES believe, Karl Rove does have a personal life. This is one area where the collective legend, which describes him as a one-dimensional, work-obsessed grind, is wrong. Rove's second wife, Darby, whom he married in 1986 and with whom he has a fourteen-year-old son named Andrew, once described him in an interview as a "combination of in-your-face and sensitive." That is very much as his friends see him too. Rove is a tough political player, takes his politics personally, and is a formidable adversary. But he has a long and happy marriage, and those close to him say he also has a talent for friendship."
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