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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Bush was the first big-name politician to see Rove's potential. "I had been very impressed with him back in my RNC days," he says. "I did not see him every day, but there was enough interaction for me to spot a rising star." It is not surprising that Bush singled him out. Rove was not only bewilderingly smart, an encyclopedia of facts and figures but also utterly and irretrievably political, and devotedly Republican. He had grown up in the Mountain West, the adopted son (one of five children) of a mineral geologist, and went to high school in Salt Lake City. He was, by his own description, a nerd. He carried a briefcase every day, wore a pocket protector, and spent hours in the library preparing for debate club competitions. And he was a Republican, from an early age. When he was nine years old, he supported Richard Nixon for president against John F. Kennedy and got punched out for his beliefs by a neighborhood girl. His parents divorced when he was a freshman at the University of Utah. He dropped out the following year to move to Washington. He would drop out several more times, always for politics. Eventually he attended four colleges, but he would never finish.
At Bush's Houston PAC, Rove found the ideal roost for an ambitious young political operative. Gearing up to run for president, Bush was raising and giving out political money and stumping the country in support of Republican candidates. Rove was involved in all of it. "He mapped Bush's schedule and helped figure out which candidates Bush would speak for and which candidates the PAC would give to," says David Bates, a colleague at the PAC. "Karl had a huge network of contacts from his college days. When Bush traveled, he would energize this network to meet him."
For Rove it was an exhausting, exhilarating, consuming, headlong dive into national politics. Though he clearly adored it, it had its downside too. He traveled frequently, and his absences were hard on his fragile young marriage to Val Wainwright, a Houston woman he had met at the RNC. He knew that if Bush were successful, he would eventually have to move back to Washington. "As much as I loved Bush," says Rove, "I didn't want to go to Washington. I had been gone for eighteen months. My wife and I were starting to think about having a family." In January 1979 he quit Bush's PAC campaign and moved to Austin to take a job with the political committee of new governor Bill Clements. The committee's main purpose was to pay off $7.2 million in campaign debt. Rove had again found a perfect launching pad. His marriage, however, would not survive. He was divorced a year later.
Rove had been hired to do direct mail, and he pushed hard to buy computers and high-tech ink-jet printers that would allow the Clements campaign to saturate the market. "He always wanted to be on the leading edge, and he was extremely computer literate by 1979 standards," recalls Jim Francis, his boss at the time and later a Dallas political operative who chaired George W.'s first campaign for governor. "He argued the point. I disagreed. We had several shouting matches about it. He was right. I was wrong." Rove, the archnerd, got his machines, and soon they were spitting out hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail. It was classic Rove: aggressive and totally sure of himself. The committee quickly paid off what Clements owed.
In 1979, acting at Clements' direction, Francis and Rove recruited James "Buster" Brown to run against longtime incumbent Democratic senator Babe Schwartz, of Galveston. The 29-year-old Rove went to Lake Jackson in 1980, hired the campaign manager and the media consultant, and engineered a stunning upset of the twenty-year Democratic incumbent in an old-line Democratic district. "Island in Shock" read the headline in the Galveston Daily News. That same fall Clements assigned Rove to run the Texas arm of the GOP presidential campaign, an operation with a $4.5 million budget. Again Rove delivered: Ronald Reagan, with Bush as the vice-presidential nominee, carried the state by 55 percent to 41 percent over Jimmy Carter. Rove was rewarded with the job of Clements' deputy chief of staff, charged with bird-dogging a complicated redrawing of the state political maps. He was already being talked about as the wonder boy of Texas Republican politics.
Newly divorced, Rove began rebuilding his personal life. His colleagues in the governor's office—including Pat Oles, Dary Stone, Jim Francis, Tobin Armstrong, and George Bayoud, Jr.,—would become lifelong friends. Rove, the only one of the group who could cook, would sometimes fix dinner for the gang at his house. Twice a year they hunted quail on Armstrong's enormous ranch near Kingsville. And Rove was always thinking big, talking big. He read intensively in American history and was not shy about telling people about it. The Republicans were going to rule Texas, he would say. Sooner than you think. His friends referred to this, simply, as "the Rove bullshit."
In 1981 Rove told Clements that he wanted to go out on his own and wanted him to be his first client. "I said, 'I am the age you were when you started Sedco [the offshore drilling company that made Clements megarich], and I want to start a business,'" Rove recalls. "This took him aback. He is a gruff old guy. He said, 'Let me think about it,' and the next day he said, 'I am your first client.' And he put me in business." Rove, who had no capital of his own, pulled in $60,000 from friends in the Clements administration to start Rove and Company, a small direct-mail and political-list operation that would be at the center of his life for the next eighteen years. Within a month he was sending out a million and a half pieces of mail for Clements. Clements' defeat was a blow to the small start-up but not a fatal one: By then Rove had used Clements' prestige to develop a handful of steady clients outside of campaigns, such as the Gulf Coast Conservation Association, a politically active sportsmen's group. After two years, Rove paid all of his investors back with interest.
AS GRUESOME AS THE REPUBLICANS' defeat was in 1982, it was not total. One seed of hope was a conservative Democratic congressman from College Station named Phil Gramm, who had won the all-important Democratic primary with Karl Rove's reluctant help. Rove had been ordered by Clements to help Gramm, who had co-sponsored Ronald Reagan's budget cuts over the objections of the leaders of his own party. Rove ran Gramm's direct-mail and phone-bank operations. After his victory in the general election, Gramm switched parties, then resigned and ran again in a special election. Rove spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day in his office as he and Gramm signed 14,000 personalized letters explaining why Gramm was changing parties. Gramm won again, and when John Tower chose not to seek a fifth term in 1984, Rove helped elect Gramm to the U.S. Senate.
Though he could not have known it at the time, Rove's timing had been perfect. Gramm was one of the early bellwethers of the political changes that were about to sweep across Texas. Counties like Collin and Denton, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and Fort Bend and Montgomery, near Houston, were booming with an influx of corporate relocations from the North. Gramm's Senate victory had validated Rove's belief that the rural electorate, long considered a sure thing for Democrats, could be persuaded to vote Republican. His business took off in the mid-eighties, first with direct-mail clients and then with bigger jobs where he was the general consultant, responsible for all aspects of the campaign. He made no more than $30,000 a year for his first four years—less than the people who worked for him—but he met his payrolls. His business grew beyond Texas, aided by his national connections. He did mail for U.S. senators Orrin Hatch, of Utah, and Connie Mack, of Florida, and for Governor John Ashcroft, of Missouri. But he never stopped doing the smaller, less lucrative races that helped broaden the Republican base. Most important, Rove was the general consultant in Bill Clements' 1986 revenge victory over Mark White. "The Clements campaign was so focused and had such discipline," recalls consultant Mark McKinnon, who worked for White (and later became a media adviser for George W. Bush's presidential campaign). "We woke up every morning and got hammered. We were constantly on the defensive. We were constantly responding to something. We would wake up with Karl's fist in our face."
By the 1986 Clements campaign, Rove had become one of the top guns in his field. He was up to eighteen employees. "Karl was one of the earliest practitioners of political direct mail," says John Colyandro, a political consultant who went to work for Rove in 1985. "Direct mail first caught on as a viable campaign tool in the 1978 off-year elections. Karl was one of the pioneers. He was very demanding. During the course of a political cycle, you would be there sixteen hours a day."
After the Clements victory, in 1986, Rove became a full-fledged general consultant. With Gramm's party switch, Rove had caught the rural-Democrats-turning-Republican wave; now, in 1988, he would catch the tort-reform wave. At that time the Texas Supreme Court consisted of nine Democratic judges, most of whom favored plaintiffs. Their ethics as a group had come under scrutiny in a 1987 60 Minutes report called "Justice for Sale?" Two judges had been disciplined by a state judicial watchdog commission. Sensing the opportunity, Rove went to work in 1988 for Tom Phillips, a former Houston district judge who had been appointed chief justice by Clements earlier that year. Rove ran Phillips as a clean candidate, sent political fundraising mail all over the country, and set voluntary limits on campaign contributions, which Rove and Phillips knew would allow the campaign to be outspent. "Karl wrote out a detailed plan for the campaign, how many votes we needed, where they were, and how to get them," says Phillips, who won the race with 57 percent of the vote.
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