Bush's Hit Man
by LOUIS DUBOSE
In early December 1999, George W. Bush's chief political strategist, Karl
Rove, and Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater squared off in the
Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. Rove was angry over a story Slater had
written suggesting that it was plausible that Rove was behind the whispering
campaign that warned that Senator John McCain--then soaring in the GOP
presidential primary polls--might any day unravel because he had been under
so much pressure when he was tortured as a POW in Vietnam.
In a 700-word article that Slater said wasn't the most significant thing he'd
written about Rove, he referred to questionable campaign tactics attributed
to Rove: teaching College Republicans dirty tricks; spreading a rumor that
former Texas Governor Ann Richards was too tolerant of gays and lesbians;
circulating a mock newspaper that featured a story about a former Democratic
governor's drinking and driving when he was a college student; spreading
stories about Texas official Jim Hightower's alleged role in a contribution
kickback scheme; and alerting the press to the fact that Lena Guerrero, a
rising star in the Texas Democratic Party, had lied about graduating from
college. Rove was explicitly linked by testimony and press reports to all but
the gay and lesbian story; the college incident had been so widely reported
for fifteen years that it was essentially part of the common domain. Slater
also reported that primary candidates Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer blamed the
Bush camp for the smear campaign.
"He said I had harmed his reputation," Slater recalls. Says another reporter
who was traveling with Bush, "It was pretty heated. They were nose to nose.
Rove was furious and had his finger in Slater's chest." Adds the same
reporter, "What was interesting then is that everyone on the campaign charter
concluded that Rove was responsible for rumors about McCain."
That Karl Rove, who, according to the White House press office is not giving
interviews, hasn't always abided by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of
political engagement is not exactly breaking news. As long ago as 1989, when
Rove collaborated with an FBI agent investigating Hightower, the then-Texas
agricultural commissioner complained about "Nixonian dirty tricks."
That was at a time when Rove was a big player only in Texas. Since then, he
has become George W. Bush's closest adviser, directed Bush's presidential
campaign and is now working in an office just down the hall from the most
powerful official in the world. Some wonder to what extent Rove will use the
power of the federal government against those who would cross the President.
Rove's past suggests such worries are not unfounded. "This guy is worse than
Haldeman and Ehrlichman," a source who worked in Hightower's office twelve
years ago said in a recent interview, referring to Nixon's advisers at the
time of the Watergate break-in. "He'll have an enemies list." The interview
ended with a request common among sources speaking about Rove, even those no
longer involved in politics: "I'd prefer you didn't quote me on this."
Rove operates from deeply held conservative beliefs, which were shaped when
he was a child growing up in Utah. His sister told Miriam Rozen of the Dallas
Observer that as a child Rove had a Wake Up America poster hanging above his
bed. Rove has said that while going to college, he was never inclined to
identify with the antiwar movement and supported the troops because "it was
hard to sympathize with all those Commies." The "die-hard Nixonite" remains
deeply resentful of the legacy of the counterculture of the sixties. Visitors
to his Austin office would often leave with a copy of The Dream and the
Nightmare by Myron Magnet, a Manhattan Institute fellow who argues that the
political and cultural left corrupted the nation's poor and deprived them of
the work ethic they now need to lift themselves out of poverty. Rove is an
eclectic and voracious reader, and although he never completed college, a
self-taught historian. He is absolutely dedicated to George W. Bush, whom he
describes as "the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me
wait for a lifetime to be associated with."
Rove arrived in Houston in 1977 to work for a George Herbert Walker Bush PAC
run by James Baker 3d. Rove subsequently moved from Houston to Austin, and in
the ten years it took George W. Bush to lose $2 million of other people's
money in the oilfields of West Texas, he became the Republican Party's
premier political consultant. At the time of Rove's arrival, US Senator John
Tower was the only Republican holding statewide office. When Rove left
earlier this year to serve as a senior adviser to President Bush, all
twenty-nine statewide elected offices were held by Republicans, and both US
Senate seats were occupied by Rove clients: Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey
Hutchison. Almost half of GOP officeholders--including the governor, the
attorney general, the chief justice and several justices on the Texas Supreme
Court--were also clients. Rove and the consulting firm he owned until joining
the Bush campaign have represented more than seventy-five candidates in
twenty-four states.
There have always been nagging questions about the tactics Rove has used to
establish market domination. So when a tape of Bush's practice debate
sessions was mailed to Congressman Tom Downey, Al Gore's opponent in practice
debates, the speculation among the press corps in Austin was that Rove had
arranged it. (A post office surveillance camera captured an image of an
employee of Bush media consultant Mark McKinnon mailing a package that might
have been the tape; a federal grand jury in Austin is still looking into the
incident.) Some speculated that the move was intended to eliminate Downey
from his role as debate coach (which it did), others that it would provide an
excuse to cancel the debates (which, in hindsight, would have been helpful to
Gore).
Rove, after all, works in the tradition of the late Lee Atwater, the
Republican attack-dog/consultant who said of Michael Dukakis that he would
"strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make 'Willie' Horton his running
mate."
Rove's first foray into politics involved gaining entry to the office of Alan
Dixon--a candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970--stealing some
campaign stationery and printing and distributing a fake invitation to
Dixon's campaign headquarters, promising "free beer, free food, girls, and a
good time." "I was nineteen and I got involved in a political prank," Rove
told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. A year later, Atwater ran Rove's
campaign for the presidency of the national College Republicans, and working
together they defeated Terry Dolan, the Republican operative who later
founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee that helped
elect Ronald Reagan.
When, in the wake of the Watergate break-in, Rove was accused of teaching
dirty tricks to college Republicans, he attributed the accusations to rumors
started by Dolan. After the FBI interviewed Rove, the Republican National
Committee--then chaired by Bush the Elder--looked into the charges, decided
they were baseless and offered Rove work. Rove later joined Bush and Baker to
work on the PAC that Bush set up to position himself for the 1980
presidential campaign, which he lost to Ronald Reagan.
Rove soldiered on in obscurity until 1986, when he was working on the second
campaign of Bill Clements, a Republican trying to recapture the governor's
office after losing it to Democrat Mark White. Rove made news by going public
with a complaint that an electronic bugging device had been found in his
office--shortly before a scheduled televised debate between the two
candidates. "We never took it seriously, because we knew nobody in our shop
had anything to do with it," says Dwayne Hollman, who worked for White at the
time. Hollman said it was assumed that it was a publicity stunt. "It was
investigated by the FBI," Hollman said, "and nothing ever came of it."
Yet some wonder what "came of" Rove's meeting with FBI agent Greg Rampton,
who conducted that investigation. Local authorities who looked into the
bugging seem to agree with Hollman's assessment. "We were the first on the
scene and concluded that Rove had hired a company to debug his office, and
that the same company had planted the bug," says a source involved in the
Travis County DA office's investigation. But the media reported that Rampton
had determined there was nothing to pursue.
Two years later, Rampton began an investigation that involved his setting up
shop in the offices of Garry Mauro, the state land commissioner and later the
loser in the 1998 gubernatorial race won by George W. Bush. Mauro said
Rampton informed him that a former Land Commission employee was involved in
an appraisals scheme that involved the commission. "I told my general counsel
to tell [Rampton] to come on in," Mauro said. Rampton accepted the
invitation. "On the day of the Democratic state convention, I got a subpoena
for every document you could possibly imagine," Mauro said.
Mauro says he was warned by Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock--who, Mauro said,
insisted on speaking to him outside their office buildings--that three
Democrats, including Mauro, Hightower and himself, were being targeted. As
Mauro puts it, "Greg Rampton lived in my office. He roamed the halls. He had
us put in a computer room, he picked out files of people who had given money
and tried to establish by regression analysis...that anytime somebody gives
you a contribution, there is a quid pro quo. Once they showed up with twelve
agents and brought their own copier." In the end they found nothing,
according to Mauro. "But," he adds, "they made it hard to run a campaign."
(Attempts to contact Rampton through the FBI office in Denver, from which he
recently retired, were not successful.)
If Rampton struck out in Mauro's office, he connected in Hightower's, after
slowing down only to subpoena Bullock's campaign finance filings. In the
summer of 1989, pending indictments against two aides to Hightower--who used
his office to attack what he called "the bullies, bankers, bastards and tort
reformers" who run the state--were announced in Washington. But it wasn't
Rampton or any other Justice Department official who announced them. It was
Karl Rove, the political consultant working for Hightower's Republican
opponent, Rick Perry.
Hightower refuses to discuss the incident. Rove later admitted under oath
that he had met with Rampton during the summer of 1989 "regarding a probe of
political corruption in the office of Texas agriculture commissioner Jim
Hightower." And in June of 1990, Perry sent out a fundraising letter claiming
that Hightower's office was rife with corruption and was under investigation
by the FBI, though there were no indictments until after the 1991 general
election, in which Hightower lost his re-election bid.
Rove has repeatedly denied involvement in the FBI investigations of top
Democrats in the 1980s and did not respond to questions submitted to him
regarding this story. When questioned under oath before a Texas Senate
committee in 1991, Rove was evasive about his relationship with Rampton and
engaged in semantic hairsplitting worthy of Bill Clinton. "How long have you
known an FBI agent by the name of Greg [Rampton]?" a Democratic senator asked
Rove. The answer should have been fairly straightforward, as Rampton had
cleared Rove of the bugging incident five years earlier and had met with him
a number of times subsequently, which Rove had disclosed in a federal
questionnaire in 1989. Yet Rove was, to say the least, evasive: "Senator, it
depends. Would you define 'know' for me?"
Rove became acquainted with George W. Bush while working for his father and
Baker in Houston but didn't work for the younger Bush until he decided to run
for governor in 1994. The campaign was all Rove: a four-point message, rumors
about the opponent (Ann Richards) circulated by surrogates and little direct
exposure to the press.
To those following the Bush campaigns that Rove ran, it was evident that he
was more than just a political consultant to Bush. Writing in the Boston Globe
magazine, David Shribman posed the questions that many in the press corps
dared not ask during the presidential campaign: "Is there a place where
George W. Bush ends and Karl Rove begins? Are you the wizard behind the
curtain of George W.? Is W. too dependent upon you? And, worst of all: Are
you George W. Bush's brain?"
Rove has certainly done much of Bush's thinking for him. Asked by a reporter
for the National Review what thinkers had shaped Bush's political philosophy,
Rove cited Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare, Gertrude Himmelfarb's The
Demoralization of Society, James Q. Wilson's On Character and several other
books--none of which Bush would have been likely to see but for Rove. (Recall
Bush's response in the debate about which political philosopher had most
shaped his thinking: It was not Magnet, Himmelfarb or Wilson but Jesus
Christ.)
When working as a political operative and not a mentor, Rove has been
bipartisan, eliminating Republicans who represented a threat to his boss's
career with the same zeal with which he attacked Democrats. "He's enormously
effective," says Dallas lawyer and Bush critic Tom Pauken, noting that Rove's
political bible is Machiavelli's The Prince. And it is Machiavelli--not the
authors of the conservative and neocon canon--who has informed Rove's
treatment of Pauken. In 1994, as Bush was beginning his first race for
governor, the machinery of the Republican Party of Texas was taken over by
Reagan Republicans and fundamentalist Christians, and Pauken--who had worked
in the Reagan Administration--was made party chairman. It was a faction that
Rove correctly perceived would create problems for Bush, who had always
understood that the Christian conservatives must be kept in line. Rove called
big funders and diverted money from the state party to Bush political
accounts that he controlled. "He did everything he could to cut off the money
to the party...throughout the time I was chair," Pauken says. "Karl
understands the importance of money in politics, and he made it more
difficult for me to function."
Similarly, after two Christian-right candidates for the State Board of
Education, Bob Offutt and Donna Ballard (Offutt was an incumbent), traveled
to New Hampshire to endorse Steve Forbes in the Republican primary, they
returned home to find their opponents' campaigns suddenly flush with cash
from big Republican givers associated with Rove. "You don't cross Karl Rove
and not expect repercussions," a defeated Offutt told the Austin
American-Statesman. A Republican political consultant was more colorful: "To
put it in a nutshell, you don't tug on Superman's cape."
In January, Superman moved into the White House office previously occupied by
Hillary Clinton. And he's only a phone call away from Attorney General John
Ashcroft.
