Bush's brain found lacking

A slew of new books on Karl Rove make us question whether the president's deputy chief of staff is truly the Machiavellian genius so many in Washington claim.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Books, Politics, Walter Shapiro, Reviews, Book reviews, Karl Rove, Valerie Plame

Salon.com collage of AP and Reuters photos

Sept. 19, 2006 | Victorious presidential campaigns rival Renaissance Florence as a repository of genius.

Thirty years ago, political reporters hailed strategist Hamilton Jordan and pollster Pat Caddell as the creative visionaries responsible for the dizzying ascent of Jimmy Carter. After Ronald Reagan supplanted Carter in 1980, news magazines rhapsodized about campaign manager Jim Baker's sagacity and image-maker Mike Deaver's mastery of the metaphors of TV visuals. Lee Atwater, the architect of George Bush's 1988 victory, inspired a generation of Republican operatives with his amoral fixation on racially tinged hot-button issues. Bill Clinton employed a different Svengali in each campaign, embracing James Carville's quick-response war-room partisanship in 1992 and four years later Dick Morris' split-the-difference triangulation.

This brief tour of the modern political wing of the Mensa Society should invite skepticism about the Cult of Karl Rove -- the belief shared by reverent Republicans and downcast Democrats alike that the president's top political advisor is unequaled as Machiavelli with a BlackBerry. A fragrant whiff of this over-the-top gush about Rove is found in the opening sentences of "The Architect," a new book by James Moore and Wayne Slater: "There is no more compelling subject in contemporary American politics and perhaps in our country's electoral history than Karl Christian Rove ... Rove is unique in both intellect and ambition and that his accomplishments have been transcendent for the American democracy."

"The Architect" is less a biography than a sloppily organized reprise of Rove's White House years by two reporters who had already strip-mined the subject in their 2003 bestseller, "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential." Having pretty much exhausted their Texas connections (Slater is a longtime political writer for the Dallas Morning News), the authors fail to produce much new evidence to justify their melodramatic subtitle: "Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power." While "The Architect" is the only full-length addition to the official Rove reading list, three other new books (all discussed in due course) shed light on his political vision and his role in the Valerie Plame game. At this rate, Rove studies may someday pass both Sylvia Plath and the Bloomsbury group in terms of bookshelf footage.

Rove admittedly poses a problem for would-be journalistic chroniclers, since he mostly talks to reporters under ground rules that Matt Cooper, a former Time White House correspondent, famously described as "double super secret background." Moore and Slater concede their struggles in the acknowledgments: "The number of people willing to speak has often been limited by fear of retribution." Unable to interview Rove and apparently frustrated in their ability to develop strong White House sources, the authors do not get much beyond the menu stage of political reporting as they ballyhoo such culinary details as, "Rove's specialty was his scrambled eggs -- eggies, he called them -- which he announced with great fanfare were prepared with a special ingredient, most likely cream."

What pass for breathless revelations are who-cares tidbits like the discovery that Rove's adoptive stepfather in the last years of his life had acknowledged being gay. An entire 21-page chapter strings together if-clauses and suppositions to suggest that neocon think-tank warrior Michael Ledeen might have had a connection to the forged documents claiming that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Amid these air castles of wild speculation, the only conceivable link to Rove is Ledeen's unverified claim that "he faxes Rove every four to six weeks with ideas that he [Rove] needs to be thinking about." The authors, in a particularly loathsome patch, devote the bulk of two chapters to speculating whether Republican National chairman Ken Mehlman is gay. No evidence whatsoever is offered beyond the shocking news that Mehlman is an unmarried workaholic, he did not seem enthusiastic in robotically stating the GOP's position on gay marriage, and he expressed rightful annoyance ("You have asked a question people shouldn't have to answer") when gay activists prodded him about his sexual identity.

If "The Architect" were better reported and argued, the authors might deserve sympathy for the accidents of timing that rendered sections of the book outdated as they were being published. Early this month, reflecting Bush's plummeting political fortunes, the New York Times ran a front-page story ("Rove's Word Is No Longer G.O.P Gospel") that made Bush's "boy genius" seem more like the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy peeked behind the curtain. As the Times on Sept. 3 put it bluntly, "[Rove] seems to have the least political authority since he came to Washington, party officials said."

That same week, in their new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin," Michael Isikoff and David Corn revealed that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage -- and not Rove -- was the original 2003 leaker who told columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, worked at the CIA. (Armitage's name is not even mentioned in "The Architect," though the book is chockablock with theories about what might have happened). What the Times story and the Armitage-was-there-first news underscored is that the doctrine (shared by right, left and center) that Rove is the prime mover in the political universe is a form of fundamentalism that does not always stand up to sustained scrutiny.

Yet, since Plamegate is now as entangled with Rove's legacy as steroids are with Barry Bonds' home-run exploits, "Hubris" is worth studying in detail as the definitive guide to Rove's culpability. The restrained, don't-let-the-speculation-get-ahead-of-the-facts tenor of the book makes Isikoff and Corn trustworthy guides to a scandal that has spawned more outlandish theories than the secret rites of the Freemasons.

The deeper you venture into the saga of the CIA leak story, the more it resembles Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," where every character had a motive to kill. Adding Armitage to the mix, "Hubris" gives us three strands of leakers -- the garrulous State Department official, Dick Cheney's top aide Scooter Libby (indicted for perjury) and Rove. Isikoff and Corn cite "a source close to Rove" who said that the White House political czar had "probably" learned from Scooter Libby that Plame worked at the CIA and had a role in her husband's mission to check out the Niger uranium claims. (Although "Hubris" does not explicitly make this point, there is no evidence so far that Rove knew that Plame was a covert CIA operative.)

Rove was the second source (after Armitage) for the original Novak piece that led to the outing of Plame as a CIA employee, merely confirming what the columnist had already known. Before the Novak column appeared, Rove went further in tipping off Time reporter Cooper that Plame worked on weapons of mass destruction matters at the CIA. But unlike Libby, who shared Cheney's Ahab-like fixation with Wilson, Rove seemingly regarded the furor as one more item on his daily to-do list. His conversations with Novak and Cooper about Plame were brief. As "Hubris" points out, "The White House anti-Wilson campaign had been less organized than depicted ... and much (but not all) of it occurred after the Novak column was published."

Once Plame's covert identity was revealed, Rove treated the matter like the kind of brush-back-pitch hardball at which he excelled. In a high-decibel, off-air phone conversation with TV host Chris Matthews, Rove reputedly said, "Wilson's wife is fair game." (This quotation comes from Wilson himself, who heard it later from Matthews, so a little skepticism about the exact wording is justified.) Matthews' reasonable verdict on the whole matter, according to Isikoff and Corn, was that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back."

"Hubris" also draws an important distinction between Libby's indictment by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for perjury and Rove's clean-slate escape, despite a faulty memory and five trips before the grand jury. "Whatever his suspicions about Rove's account," Isikoff and Corn write, "Fitzgerald was a professional who would not indict a suspect unless he could establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And perjury is notoriously difficult to prove ... Fitzgerald didn't have a parade of witnesses contradicting the White House aide's account -- as he did with Libby."

The biggest mystery surrounding Rove's six years in the White House has nothing to do with Valerie Plame or Patrick Fitzgerald. It is a much larger question: As Bush's deputy chief of staff with a high-level security clearance and membership in the shadowy White House Iraq Group, did Rove help shape war-on-terror policy or was he only involved in the political marketing of it?

Next page: Is Rove really the Stephen Hawking of political manipulation as so many in Washington claim?