Transcript
November 8, 2013
Riley
I don’t know if there was any piece of the original interview that you wanted to revisit. You’re shaking your head no. This was just to help refresh your memory about what we did last time. We’ve all looked at it, and basically we got you in the White House. That was about where we got.
Milkis
It wasn’t easy, but we got you there.
Riley
Exactly. So we’re going to try to finish today and tomorrow, sort of a rough division of labor. If we can get through the first term today, we’ll be in good shape and we can pick up the campaign. If we move beyond that, that will be terrific.
Rove
OK.
Riley
Let me start with a very broad question. That is, tell us what your job description was when you went into the White House. You had a title—
Milkis
An incredibly long title.
Rove
All White House titles are long because every title is prefixed by whether you’re Assistant, Deputy Assistant, or Special Assistant to the President, and then your regular title, in my case Senior Advisor.
I supervised, in no particular order, the Office of Political Affairs, OPL [Office of Public Liaison]. The injunction from the President was, “Keep it away from me. I want the office on the far end of the EOB [Executive Office Building] and I don’t want us to be consumed with polls.” This office has an important function in checking with our supporters about potential appointees to help us understand who is credible, who is not, and who has difficulties, who’s got skills. But they don’t get to decide. They just get to provide input. And they handled the necessary political activities of the President.
I oversaw the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which was the outreach to Governors, mayors, legislators, and so forth, and the Office of Public Liaison, which handled outreach to outside groups to be the advocate for the administration’s policy. You have to figure out ways that people can understand where we’re coming from as well as understanding where they’re coming from.
Then Andy Card said, “You’re in charge of an office that tries to think long term.” He said the biggest problem he saw from serving inside a White House was the tendency to focus on the in-basket. He said, “We need to have some way to think about long term, what should our message be, what should our priorities be. So you’re in charge of that. Go figure out how you’re going to do it.”
It was an interesting assignment because Andy shared that this was attempted in [George H. W. Bush] 41’s administration, when they had one person in charge of a similar long-term planning process. It failed in large measure because everybody else said, “Am I chopped liver?” Everybody else said, “Wait a minute, he’s the one guy who’s supposed to think long term? What about me?” So the question was how to go about doing this.
I put in charge of the office one of my principal deputies, Barry Jackson, who was succeeded by Pete Wehner. We decided we would focus on facilitating other people thinking longer term about what should our priorities be—What should the use of the President’s time be? What was going right? What was going wrong?—by having this office facilitate discussion among all the senior leaders in the White House. So we established these sessions, which came to be called “strategery meetings.” The strategery meetings were principals only; you couldn’t send a substitute. If you weren’t there, you couldn’t send a deputy to it and you missed out.
Second, we decided we would hold the meetings after hours so that people weren’t in the middle of the day, with all the pressures that brings. We’d have it at 6:30 or 7:00 at night. We knew the people would be tired, but it would be out of the press of the day. We would hold them periodically, but every six, seven weeks.
We decided we would hold them someplace that was not normal. So it wasn’t a Roosevelt Room kind of thing. We held one at the Blair House, and that was a problem because you have to feed people. The bill for having very nice little cucumber sandwiches from the Blair House was enormously expensive. So what we did was, the Secretary of State’s office in the EEOB [Eisenhower Executive Office Building] was grabbed by the intelligence community whenever the last State Department people moved out of the EEOB. It was turned into a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility], a secure room for highly sensitive intelligence meetings. It’s a beautiful room with a giant old table that nobody ever uses except the spooks. So we started having our meetings there. It was cool to meet there. It was sort of a nice room that no one had seen.
It was also the only place where we routinely shared polling data. Everybody on the senior White House staff, whether they admit it or not, is at heart a political junky. So if they wanted to hear what the polls were and the composite of public data, this was the one place they got to see it.
Perry
Karl, could I interrupt there? I’m intrigued when you say at the very beginning how the President said to you he didn’t want to be watching the polls all the time. But explain that, because the President has to know how programs are playing and policies are playing. What does that mean when the President says that?
Rove
He was happy to have information about how people were receiving things and he was happy to have information about the words that were best in selling something, but the best way to kill an idea was to walk into the Oval Office and say, “We’ve tested this and this is an 80/20 winner.” He was just stubborn enough to say, “Let’s do the 20.” He had this belief that public opinion could be affected by doing the right thing the right way. He had an instinctive negative reaction to people who wet their finger, put it in the air, and figured out what do.
He didn’t want his people to be governed by are we doing the right thing. If you’ve taken a poll and asked do you believe we ought to commit 20,000 or whatever it is, 60,000, additional troops to Iraq over the next year, that poll would have been ugly.
Milkis
I saw those.
Rove
You change public opinion over time, and at the end of it, the surge changed the arc of the war. He is enough of a political animal that he pays attention to politics. He is enough of a realist to understand that politics intrudes into the White House. But he didn’t want it to be central to the decision-making process. So he wanted it pushed away from the center, which is ironic. If he had said to me, “I want you to be head of the Office of Political Affairs,” OPA, I wouldn’t have done it. That wouldn’t have been exciting at all. But when he said, “I want you to do your homework and be in a position where you’re able to opine on all things domestic and on some things foreign, some things international,” that was an interesting job assignment. And oh, incidentally, part of your job is to keep the politics out of here.
Riley
You just gave us a different job description.
Rove
I was responsible for running these offices, but the President’s principal directive was, “Do your homework. Participate robustly in policy discussions, because I want to arrive at consensus on as much as possible below me. Bring the tough stuff to me: I want the best arguments to be made on all sides of the equation, and all the important information that I need to take into consideration. Your job is to be my Senior Advisor. Your job is to participate in that process. It gives you a chance to be rambunctious, but control yourself.” [laughter]
So I had to create the Office of Strategic Initiatives, OSI, and then run it and OPA, IGA [Office of Intergovernmental Affairs], and Public Liaison. But the bigger part of my job was to participate in policy discussions and in shaping thematics, scheduling, and then participate in all the hunky-dory stuff that every senior White House aide faces, like read all the Presidential speeches and comment on them and so forth.
Riley
Did you get pushback from people in those offices where they weren’t going to be headed up directly by an Assistant to the President? Or was it that they welcomed being under your umbrella because they understood that you had the President’s ear?
Rove
The heads of each of these offices were Deputy Assistants to the President, which I think is pretty traditional. I’m not certain that the head of OPA before [Barack] Obama was an Assistant to the President. Symbolically, the head of OPA should be a Deputy Assistant and the number two person a Special Assistant.
Milkis
So Strategic Initiatives is the one innovation in effect that is something different. These other offices have some history.
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
Were these meetings fruitful? You were meeting every six or seven weeks—
Rove
We tried to do them on a regular basis to cause people to think about what did we, over the next three months, six months, want it to look like? What did we want? What was coming up that we had to do? G20 [Group of 20 economic summit], Martin Luther King, so we could look at that. But step back even further, what is it that we wanted to try and bend the arc of the next six months to be about? What was it we wanted to make the emphasis? Then you’re constantly rejiggering that. So the question was how do we rejigger it. But it was always: Where are we? What are we trying to do? What did we want to try and do? What did we agree that we were going to try and do? Are we doing it, and if not, why?
Milkis
Yes.
Rove
Then it was also, How do we want him to be perceived? How is he perceived? How does that differ from what we want, and is there anything we can do to make it more like what we want? If you looked at the arc of these things, you very clearly saw that events really do intrude, as somebody once said.
Milkis
We call that “contingency.” Exogenous shocks. Want to make sure you get that in there.
Rove
They were useful. People came. It’s funny. Things like you had to have the cheese and carrots for the vegan crowd there, pretzels and the special little snacks. You had to have not the Diet Coke but the diet caffeine-free Coke. People got into a routine of coming to the meeting. We’d always start off with the polling data and then go to the calendar of what we had anticipated and where we were and then looked to the future. Then we would have a laundry list generally approved by the Chief of Staff and have discussion on it.
Riley
Karl, do you have any recollections of instances—You mentioned the surge earlier, but apart from the surge—when you felt that you really needed to bring polling data to bear on an argument that you were making with the President?
Rove
I only cite the surge because if you had done it, it clearly would have said people were against it. In fact, even after it was announced people were clearly against it.
Riley
Do you recall any other instances, conversely, where he did look at the polling data or you were bringing it in and he said, “Look, I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
Rove
We were all properly trained when it came to polls.
Riley
Got you.
Rove
Look, he’s a consumer, like anybody. So you’d say the latest Gallup number is this or the blah-blah that, but it’s fine to opine. You look at it. You opine about the climate. He has just got a gut instinctive negative reaction to, “Here’s what we ought to do because it is popular.”
Riley
You hear from Bill Clinton’s people that he wanted to see the crosstabs and look at them. This is not this President’s operating style?
Rove
He might want to talk about something like the—Obviously on the reelect he was interested in who are we going after and what did the polls say and what was it indicating. But when it came to the construction of policy, this was not something he focused on. He didn’t want to know. “OK, tell me the poll says everybody thinks I’m doing a crappy job on Katrina. Great.” [laughter] Didn’t need a poll to tell that.
Riley
Who were you using?
Rove
Jan van Lohuizen of Voter Consumer Research did most of our polling.
Riley
How proactive were you in the shaping and construction of the polling?
Rove
The general subjects, but I’d talk with the head of OPA [Ken Mehlman] the first two years, Matt Schlapp, Sara Taylor, Jonathan [Felts] and just indicate what we were looking at and then look over the instrument. But again, most of our polling, even that we shared, was just public data. I don’t know what the budget was, but I saw the budget defer—President Obama’s people spent something like $15 million in one year through the DNC [Democratic National Committee] for polling. I don’t think we spent one-tenth of that. I’m pretty sure we spent one-hundredth of that.
Riley
So you’re looking at public numbers, then, rather than generating your own polls?
Rove
On occasion we’d do stuff through the RNC [Republican National Committee], but it was infrequent.
Riley
Were there any innovations in either polling or in general assessments of public opinion that were occurring during these years that were notable for you?
Rove
The start of the century is when everybody is grappling with the declining use of landlines and the extraordinary growth of cell phone numbers. Everybody is talking about that, but no. We’re driving some improvements out of the RNC, particularly handling cell phones and getting more representative samples in preparation for ’03 and ’04 for our purposes.
Riley
Were they doing focus groups for you also or not?
Rove
No. Again, in later 2003 and ’04 we had focus groups done by the campaign that we’d get reports on, but again, it goes back to Bush. Oh, great, we’ve gone from depending on the views of 1,200 people in a scientifically drawn sample to having 20 people sitting in a sterile conference room in a suburban Columbus, Ohio, mall drinking stale coffee and eating old doughnuts and we’re going to depend on the fact that 11 of them think this and 9 of them think that? No. I don’t think we’re going in that direction.
Riley
Is that a direct quote from the President, or just a characterization?
Rove
A characterization.
Milkis
Could you give me a flavor of the kinds of policy discussions you had? You had a pretty good idea of things you wanted to do when you got in there, things like No Child Left Behind.
Rove
One of the things that happened after the campaign was that we were stealing people from Josh Bolten’s policy shop, and because they’re bright lawyers, shipping them off to Florida. But they had catalogued all of the pledges and promises made during the campaign. Before we came in, we had literally planned out the first six months of when we would want to do things, what were we going to do. The first priority was No Child Left Behind. So when were we expecting to do important things, and what did we need to do?
Milkis
Taxes?
Rove
When did we expect to do them? The appointment of the Energy Task Force, all of these things were things that came out of the campaign during the transition. We had charted them out on a calendar for the first year with a great deal of specificity for the first six months’ calendar of action steps.
Perry
Some examples of these intrusions prior to 9/11. So you’ve got your overarching strategery and you have your 180-day plan, and you’ve got the issues lined up from the campaign, and then give examples of the intrusions that happened and how do you work those into the system?
Rove
You have to constantly be talking through the policy process, strategery, or scheduling about how you are going to adjust in response to things that are happening. We had robust daily senior staff meetings. Andy did a really good job of making it a place where people not only reported on the things of the moment but where people felt comfortable saying, “Do we need to think differently about X or Y?” If it wasn’t fully discussed out and resolved there, at least people flagged it—“We think there is a need for us to review the scheduling, the priority, the attention, the resources.”
The same thing happened in the policy process, where Josh Bolten at first, and then after Josh went over to OMB [Office of Management and Budget], and I moved into the job, and then where Joel Kaplan after me, you had to think about how were events intruding that required you to jiggle things around in the policy process as well.
One thing about the modern White House that struck me: There is a constantly changing set of—Between interactions with Congress, the press, world leaders, and events, you have all of these things meshing together. Something over here will cause a change over here, and you must constantly monitor and change things, whether we’ve got to bounce that meeting that we’ve spent two weeks to prepare on Medicare Part D back for a week because we’ve now had another issue intrude and we need to resolve it because we have a looming WTO [World Trade Organization] action over our steel tariff decision, which in turn was provoked by an International Trade Commission decision. So all these things were constantly causing changes. Obviously mostly below the President’s level, but—
Perry
How do you decide how to prioritize the intrusions? Because those are happening at such a fast pace and there are so many of them.
Rove
Through a process run by the Chief of Staff. Bush had essentially two Chiefs of Staff, which is pretty remarkable. One of their great talents was finding the balance between the sense of urgency from events versus trying to keep to the plan. This has now intruded; how much is that going to disrupt this? You have to handle this, but you can’t let go of that. It was one of the constant strains inside the White House.
Riley
I want to ask you a kind of political science question. That is, talk a little bit about the operating styles of the two Chiefs of Staff. I am particularly interested in the first term in the hierarchies within the White House because there are these two conventional models that you know about: the strong-Chief-of-Staff model and the spokes-of-the-wheel model. The perception from the outside is that you blended this in the first term, which we keep hearing doesn’t work, but it seems to have worked well.
Rove
That’s because Bush supported a strong Chief of Staff. On the other hand, people had walk-in privileges. He collected information in a very disciplined fashion. But he didn’t allow the kinds of things that are the corrosive part of that, which is, I’m going to go in and I’m going to sell the President on we need to go do this because I don’t want you and I don’t want you to hear my arguments. I’m going to give the President information about the two of you in such a way that it undermines you. Bush didn’t allow that kind of stuff.
Perry
He’d just stop you and say, “I don’t want to hear that”?
Rove
No, no, “He’d say that’s interesting. Let’s get those with a different view in here.” But remember, he’s set the tone in advance. I don’t think it was an accident. We talked about it last time. It was not an accident that he wanted me to make my arguments about [Richard] Cheney in front of Cheney. He knew that would get around. That’s his style.
Riley
OK.
Rove
He had strong Chiefs of Staff in Andy and Josh, different operating styles, different temperaments, but both strong. At the same time, he also wanted to be able to have people come in. The object was if you’re going to come in and try and sell me something I haven’t heard before, you’d better have respect for your colleagues to try and sell them on it. Or if you come in and want to sell me on something, don’t expect me to buy it until I’ve collected other information. Thanks for telling me about it, but go inform your colleagues.
Milkis
So he wanted you guys to hammer out a consensus as best you could.
Rove
But recognizing that you couldn’t in each and every instance. That’s why the relationship between he and Andy and he and Josh was so important. My sense is that an important part of his relationship with them was gauging how is that process arriving so that he can make an independent judgment and signal, “OK, fine, bring it on in.”
He read all that briefing material too. He has an unbelievable ability to absorb all that stuff and to recall it, so that he was able to feel less dependent on an individual and more dependent on the process.
Riley
How many people had walk-in privileges?
Rove
Probably a dozen. Let’s see: Chief of Staff, NSA [National Security Advisor], counselor, Senior Advisor, Leg [Legislative] Affairs, general counsel, Staff Secretary, NEC [National Economic Council], DPS [Domestic Policy Council], Personnel. Interestingly enough, the Staff Secretary office was always occupied by somebody who had the skill set to handle one of the most difficult jobs in the White House, which Bush wanted to be the ultimate neutral party. He wanted the Staff Secretary to be the—“OK, Barbara said this, Sidney said this, Russell said this, Karl said this. There generally seems to be a consensus it ought to be what Barbara said, but I’m going to defer to the Chief of Staff and the policymakers rather than put my thumb on the scale.”
Riley
Did the President determine who had walk-in privileges?
Rove
Oh, yes, I assume he did, but Andy sort of blessed you.
Riley
What I’m trying to figure out, Karl, is what distinguishes what you just described from conventionally what we would think of as a spokes-of-the-wheel—?
Rove
Because he relied on a strong Chief of Staff who ran a deliberate policy process. You could walk into the Oval Office and say, “Geez, I think on that Medicare Part D we’re making a mistake on the rollout and I think we ought to do something else.” He’d say, “Interesting idea. I hear what you’re saying. Have you talked to Andy about it?” But you couldn’t go in and try to sell him on a policy issue while short-circuiting the policy process. You’d better have all the requisite partners saying, “Mr. President, we’ve reached a consensus on this and we just want to touch base with you about it because this is time sensitive and we need to move.” You could not walk in and get him to make a unilateral decision that bypassed the policy process.
Riley
Did you hear him talk about his father’s experience in the White House as a negative example for how he wanted to set up his own shop?
Rove
Not so much. I think we talked about this last time, about when I said to him, “I don’t think I’ll go. I’m not certain I’ll go.” That’s the only time I ever heard him reflect on it. He has a pretty firm idea on how he wants things to run, and he takes actions that cause it to run in that way. We’d have these meetings in the Oval with 15 people sitting around waiting to listen to the combatants go at each other and ask questions. He encouraged people to ask questions of the presenters, and particularly if the presenter was Condi [Condoleezza Rice] versus some level-three career person, regardless of the decision, if they’d presented well—made a good case—he’d go out of his way to make the level-three person feel comfortable and compliment them. That kind of stuff gets around.
Riley
I see.
Rove
And if you weren’t well prepared, he wasn’t wagging his finger in your face, saying, “You’re a dumb son of a bitch,” but you knew you could do better. So everybody brought their A game.
Riley
So this functioned well because the President was the ultimate enforcer?
Rove
Yes; he had a process that helped enforce it. The Chief of Staff was important to that process, as was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. I enjoyed being Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in many respects.
Once you get into that job you’d better have an opinion, but better not make that opinion well known early. I’m sort of an opinionated guy, [laughter] but the process only works and serves him if there is a very robust discussion of the issues with candor, openness, and mutual respect. If you can arrive at a consensus, fine; if not, bring it on. He’ll make a decision; he’s comfortable with that. But bring your A game and don’t try an end run. The end run is like a polling thing. Geez, let me make an end run. I’ll go with the other guy just to send you a signal: Don’t do that again.
Perry
Is that his basic personality and his training as a manager and an MBA [master of business administration]? Is it all a package?
Rove
Yes: it’s all a package. I don’t want to underestimate the value of his Harvard experience, because Bush is Peter Drucker personified, in many ways. I read Drucker’s Management, the big tome. I remember when Bush became Governor, thinking, God dang it, this is it in action. This whole concept of aligning authority with responsibility, setting the goal, a vision, and then allowing people to define how to reach the vision. Holding people accountable, having a clarity of underlying principles. This is how he has operated right from the beginning.
I assume part of this is his nature, but I assume part of it is also being a Yale undergraduate in history and a Harvard MBA. I think it’s one of the reasons why he had only two Chiefs of Staff in eight years and people on the staff who are there for five and six and seven years He’s an effective leader.
I don’t begrudge people when they say Obama is hemorrhaging people after 18 to 24 months. Welcome to the real world. It’s a meat grinder. Yet Bush was able to create an environment where people enjoyed working in a place where you could have those kinds of discussions.
He was very good about saying—in a positive way—“You don’t impress me if you’re here at 7:30 or 8:00 at night if you can be home with your family. Just being here occupying your station doesn’t impress me.” Nobody in the West Wing thought that when he left there at 5:30 or 6:00 that he was just going to watch ESPN [Entertainment and Sports Program Network] the rest of the night. At day’s end he received a notebook anywhere from 75 to 150 pages of material to get ready for the next day. Everybody knew he would absorb that, think about it, and at 6:30 the next morning have questions about it, and remember everything that you had written in months past when you had a meeting about it.
Riley
I was going to ask about Andy Card’s operating style, and then get you to tell us a little bit about how it differed from Josh’s. Andy has an image from the outside of being a kind of avuncular person. What is his operating style? Is there a fist in a velvet glove?
Rove
He is very low key. There is no fist there—Because he had the clear backing of the President, he didn’t need to have a velvet glove to grab for the hammer. He could just say, “This is what we’re going to do.”
I had an unusual relationship with him. Cheney warned me at the beginning. He said, “Look, you’ve got to be careful because of your relationship with the President. Not everybody around here has that relationship, so you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to really do your homework, but express your opinion later in the process. Too many people are going to misinterpret what you say. They may think that you know what the President thinks, and you don’t.” He was a lot more polite about it, but that’s what the message was.
Several years in or something there was an interview that Andy gave where he said, “Karl is a formidable adversary.” I never thought of myself as an adversary. I always thought of myself as Andy’s subordinate and colleague. But what in retrospect I took away from that is that Andy was put in a very difficult situation. He’s got Karen Hughes and Karl Rove in the West Wing, who have a much longer and deeper history with the President than he does, who are his subordinates, but have a different relationship. I think that was something that weighed on Andy.
My relationship was always very good and cordial with him, but now I think one of the reasons why he said, “I want you to go do OSI,” was both to keep me occupied and out of his hair and the President’s hair, and also because this function needs to be done, so why don’t I put somebody in charge of doing it who has a relationship with Bush? Not somebody who will need to sell that concept to him, but that if he is in charge of that, Bush will tend to have confidence in it, just like if Karen or Margaret Spellings were in charge of it. In the West Wing, the President had Margaret Spellings, Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, and Clay Johnson [III], Bush’s roommate at Andover and Yale.
Riley
Exactly. That perfectly encapsulates the premise of my question, which is how does this work? On paper it seems to be impossible that it works.
Rove
It works because the guy in charge says, “That is my Chief of Staff. Next to me he is number one, and you work for him.”
A lot of times the President would say, “Have you talked with Andy about this? You have to talk to Andy. Mention this to Andy.”
Milkis
What value do you think there was in having someone who was outside the circle of long-standing Bush friends as Chief of Staff?
Rove
It was very useful. First of all, he had a long-standing relationship with Bush. There was a reason why Bush picked him. He had seen him up close and personal working for his dad and said, “Of all of the people that I have available to me, he will best serve me as my Chief of Staff.”
If he had picked one of his Texans, none of us had that skill set to be the Chief of Staff. Andy did. None of us had the knowledge of how Washington worked in the way that Andy did. Nobody had the knowledge of how the White House worked and the skill set to make it work from the position of the senior staff. Joe Hagin [II] had a knowledge of the White House and knew intimately how to make the administrative side of it hum. But he wouldn’t have had the skill set to be the Chief of Staff. Andy was a unique figure.
Then it turned out that Josh Bolten had a similar set of skills, some of which he had before and some of which he either developed or which became evident while he was in the White House in other jobs.
Milkis
Back to Russell’s question. Was there a difference in their style?
Rove
Hard to say. Yes, there is, because they’re different human beings.
Milkis
They’re very different personalities.
Rove
Similar in many ways. They’re both restrained, they’re both low key, they’re both very pleasant. These are not screamers and yellers or table pounders. They’re both very smart. One of them with a deeper background in the policy side and the other one with a deeper background in the process side, particularly understanding the legislative dynamics, but they’re alike in more ways than they’re different.
One of them we could count on to make certain that at every major Jewish holiday we were explained the intricacies of Jewish ritual, so we all had the explanation of the dreidel. The other one’s wife was a Methodist preacher.
Riley
Any follow-up on that? Is that relationship replicable? Can you take the model that worked in this administration and apply it to a different group of people and have the same outcome?
Rove
I bet so. It might have looked effortless, but it requires a President who sets the tone, creates the climate—Bush does well at playing the good old boy, but he’s constantly thinking about how to make this complex apparatus operate. He is constantly paying attention; he is tweaking it, constantly saying, “My goal is to set the vision. My goal is to ask the tough questions that cause people to stop, hear, and consider. My job is to say, ‘OK, we agreed on that. What’s happening?’” We had meetings on Medicare Part D. One of the HHS [Health and Human Services] experts in the room would say, “Mr. President, here is the testing schedule we need to make this work.” Then months later, the President would ask, “Testing schedule, what’s the latest?” Decision making in the White House requires somebody who really is focused on making the process work.
Riley
Karl, can you remember any instances where the process didn’t work or where some of those who were old-line Texans got cross with the Chief of Staff on anything in particular?
Rove
I’m sure it didn’t work at times, but I never saw systemic failure. When it didn’t work, it was a failure of judgment: we made the wrong decision. I was really impressed how well the policy process and the process for the development of the President’s public statements was run. It required a lot of effort. He wouldn’t tolerate sloppiness on the policy side, so you didn’t get much sloppiness there. If it was sloppy, he’d suggest something to solve it.
Riley
Do you recall any instances of people at lower levels raising complaints about accessibility to the President with respect to the Chief of Staff?
Rove
No. The President was accessible, but not overly so, because again, if you had something important to say, he’d listen. If he didn’t, there was a gentle way he had for moving you on.
Riley
The entire range of questions is prompted by our conversations with other administrations. If you look back at the Chief of Staff operations in earlier Presidents, they almost all end up poorly. Not universally, but every President seems to go through an episode or two of having problems with a Chief of Staff about as far back as you can go.
Milkis
That’s probably true. [Dwight] Eisenhower is the first one to have a Chief of Staff, right? That didn’t work.
Riley
In the ’60s, [Richard] Nixon, maybe not [Gerald] Ford, because he wasn’t there, but certainly [Jimmy] Carter, certainly [Ronald] Reagan, certainly George H. W. Bush, certainly Bill Clinton.
Rove
Reagan has the brilliant James A. Baker III until he moved up.
Milkis
Until they traded.
Riley
Exactly. But that’s what I’m saying. You come to the second term there, you have kind of a train wreck with [Donald] Regan there. So it’s more common than not that the senior staffing arrangement has problems in an administration. It’s striking that from the outside there isn’t any of that. I’m just probing to see do we know enough—
Rove
Part of it is that Bush is really good at sizing up people, figuring out where they would best be put.
Riley
Like a baseball—
Rove
It’s Billy ball. He’s really good at that. I can remember him talking about, even the Cabinet, “OK, that was not as good as we really needed to be, so maybe we’ll make a change later.” But he is really good at sizing up how to get it done and putting people in positions where they can succeed. Look, nobody knows who Joe W. Hagin is. The guy did a spectacular job—
Riley
We know.
Rove
—not only administrating the office and undergoing a major construction project and a major renovation project, but then he plays a critical role when we get off to the wrong start on Homeland Security and he is part of the working group, the PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center] group meeting to plan the Homeland Security bill. Where did that come from? Bush remembered Joe from his dad’s administration and put him in a critical role in the campaign. He did so because in part he wanted to make certain that his instincts about him were right because he was thinking about him; he was thinking two steps ahead about staffing an administration.
In the campaign, he wanted somebody to serve as an independent check on spending, somebody with administrative ability to be a gentle cheapskate. That’s Joe. But also, he wanted to see how Joe performs, because he thinks, This is a guy who when I get elected can run the administrative side of the White House. That’s unusual. He is an executive.
Riley
One more question on this, Sid, and then I had interrupted your trend.
Milkis
I was going to ask what issues led to the most robust discussions or debates among the White House office people in this policy process. What roiled it?
Rove
Lots of things. Were we able to, at the end of the day, resolve them?
Milkis
So there was vigorous debate on a number of issues.
Rove
Vigorous on lots of things. And groping sometimes. What are the possible options, and where do we end up on them? Then some of them we ended up on we weren’t able to execute.
Riley
In your book you indicated that you had not agreed with the President’s decision to put Mike Brown at FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. In the context of what you just said about his being a shrewd judge of talent and a team builder, are there other instances of cases where you felt that his instincts failed him on this point?
Rove
I don’t say his instincts failed him. He did a very good job inside the White House and he did a pretty good job inside the Cabinet, where there are major decisions. But you start getting down in these agencies and there is a process. The process there was that the personnel office relied on outgoing Director Joe Allbaugh’s strong recommendation on behalf of his deputy.
Riley
Right.
Rove
Brownie was the number-two guy there. I didn’t think he had the skill set, but Joe was insistent and the process—You don’t get your way on every appointment, and in this instance Joe got his way on the appointment and convinced the personnel shop that this guy deserved a shot. In all candor, when Bush said, “Way to go, Brownie,” it was after the Governors of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida had all just finished thanking Brown, congratulating him on his response to Katrina in their states.
Riley
Conversely, were there cases where he, from your viewpoint, hit a home run with somebody in a sort of unexpected way?
Rove
Yes, Al [Allan] Hubbard, the second Director of the National Economic Council. I liked Al a lot personally, but I thought, Here is a Harvard MBA classmate who has then gone out and spent his life in the pursuit of financial success. Is that really the guy you want to have in charge of the National Economic Council? He turned out to be one of the best read, most thoughtful people on economic questions. Also had a terrific attitude toward making certain that the President got a wide variety of viewpoints from very sharp people on the economy. So I thought, This will be great. This is going to be a friend of Bush’s. He’s going to be comfortable. We’d better make sure he has a good strong number two. But he turned out to be a dynamic, fantastic, number one.
He understood this stuff. He’d read carefully, he involved himself in a number of organizations, even the Bilderbergers, to keep up on economic issues. So he had the theoretical knowledge and really developed a strong relationship with the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, but also had the practical experience of having actually been inside the economy. I liked him right from the get-go, but I really became enormously respectful of his talents.
Perry
Can I go back to a phrase you used in describing the President and how he worked on policy? You said, “He could play the good old boy, but he knew what he was talking about and he knew what he was dealing with when people came in to brief him, et cetera.” What did you mean by that? That he knew how to play that? What part of his persona is that?
Rove
I think it’s the retail politician. He is very good at making people feel very comfortable around him and putting people at ease. Part of that was to say, “You’re smarter than I am, tell me what I need to know.” Most of the time it was true, they knew more than he did, but he knew a hell of a lot more than most of them thought that he did.
Perry
And you could see this side of him all through your association with him in the Governorship and—
Rove
First in the Governorship. I didn’t see him as up close in the business decisions he made, but I certainly saw in the Governorship and then in the White House. It was a constant thing. Smart people caught on very quickly. He is not a monologue guy, so he asked questions. I think I may have mentioned this to you before: While I was at the White House I was reading a book about William Herndon, about [Abraham] Lincoln, and William Herndon said his law partner’s great ability was to get to the nub of a thing, and I said to myself, That’s Bush. He gets to the nub of a thing pretty quickly.
So when conversations would start going off there, he’d bring them back with a good question, and when they sort of got fuzzy, he’d sharpen them up with a good question. When it came time for the decision, he’d ask a good question. That’s why you came well prepared; it was not going to be a monologue. He’d ask you what he wanted to know, and oftentimes he was picking at what he perceived to be the weakness of any argument.
Milkis
Before 9/11 was he engaged in foreign policy deeply? It would seem his preparation was mainly for domestic—
Rove
It consumed so much of the agenda afterward—
Milkis
Kind of reminds me of Woodrow Wilson saying, “All my preparation has been in domestic policy, then my whole administration—”
Rove
From the campaign, this was an area—Given his father’s experience and given the demands of the campaign, this took a disproportionate share of the time of the issue groups in the campaign. Given a choice between sitting in another meeting about Social Security or having the Vulcans meet again, he’d pick the Vulcans every time, even though his view was that he would have an administration that had to do more with education or other domestic issues.
Milkis
Interesting.
Rove
Part of that also was that foreign policy was not an area he had dealt a lot with as a Governor, compared with, say, education.
Milkis
Right.
Rove
In a way, the foreign policy and defense issues during the campaign were a little bit of self-preservation. He knew less about them than about other things. Even subjects like Social Security, where he would engage in his own tutorial over a four- or five-year period on Social Security, bringing in people to talk to him. José Piñera from Chile happened to be in the United States, and Bush said, “See if he’s coming to Texas. If he’s coming near Texas, I want to see him.” So Piñera was in the Governor’s mansion talking about Social Security modernization. I had some guys from Sweden talking about the Swedish Social Security modernization.
Contrary to popular opinion, Bush is a very curious guy. He was constantly having those kinds of meetings in ’97, ’98, and ’99. The foreign policy stuff he readily recognized was not his forte, and every Texas Governor has to have a foreign policy because we border Mexico and the more problematic foreign nation of Oklahoma. [laughter] But he was engaged in the foreign policy side right from the beginning. After 9/11 it was all consuming.
Milkis
As someone who wanted to be deeply involved in the policy process, did you feel the need to engage yourself in learning about foreign policy?
Rove
Oh, yes.
Milkis
There wasn’t a division of labor before 9/11 where you were focused mainly—
Rove
No. Every opportunity I had to sit in on something like that—It’s like having a graduate education. You can listen to some really smart people talk about something, whether it’s foreign policy or domestic-side issues or the economy. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, you have a chance to be around some very smart people and listen and learn.
Riley
What were the boundaries of your engagement in foreign policy? Was there some formal—
Rove
Formal boundaries, yes. I was not a member of the National Security Council or the War Cabinet. After 9/11 I had some things to do with messaging—how do we explain what we’re doing and the defense of what we were doing—but no, I’d go into the Oval Office and hear him talk about it and ask a question or two. I had my turn in the barrel doing the meetings with families who had lost a loved one. He might say, “What do you think” about this or that, or just want to have a moment where he said, “Here is what I’m thinking about.” But he had lots of smart people advising him.
Riley
Did you have the highest-level clearances?
Rove
I think I had the highest level.
Milkis
Nobody ever threw you out. But you must have been involved in the discussions that led to the Department of Homeland Security that first—You must have been involved in that.
Rove
Yes. Didn’t make any difference.
Milkis
That’s what is so interesting about 9/11, it is the merger of domestic—
Rove
And the more you got into it, the more sense it made. I mean, what is the Department of Agriculture doing with an agency that looks at bioterrorism? Why do you have so many different parts of the government with counterterrorism responsibilities? We lived in a different world after 9/11, and it made sense to reform the government to deal with that challenge.
Riley
Were there any things on the domestic agenda that in retrospect you wish you had had at the top of the queue when you first came into office in 2001? Because 2001 interrupts the planned sequencing, I’m sure.
Rove
Less 2001 than 2005. I do think you could make the argument that we would have been better served had we moved immigration earlier and then tackled Social Security earlier than we did. I know that it made sense to move Social Security to 2005. You could make the argument that we should have moved it as soon as [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan was finished with his work. The longer he was alive, the more moral authority we had on the issue.
Milkis
When did he finish his work?
Rove
I want to say 2003, maybe 2004. But then he was in ill health by the time it finished and was not able to carry it forward.
Riley
I’m trying to reflect back on the period before 9/11 just to see if there’s anything that we ought to talk about. You address a little bit the [James] Jeffords problem in your book.
Milkis
I’m also interested to hear a little bit about stem cell. That was the first important speech the President—it wasn’t what I was expecting. I remember being a little surprised.
Rove
We were surprised too. [laughter] It was something we couldn’t avoid. We had to make a decision about it. The question was would we or would we not allow government funds to be used in the destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines for research. There was a lot of pressure from [Arlen] Specter and others to allow it. The concern was, were we crossing a moral line? We had a lot of discussions about it.
It culminated in meetings with Leon Kass and another bioethicist whom we had asked Kass, deliberately, “Find somebody who is on the opposite side of the issue—”
Milkis
Interesting.
Rove
“—and who is comfortable coming in and debating it in front of the President.” It turned out that Leon and this guy were pretty much in the same place, unbeknownst to Leon. Leon thought the other bioethicist was someplace else. This was a tortured decision. I thought it was the right decision, and history has proven it such. By buying time for the science to catch up with it, we now can create these stem cell lines without the destruction of human embryos. So we haven’t crossed this moral line of creating life for the purpose of healing and making better existing life. But the decision was not popular at the time, that’s for certain.
Perry
Is that one of those examples you were telling us about from the very beginning about trying to plan ahead? Not only intrusion, but also being pushed from the outside, the Juvenile Diabetes people and the Parkinson’s people. You’re just pushed to the point where you can’t ignore it.
Milkis
Nancy Reagan.
Rove
There was a legislative initiative, too.
Milkis
That’s right.
Rove
Funding for NIH [National Institutes of Health] was coming our way with this, and we had to make a decision about it. We had pro-life people saying no, we had the Catholic Church saying no. We had Juvenile Diabetes saying yes, as well as those with Parkinson’s and NIH researchers. Then we had a lot of for-profit entities that were pushing for this, under the guise of advancement of human health. Their real concern was the quicker we can create these lines, the better off we’ll be financially.
Milkis
Were you a little uneasy about this being the President’s first major—
Rove
Yes, but we didn’t have a choice.
Milkis
You just felt you had to go on TV—
Rove
We had a funding bill coming our way. So when one of the 12 appropriations bills from the NIH was coming our way, in all likelihood if we did nothing, there would be a provision in it.
Milkis
I understand that you had to decide something, but what I’m curious about is the decision from the President to go on national TV. You have to pick and choose those.
Rove
Yes, you do. But it was such an emotional debate. We felt that we had the best shot of explaining an unpopular decision. It would be better to explain it openly, plainly, and simply. Over the course of his deliberations, he became convinced this was a big moral issue. This was the moment where science and ethics collide. If you want to look at it strictly from the scientific perspective, you can make a very convincing case that this makes it easier. Just go ahead. There are lots of these embryos available in fertility clinics. One argument made to us was this is a way for women to earn money.
Milkis
Yes.
Rove
At the core of the support was this belief that ultimately we would be able to heal everybody. If you had a disease, all we had to do was take your genomic material and create a fetus that mimicked you and we’d be able to heal you of whatever ailment you had. Bush thought that was a deeply dangerous road, to harvest material from life to create life to make us better. That caused him some squeamishness. But he did not make a decision until after the bioethicists met and then he considered their arguments.
Bush is really good at saying, “I’m not going to make a decision until X,” and then not doing it. He will make a decision when the moment comes, but he is not one of these people who says, “Gee, I’m going to make a decision today and then change my mind tomorrow.” It’s like, I am going to give myself a chance to collect all the information. I have things that are causing me to lean this way, but I am consciously not going to make a decision until I feel I have all the information to make a decision. That allowed him to have an inclination to be here and then ultimately to be open to being convinced to being over here.
Riley
When he made the decision in this case, did you ever sense that he was anguished about it later?
Rove
No, not later. Once he made the decision he understood how powerfully some people felt about this. He had family and friends who came to him and said—and the Juvenile Diabetes people were extraordinarily energetic in their lobbying efforts. I write in the book about the one in Georgia where the fund-raiser says, “They tell me if only the President will approve this that my son will be healed.” Well, that wasn’t what we were hearing, even from the proponents of robust testing using embryos.
Perry
Karl, that speech was in August of ’01?
Rove
Yes.
Perry
Do I remember correctly that the President delivered it in Texas, from the ranch?
Rove
I think that may be it, but—
Perry
Because I can remember—
Riley
He was outside, wasn’t he?
Perry
I think I remember seeing the seal. Did you have a seal that had the White House logo but said something like Western White House? The reason I’m asking, I’m just trying to think in terms of using the backdrops, how to pick the backdrops, particularly on 9/11. You mention in your book about how the President wasn’t speaking at first from the Oval, wasn’t speaking with Congress in the background. So maybe that answers my question, that you don’t have a firm memory of that.
Rove
I think it was from the White House before he departed.
Riley
It doesn’t say in the briefing book.
Milkis
I thought it was from the White House, but I can’t swear to it.
Riley
My memory is probably confused by the Katrina speech, which was—
Milkis
The Katrina speech was—
Riley
That we talked about.
Milkis
In front of the Andrew Jackson—
Perry
Jackson Square.
Riley
What about his relationship with the military, again before 9/11, both the military and his senior national security team? How was that developing?
Rove
He had given [Donald] Rumsfeld the go-ahead for modernization. That was a big part of the campaign, the Citadel speech. Rumsfeld was chosen in large measure because he was so in sync with that, and also knew the Pentagon and could actually make it happen. Ironically enough, in my recollection of our early months in national security issues, the administration is trying to kill the Crusader system to free up funds for modernization. It was a lesson on how difficult it was going to be. Here was a system that was clearly designed to meet the challenge of 5,000 Soviet tanks coming through the Fulda Gap in Germany that wasn’t there any longer. Yet it took an enormous amount of muscle to kill it, raising questions about how difficult it was to modernize the military.
One of the most powerful benefits that President Obama received from his predecessor was a military that transformed from large units capable of stopping the Soviet challenge in central Europe to a structure that was lighter, more mobile, more lethal, and quicker and easier to deploy. You didn’t have to worry about putting gigantic tanks on convoys to Europe; you were worried about how do you take the Special Operators or the 10th Mountain or somebody else, take brigades out of them and drop them into someplace across the world 24 hours later. That’s what the focus was on during 2001, the essential early steps of transformation.
Riley
Sometimes in looking back at history the picture is of a President coming in who is sort of feeling his way along with the military, learning the ground, sort of getting his sea legs. Did that President have that experience?
Rove
You mean with the military itself?
Riley
With the military and with their newfound position as the world’s most powerful political figure.
Rove
I don’t know; that’s something you’d have to ask him. From my perspective, the ordinary people in the military he had an affinity with.
Riley
Right.
Rove
So whether it was Fort Hood or Fort Bliss or just simply the Texas culture, the military looked up to him. To the degree they knew anything about him, it was that his dad had been in the military, he’d been in the military, and he was going to restore dignity to the White House. And he treated them with enormous respect right from the start. But the other part of it—I think the relationship started off well with the Joint Chiefs and the rest of the military’s leadership because he had a clarity about what it was he wanted to do.
Inside the Defense Department, there were reform elements that were looking for leadership. The entire Defense Department wasn’t saying, “Change our structure,” but there were elements inside the military, particularly in the upper echelons, smart people who recognized that we had a force structure that was designed to meet a threat that had gone away.
Riley
But from your perspective there was a comfort level on the part of the President with this aspect of the job pretty much from Day One? It wasn’t a role that he had to grow into?
Rove
He had to grow into it. Any President has to grow into the issue of being Commander in Chief. Sometimes you’re forced to, like the events of 9/11.
I think one of the reasons the military was so powerfully in his corner, and ordinary enlisted personnel were so passionate about their Commander in Chief, was what he displayed in the way of grit after 9/11.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
But before 9/11 I think he had a very good relationship with Rumsfeld, [Paul] Wolfowitz, and the Joint Chiefs, and there were lots of things set in motion before 9/11 that came to fruition after 9/11.
Riley
You didn’t detect any missteps or any—
Rove
There might have been, but I didn’t see them.
Riley
Was the episode with the Chinese shooting down the aircraft historically important at all for us?
Rove
It is Bush’s first real-life exposure to foreign policy crisis management. At certain points he’s mystified. He is trying to get hold of the Chinese Premier, who is in South America, and can’t get hold of him for two days.
Riley
Two days?
Rove
The better part of two days, I think it was. He is mystified. The Chinese are dysfunctional as the old guy is going out and the new guy is coming in and the old guy is making his tour. They don’t want to either take or return his call because they haven’t figured out what to do. In the meantime, we have an aircraft down on the ground on an island off China and they’re stripping every piece of equipment they can off of the plane and the President can’t get the Chinese Premier to return his phone call.
Riley
Is there a lesson for him out of this other than the Chinese are—
Milkis
Hard to track down. [laughter]
Riley
They leave their cell phones on silent.
Rove
Yes, it drew his attention as to what happens to big regimes in moments of transition.
Riley
I guess the question was prompted by wondering whether there is anything that can be learned from that episode that then tees up the leadership that you just defined in the post-9/11 era.
Rove
No. It does go back to the point we talked about earlier. We spent weeks dealing with this. This was like a three-week episode before everything is settled and crates of pieces of airplane are being put on U.S. transports. But it’s recognition you don’t control your agenda.
Riley
Sure.
[BREAK]
Milkis
We want to talk about Jeffords, right? I read what you said in the book, that Bush wasn’t as pissed as you were?
Rove
No, he wasn’t. He understood it, but I just wasn’t so accepting. My problem was also I had to deal with Jeffords after, in the 2000 campaign, when he insisted on pushing aside the secretary of state, later Governor, who had been our chairman there. Jeffords insisted on taking charge of the Vermont campaign. He had no reelection difficulties that fall, but he demanded that he control the Vermont Victory Committee funds so that he was in charge of the money from the national committee. So to then retrospectively say, “I’ve been against Bush all along and I’m switching parties because I found his leadership repugnant” after he had said, “I must be the leader of his delegation to the national convention and chairman of his campaign,” I thought it was hypocritical and sanctimonious.
Riley
Let me ask you this about—Again, the pre-9/11 period, if you can reflect back on it. Were you surprised at how Congress looks from your perch in the White House, and if so, how so?
Rove
I was part of that Texas crowd that was sort of taken aback by how partisan it was. You had things like [George] Miller and [Edward M.] Kennedy willing to work on No Child Left Behind, but the vast preponderance of Democrats in the House were just hostile to Bush. He’d stolen the election.
Minority Leader Dick Gephardt was a really good guy, but before Bush got sworn in, Gephardt was on Meet the Press, and [Tim] Russert asked him two or three times whether Bush was legitimately elected President and he refused to answer. Then after 9/11, Bush literally is transparent with him, saying, “Here is what I’m going to do on a stimulus measure, and the number one thing that the economists tell me would help is to cut the corporate tax rate.” He says, “We can’t go for that, but we can support expensing and depreciation.” Bush swaps out the corporate tax rate cut for Gephardt’s expensing and depreciation and then Gephardt came out and attacked it.
I thought foolishly that there would be a limit to that. There was with some players, serious legislators like Miller and Kennedy, but with a lot of Democrats, it was like, I can’t get past the “D” behind my name. It was a little eye opening.
Riley
Your relationship with Nick Calio and his operation, was it very close?
Rove
The dirty little secret is that everybody who is a senior aide to the President gets deployed by the legislative shop. You’re given your assignments.
Riley
Is that right?
Rove
It makes a lot of sense. There are just not enough people in the legislative shop to handle everybody, and you want somebody who thinks they know you, who feels comfortable picking up the phone and calling the White House. I hadn’t thought of it that way before I got there, but it was very smart. It also requires there to be a big person to be Leg Director, because you’re depending on your colleagues to deal with either a big player in the House and virtually every Senator, to make them feel like they can pick up the phone, call somebody at the White House, and know that it is going to be passed on to the President. That requires a level of trust and tact on the part of the Leg Director.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
Whether it was Roy Blunt in the House, or Orrin Hatch or Harry Reid in the Senate, you needed them to say, “I need to get a message to Bush. I’ll pick up the phone and call my White House contact.”
Riley
Yes.
Rove
You don’t want to have it be just the Chief of Staff or the President if possible, because they’ve got a lot on their plates. Calio was very smart, I thought, about that.
Riley
I don’t think I’ve heard anything similar in any other administration. Sid, do you recall when we were talking with the CLs [congressional liaison] in the other places whether they willfully carved out a piece of their turf to give to somebody else in the White House?
Milkis
I don’t think so.
Rove
You had to tell him what you heard.
Riley
Of course.
Rove
You get a phone call from Harry Reid, you had to tell three people. If appropriate, the President, at the appropriate time the Chief of Staff, and always the legislative chief. I invited Harry Reid to my house for dinner and then picked up the tab when he invited us to go out for dinner, incidentally, at Jack Abramoff’s restaurant, which I always thought was sort of an odd way for Reid to reciprocate.
Milkis
I have to confess I didn’t know Abramoff had a restaurant.
Rove
Neither did I, beforehand, but he had a restaurant and a deli.
Milkis
Just one quick follow-up on this partisanship. I hear you there, the bitterness over the election, but partisanship had been building in the Congress. It’s not new. His dad, Bush 41, was kind of shocked with the intensity of the partisanship.
Rove
I guess I thought that there would be this moment afterward where it would lessen. We see this in Texas. Texas politics is a blood sport, but after elections it sort of disappears for a while, and here it didn’t.
Milkis
It’s like permanent campaigning.
Rove
Right, and then I also thought that over time Bush’s attitude toward Congress and how he would talk about Congress would help ameliorate it, and I don’t think it did. That may just have been—There was a great deal of unity after 9/11, but then the battle over Homeland Security, where it quickly became are you for the labor unions or not, and then the Iraq War, particularly after things started going badly. I think that all just mitigated against it.
But you’ll notice that Bush never engaged in, or allowed the White House to engage in, the kind of name calling that was routine between [Newton] Gingrich and Clinton in the 1990s.
Milkis
That’s true, yes.
Riley
Is there any piece of your 9/11 story that you didn’t record in your book that was too sensitive or—
Rove
I pretty much dropped it all in there.
Riley
A sequence of questions: Did the President change materially after that tragic event? Did the nature of the White House organization change? We talked about the Chief of Staff’s office. Did your portfolio substantially change after 9/11?
Rove
I think he changed. There is something horrific about having to order people into harm’s way and knowing that people die. So yes, you could tell that it wore on him. The irony is it also drew more of his time and attention into the war side and the international side, but he made it clear that he didn’t want to stop on the domestic side. So it was sort of like he rode with a less firm hand on the domestic side and entrusted people more.
Riley
OK.
Rove
This might be an interesting thing for you to explore with Margaret Spellings and with Larry Lindsey, but you could see him saying, in essence, “I’ve got to limit to how much my attention can be drawn into things other than the war, encourage everybody to keep going, but I’m going to say you figure it out.” And there were some “you figure it out” moments. But it just required more of everybody, and everybody sort of rose to it. Some people burned out a little bit quicker than they might otherwise, but I think by and large everybody rose to it.
What was the other half of the question?
Riley
There were two other—
Perry
White House organization.
Rove
Oh, the White House organization. Obviously a lot more time was taken up then by the War Cabinet and the national security. You start seeing more of the President’s schedule, particularly in the early part of the day, devoted to contact with—Rather than at nine o’clock in the morning maybe talking to [Dennis] Hastert, he is talking to [Hamid] Karzai or doing a secure SVTS [secure video teleconference system] with the team in Baghdad or the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] is in there, not simply with the daily brief, but 30 minutes more on the latest effort here or there. So there was a lot more on the schedule, obviously, as you’d expect, that was devoted to the War on Terror and a lot less to everything else.
Riley
Does that consequently move you a bit further out of the President’s orbit?
Rove
Yes, I’m not in the War Cabinet. I think everybody who wasn’t fighting the war, and this again would be an interesting question to ask Margaret, felt more pressure because it was like OK, it’s got to be crisper. When we go in there, we’d better be able to resolve this thing, because we can’t go on and on. We’ve got to find different ways to emphasize that, because he’s not going to be able to. But particularly when it came to the resolution of policy issues it was like, “OK, let’s really see how much we can get done before we have to go in and occupy his time.” When we do occupy his time, you’d better have everything crystallized in everybody’s mind and make it crisp. I think people by and large did that.
I was impressed by how serious the West Wing was at the beginning. I was really impressed with how seriously people took their duties after 9/11 and adjusted. You didn’t hear people bitching and moaning about “I don’t get to see him as much as I used to. Our time has been cut back because he’s got this stupid War Cabinet.” You just didn’t get that.
Milkis
I’m just wondering what you were focusing on in terms of policy after 9/11. Were you focusing on some of the Homeland Security legislation?
Rove
That was more in 2002.
Milkis
No Child Left Behind passes at the end of 2001, right?
Rove
In 2001, right. In fact, we go out to sign the bill, and Judd and Ted Kennedy travel around with George Miller and John Boehner. It was really one of those weird moments. It was just great. They did a lot of good work, the four of them.
In 2002 we had Homeland Security; we had the rest of the domestic agenda. We have the energy taskforce, which is starting to maneuver. We have the creation of the Moynihan Commission and its activities, which have to be monitored. Then we have the 2002 midterms. We also have a lot of work to be done that involves people on the preparation for the vote on Capitol Hill on the Iraq War. Remember, this is not on our timetable. This vote is pressed by—
Milkis
That was interesting.
Rove
By [Thomas] Daschle’s statement to the press.
Milkis
You thought it should not be before the election.
Rove
Right. It should not have been. Bush didn’t want it to be. He felt that would taint it with politics.
Milkis
That’s interesting.
Rove
Then Daschle said, in essence, “We’re expecting to have the vote before the election,” which threw us for a little bit of a loop. But we had to work on that. After that we had the vote in Britain, which I got drawn into because we had to convince British conservatives not to bail on Tony Blair just because it was Blair.
Riley
How engaged were you in that?
Rove
I was helping a little because I knew some of the British conservatives. Liam Fox, who later became the Defense Minister in the Conservative government, was helpful. There was a group of MPs [Members of Parliament] that were helpful.
Riley
Were you talking with them on the phone?
Rove
Yes.
Riley
Walk us through—
Rove
I was just talking to them on the phone and saying, “OK, what can we do? What do you need from us? Is there anything that we can do to help you solidify the Conservative Party not to oppose him?” If they had opposed him and then the Lib/Dems and then the left wing of the Labour Party had split, then Blair could have easily gone down in defeat.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
Bush told him, “Don’t bring it to a vote if you think you’re going to lose. It’s more important for me to have you where you are than for us to lose you in this.” It would have brought down the government.
Riley
So you had clients there?
Rove
No, not former clients; only in Sweden, of all places. But I had British friends, people I had known from over the years.
Riley
Was there any serious discussion of a formal declaration of war after 9/11?
Rove
Not at my level. I suspect there were discussions about it, but again, we’re facing a nonstate actor, so it’s sort of hard. All the lawyers said the use of force resolution is adequate. But we were talking about a government in the form of the Taliban. You have to cough up [Osama] Bin Laden and al-Qaeda or there will be consequences. This was felt to cover both the state actor and the Taliban, which was the host, but the principal focus was al-Qaeda, which was a nonstate actor.
Riley
Let me ask you a general question that may lead to some follow-ups. There is a lot of discussion after the Bush administration, particularly after 9/11, about the extent to which the President was committed to restoring power to the Presidency, which certainly happens after 9/11. There are some authors who have tracked the roots of that with various people who populated the administration. Was this something that you were aware of at the time or participated in? Was it your impression that President Bush in coming into office in 2001 wanted to do something to restore the health of the Presidency?
Rove
He said he wanted to restore the dignity of the office. That was the deliberate one. I think he did. Every President is conscious of his prerogatives. He was conscious that the prerogatives of the Presidency had been worn away principally through scandal and disuse, but he wanted to restore that.
I’ve seen these theories about Cheney and the unitary Presidency and so forth. There comes a point at which you do have discussions about how appropriate is it for a President to do this or that. The President did want to have a strong Presidency. But the Presidency is strong. I think this is overblown. Every President is concerned about the prerogatives of the Presidency. The irony is Bush took a couple of powers of the Presidency and in essence you can’t say he weakened it, perhaps, but you can’t say that these things necessarily strengthened the Presidency.
For example, he very rarely used the power of commutation and pardon, which is an unlimited power of the Presidency. He insisted on a process that minimized this. There had to be either an obvious miscarriage of justice, a serious recognition by the defendant that they had acted wrongly and then done something with their life to turn things around, support by the prosecutor or his successor and the judge or his successor that this was appropriate, and it had to go through a panel at DOJ [Department of Justice] before it ever got to the White House.
That was weakening his power. It is not the central power of the Presidency, but it is an unlimited power. It showed Bush’s attitude, which was, “I want to put it in a process and constrain it because I’m concerned about unlimited power.” You saw this to a lesser extent—I had one other example on that—
Riley
I’ve got one I might want to float past you.
Rove
Go ahead.
Riley
The use of the veto.
Rove
Well, yes, but even before that, signing statements.
Milkis
I was going to ask about signing statements.
Rove
Signing statements—His attitude was, “I have an affirmative obligation by the oath of my office to declare if I think an element is unconstitutional.” Congress obviously does things all the time that violate this one particular core decision involving Congress trying to act in an executive manner, [Jagdish] Chadha v. INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]. Bush’s attitude was, I’m going to be very explicit in the signing statements so that the Congress knows what I believe my constitutional obligation requires me to ignore. I’m not going to hide it from them if I think there is a problem with a statute, so they have immediate recourse to the courts.
Milkis: So why not veto the legislation, which is his constitutional power?
Rove
Because you’re talking about a large piece of legislation with a number of provisions in it.
Milkis
You don’t have a line-item veto.
Rove
Yes, you don’t have a line-item veto, but nonetheless, a President does have the responsibility by the oath of their office to defend and protect the Constitution, not to do something that is unconstitutional. Bush’s attitude was, “I’m going to be very serious about these signing statements and be very explicit about what I’m not going to do in that law so that I constrain the power of the Presidency by giving people a chance to go sue me in court and force me to do it if the courts hold that I’m acting in an inappropriate manner.” Not to be too contemporary in it, but we looked at the issue of does the President have a unilateral authority to declare a class of individuals not subject to the immigration laws of the United States and concluded no.
You have a specific responsibility in several parts of the statutes in specific instances with specific standards not to apply the law to individuals, but there is no ability under any immigration law on the books to grant abeyance, deference for a class of people.
Milkis
Yes.
Rove
So we didn’t do it.
Milkis
There were discussions about it. Very interesting.
Riley
So your take on this is that there is an inclination on the part of the President to try to empower the Presidency, but he is dealing with this not under some broad umbrella theory where he is actively seeking out avenues, but—
Rove
The unitary theory of the Presidency would say, as some people advocated, you don’t need to go to Congress to get a use of force authorization. His attitude was, “I want to go to the Congress. I believe it would be better for the country if we take military action with Congress supporting it.” Also there is a belief that he needed to ask the Congress for the use—It was not a response to an imminent threat of attack on the United States in which, “Yes, I’m going.” But this was to remove a threat to the United States’s security interests in the region.
And remember, even after 9/11 we get a use of force authorization to empower us because we’re dealing, in this instance, with a nonstate actor, so we want to make certain that we have the continued authority to go after these people. When they move out of Afghanistan and go to Pakistan and then show up in Yemen, you have to have the ability to go after them.
Riley
I guess a lot of the subsequent reliances on Presidential power would cite both the constitutional provision as well as the authorization for use of military force to make sure everything was covered.
Rove
Right. Suspenders and belt.
Riley
To go back to the veto, there wasn’t one used until 2006, I believe. Very late.
Rove
Don’t we veto stem cell? Stem cell is a veto.
Perry
Yes, I just read that.
Riley
Stem cell is a veto early in the first term?
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
It would have to be.
Riley
That’s the exception.
Milkis
Because after Bush makes the ruling, then Congress restores—
Riley
That’s the exception.
Rove
The reason for the paucity of vetoes, is there was a paucity of things that he felt necessary to veto. We had very strong support among the House Members, which gave us leverage. We had control in the Senate for four out of six, four out of eight, total. But the Congress generally, particularly when it came to spending matters, gave us our top-line numbers. They didn’t give us the internals, and we had a constant battle over earmarks. Particularly the House was run by top-down decision greased by toughness on committee assignments, leavened by generosity with earmarks.
Roy Blunt, at a breakfast in the White House mess, read me the riot act about guidance from Mitch Daniels, who was OMB Director. Most of these earmarks are never voted on. They’re included in so-called report language promulgated by the staff and adopted by committee without a vote afterward. Daniels sent out this missive to agencies saying you’re not authorized to spend any money on any project that is listed in report language without coming to the OMB for permission, which will not be forthcoming. This just drove Congressmen and Senators up the wall.
So Blunt is reading me the riot act in the middle of the White House mess and I’m looking around at my colleagues and they’re just mortified. I’m getting my ass chewed out by Blunt, who is mild mannered, but he was that day really a little irritated with our interference, and he’s the Whip. His boss is Tom DeLay and Blunt is losing one of his tools of getting the votes.
Riley
So the absence of vetoes was more the pragmatic reaction to what you were getting from Congress rather than a principled—
Rove
He had veto authority and he knew it. There were some things that I think he might have been inclined to veto, but for him it was always a question of relative. OK, Nancy Pelosi kept insisting on, in any of these economic measures that we had basically a rebate, that you give a$150 rebate or $250 rebate to a certain class of people, which the economists said had no impact whatsoever in stimulating the economy, but the Democrats insisted on it. If Bush wanted to be a hard-ass, he could have said, “I’m vetoing this bill. Take this stupid provision out, because it has no economic impact, and send it back.” But he had a more nuanced view of how Washington works and what a President ought to do. His idea was the President ought to take into account reasonable differences with the Congress and do things that he might not want to do if he had everything under his control, but that there was an appetite in Congress to have happen.
Riley
Was John Yoo somebody you knew early on?
Rove
I didn’t know him well, but I knew him. I knew him.
Riley
Did you have anything to do with his appointment?
Rove
No. I suspect we checked off at some point; the Office of Political Affairs had to vet these to make certain we didn’t—We had one guy Colin [Powell] wanted to appoint. He had not only campaigned for [Albert, Jr.] Gore—We had people who were Democrats in the administration—but he had made some very serious comments after the election regarding Bush’s intelligence or lack thereof. Colin wanted to appoint him to something and I refused to sign off on it, which earned me, let’s say, Colin’s scorn for a little while.
Milkis
Is that when he made you do the pushups?
Rove
No, that was another moment like that.
Riley
That’s what I was asking, whether it originated—
Milkis
Give me 20.
Rove
He didn’t want me to do the 20.
Riley
Could you do 20 now if we ask you?
Rove
No.
Milkis
Could you do them then?
Rove
Yes, I did it then. I wasn’t not going to do it then. I have the picture by the official White House photographer.
Milkis
I wasn’t sure you really did them. I saw the picture.
Rove
I was doing them. Colin gets down on his knees and puts the fist there so I have to bump his fist, and by God, I’m going to do them. If I walk out in my hallway and drop dead, I’m doing them.
Riley
Excellent.
Rove
I knew what that was.
Riley
Any more questions on this unitary executive or the Presidential power question? If not, we will move ahead. You mentioned earlier that one of the big things was the 2002 midterms. In your book you suggest that you had had a role, an important role, I think, in helping to identify candidates. Could you tell us about that, how that comes to you and the process, who some of the people were?
Milkis
I just have one quick question about that. I’m assuming that after the Jeffords thing—I’m sure you were worried about 2002 before, but this must have focused you like a laser on that midterm campaign—
Rove
Right.
Milkis
—and the importance of President Bush and you playing a big role. Is that a fair predicate?
Rove
Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, the Jeffords defection—
Milkis
Better to control the Senate than not control the Senate.
Rove
Suddenly everybody shifted. It was a big change.
Riley
Were there recriminations against Nick Calio?
Rove
No. There was, “Why did this happen?” but you had Nick Calio and Margaret Spellings doing everything they possibly could to assuage him. He was asking for multi–tens of billions of dollars—
Milkis
Special ed.
Rove
He wanted it to be put into mandatory spending and to have a formula that would guarantee future automatic increases. This would be a huge entitlement, it would bust the budget, and—here’s the issue. These special ed programs, they have a nice name and there are a whole bunch of kids who do need special assistance, but the funding—There are lots of questions from the inside of the economic world as to the efficacy of the programs as they were then designed. We were going to take a bad system that was having bad outcomes and simply guarantee a gigantic amount of money on an ongoing mandatory basis with no reforms whatsoever. Jeffords was threatening, “Do this or you’re going to lose me.”
At the end of the day it would have been horrific had we caved. Then everybody else would have said, “You know what? To get my vote you’ve got to do something else.” No, there were no recriminations. There were a lot of mystified folks asking, Why the hell is he doing this? Jeffords had been a lifelong Republican. Colleagues who loved him were personally hurt. I think part of it had to do with that he was term-limited out as a committee chairman. This was about more than what he claimed it was—mandatory funding for special education—which was this impossible demand.
He had to know we wouldn’t agree to it. It was so impossible a demand for us to accede to that this was a case of, “I’m going to ask you to do something I know you can’t give me in order that I can make an escape that will guarantee me a committee chairmanship and other stuff that I’m not going to get if I remain.”
Riley
Ok, let’s go on to 2002.
Rove
The object was to figure out where did we have a shot to win and who was the most likely candidate to get there, and then how could we use the prestige and allure of the White House in order to get us there. We had a very bright young speaker of the house in Minnesota who wanted to run for the Senate. We had the former Democratic mayor of St. Paul. It was clear that Norm Coleman [Jr.] had a better shot of winning this than did Tim Pawlenty. So I called up Pawlenty and said, “We just want to tell you that we’re behind Norm Coleman and hope you’ll run for Governor instead. If you do persist in the race, I don’t want you to be surprised by the fact that we’re encouraging people to muscle up behind Norm Coleman.” Called Georgia, called [Clarence] Saxby Chambliss, who was in the Congress, and said, “If you run, we’ll move heaven and earth to get you there.” Did the same with Lamar Alexander.
Milkis
North Carolina.
Rove
Elizabeth Dole. We were not doing this unilaterally. We were talking to our people inside the state and the Senate.
Riley
Bush people.
Rove
Bush people and the party people inside these individual states.
Milkis
Did you get any pushback from the local party people about the Presidency interfering in these—
Rove
Some, but it was not over the general principle. It was, “Why are you pushing against my man Pawlenty?”
Milkis
OK, it wasn’t a defense of their prerogative.
Rove
No, in fact—state chairman, national committeeman, committeewoman, Bush chairman, Bush finance chairman, Bush leadership, we were talking to them and seeing if there was a consensus and if there was a preponderance behind the candidate.
Riley
But this is unusual.
Rove
Yes, it is. But it’s a big—
Milkis
Not unprecedented.
Rove
It’s a gutsy call on Bush’s part. Midterms are not necessarily nice to White House parties. The question was, were we going to be willing to expand influence in order to try and have a different outcome in the House and the Senate?
Riley
This is Bush’s call?
Rove
Yes, it had to be. I couldn’t decide and then execute it all by myself.
Milkis
But I’m sure that this was something you wanted to do. You’re a historian. You know nobody had done this since FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt], right?
Riley
When we did the congressional liaison session in 2003, I remember Dick Neustadt, one of the last appearances there, said—I think he used the word “cheeky” at the time.
Milkis
I looked back at Presidential involvement in midterm elections and I don’t think there has been anything on this scale. Roosevelt carried on the purge campaign. That was the most dramatic, but—
Rove
We went into it with eyes wide open. First of all, we would have to reduce primaries wherever we could, recruit the best candidate, reduce the likelihood of primaries, and then raise an ungodly amount of money for them, which meant that the President would have to commit himself to an extraordinary effort on behalf of these candidates.
Milkis
And a risky effort, because if they lost—
Rove
Right.
Rove
I’m trying to remember where else we were involved in 2002.
Riley
Only in Senate races?
Rove
No, House races too. There it was more muscle. For example, the President went, twice, to Indiana CD2 [Second Congressional District]. Most congressional candidates are likely to get one Presidential event. Chris Chocola got two, one in the spring and one in the fall, both of them aimed at raising money and profile.
Riley
Who were you after there?
Rove
We were after the seat. We weren’t after anybody.
Riley
Who was in the seat?
Rove
Can’t remember, but it was an incumbent Democrat and the object was just to get a Republican in there.
Milkis
Is that the district just south of Indianapolis?
Rove
No, it’s the northeastern corner of the state, South Bend, now held by Jackie Walorski, which was previously held by Joe Donnelly, who defeated Chocola in 2006. But I’m trying to remember where else we had. We did have Georgia, North Carolina. This would be the class of 2008, 2014, the seats coming up. So Louisiana, Arkansas, I’m trying to remember where else. Anyway, it’s in the book.
Riley
You did weigh in in Louisiana and Arkansas as well.
Rove
Yes. But the key gets were Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and there is one other that was particularly successful for us.
Riley
And you just don’t remember any pushback?
Rove
There were people—Tim Pawlenty’s people were unhappy.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
But on the other hand they sort of got it. We also had people that we tried to help, that we tried to keep in the Congress. For example, we told Connie [Constance] Morella we’d do anything we can—Even though she was not a straight party vote, we said we’ll do everything we can to keep you in. What can we do to help you? Senate was basically aimed at getting control. How many seats could we get to gain control and where could we get them, and then move heaven and earth to make it happen.
Riley
Was this possible because you were dealing with a wartime President?
Rove
Partly, but also the nature of the playing board helped us. Georgia, North Carolina—We’re talking Republican states. The President was popular. We’re not certain how transferable it is. You can’t just simply, by blessing somebody—but you can help raise the resources. So go do two fund-raisers for Lamar Alexander. Go do three fund-raisers for Saxby Chambliss. But at the end of the campaign, we basically determined that the President would go wherever the polling data of the campaigns indicated that he would be a plus. We wouldn’t force ourselves on anyone.
We systematically worked through, and every one of them said, unfortunately, “We want you to come.” So we’re taking five or six days and for example, dropping into a huge airport rally for Lamar in the tri-cities area in eastern Tennessee. The main thing was get him in there, muscle up the resources at the committees and the individual campaigns. At the end of the campaign, if we were in for a penny, we were in for a pound. If it was helpful for him to appear, we went and appeared.
Milkis
Didn’t you guys test-drive some of these grassroots that would become so important in 2004?
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
Then 2002 was the first time?
Rove
No, 2001. We started in 2001 and tested more in ’02 and ’03.
Milkis
Where? A place like Jersey and Virginia?
Rove
Local elections in Virginia 2001, and 2003 in Mississippi. We were field-testing all kinds of things. In Virginia in 2001 we were doing mail and phone tests on precinct levels, lots of A/B testing. Make these kinds of phone calls in this precinct and don’t make them in this precinct and then evaluate the difference.
Milkis
Did you have a large number of volunteers in 2002? I know you had enormous, like a million and a half in—
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
So you were already developing that system, using the Internet to connect to people on the ground?
Rove
Yes, I’ve got to tell you the Internet connection in ’04 is like nothing compared to what it is today. We had a virtual precinct tool in 2004 that looks like stone tablets with chisels.
Milkis
I know it’s really amazing how technology—
Rove
The speed with which it’s developed.
Perry
At this point, ideology and what part of Republicanism is at issue is not an issue for you. It is who is the strongest candidate who can pick up that seat. You mentioned in your book how you had Republicans who were not happy with compassionate conservatism, but at this point that is not—
Rove
We’re big tent.
Milkis
Libby Dole is a great example of that. One can see this as kind of party building.
Rove
Right.
Riley
Only Washington races? Or were there Governorships that you took an interest in?
Rove
We were pro-Governor because of his relationships with a lot of his colleagues, but the real focus was the Senate. We helped some Governor races.
Milkis
The one that became in the general election so controversial was the one in Georgia.
Rove
Saxby Chambliss versus Max [Joseph Maxwell] Cleland.
Milkis
Max Cleland. One of my colleagues, Gary Jacobson, makes a lot of this in calling Bush a divider.
Rove
It was a Saxby Chambliss campaign ad, first of all. And second, it was a counterpunch. Max Cleland ran a TV ad featuring footage of him and Bush talking about his strong support for Bush in the War on Terror and on protecting the homeland when he was one of the principal opponents on the Homeland Security bill because of the unions.
Milkis
Because of labor. He supported the labor position.
Rove
So the Chambliss campaign responds with an ad that starts off with footage of Osama bin Laden and others to establish that it is the War on Terror, and then goes and depicts Cleland, but no image of Osama. He’s not anywhere to be seen, but they do have Cleland and they say here’s how many times he voted against Bush’s version of the Homeland Security bill. So Cleland tried to make himself into a victim and failed, saying the Bush White House is behind this, which we weren’t. We found out about the ad when the controversy broke. Then he blamed it on me specifically by name—
Milkis
Because of your method.
Rove
Yes, because of my method, which I thought was interesting. Here’s a guy saying, “Dirty politics, despicable Karl Rove. He made this ad,” with no evidence whatsoever that I had anything to do with it. In fact, shortly thereafter there was an explicit denial. I think the ad was fair, but why buy yourself controversy at the beginning by having a visible symbol in Osama bin Laden? They didn’t need it. You can have other images of the War on Terror that don’t have a hated figure like that. To this day Max Cleland feels that I’m responsible for his defeat.
I finally called my agent and said, “I don’t care to be paired with him ever again. If it means I don’t get some engagements, I won’t take them.” To this day he still is that way.
Milkis
He’s very bitter.
Rove
I saw him not more than six weeks ago. I was having lunch with Senator Rob Portman in the Senate dining room and he came in. Cleland has a sweet little guy, an old guy from Ohio, who pushes him around and so forth, and he came over by the table. I stood up. “Senator, how are you?” and told his helper, “Here is your Senator, Senator Portman.” The first thing that Cleland says to me is, “Why aren’t you in a prison uniform?” I said, “You must have me confused with the Senate Majority Leader [Harry Reid].” [laughter]
Cleland lost because he voted much more liberal than Georgia was willing to tolerate, and Saxby Chambliss was a much more attractive, outgoing, handsome, personable, friendly guy.
Milkis
It is. It is one of those tragic cases.
Riley
Barbara, do you want to ask some questions about the judicial nominations in the first term?
Milkis
Oh, my goodness, yes.
Riley
A lot of this comes to fruition in the second term, but since you just raised this business of appointments—
Perry
It’s on my list, and Arlen Specter.
Rove
Go ahead.
Perry
In the midst of everything that is happening through the term, you’re going through not only for the lower courts, but you’re starting to look through the black notebooks, like our briefing books, for people for the U.S. Supreme Court. Do you want to talk about some of that and the politics of that and the politics of the Judiciary Committee and the nuclear option and the Gang of 14 and all the rest?
Rove
My memory is going to be very faded on this, but I do remember we solicited thoughts early on in a very low-key way from judiciary members to say who should we be looking at. We even got suggestions from Democrats. [Joseph] Lieberman, for example, gave us some input about possible Supreme Court—
Perry
You were asking for input for all levels?
Rove
For all levels. You have to. But especially for the Supreme Court. We were quietly trying to find a way to sort of say, who should we be—
Perry
Find some consensus on those—
Rove
If we had a Supreme Court nomination. We don’t know of one, just getting prepared. It was low key, but we were building internally our own roster of those people as well. But on all the judicial nominations, it starts with the U.S. attorneys. You’ve got 96 of them to put in. Then you’ve got all of these judicial vacancies. It is a constant struggle to navigate this process, particularly when you have two Republican Senators in a state or one Democrat and one Republican Senator, how do you go about doing these things? We tried to avoid commissions where we possibly could, because that is in essence surrendering the President’s power. But some states have them. Texas has an advisory commission that makes recommendations to them.
In California we had Gerry Parsky, who is a very successful private equity guy, and Bush’s chairman out there. He chaired a commission that ended up getting [Dianne] Feinstein people, [Barbara] Boxer people, and Republicans to agree to a whole series of recommendations that were by and large superb and in the process got Feinstein’s and Boxer’s votes. The process bound them to support the efforts of these commissions. But it took a lot of time.
Perry
President Bush is given lots of credit for diversity without using commissions, as Carter did.
Rove
Right.
Perry
At the lower courts, in particular Hispanics. Was that deliberate?
Rove
Yes. He said, “I want a judiciary that represents the changing face of the legal profession and the changing face of the country.” He faced this when he—In Texas he appointed Harriet O’Neill, Greg Abbott, Alberto Gonzales, and Wallace Jefferson to the Texas Supreme Court. We had a very diverse supreme court. Bush said, “There are lots of smart lawyers out there who would be terrific at serving. Go find them.” Same on the federal judiciary.
Perry
This will move us into 2005, but it is intriguing in your book when you talk about the interviews that were occurring with the winnowed-down short list, and particularly your first impression of now Chief Justice [John] Roberts. You don’t go into detail about that first impression, why you had it.
Rove
Listening to him talk about his upbringing—He did not grow up in a political household. He grows up in a middle-class Catholic household in northeastern Indiana. They don’t talk politics around the kitchen table, and yet you have a sense of solidity about the guy, quiet solidity. I wondered where he became a conservative and why he became a conservative. When did he have a political awakening? So I asked him, and he said at Harvard, because in the inevitable bull sessions after hours he realized he didn’t view the world the same way as his classmates did. He figured out that he was a conservative and they weren’t. I thought it was very interesting that he came to his world view by his upbringing and didn’t realize it until later.
Perry
Did he talk about being raised as a conservative Catholic and going to conservative Catholic prep school?
Rove
He talked about being raised a Catholic, but he thought about it as being a Catholic, not about being conservative. I grew up in an apolitical household, so I identified with him. My parents were not particularly political. But I can look back and see that I was raised with conservative values that naturally led me to be a conservative. Part of it was the accident of where I was growing up. He was growing up in a Democrat part of the world with heavy union influence that was culturally conservative, but it created a whole world outlook that is conservative in nature.
Perry
You mentioned Michael Luttig, that you thought he had a sense of entitlement for the position, so you checked him off the list. You didn’t mention Jay [J. Harvie, III] Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit, who was interviewed by the President.
Rove
Jay Wilkinson was part of the mountain valley Republicans that existed in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1960s to 1980s. He ran for attorney general or something as a very young man and represented mountain Republicanism: strong on roads and schools and moderate on race. I’ve always been intrigued by that weird strain of Southern Republicanism. So I was a fan of his. He’d written a couple of good books, and I followed him over the years. He was a possibility.
The more we looked into him, the more he might be another [Anthony M.] Kennedy. Of course we appointed Roberts and we got the Obamacare decision. [laughter] I thought it was important that he be interviewed by the President, though I doubted he was the right one. We had multiple people to be interviewed. He was worthy of being interviewed.
Perry
Then Justice [Samuel] Alito [Jr.], now Justice Alito. I was tickled by your description of his interview—literal quaking.
Rove
He is quaking. I mean literally, the table is like [shakes table]—I felt for the guy. You could tell he was enormously nervous.
Milkis
I remember my first job interview.
Perry
I understand his intellect, and it overcame—But were people concerned that someone who was that nervous in an interview, that that could—
Rove
You’re sitting there with five people you don’t know much about, except the Vice President of the United States, and you know that how this goes will have a big thing to do with whether or not you get the thing that would be an honor of a lifetime. So no, I didn’t—no, no.
Perry
It was just—
Rove
We were all—
Milkis
Were you confident you could get him calmed down by the time the Senate Judiciary Committee—
Rove
Exactly, exactly. It was comical.
Riley
Can I ask who else is in the innermost circle? And if you were to reflect on the process, who were the two or three really critical people involved in what we’ve been talking about from the receiving end?
Rove
You mean in terms of the decisions?
Riley
The White House, the senior—I guess it must be White House. It may be Justice Department people.
Rove
I may have it wrong. I’m trying to remember. The Vice President, Scooter [Irve Lewis] Libby, Alberto, me, and there was one other.
Perry
Was it Harriet Miers?
Rove
You’re right. Harriet in the second term, not in the first term, because we start out with Alberto Gonzales—
Perry
As counsel.
Rove
Then Alberto moves over to Justice. We may have had [John] Ashcroft in there in the first term, but obviously no action until 2005, so you’re right, Alberto was in there when we were discussing names. We’d meet briefly every six months or so just to sort of see if—
Perry
And discussions about him, perhaps not with him there, but were there discussions about him? And did the Wilkinson factor preclude his nomination, the fear that he would be a David Souter?
Rove
Who?
Perry
Alberto Gonzales.
Rove
No.
Perry
There’s no discussion—?
Rove
Not that I recall.
Perry
—of going on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Rove
No, not that I recall.
Milkis
While we’re on nominations, how about Harriet Miers?
Rove
We ill-served the President. She would have been great, but this caught our allies by surprise. We could have muscled it through, but he was weaker by that point and it would have been difficult. Before Roberts was sworn in—I say that to be clear—before he was sworn in, he proactively sought out the President and said, “I want to tell you how impressed I am with the cast of her mind and how capable she would be if she were on the bench.” Then we had very positive signals from Harry Reid about it, but of course that quickly changed, as everything changes with Reid. But we ill-served the President because we didn’t have time to sell it to our natural outside allies.
There is a very strong upside to the Federalist Society, which is that it has created a network of these very bright people who by and large have gone to major law schools and have given a lot of thought to the quality of the federal judiciary. Many of them clerked for federal judges and have dedicated a lot of time and what could be otherwise a far more lucrative legal career to public service. But it does have a downside. Miers went to SMU [Southern Methodist University] Law School. That’s not Harvard, not Princeton, not Yale. She didn’t clerk for a Supreme Court Justice or Mike Luttig when he was on the bench, which was a training ground for them.
Riley
How was the influence of the Federalist Society felt precisely in these vetting procedures?
Rove
They’re a great source of information about prospective nominees to the federal bench. There are chapters around the country and they know each other and they come together to discuss very interesting legal questions. They knew the available talent and could provide scouting reports.
Riley
Are you the liaison to the society? Are you talking to the President? Are you going to their meetings?
Rove
Yes, Leonard Leo and then people inside the organization.
Riley
So you have a network of people there that you would, on a routine basis, touch base with: “How are you doing? What do you have for us?”
Rove
Sure. Also, you’re always getting judicial vacancies, so you’re constantly asking the Republican and Bush leadership, “Who among your legal community are outstanding lawyers and worthy of consideration?” In West Virginia it was a problem. We were trying to dope out federal judges in West Virginia, and it takes a long time, because there are not a lot of Republican lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, at least in 2001 and 2002. So you’re talking to lots of different people about who might be a good prospect for this.
Perry
You said you ill-served the President. Is it your group who goes to the President and says, “How about Harriet Miers, because this is Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor’s seat? It would be appropriate to put in a woman, and we think she’s qualified.” The President says, “Great. I think Harriet is perfect.”
Rove
I think part of the problem is this wasn’t a well-considered thing. I don’t know where it emanated from; it just sort of popped up.
Perry
It didn’t come from the President down?
Rove
It came to the President. It may have come from two or three coincidental sources, but we should have stepped back and said, “Wait a minute, let’s hold on.” But he knew her. He knew how strong she was. He depended on her not only in the White House as general counsel and Staff Secretary but when he was Governor of Texas he sent her in to clean up a terrible scandal at the lottery commission and she did so with enormous skill and ability.
Perry
You say she was a pioneer.
Rove
A pioneer: Harriet Miers, the first woman bar president in Texas; also Kay Bailey Hutchison, who graduates at the top of her class at the University of Texas Law School in the late ’60s and can’t get a job as a lawyer and has to go to work as a TV reporter in Houston because law firms just don’t hire smart women.
Perry
Like Sandra Day O’Connor.
Rove
So I think how unfair is this, that because she didn’t go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Columbia that she is somehow unworthy of the high court. She was a major partner of a major Texas law firm, first bar president, brilliant lawyer, but having said all that, we should have considered the idea more thoughtfully.
Riley
Should it have been pushed through?
Rove
I don’t know, but I do know that we should have slowed down, thought about it, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Riley
It’s sort of striking for a President—We’ve been talking about a very muscular institution and a very forceful political figure in George Bush—that when it comes to this fight, it doesn’t materialize.
Rove
That’s the exception that proves the rule.
Milkis
Yes.
Rove
That proves why the idea of having a strong process in place by which you make decisions—by which you examine an issue, collect input, analyze data, and present it to the President—is important. Because the one instance where we didn’t have that happen, it blew up in our face.
Riley
Interesting.
Rove
It would be an interesting question to ask the others who are in this process, because my sense is that by failing to go through the process that we’d gone through with everybody else, we ended up where we were, which was a defeat for the President. Harriet was the courageous one who called a halt to the exercise.
Milkis
Did she stop it?
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
You were willing to muscle it through if she had not—
Rove
Yes, but she was wise enough to say, “He can’t afford this kind of expenditure of political capital in a cause that may fail. The damage will be greater if we push it through and lose, and there will still be greater damage if we push it through and win, because we will have expended a precious commodity that is more difficult now in the second term to re-create, and there are other good choices.”
Riley
In your judgment had she gone on the Court—
Rove
She would have been superb.
Milkis
So you think she had the heft; this is just snobbery?
Rove
I don’t know if I’d say snobbery. People are entitled to their judgments. She didn’t have—Sam Alito and the Chief Justice had a set of professional relationships from practicing law in this town or being on the bench that gave them credibility.
Riley
But one of the criticisms of the modern court is the absence of the kind of life experience that Harriet Miers had, right?
Rove
Yes.
Riley
Barbara, more?
Perry
Finished. [discussion of time left and agreement to proceed]
Riley
We sort of jumped ahead. I’m trying to remember, when did you lose Trent Lott? Was that the first term that [William] Frist comes in?
Rove
Yes, it’s the first term, I believe.
Riley
That’s checkable. The question is more is that an institutional problem for you? Do you lose something in losing Trent Lott that Bill Frist doesn’t do for you on the Hill?
Rove
Trent Lott had been in the institution longer and had more tricks up his sleeve, so it does cause a problem. On the other hand, his comments were damaging and made it difficult for him. He’d lost the confidence of his colleagues.
Riley
Of course.
Rove
It’s one thing to lose the confidence of the political opposition. It is another thing to lose the confidence of your colleagues.
Riley
Let me ask a general question. I’ve got two or three—
Rove
As I said in the book, I made a mistake. I say in the book I ran into him or he called me—I guess I ran into him. He was coming out of the Oval, and he made some comment about—maybe it was not out of the Oval, but I ran into him and he made some comment about how this is going to pass over, and I say, “Yes, OK,” rather than saying, “It’s a real problem and you’d better get this solved.” He did have time to solve it, but it had such an initial bad response he needed to move quickly.
Milkis
How would he have solved it?
Rove
Saying, “I said something that was really stupid. In a moment honoring a great United States Senator for his commendable service, I said something that was stupid, offensive to every American, and I can’t believe I did it. I apologize and I hope people can find it in their heart to forgive me.”
Instead, we had several days of different explanations and responses. Then he went on a television program, and did the equivalent of dousing himself with gasoline and throwing the match. It was sad. Look, we had our challenges with Trent Lott, like on the determination of seaward lateral boundaries of states.
Milkis
I knew we’d get that back in. [laughter]
Rove
Yes, we got it back in. But Lott knew the institution and wanted to get things done. So did Frist. Frist knew the institution, not as well as Lott, and wanted to get things done and brought some skills to the task that Trent didn’t have. We would have been better off had we had continuity as opposed to abrupt change. But we had to have change. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Lott’s colleagues, after his initial response and then the flub, could never bring themselves to support him.
Milkis
It’s amazing that someone with so much political savvy could do something like that.
Riley
In the first term, who are your best friends on Capitol Hill? Who are the people who invariably go to bat for the President?
Rove
Hastert, Blunt, to a lesser extent DeLay. DeLay was not supportive of Social Security reform, but we had great House leadership. Senate leadership, Lott, [Addison Mitchell] McConnell. Jon Kyl was a particularly, I thought, not only effective advocate for us but an enormous source of good judgment and insight. Judd Gregg and John Boehner in their respective areas. Judd was personally close to the President, which is always odd because one is a sunny optimist and the other is a dour New Englander, one outgoing and the other is introverted, but they hit it off. I listened to the LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] tapes. The guy I walked away most impressed with was Rich Russell—
Milkis
Richard Russell, yes.
Rove
I’ve often thought about at the White House how well served Johnson was by having a friend like that who can say, “Lyndon, I’ll be with you on this, but I think you’re making a mistake on this Vietnam War thing.” Or, “You need to know I’m going to oppose you on this, Mr. President, because I can’t support you on the Civil Rights Act of ’64, but I’m going to do what I can to be respectful.” I think he was enormously well served by having such a legislative friend. On those tapes, everybody is a sycophant, with the exception of Richard Russell and Lady Bird [Johnson]. Lady Bird puts honey on it, but she is a straight shooter. But everybody else tends to sycophancy, though, and Richard Russell doesn’t.
Riley
Did Bush like dealing with Members of Congress?
Rove
Yes, a lot.
Riley
He did?
Rove
He did. He liked it. He liked them as people. Bush is a people guy. So the idea of having 12 or 14 guys over sitting on the [Harry] Truman Balcony and all these guys are smoking cigars and Congressman [Craig L.] Thomas is just taking apart Senator Chuck [Charles] Grassley over capital gains tax reform. This is wonderful drama for Bush to watch.
Milkis
If you like drama, Thomas is your guy.
Rove
Thomas is your guy. He is just pummeling poor Grassley over capital gains. We’d have these picnics every year for the Congress. They’re really fun in many respects, but many Members of Congress show up with the four guests they are allowed and three more. It’s just weird. There are Members who abide by the rules, and people who don’t. And Bush loved the picnics and the chance to interact with Members. He’d hang around; he’d be there early. He’d pose for pictures with everybody. He knew everybody. He’d give everybody a nickname. [laughter] There would be entertainment and stuff. He’d hang around forever. Part of it was he liked people; part of it was also he knew, I’m better off if I’m a human face to them and they’re a human face to me. He liked having Members down.
He was talking to these Republicans and Democrats all of the time. We’d have these terrible bipartisan meetings in the Cabinet Room on an issue with Pelosi, Hastert, Frist, and Reid and sometimes nothing would happen, but at least he was giving them the shot. It was a constant flow in and out of the West Wing.
Riley
Did he bring them into the Residence?
Rove
Sure.
Riley
Only the leadership?
Rove
Oh, no, remember most of these Members went years and years without getting in the White House. So you’ve got a guy who says, “Hey, junior Members, let’s hang out together on the Truman Balcony—”
Riley
Smoking cigars.
Rove
Smoking cigars. Or, “Let’s go upstairs. Come on over for drinks and bring your spouse. You want to see the Lincoln Bedroom?” He was a tour guide, and it really helped. It gave you the ability to talk to people. It didn’t solve all the problems.
Riley
Movie theater?
Rove
Movies? You bet. Every movie he tried bringing in people who had an interest in the topic. He didn’t have Members of Congress at every movie, but we’d think about it. Is this about Pittsburgh? See if What’s-his-face wants to come in.
Milkis
Did you like it? Did you like dealing with Congress?
Rove
I did. I’d have Members down for breakfast or lunch down in the mess. There is a small dining room off the mess for groups of them. Yes, I tried to be open to it. They’re your allies. At the end of the day it’s a two-way street. Part of the antagonism of Congress to the President is if they don’t communicate. The difficult thing was trying to find people that you could talk to on the Democratic side, particularly after the war heated up, and particularly after 2004.
I remember there was a—I want to say [Clarence William] Nelson—who was from Florida too, who was the ranking Democrat on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security who I coaxed down to the White House for a meeting on Social Security who said—This was after Moynihan—“I’d like to help you, but I can’t because my caucus won’t let me.”
Milkis
Wow.
Rove
Nancy Pelosi says, “We don’t want to give Bush a political victory.” So Moynihan did a great thing for the country, providing a road map to save Social Security: Republicans won’t get your personal accounts, and Democrats won’t get our tax increase. So any President must try and push things through, using any relationship that you have. It’s easiest with the Members of your own party.
Milkis
Of course.
Rove
But it still requires a lot of work, because once you’re available to them they test the relationship. “How much can I get out of this?”
Milkis
I read an article in the New York Times magazine and I wanted to ask you this. The article said that Cheney used to go with you to the Senate Republican caucus meetings and that you would both go and participate. It was presented as though this was intrusion. So I’ve always wanted to ask you about that, and here is my opportunity.
Rove
I may have only gone once or twice and at their request.
Milkis
Did you read that story by—
Rove
No, I didn’t. I only went once or twice at their request. Cheney would never go unless requested.
Milkis
So you might have gone, but it was not like you were showing up—“The White House is here, guys. Sit up straight.”
Rove
Oh, no, only at their request. Cheney’s attitude was the same. He wouldn’t go unless requested.
Riley
Since his name has been raised, we really haven’t asked you. Cheney has a very prominent place in the popular conception of what this Presidency was all about. Tell us, what was his role? Who is this guy?
Rove
His role has been exaggerated. Cheney was a very strong colleague and partner to the President, but the idea of Cheney dominating the West Wing and dominating the Oval is—
Milkis
—made foreign policy.
Rove
—is ridiculous.
Riley
Is ridiculous?
Rove
Yes. Cheney was very valuable to the President because he had been there in so many different roles, but the President was the President and he was the Vice President, and both of them knew that. There was one moment in the aftermath of 9/11 where Cheney basically said, “Do you want me to chair the War Cabinet?” I don’t think it was Cheney grabbing for power. I think it was just Cheney saying, “Do you want me to chair the War Cabinet?” And the President said, “No, I’ll do this.”
Cheney understood how the West Wing operated, so he never gave his opinion publicly unless the President asked. If the President said, “Dick, where are you on this?” he’d opine, otherwise he didn’t. I’m confident he opined on the Thursday lunches a lot, because Bush, when he said, “I really do want your opinion,” he meant it. But Cheney was quiescent in that process. He had people who sat in on all these meetings, and occasionally they would be called up for an opinion. The Vice President very much thought, My job is to be ready to respond to the President, not to try and dominate this place.
When he took on assignments, he ran them like he was a staff person. So the President said, “Dick, you’re in charge of the Energy Taskforce. You know what we said in the campaign; figure out what else we need to do and go get it.” So there’s Dick Cheney, who ran the world’s largest oil service company, helping pass the 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard. Why? Because it was part of Bush’s program and that’s what the process reinforced.
Riley
Did his staff act with the same level of deference?
Rove
They did in my involvement with them. Cheney was very circumspect about where he was and what his opinion was and his people were circumspect, too. I thought that was an admirable way to operate.
Milkis
Their relationship was good, their personal relationship?
Rove
Very good. In fact, I was reminded of it this week. I was down in Texas with T. Boone [Thomas, Jr.] Pickens—I can’t remember, it was 2002 or 2003—Boone is talking to a wildlife photographer named Wyman Meinzer of Benjamin, Texas, a pal of mine. Benjamin is in the middle of nowhere and Wyman lives in the jail. He bought the old town jail and renovated it. He is this fantastic outdoor photographer.
Boone is trying to get a vanity book put together for this fabulous ranch he has in the panhandle of Texas. He is going through Wyman’s work and he sees a picture of me and he said, “Karl Rove? Is that Karl Rove?” He said yes. “He’s a bird hunter?” “Yes, we go all the time.”
“Is he any good?” “Yes, he’s pretty good.”
I’ve known Boone since 1977, and Boone didn’t know I was a bird hunter. So Boone calls me up and says, “Are you a bird hunter?” I said yes. He said, “You want to come hunt?” I said, “Yes, I’d love to.” He said, “Well, I’ll give you some dates and you put together a group and come hunting whenever you want. All I ask is that your group be interesting.” [laughter]
So I said, “Fine, I’ll do that, thank you.” He sent me three dates in February. This is February of 2003 or something, no, February 2004, something like that. So I’m thinking I’d have to fly to Denver, then to Amarillo, or fly to Dallas and then to Amarillo, and I’m going to have to drive about 80 miles. How the hell am I going to get away from the White House and go bird hunting for two and a half days?
The next day we’re in the daily brief, which you know is Bush, Cheney, Andy or Josh, Condi or Steve [Hadley], me, Karen, or Dan [Bartlett]. The President is late in coming from something, so we’re just sort of sitting there. I said, “VP [Vice President], have you ever hunted Boone Pickens’s ranch?” He said no. I said, “Have you heard about it?” He said, “Yes, I’ve heard about it because it’s great hunting.”
I said, “He’s given me a couple of dates and said I could put together a group to come on down, but he said they had to be interesting.” Without breaking a beat Cheney says, “I’m interesting.” [laughter] So we fly down on Air Force 2. We land in Pampa, Texas, and drive about 25 miles to the ranch and fly back on Air Force 2, thereby giving me the transportation I sorely needed. The second year we took some Senators down. The next year we take some more Senators down. We took Saxby Chambliss and Lamar Alexander. I guess this had to be ’05 or ’06, because at Boone Pickens’s ranch we start to get a breakthrough on immigration reform with Lamar Alexander.
So the second year we go down, Boone has constructed a 6,000- or 8,000-foot concrete runway so that we can land Air Force 2 at the ranch. The third year we arrived, Boone has erected the gigantic hangar capable of taking three 737s for us at the ranch. As a matter of fact, the concrete plant next to the runway has not been dismantled yet. So we had a lot of fun. I had a very good relationship with the Vice President, very good.
Milkis
Did you call him “Veep”?
Rove
Occasionally “Veep,” but mostly “Mr. Vice President.”
Riley
What did he call you in return?
Rove
“Karl.”
Riley
You didn’t tell us how the hunting was.
Rove
The hunting was damn good. Boone has not run any cattle on this place for 30 years, and has like 60 miles of drip pipe for the quail for habitat. So you have great quail and pheasant. It’s a lot of fun to hunt.
Riley
Sid, you want to break into—
Milkis
I was thinking before we get to the 2004 election we ought to talk about Medicaid Part D.
Riley
That occurs first term. Go ahead.
Milkis
The reason I think it is worth talking about is when people from the Tea Party look back on the Bush administration and they’re critical of it, this is one of the things that they—
Rove
And they’re fundamentally wrong.
Milkis
It seems counterconservative to some.
Rove
It’s fundamentally wrong.
Milkis
So that’s why—
Rove
I’m a huge fan of this reform. Part D is stolen from a Clinton administration initiative. We looked very carefully at the Clinton Medicare Reform Commission in 1999 and 2000, asking how to modernize Medicare. Medicare was passed in 1965, where senior health care meant invasive surgery and a long hospital stay. In the intervening years, private industry said let’s not wait until disease emerges full-blown. Let’s manage with drugs. That’s why virtually every private company provides drug coverage to its employees, because it has a huge impact on long-term health care costs: manage the disease rather than having to deal with it through invasive procedures.
So in the 2000 campaign we had called for Medicare reform, a way to a drug benefit, just like Gore had. But we modeled ours on the premium support model of Senator John Breaux, who led the Medicare Reform Commission. Rather than the government being the formulary, setting the prices, deciding what’s available, and giving it to seniors 100 percent free, we proposed giving people a fixed amount of money to purchase a drug plan that meets their own individual needs so the private market competes for their business.
So if you’re at risk for diabetes or heart disease, you can get a plan that is geared toward your needs. Create a competitive situation that produces a multiplicity of plans and let the consumer pick one that meets their needs. Now, we preferred to have it means tested so that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would pay a higher price than the working man or working woman, but Congress wouldn’t go for it. So it is a uniform amount, but if you want something more robust than what the government provides, it comes out of your pocket.
To control costs, we had to create what was called the “doughnut hole.” Up to a certain level you were covered; above that level you have to pick it up; and above a certain level the recipient gets 100 percent coverage. The interesting thing was that the doughnut hole was filled by the companies, because if you’re a drug company and you have a high-priced drug, you’re not going to want to lose that customer. They give their customer a co-pay card that says you take a heart medicine that requires $500 a month, and once we get up to the doughnut hole, we’ll give you a co-pay so that your drug costs you only $10. We pass it.
Milkis
It was a pretty brutal fight in the Congress.
Rove
Really brutal. To me that was—
Milkis
You said Thomas before. I was thinking Thomas—
Rove
Which goes back to this issue. This was a Democrat idea. We took Bill Clinton’s Medicare Reform Commission and said—
Milkis
Which I thought was ironic.
Rove
John Breaux, premium support, good idea, we’ll adopt it. The opposition was politics, pure politics. They couldn’t be angry with Bush about the war and 9/11 at this point, although they got pretty angry about the war soon. But this was, “That illegitimate SOB [son of a bitch] is in the White House. We can take it out on him. We’ve got to keep him from getting this. He’s fighting on our turf by trying to reform Medicare. We want to have a Medicare drug benefit, but done our way. We can’t let him have his benefit, even if it’s based on a Democrat idea.” So we passed it.
We had the normal humble-bumble of getting it set up, but nothing like what happened with the Affordable Care Act. Tom Scully and Mark McClellan were in charge. Really a magnificent job by the two of them. When we started it, three bad things happened pretty quickly: more people signed up than estimated; they signed up much quicker than estimated; and they used the benefit much more than anticipated. However, we’re now at the tenth anniversary.
Milkis
I can’t believe that. Right.
Rove
The program is coming in 40 percent under the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] cost estimates. It is the only health care program in the country’s history to come in under its budget estimates. The reason is it has competition in it, market mechanisms. Insurance companies are out there fighting hard for your business. They’re trying to determine what plan they can sell Sidney that fills Sidney’s needs, and how can we give him more for less? Because we’ve got Russell over here trying to sell him as well. Every single one of the regional markets that was set had a failsafe if no more than two plans were offered. Every one of them had far more than the anticipated number of plans and has remained so.
Even in Alaska you have like 20 plans available. I think the smallest number of plans in any region was seven. The insurers figured out how to do this, to give you something that is even more tailored for you and give you another variation of that plan. So this thing has been an enormous success.
The Tea Party is right that we have a debt problem, so then we ought to look for structural reforms. Paul Ryan is right that the best structural reform for Medicare—We can means test, raise the age at which you get the benefit—but the best and largest reform is to put market mechanisms and competition put into Medicare like we have in Medicare Part D. It will have a huge impact on the cost of Medicare. So when I hear some conservatives say, “Oh, that was a bad thing,” unless you’re willing to say get rid of Medicare too, it’s stupid to say we’re only going to pay for your health care if you have a $21,000 operation and three weeks in the hospital, but we’re not going to stop you from having that surgery by having a $200-a-year or $300-a-year benefit to get the medication you need to avoid that problem.
Not only that, but your choice is, do you want to reform Medicare? If you want to reform Medicare, what are you going to do? You can means test. That saves you some money, but doesn’t solve the problem. You can say we’re going to raise the age; that will solve some of the problem, but not enough. You need structural reform and the competition of premium support is the way to go. Opposition to Medicare Part D is a cheap and easy line by people who want to make themselves—“Hey, Bush was a big spender.”
Milkis
Big-government conservative.
Rove
In fact, instead—
Milkis
Was it 2000?
Rove
The 2000 campaign.
Milkis
I remember it being in 2002.
Rove
We very clearly talked about it. In fact, it pops up in the debates. We spent a lot of time tailoring it. The idea was it was also the measure where we get health savings accounts.
Milkis
I remember talking to Grover Norquist about it. He said, “Well, it has health savings accounts—” That was a relatively small part of it, right?
Rove
No. Huge.
Milkis
I know it’s important, but—
Rove
It’s a small provision, but it is the fastest growing part of the health insurance market and has the highest satisfaction rates. It was deemed so dangerous by the Democrats that in the Affordable Care Act they cut the amount of money you can save tax-free for your out-of-pocket medical expenses. This is one change that makes no sense at all. The Affordable Care Act says you cannot use HSA [health savings account] moneys for over-the-counter drugs. I thought the goal was to manage disease in the cheapest way possible. There are over-the-counter drugs that help people manage disease. So why are we saying you can’t use your HSA account to do it? You can use it for a prescription drug that attacks the same disease, but you can’t manage disease with an over-the-counter drug.
Milkis
This is something you’re really passionate about.
Rove
I was a health care nut during the Bush administration. [laughter]
Milkis
I would have never expected you to be this—
Rove
I’m a huge fan of health care policy. I was part of the West Wing cell committed to consumer power in health care.
Milkis
This is something you really took on. Interesting.
Rove
Yes.
Riley
Trace the trajectory from the campaign then to 2002. What happens to it? Was that teed up as—
Rove
Sure, the 180-day plan had steps in it to begin developing the legislation. This was one where you needed a lot of buy-in from Congress and infinite amount of work with Bill Thomas, who was actually fun to work with.
Riley
I see.
Rove
Fun to work with because he’s crusty, he’s opinionated.
Milkis
Tough.
Rove
Tough as nails. He wants to do it his way, but also he’s damn smart. So if you just stay in there for about four rounds and keep punching with him and absorb a lot of body blows and you’re right, he’ll agree with you.
Milkis
I remember he was ruthless in that fight in the Congress.
Riley
Was he—
Milkis
He was head of Ways and Means.
Riley
This was teed up to go at the time 9/11 happens?
Rove
It was expected to move in 2002, but because we needed a lot of work done on it in 2001—you get education reform. This was supposed to be moving by the end of 2001, and our goal was 2002.
Riley
So it came up about the time you wanted it to.
Rove
A little bit later.
Milkis
Who was your health care czar, so to speak? Who was your Nancy [-Ann] DeParle?
Rove
Mark McClellan, who was at CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services], and then Tom Scully, who was Tommy Thompson’s right-hand guy.
Milkis
So you worked with CMS from the beginning; you didn’t hatch this all in the West Wing.
Rove
No. We had Margaret Spellings, and the National Economic Council and CEA [Council of Economic Advisers] were also given a seat at the table, but the object was to have this driven from within the agency. We laid out the game plan of what we wanted. It gets very thorny, all these mechanisms to ensure competition and private involvement. For example, the doughnut hole came up once it became clear Congress was not willing to means test.
Riley
OK, we have to go.
[BREAK]
Karl Rove, 11/8–9/2013 51
November 9, 2013
Riley
We’re starting Day Two of the follow-up interview with Karl Rove in Washington. We’re going to try to get finished today. I know that one of the things that Sid wanted to get into was the 2004 campaign. There are a couple of things left over from yesterday that I’d like to go back to and pick up, just a couple of threads.
Milkis
Sure.
Riley
Then I wondered if there was anything that occurred to you that we needed to discuss.
Rove
No.
Riley
We didn’t really talk about Iraq and the move in that direction. You said that a part of your portfolio included messaging when it came to foreign policy. Is that true—
Rove
Participate in discussions about it. I’d have to read draft speeches and participate in the discussions about what we were going to say and when we were going to say it. I didn’t participate in the formal discussions about should we or should we not go to the UN [United Nations], what would the phasing of this action be and so forth, though occasionally I’d sort of stumble on to that, and he’d say, “What do you think about X or Y?” But—
Riley
Was there ever any complaining by military people or others that Rove has a piece of the action?
Rove
No, because I didn’t have much. To the degree that I had any visibility was when I’d be in the Oval Office and he’d say what do you think about this or that.
Riley
OK.
Rove
I wasn’t a decision maker. Bush samples a lot of opinion and filters it, paying a lot of attention to [David] Petraeus on military matters, not much to Rove. On the other hand, when it comes to the campaign, I’ll pay a lot of attention to Rove and not much attention to Petraeus.
Riley
But he will ask Petraeus?
Rove
He will ask a wide variety of people, “What do you think?” That is one of the interesting things about him. It’s not just—Some people do that Ed Koch, “How am I doing?” That was not Bush. It was, “What do you think?” He wanted to know, not just hear your, “I think you’re doing great.” It was, “What do you think we’re doing right? What do you think we’re doing wrong?”
Riley
Was that how he dealt with the sort of hermetically sealed life of a President? I’m often curious about how politicians who have their antennae out all the time suddenly find themselves in an envelope where that public contact isn’t possible. I can’t figure out how a President manages to—
Rove
I think one of the essential challenges facing any President is how to fight the isolation. Bush had seen the isolation before. I think he consciously and unconsciously fought it. First of all, he encouraged a robust discussion of differences as long as it wasn’t then explained to the Washington Post or the New York Times and as long as it was done respectfully. He labored at the task of creating that environment all of the time.
He also sampled a lot of different opinion, including congressional opinion. Remember, he’s talking with them a lot, some socially, but some just checking in. One other thing—and I don’t want to overemphasize it—but the third floor of the White House was like a bed and breakfast. Bush is bringing up all his friends from Texas, some of whom are there just because it’s friendship, but it does give a President a chance to say to the more discerning of them, “What’s going on?” or “What do you think?”
We talked about stem cells yesterday. He would say, “OK, I’m hearing from Leon Kass. I want to hear from someone who is not Leon. Who does Leon think is the guy who has the best handle on the not Leon position?” Particularly I remember—apropos of Petraeus, as we mentioned a moment ago in another context—I remember him in whatever it was, 2005 or ’06, when Petraeus was out at Kansas, saying, “You need to read this,” and giving me a copy of the Petraeus document that was in essence the theory behind the surge, his training manual. How the President got it I don’t know, but it was clear that what intrigued him was that this guy had a theory that was clearly at odds with the dominant theory of the Joint Chiefs, which was build up and draw down. That was process, not outcome.
Bush wanted to have people around him whom he felt would feel comfortable saying, “I disagree.” I think that was one of the things he prized about some of the staff that stayed as long as they did.
Andy had a candor to him, Josh even more direct. I think that is one of the reasons why they made such good Chiefs of Staff. They would say things to him that were candid and they would also superintendent a process that had differing perspectives. Neither one of them had—It wasn’t like, “I feel so strongly about my opinion that I’m willing to do everything I can to disparage, diminish, and hide the opposing opinions.” It was almost the opposite. It was, “Here’s where I am. Let’s make certain that we have an even more robust presentation of where I am not.”
Riley
The White House Iraq group, is that something we should pay attention to?
Rove
It’s overblown in the literature. The Iraq working group was essentially created twice. Once was after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, to make certain that after Baghdad fell there was sufficient messaging. There had been a pretty robust pattern of messaging, open channels of communication, through the press to the American people, during the war itself. We had imbeds and robust briefing and so forth. But once we got to Baghdad, after a time it was apparent that the administrators of the reconstruction effort in Baghdad were so focused on this chaotic scene that we needed to do things to better communicate what they were doing.
The Iraq working group was designed to figure out what should we do, and what resources were necessary. How do we make certain that the lines of communication are unplugged, that there is robust communication between the Green Zone and the press in the Green Zone, but also robust communication between the Green Zone and greater Iraq back directly to America? After a while, once things were felt to be put in place, the institutions put in place, the group basically stopped meeting. Then I played a role in provoking it again when things went bad in 2005, because part of the issue was we were not communicating what we were doing. What was beginning to happen in ’05 and ’06 in Anbar, for example, was not being communicated. We had a little bit of difficulty in getting it jump-started, but it did begin again.
It was seen in the press as having policy implications. It was basically communications functions. What was happening over there that people need to know about, good and bad? We discussed the need to make certain that bad things that are happening are known back here, so that if they get better we get credit for it, and if they get worse it’s not like people are going to be completely surprised.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
But it was a communications exercise, not a policy exercise.
Riley
Sid, I sense you have a question coming.
Milkis
No.
Riley
One more on this. It was about your relationships with the Pentagon. Did you have a lot of direct communication with them on messaging issues?
Rove
They had people who participated in the Iraq working group, but no. To the degree that we communicated over there it was through the NSC [National Security Council], through appropriate channels.
Riley
From your perspective, working relationships between the Pentagon and the White House were good at this time?
Rove
Yes, they were good throughout, which doesn’t mean that they weren’t at times contentious and bumpy. Particularly in the run-up to the Iraq War there is a lot of tension between State and Pentagon that is having to be litigated by Condi. Then when things went south in ’05 and ’06, you could just sense that the Pentagon was stuck. They had the strategy of we’re going to build up the Iraqi security forces and diminish our combat responsibilities. That wasn’t the same as what do we need to do to win.
You could just sense the exhaustion. We’ve been at this; this is hard. This is the best we can do. We have a strategy. Let’s execute it. Bush was pressing for, “What is the outcome of this?”
Milkis
Did you have any—I know in your book you write that it was the right thing to do.
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
I’m just wondering if you had any concerns at the outset.
Rove
Sure you do. Yes, absolutely.
Milkis
Were you squeamish about it? Squeamish is probably not the right word.
Rove
The question was why hadn’t action been taken before? Clinton said WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and we had Operation Brown Fox or something like that, a 10-year-long regime of no-fly zones, which is sucking up a lot of resources of ours and the Brits. But yes, what is the goal here and the rationale for it? Is the rationale justified? It’s interesting. Again, I’m seeing this from a distance. I’m not going to the CIA and the—
Milkis
Your perspective is interesting to me since you were seeing it from a distance.
Rove
What I saw was intense focus on the quality of the intel [intelligence] and did it say that he had WMD. I think that was the lever. It was one thing to say that this was a bad actor who supported terrorism. It was another thing to say that this was a bad actor who supported terrorism who had weapons of mass destruction and regional aspirations that threatened American interests and the interests of our allies in the region. I saw the care and the detail that was gone over and participated in a distant way as we prepared these speeches and statements. There were robust arguments about phrases.
I remember John Kerry went out and made a speech on the floor about the threat and we discussed about how he said things that we would never feel comfortable saying, that he painted a picture of greater immanency than we were willing to acknowledge, particularly on Saddam’s nuclear program.
This is a sobering decision all along, even after we went in and the concerns grew even heavier. I remember when the Third ID [infantry division] was approaching Baghdad and there was really grave concern because Condi and Hadley revealed that the Iraqi commanders are talking to each other in open traffic, “When do we get to use the weapons? When are we going to deploy the weapons?”
So we have the Third ID in MOPP [mission-oriented protective posture] suits. It’s 95, 100 degrees, and they’re approaching Baghdad. These kids are in these antibiological, antichemical warfare suits, looking like something out of some sci-fi movie, approaching Baghdad and trying to fight. You can’t ignore some Iraqi brigade commander saying, “General, when will the weapons be unleashed?” You can’t say, “Geez, they don’t have any.” We did find I think it was 14,000-some-odd artillery shells and short-delivery weapon systems with missile systems with degraded chemical material in them.
I think the whole system of the government over there was so dysfunctional that as these stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons deteriorated, nobody wanted to go in and report to the chief that that was the case. Saddam had them. He used them on his own people. We found them. We found the dual-use facilities that he could use to make these things quickly, particularly chemical weapons.
Saddam was pretty clear with his U.S. interrogators that these weapon systems, or the thought that he had these weapon systems, were important to sustaining him in power. He was diverting tens of millions of dollars from the Oil-for-Food Programme to keep together the infrastructure necessary to reconstitute all these programs when Western attention faltered. He was confident it was, and it was.
Let’s be honest about it. How many UN resolutions demanding that he live up to the terms of his surrender agreement from the First Gulf War did the UN pass? Fourteen? Even the Russians and Chinese are voting for or abstaining from resolutions, saying, “Live up to the terms of your surrender agreement,” and this guy just thumbs his nose. His attitude was, “The West is weak and they’re going away. I may not live to see the moment, but Uday [Hussein] and Qusay [Hussein] will, and let’s keep everything in working order so that we can reestablish ourselves as the king of the heap.”
Riley
Karl, let me ask you a question on that point. One argument that has been advanced is that because of the defiance of the UN resolutions there was ample legal rationale to go in and do what we did anyway because effectively the First Gulf War had not been—
Rove
The terms of the resolutions had been violated.
Riley
Exactly. So my question is to get you to respond to that. Is that an insufficient argument in the post-9/11 environment to prosecute the war?
Rove
You can make that argument. I could accept it, but look at it from Bush’s perspective. Bush’s perspective was, “I want this to be done in a way that is sustainable. I don’t want to just use the precedent of ‘He is violating a number of UN resolutions.’ I think we will be in a stronger place as a country and internationally if we have a vote of Congress, a vote of the United Nations, and a broad coalition in agreement with us that we need to enforce this.”
Riley
Right.
Rove
This attitude was formed over many months of discussion. I think his rationale was that the country would be better off if this is done by Congress rather than done by him. Perhaps this goes maybe unconsciously back to the fact that he recognizes that Florida and the 36 days from hell have put him in the Presidency, and that places a special burden on him: There are people in this country who don’t accept that I’m legitimate, so they will apply a tougher test on an action, and I don’t want to weaken the Presidency long term. I want to strengthen the office that I have. I want to leave it in better shape than I found it. The office has been hurt by the lack of respect that many Americans think it was held in, and then more importantly, I came here in a way that is controversial. So I need to take additional steps to make certain that the Office of the Presidency is not weakened by this action.
Riley
Got you. What I was trying to make a distinction about was whether the argument about weapons of mass destruction was a necessary argument in a legal environment where the violations existed whether he possessed the weapons of mass destruction or not.
Rove
That’s right, but after 9/11 this was a bigger issue for us. The issue had been in force since 1991, and obviously neither 41 nor Clinton had felt that his—We then get an argument, “Well, if it was so bad, why didn’t Clinton come? Why wasn’t Clinton in favor of this? Why didn’t Clinton do this? Why didn’t your dad do this? Why did your dad let this happen?”
Riley
And that doesn’t change after 9/11. You can’t make an argument that we’re in a different environment.
Rove
You can, but the calculus after 9/11 is we can no longer tolerate an actor like this with access to these kinds of weapons who is playing around with terrorist elements and can slip these things to nonstate actors. So the calculus changes after 9/11.
Milkis
The preemptive doctrine sort of changes—
Rove
We can’t wait until these challenges make themselves felt with buildings falling in New York City. So yes, 9/11 changes a lot of things. Bush felt it important. Still there was a robust debate: Do we need to go to Congress, or not? Cheney is on one side—
Milkis
Cheney thought it wasn’t necessary.
Rove
Cheney, Scooter, and David Addington are arguing you don’t need it. Bush accepted in some sense, yes. “I don’t need it, but on the other hand, are the country and the Presidency better served by a broader range of support?” It was achievable. We had allies on the Democratic side in both the House and Senate whose attitude was yes, 9/11 changes the calculus, and Saddam does represent a threat to our interests and the interests of our allies in the region.
Riley
It’s interesting here; he does follow the pattern his father set in that. His father insisted on getting congressional support.
Milkis
After a pretty robust debate too.
Riley
But internally, in the interviews that we did on the 41 project, it was clear that [William P.] Barr and Cheney and others were telling Bush 41, “You’ve got all the legal authority you need,” and he still insisted on going to Congress.
Milkis
Were you involved at all in the congressional deliberations? Were you a part of that?
Rove
Just a little bit. “Can you call So-and-So and see where he is on this?” I did get some phone calls from Members saying, “Will you tell the President X or Y? Is the White House aware of this or that?” The outcome was very interesting. There were oddities. [Joseph] Biden votes against the First Gulf War resolution and for the Second Gulf War resolution. That was the one surprise. There were lots of surprises, but that was really a surprise, because he’s going to be a no and oh, he’s a yes.
Milkis
There were a lot of surprising yeses. Kerry voted for it. Hillary Clinton voted for it.
Rove
Yes, and she—
Milkis
She would live to regret it, I guess.
Rove
There were a lot of surprises. Al Gore goes out and gives a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and says alarmist things about Iraq. Kerry makes the most belligerent and over-the-top address of any of the Democrats on it, and again, I remember at the time that we were sort of taken aback that he depicted these programs, particularly the nuclear program, as far more robust than we thought they were.
Milkis
There have been discussions in political science circles about whether Al Gore, had he been elected President, would have gone to Iraq. I was on a panel one time. I said no, but after talking to Mel [Melvin] Leffler, I think I probably was wrong.
Riley
What about the aftermath? Once you go in, particularly on the weapons of mass destruction, can you characterize the internal reactions that you’re getting as the reports are coming back and people aren’t finding them—
Perry
And how that affects the messaging process.
Rove
It did, when stockpiles of things are found, but not operative weapon systems—particularly after the July 4th Ted Kennedy speech. In a speech at Georgetown, Kennedy is the first one to say, “Bush lied.” But it became quickly apparent this was to be a major talking point of the Democrats. They were not going to simply say, “You told us this stuff was there but you didn’t find any.” They were going to turn this into a political argument for the 2004 election, that Bush lied.
Then shortly after that came the Joe Wilson “16 words.” The 16 words were absolutely true. In fact, Joe Wilson came back with what I think is what the Brits based their intelligence on, which is that he found something that was previously not known to U.S. intelligence. The Iraqis had attempted through a third party, Mali, to get the Niger government to accept a trade mission, and the Niger government said, “We don’t sell anything except uranium,” and that is on the forbidden list. If that is what the Iraqis want to talk to us about, let’s not accept their trade mission.
I don’t know, but I think that is what the Brits knew that we didn’t heretofore know, and Wilson stumbles across it. Yet he comes back and says the 16 words are a lie, that [Saddam] Hussein had attempted to acquire uranium yellowcake in Africa. The Brits then appoint a Royal Commission, which then investigates the 16 words and reaffirms them. But the Wilson mess was that this happened at a point where people were getting worn out, discombobulated by the failure to find WMDs, and we were spread to the winds with part of the stuff in Washington and part of the people in Africa on a Presidential trip. So the response was to initially say they shouldn’t have been in the President’s speech.
Now there is a difference between they shouldn’t have been in the President’s speech because they were controversial and they shouldn’t have been in the President’s speech because they’re wrong. We left the latter impression, not the former. Our opponents piled on.
Riley
Just for the record, you cover that fairly extensively in your book, and unless my colleagues have questions about that—One other question on this point. As Iraq becomes complicated, I don’t want to use the word “second-guessing,” because I get the sense that this is a President who doesn’t second-guess himself, but is there—
Rove
He does. He is not a guy who wrings his hands, but he is a guy who looks backward and forward. There was a recognition that the failure to find WMD would have consequences for future public support. It was going to arm the opposition and allow them to escape responsibility. It allowed people like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to say “Me no Alamo. I was misled.”
Well, wait a minute. You looked at the same body of intelligence that we did and came to the same conclusion. You had the ability to go in the Senate SCIF and look at every piece of it by yourself. Some of you did, some of you didn’t, but all of you got briefed on it and all of you had the chance to examine it yourself. But the failure to find active, operating WMD gave them a political chance to say, “You lied. That’s why I’m explaining away my now unpopular vote back home.”
Riley
Got you.
Rove
But yes, he did look back. I may be in the minority on this. I think if there had not been sufficient evidence about WMD, then we probably would not have had a vote in Congress or won one. I think the WMD was a critical component in a lot of people’s thinking about it. I don’t know what his thinking is on it; I know he has thought about that question. But you’ll get to ask him that question maybe.
Milkis
There has been a lot of criticism and satire about on the Abraham Lincoln, “Mission Accomplished.”
Rove
Which I think is largely unfair. The story behind it is the commander of the Abraham Lincoln group said to the White House advance team, “We’ve just finished the longest deployment of a nuclear aircraft carrier in American history. Can you help us get a banner that thanks my people by saying, ‘Mission Accomplished’”? Then White House advance got the banner. Nobody said, “Wait a minute, let’s put that banner up after the President leaves.” He was not saying to the country that Iraq was over. In fact, the speech clearly says Iraq is not over. That banner was mission accomplished for the crew of the Abraham Lincoln.
The advance guys did such a spectacular job in putting him on to it in a jet, and a really good speech that hit the point of it’s not over, but in retrospect it is all wiped away by this entirely appropriate banner that is aimed at the crew and their families. Remember, the air wings will fly off in San Diego and then the carrier will make its way up to Bremerton, which is going to be a day-and-a-half sail to see their families. It was the longest deployment. The crew did two deployments as one. These deployments are carefully figured as to the wear and tear on the crew and the equipment, and yet they were able to keep it at very high proficiency.
The Navy guys tell me that they are blown away by the second half of the Lincoln’s deployment. They measure all of these metrics about flight hours and downtime and mechanical—and the Lincoln was operating like it was at peak performance when these guys and gals should have been dragging their posteriors and things should have been breaking down. Instead they were operating like a gigantic machine.
It may have been the Naval Chief who said, “I’m proud of the Navy, but I am really proud of the Abraham Lincoln and the entire unit,” not just the Lincoln itself, but the entire Lincoln battle group. It was apparently like a machine, and the Navy was really proud of them.
Perry
I wanted to ask back on the messaging as Iraq is turning a bit sour, but Bin Laden is not being found either. Are there discussions going on about that, and how that is being perceived by the American people?
Rove
Yes, and the problem was we were running every lead to ground and squeezing every bit of intel out of these guys. I can’t remember exactly—It’s after the 2004 election, not before, that [Michael V.] Hayden is over at the CIA. I didn’t know about it at the time, only knew about it in retrospect, when Hayden makes his really gutsy call that eventually leads to Bin Laden. I guess this has to be ’06 or ’07. In walks his team and says, “We have captured this courier and we think he is significant. We have asked KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and [Abu] Zubaydah if [Nabil] Elaraby was important or not, and both of them dismiss him. But there is something about their answers that causes us to think they’re hiding something and we want to trace this guy’s past movements.”
This involves lots of people, money, and resources. Hayden trusts the gut instinct of these interrogators who say there is just something about the way they respond to this that leads us to believe they’re not telling the truth. Of course this ultimately leads to the Abbottabad facility and ultimately to Osama’s death. I had dinner last night with Hayden and it was a pretty gutsy call. This is the kind of thing where even if it is never made public, somebody could say you wasted tens of millions of dollars on somebody’s pathetic excuse of a lead, and chopped him up professionally. But that was a gutsy call.
Riley
I keep promising we’ll get to 2004. There is an episode that gets a lot of attention afterward, press coverage, related to John Ashcroft and Jim Comey. You had a connection with Ashcroft. Were you at all involved—
Rove
No, I only heard about the controversy over the “Stellar Wind” reauthorization afterward. This was a vital intelligence-gathering program. Bush was not happy that he was blindsided over its reauthorization. It’s not comfortable for the President of the United States to have to find out the Attorney General had handed over his powers to his number two and not told the President. So he was not happy with that. This disagreement over the reauthorization could have been resolved earlier had he been made aware of it.
There were a lot of hot dogs over at Justice Department who could have handled it much better, particularly now Director Comey, which will probably get me investigated by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]. But look, there’s Ashcroft, who is ill, and Comey is leading the opposition to renewal. The right way for Comey to operate is to say to the Chief of Staff, “Andy, respectfully, I think I need a chance to present to the President our concerns because I’m in charge, since the AG is so ill. I’m now in charge.” But Comey is a hot dog and instead threatens a mass resignation. “Let’s go energize ourselves over here, wire ourselves up, so that by God, if they don’t agree to this, we’re going to all resign in defiance as a moral conscience.” And so we end up with the episode not too far away from here of Andy and Alberto trying to get the authorization from Ashcroft. They had to get it from Ashcroft.
Riley
Did you hear from Ashcroft later about this?
Rove
No.
Riley
Sid, what do you want to talk about on 2004? Let me give you free rein.
Milkis
There are a lot of things about that election that interest me, probably just because of my own interest in mobilization, what I think you call the “army of persuasion.”
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
I don’t think there has been enough attention paid to it.
Rove
We said we can’t win by getting out the people we got out last time. We have two target groups. We must persuade people to be for Bush who were not for him the last time around and we must persuade people to be for Bush who did not participate last time.
Milkis
You were kind of disappointed in the turnout in 2000. The unions did better than you thought they would do.
Rove
I think the Democrats did better than I thought they would, but more importantly, I think we did worse than we should have. Part of that was outside our control. You take and draw a line across the country. East of the line are states that have closed their voting at the time that the networks call Florida prematurely. To the west of the line are states that are still open and voting. There is a difference in turnout between the states to the east and to the west. Compared to 1996, the states to the east of there improved; the states to the west of there don’t.
Besides the media’s impact on Election Night, the Thursday before the election out comes the DUI [driving under the influence], which is one of our biggest mistakes in 2000, and that causes, I think, a lot of religious evangelicals to say, “He’s not the guy I thought he was. I’m for him because he was going to restore the dignity of the office, but he hid from me this youthful indiscretion. What else is he hiding?”
Then finally, in retrospect, we ran out of gas at the end of the 2000 campaign. You look at the quality of Bush’s statements in the closing weeks, and he is asking people to get out and vote. There is nothing of substance in it. One of the lessons of 2000 is you’d better end on a note that is emphasizing the reasons that motivated people to support you rather than just simply saying, “I need your vote. Will you get out and vote?” You must say, “I need your vote because here are the three things that I intend to do or have done and will want to do.” We were worried about it.
[distraction, lots of police cars outside]
We knew that the Democrats had Americans Coming Together, which was a [George] Soros–funded effort. The one good thing about the Gore campaign in 2000 was that they had Donna Brazile, who was a huge proponent of grassroots. The bad thing about the Gore campaign is that she was pushed out at the end. She was the subject of a boys’ revolt sometime in the summer and was largely without authority to move resources around. She was a proponent of the ground game. We had done a lot of testing in ’01 and ’02 and ’03 aimed at perfecting techniques that would impact turnout, showing us the respective strength of different kinds of techniques. So we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do by the time we started moving in March of ’03 with plenty of time to put it into action. We wanted to deliberately grow the electorate, partly with people who were already with us but not disposed to vote, but also the most important part of it aimed at—
Milkis
Expanding the base.
Rove
Well, expanding the base—First of all, the base is just a terrible concept.
Milkis
I suspected you’d say that.
Rove
I love it, the base of the party? That means it’s the thing on which we’re built that is part of a bigger thing, which is the party. How can you win by appealing to the base? You want to have the base there, but you want to have the broader party there, and then you want to look at those elements of the electorate—independents and soft Democrats—who can be swiped away. Are women the base of the Republican Party? Bush erased the gender gap. We’ve got 44 percent of the Latino vote. Are blacks the base of the Republican Party? We got 16 percent of the African American vote in Ohio.
So we were doing things like—One group that we would obviously have success with between 2000 and 2004 were Jews. We had the damnedest group of Jewish Bush supporters, many of them not Republicans, in places like Cleveland and Detroit, a weird group of self-activated people that was wildly successful. I remember we had Rabbi Benny in Detroit who organized “Rabbis for Bush.” We showed up in Detroit. God knows where he has gotten the money, and he’s got “Jews for Bush” bumper stickers. [laughter]
In Cleveland we had a group of very active young Jewish Bush enthusiasts. Some were Republicans, some not. Many in this part of the Jewish community were Russian, so they asked which Bush supporters spoke Russian. If you had any difficulty communicating, these three guys were going to go work this crowd. There were Jews from Poland, so, “Who has Polish Jewish roots? Anybody speak Polish?” It was a pretty impressive apparatus.
The object in all this ground game activity was to find who was persuadable, who was reachable. Another group was “soccer moms,” called “security moms” after 9/11. The interesting thing is we did worse among independents in 2004 than we did in 2000. I think that is in part because we were so successful in integrating some independents in the Republican Party that a greater share of the electorate was Republican in ’04 and these independents were temporarily Republican. They were security moms who said, “Given the choice between these two parties, I will temporarily identify myself as a Republican because of George Bush.”
Milkis
In setting up the ground game, which I guess was particularly strong in the swing states, did you build your own organization and get volunteers who were kind of a new Republican offensive, or did you work with the state and local organizations?
Rove
Both. Our object was to maximize volunteers. We had to have a seamless relationship between Bush, Cheney, and the Republican Party of Ohio, for example. We had to have an integration of the two.
Milkis
That worked reasonably well?
Rove
It worked really well. We had a field marshal in charge of the campaign in Ken Mehlman, who is about as meticulous a human being as there is. This was all built first on the idea of microtargeting, which we used in 2000 and perfected in 2001, ’02, and ’03 and continued to refine. So in 2004 we literally had the best that had ever been done at that point. We had a very clear idea of these expansion targets and we applied it to voter registration.
I’ll never forget this phone call I got at the White House. This guy fights his way through the operators to get to me. “You don’t know who I am,” he says, “but I’m So-and-So,” a Bush county chairman in one of the Ohio counties. He said, “I just want to tell you I’m a believer after the experience that I’ve just had.” We’d sent out to everyone a list of target, unregistered voters, people who we thought were disposed to be for Bush but who were not registered to vote.
Milkis
“Lazy Republicans,” I think someone said.
Rove
Even worse, we live in a mobile society, so a lot of people move. We had sent this list out to every target county with instructions for a big voter registration effort. The guy calls and says, “I did exactly what any country chairman would do. I open the box and pull out my precinct to check it out. The first name that I see is the retired Navy captain who is my golfing buddy, drinking buddy, best Bush volunteer. I call him up and say, ‘Captain, you can’t believe how screwed up the Bush/Cheney campaign is. They’ve got your name on a list of unregistered voters.’ The Navy captain says, ‘Well, Sally and I have never gotten around to registering.’” So the guy tells me, “I’m a believer.”
We were very serious about that starting in ’03. For a period starting in ’03 all the way through the second week of October of ’04, I got a report every Monday that tabulated the voter registration statistics for every battleground county in every battleground state so that we could determine if we were keeping up with the Democrats in the registration.
In states like Ohio, where you don’t register by party, we’d be able to say, “Here are the people that we have gotten registered. What percentage are they of the entire population that is registered?” Then do some analytics on if they were in Hamilton Country or Warren County, that was better than if they were in Cuyahoga County, for example. In states like Nevada, with partisan registration, we knew for Clark County, every Monday, how are we doing versus the Democrats and we could adjust resources accordingly. But this was part of we needed to grow the electorate among people who are persuadable. Then we had to maximize Republican turnout. We can’t win this unless we persuade a large number of people to vote for us who heretofore had not supported him.
Milkis
Who mobilized—Who was the head of getting the volunteers?
Rove
Each state.
Milkis
That was done locally?
Rove
Yes, each state.
Milkis
Did you get somebody from the campaign?
Rove
Oh, yes, we had a Bush person in each—
Milkis
Someone indigenous from Ohio. So that was all done locally?
Rove
There were tools at the national level that helped. We took the Bush volunteers from 2000, collected other volunteer lists. We identified likely volunteers from microtargeting data. We had lots of tools to help state and local leadership expand their pool of volunteers.
Milkis
Now I know you said yesterday that what you had then compared to now was pretty primitive, but I remember being pretty impressed. I’m just making this up because it was interesting, but I went to the website of the Democratic campaign and it was dedicated to getting money. Then I went to the Republican one and it was dedicated to getting volunteers. I thought that was pretty impressive. I interviewed your Web guy.
Rove
We made the most robust use that we could of technology. We even had a virtual precinct. You could create a precinct of people. My precinct was my wife’s in-laws in Mississippi and my brothers and sisters in Oregon, Nevada, and Colorado. These were tools so that you could say if you’re not registered to vote I could send you the application. You live in Washoe County, Nevada? Here is the Washoe County form. It automatically would generate the Washoe County form for you. It was the same with early voting, absentee voting. You could tell them what their precinct voting place was on Election Day. Then of course I could send them whatever I wanted to send them about Bush.
Think about the technology between then and now, how rudimentary it was. There were no real social networks to sweep, for example. You had to create your own precinct list as opposed to now, where we could look at your electronic address book on your computer, or your phone, and tag all those people on the master voter file. Then we could come back to you with a list of people who were target voters who we thought were lower-propensity voters leaning in our direction who needed reinforcement and suggest you contact them. Or we could sweep your social networks, which is incredibly inexpensive and easy to do, and tag all those people so we could say, “Here are the 10 people who either are on Sid’s Facebook page or Twitter,” or whatever.
Milkis
I don’t have a Facebook page. That’s one of the reasons I don’t.
I know it was kind of primitive, but it was now viewed—not by political scientists, just by people like myself—by other strategists as kind of a pioneer in campaigning. David Plouffe said that he got a lot of the ideas for the Obama campaign in 2008—He elaborated on them, but basically—the way you got volunteers to canvass people, that kind of top-down/bottom-up mobilization. That was kind of innovative. Did you have a sense you were doing something new, that it was a new kind of—? Turnout went up; I think the turnout had gone down since the ’60 campaign.
Rove
It went up big.
Milkis
Sixty percent?
Rove
Bush gets 25 percent more votes in 2004. It is a 51/48 election, but Bush gets 25 percent more votes, which says the other side was doing this too. They had a different model, which was based around labor unions, paid workers—
Milkis
In 2004.
Rove
In 2004. We just couldn’t duplicate that, so we went this way. When I started my business in 1981, I deliberately said I’m here in Texas. Everybody else is in Washington. The only way I’m going to be able to succeed in the direct-mail business is to be two steps ahead technologically. The first microtargeting effort I was ever involved in was on behalf of Kit [Christopher] Bond’s Senate campaign in 1984, I think it was. Consumer information and the technology were not available, so we called every voter in the state of Missouri for whom we could get a phone number and asked them two questions. What do you think the number one function of government is? Providing for a strong national defense, promoting strong moral values, encouraging jobs and a free enterprise system, protecting personal freedoms, or helping the unfortunate?
Then we asked what is the number two function of government and read them the same list, randomly generated. So if you said, “I think it is promoting strong moral values” and the populist economic answer, you were a social conservative populist. If you said, “Promoting a strong national defense and encouraging free enterprise,” you were a traditional conservative.
Back then we microtargeted by asking individual questions. By 2004, we have 250 pieces of household-level information to microtarget.
Milkis
Magazines, I heard, were the big one as far as information.
Rove
It isn’t one piece of information. It’s the relationship between a number of items. If you had to pick one to go with cars, if you have a Volvo, you’re a Democrat; if you have a pickup truck, you’re a Republican.
Riley
Is that why there are so many of those in Charlottesville?
Milkis
That’s right. Even though they’re lousy cars, the Democrats insist on driving them.
Rove
But really it’s the relationship between dozens of pieces of information that create this algorithm that says—
Milkis
I love that word “algorithm.”
Rove
That’s exactly what it is. The big thrust of the ground game was the care and feeding of the volunteers.
Milkis
I wanted to ask one question about the care and feeding. I went out and did some interviewing in Ohio, some of the people in the organization. I said, “How do you motivate these volunteers who work so hard? You’re hard on them, you fire them if they don’t meet their targets.” The guy was telling me, “We fire volunteers.” Wow, that’s a tough campaign. I said, “How do you keep them motivated?” He said that part of it is they enjoy the social, but their loyalty to Bush.
Rove
It was unbelievable.
Milkis
He said from time to time you guys would bring these people out to the tarmac to meet Bush. If you were one of the better volunteers, you’d get to go out.
Rove
This was Mehlman’s insight, and he was right. Let’s not always have at the tarmac the supervisor, county clerk, and big donor. At every single airport, greeting and departure, every single site event greeting and departure, we would have volunteers. It got around. If you were doing a hell of a job and Bush was coming to Cincinnati, some of your crew got to meet him. It wasn’t just one. We’d have eight people there, and four of them would be volunteers, then Congressman Jones and the chairman of the campaign, but it was really important.
We didn’t do as good a job as we should have, but we’re constantly trying to think of it as an affinity program, a sort of gold rewards program. You get the little pin, you get the letter, you get the phone call. They’d give me a call list.
Milkis
Of the most impressive people—
Rove
People who had done something particularly distinctive, and I’d call them. But again, Mehlman and his people were constantly thinking about how can we reward, motivate, and incentivize volunteers. We didn’t fire them per se. We’d move them out of a job that was critical into a job that was less critical. That’s the other thing—
Milkis
The guy in Ohio said he would fire them. He was probably exaggerating.
Rove
If they didn’t do a good job of walking, we’d move them into something else. We’d fire them from the job of walking. You wanted to have your best salespeople in the sales jobs.
Riley
You started meeting internally on this in early 2002. You describe these meetings in the book, breakfast meetings on the weekend.
Rove
Actually, I think we started in 2003.
Perry
Early January 2003.
Rove
In 2002 we went around and talked to everyone who had run a reelection campaign. Jimmy Baker and [Michael] Deaver were the two best sources of information. But Baker made it clear. He said, “You think the first race was tough; this is going to be worse for you because you have two entities. Each of them think they’re in charge of the campaign, the campaign and the White House. So you’d better figure out how you’re going to corral your colleagues in the White House.” He said two things. He said, “Have one point of contact between the White House and the campaign. Eventually people will break that down, but the longer there really is one person, the more likely when they begin to try and break that down, that one person is part of the process still.”
Riley
OK.
Rove
So my deputy, Susan Ralston, was the point of contact. My office was the pipeline and she was the point of contact. Then the second thing is I decided to have everybody be a piece of this and make it sort of strategery for the campaign. So we would have these sessions, generally at my house, on a weekend. Again, the idea was no substitutes. If you can’t come, you’re not at the meeting.
Then we made them substantive enough that we told them, “Here’s what we’re thinking about doing.” We tried to stay ahead. “Here’s what we’re thinking about doing and we want your input on the front end rather than to just tell you it’s going to happen.” There were moments when you had to tell them, “This is going to happen,” or “This happened.” But we tried to stay ahead of it and be as proactive as possible so that everybody got a chance to opine.
It was interesting, because you could tell there were people in that room who didn’t want to be structured. They wanted, particularly the communicators, to be able to say, “I’m in charge of that part of the campaign,” and they’re in essence reporting to me at the White House, not to Ken Mehlman. This was a point at which some people bridled, the communicators in particular. It was, “That part of the campaign ought to be responsible to me, not to the manager.”
Riley
You’re cooking breakfast for them?
Rove
I’m cooking breakfast.
Milkis
What did you cook?
Perry
Eggies.
Rove
Eggies.
Riley
Some sort of sausage.
Perry
That strange sausage, Indian antelope sausage—
Rove
Nilgai. It was a particular favorite. N-i-l-g-a-i.
Perry
What does it taste like?
Rove
Really good. I’ll send you some.
Perry
Is it like gamey venison? Mild? Except for the spices?
Rove
No, in fact it is very mild. You can spice it up whatever way you’d like, but it is very mild and incredibly lean. If you want to make hamburger out of Nilgai meat you have to add 30 percent beef tallow, otherwise it won’t stick together. That’s how lean it is. It is grass fed. They live—
Perry
Like buffalo meat?
Rove
No, it is not heavily gamey, it is just really good. I’m going to send you some.
Riley
Do you hunt them?
Rove
Oh, yes.
Riley
So that these are ones that you actually killed in the field. Did you field dress them yourself?
Rove
No.
Riley
I hope you heard this. He shot them but he did not field dress them.
Rove
That’s why you have the ranch hand.
Perry
Or Sarah Palin.
Rove
Did you see the episode of her trying to hit the caribou?
Perry
I only saw her drive in in the RV [recreational vehicle].
Rove
She had a Discovery channel—
Perry
Her reality show.
Rove
There is one in there where she is hunting. That woman knows how to pull the trigger, but she doesn’t know how to aim. She has a giant animal standing not that far away and she shoots at it seven or eight times and cannot hit it. She blames it on the scope not being sighted in. You don’t need a scope to hit that big son of a bitch.
Riley
You organize the states into categories. You had four categories, right?
Rove
Yes.
Riley
Any surprises among those categories?
Rove
I thought Oregon and Washington State would be more competitive than they ended up being. We were thrilled that some of these states—West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas—were not competitive at all.
Then of course the one that always breaks your heart, Pennsylvania. We had greater expectations for Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota, and the one that broke our heart was Pennsylvania. Broke my heart.
Milkis
How was that? Was it close in 2004?
Rove
I want to say two points.
Milkis
Was it two or four points?
Rove
Two or four, something in that range.
Milkis
That’s interesting the way Pennsylvania has become a blue state. It was pretty red—It was a pretty moderate Republican.
Riley
You indicated in your book that you had brought in some Republican political scientist. That must have been a hard chore to find a Republican political scientist.
Rove
We actually started it in 2000 and by 2004 we had a pretty robust group of them.
Riley
Can you tell us who they are?
Rove
Dr. Daron Shaw at the University of Texas was one of them; Jim Gimpel at the University of Maryland was one of them; John Petrocik is retiring from the University of Missouri, wonderful guy.
Milkis
I didn’t know he was a Republican.
Rove
Oh, yes. We had a bunch of these. Professor Wendy Cho at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. She is wicked smart. What brought her to our attention is she had created a chart of Asian last names and categorized them. So this was Vietnamese, this was Chinese, this was likely to be Bangladeshi, this was likely to be Indian, and so forth. Then she ran the entire Federal Election Commission database to identify over time the changes in giving patterns among Asian Americans. It was this incredible—That’s like 75 million records and there she is cranking away on some computer at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.
Milkis
They’ve got some big computers there.
Rove
We had a great group of academics. They were enormously helpful, particularly in setting up the sort of A/B testing that we’d done in ’01, ’02, and ’03, and then to help us understand how to apply those lessons in ’03 and ’04.
Milkis
How about messaging, the discussion of how to frame the campaign? It seemed like you set—I don’t know if it was deliberate, but the main message I got from that campaign was “strong leadership.”
Rove
Right. Even if people didn’t agree with his policies, the one thing that kept them glued to him was they thought he was a strong leader who was doing what he thought was right. Sometimes the difference between winning and losing is getting people who might have some degree of disagreement with you, but believe you’re a strong enough leader that they have to trust you.
Scott Walker told me that that was the situation in his reelection. He gave a little talk at one of our Crossroads meetings recently. He said, “The thing that I learned from my experience in winning that election was that I won in large measure because people agreed with what I did, but the margin of victory was among people who had doubts about what I’d done but had confidence in my leadership enough that they were willing to give me a chance.”
The most likely Democrat nominee, Kerry, would not be seen as a strong leader, we thought. It would be a good contrast. Bush was; he wasn’t.
Milkis
Although I think he reacted to that strong leadership campaign and that’s why I think he marched up—That’s why he did the “reporting for duty” thing. He was trying to match your campaign with his position.
Rove
Right from the get-go. You go back to the beginning, and when they described why they think he is going to be strong against Bush, it was because he had fought in Vietnam. He had an exemplary military record. That’s fine, but a) it was ultimately undermined by his comrades in arms stepping forward, but b) it wasn’t—
Milkis
The swift boat thing.
Rove
Yes, the swift boat. The critical moment was the trip to West Virginia where he was trying to say, “I’m a leader because I’m going to go wear my VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] or American Legion cap and meet with a bunch of veterans in Huntington, West Virginia, and challenge Bush in his support of the military.” He made the famous statement, “I was for the $84 billion dollars before I was against it.” That was provoked by us. We did an ad and ran it in West Virginia as he’s in the state. It causes him to make that statement. It was the gift that kept on giving the rest of the campaign. It crystallized in one moment the doubts of everybody who potentially had doubts about Kerry. Then Bush reaffirms it as the campaign heated up in the fall. He told us, “I’m going to wait, and then there is going to be a moment when I’m going to say, ‘Knowing what you know now, would you still have voted for the war?’”
He makes it in a speech and Kerry is out trying to win Arizona and is on the edge of the Grand Canyon and gets asked Bush’s challenge. “Knowing what you know now, would you have voted for the war in Iraq?” And he says, “Yes, I would.” There was no good answer for that. If the answer was, “No, I wouldn’t,” it would have probably been better, but he gave us the best answer, which was “Of course I would.”
Milkis
I thought your discussion in your book of the swift boat was very interesting. I think it is interesting how everyone talks about the groups outside—even though it is not true—the outside groups, independent groups, on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but then most of the outside groups were liberal.
Rove
Yes, liberal and Democrat.
Milkis
They were more supportive of the [John] McCain-[Russell] Feingold bill than you guys were. You guys did most things in house. You comment on how this swift boat phenomenon, regardless of the fairness of it—There were some parts of it you thought were unfair, some fair—but you thought it was a bad thing for politics to have these shadow parties. Do you still believe that?
Rove
I do. I like strong parties.
Milkis
Even though you’re part of one—not part of one, you lead one.
Rove
I like strong parties, and these weaken parties. I like strong campaigns, and these weaken campaigns. But the thing about the swift boat is that the ads didn’t matter so much as the conversation it caused among voters about what Kerry had said and done about his comrades in arms.
Milkis
He testified at Congress.
Rove
He testified in front of the Congress things that were not true. He said his comrades raped and pillaged in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. This angered a lot of Vietnam vets and played into the idea that he was fundamentally untrustworthy and was seen by a lot of Vietnam veterans as a betrayal of their service, and they talked to their family and friends. One ad doesn’t swing a campaign and one issue doesn’t swing a campaign, but it definitely took the strength that he had, “reporting for duty,” and weakened it.
Everybody knows a Vietnam veteran, so I suspect at that time it was enormously hurtful to him, because people would ask their vet friend, “What do you think about that?” They’d say, “I hate it.”
Milkis
Should we talk about anything else about the campaign, the debates or anything?
Riley
I was going to ask—Was it a foregone conclusion that the Vice President would stay on the ticket?
Milkis
That’s interesting.
Rove
Yes. He offered, but there was no reason to change. Vice Presidents don’t win or lose campaigns, and he was a valuable colleague in the White House and a valuable partner to Bush. There was never any serious contemplation on Bush’s part. It was discussed. Is there anybody? But what are you going to do? Why?
Riley
Sure.
Rove
At the end of the day, why make a change? Cheney was a loyal warrior. There was a part of the Republican Party that liked him and he was capable of fulfilling the tasks that you need a Vice President to do politically, go out there, go to the places where you don’t need to have the President go, and go raise the money that the President doesn’t have the time to vacuum up.
Riley
The convention. Is there anything notable about the convention that year?
Rove
Other than it being in New York City. That was obviously of course a not-so-subtle way to reinforce the 9/11 motif. But actually people had a good time. [Michael] Bloomberg did a fabulous job in helping ensure the success of the convention, from making certain that it raised the necessary funds—
Milkis
Yes, you mention that in your book.
Rove
He was a loyal guy. You’re coming here. The mayor and I are going to make it a big success.
Perry
Did the President talk about, before the reelection—We talked a little bit yesterday about Social Security and whether it would have been better to go with that.
Milkis
Good question.
Perry
But did the President talk about other issues or other things that he wanted to accomplish and say, “Let’s do that after the reelection and then let’s see how much I’m reelected by?”
Rove
Yes, immigration. By 2004 everything is still dominated by the War on Terror, but he wants to—we had Medicare Part D and we had pretty good progress on an energy bill, which comes to fruition in ’05. His idea was that in the second term, the big domestic initiatives were going to be Social Security and immigration.
Perry
Anything that he talked about wanting to do that never even surfaced after the reelection?
Rove
We talked about further reform of Medicare, because even then the numbers were looking bad on the Medicare hospital, and parts A and B were in trouble. But the thought was Social Security modernization was easier to do and would lay the predicate for Medicare modernization.
We would have the success of Part D, which was only at that point a year and a half in, but even then the numbers were—After the shock of the initial, more people, quicker, higher utilization rates, the robustness of the competition brought the first year in under the estimate by a significant margin and the implication was that the delta would get better over time. So there was a sense that yes, we might have a shot with Medicare, but the thinking was get these two things done first and Social Security will allow you to identify the forces in the Congress that might be willing to do Medicare, and Medicare Part D might allow you a greater experience base to operate from.
Milkis
Did Social Security and immigration reform come up in the campaign?
Rove
Yes, particularly Social Security; immigration not so much. But Social Security, yes. It was a standard part of his stump speech.
Perry
And the debates, the lockbox?
Milkis
It came up in the debates. I thought that was 2000.
Perry
That’s right.
Milkis
That was Al Gore. The lockbox.
Rove
Lockbox. [Southern drawl imitating Al Gore] [laughter]
Riley
Isn’t that in the Smithsonian now?
Rove
Some time during this period we go to West Virginia and I get to see the lockbox, which is in West Virginia, at the Bureau of the Debt.
Perry
Robert Byrd’s—
Rove
There is a file folder in a cabinet and they open it up and it is nothing but a series of pieces of paper that are run off on the office laser printer that says on November 9, 2013, the Treasury Department borrowed $327.2 million from the Social Security Trust Fund payable in the future on demand.
Perry
IOU. I think the Washington Post did an article on it.
Rove
You open up the drawer and it is nothing but this. That drawer is worth a trillion-something dollars in notes. Can I have one of those? No, it’s too soon.
Milkis
Just give me one.
Rove
Just one. It doesn’t need to be a big one, just an itsy-bitsy tiny one. What’s the smallest one here? I’ll take it. [laughter]
Perry
I think I have a question to follow up how we began yesterday, about President Bush not wanting to be a poll-driven President. How does an incumbent President who is running for reelection try to find that balance between not wanting to be driven by polls but wanting to be reelected?
Rove
You have to have a fundamental faith, as he does, in the power of leadership. If I do the right thing, people will reward me. But I’ve got to explain it right. Even then, the war was unpopular. He gets reelected with a 49 percent job approval or something, so we knew we were going to be in a contentious election, but his confidence was if we explain what we’re doing and why, we will win. I don’t know whether he had the same theory about—There are going to be people who will vote for me who have doubts about what is going on, but trust me that I’m a leader. I know this is what the Democrats were doing.
What was the purpose of saying he lied about WMD when they knew that was a lie? Undermine people’s trust and confidence in Bush as the chief executive? I don’t trust him as the leader. So Democrats operated from that theory.
Milkis
Were you worried after the first debate?
Rove
Yes. The good news is Bush is a competitor, so one crappy performance is going to cause him to be better. Then of course I think it was the second debate at Arizona State where Kerry gratuitously overreaches by attacking Mary Cheney.
Milkis
Oh, yes.
Rove
I was sitting in a trailer with Margaret Spellings and Condi Rice, and when he said it, both of them literally [sound of drawing in breath]. You could just tell—if their reaction was like a lot of people’s reaction, it was going to be “you son of a bitch.” But no, the first debate—A reelection is harder for a President.
Milkis
Yes, I was going to say, taking you back to the point about—
Riley
Is that right? How so?
Rove
You’ve got a day job and you’ve got to fit a second job into it. It’s grueling. The one advantage is that you do fly around on Air Force One and you have people to take care of you and so forth, but it’s grueling because you’ve got your day job to do, and Bush was very serious about the day job. We pried days out of the official schedule. Remember, we have to convince him in March of 2003 that we have to file a committee. He doesn’t have to campaign, but we have to file a committee because we have to raise so much money. If you look at the pace of that, we start losing a lot of ability once we start—think about this. Between January and March we lose over 1/8 of the time that we have to raise money for the election.
Every quarter that we lose—if we don’t do it until June, we have lost 1/7 of the time. Originally people were talking about September. We would have lost three out of the seven quarters that we had to raise money, so we had to file a committee. But his thing was, “Don’t expect me to go campaign.” So we have one thing that we have to do—I can’t remember when we do it, but we don’t really start campaigning in earnest until July of 2004. We pried days off of his schedule. It is like war to clear days for campaigning, and this is a competitive guy who wants to win. But he has a day job.
So when we go on the road, it’s two days’ worth of work for every day we’re out there. He’s campaigning, but we’ve got meetings. Everywhere he goes, we’re going to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and before he’s got to go speak to 10,000 people at Lambeau Field—
Milkis
Didn’t Kerry get the name wrong?
Rove
Yes, he got the name wrong. “Lambert Field.”
Milkis
I knew he was in trouble when he said he wanted to go. Remember when you were talking about cheesesteaks yesterday? He ordered Swiss cheese. I knew he was in trouble. He still won Pennsylvania, but it was a lot closer.
Rove
Bush is getting ready to go give a speech at Lambeau Field and he’s meeting with a mom and dad of an Iraq casualty. This was a really demanding period of time. Meanwhile, Kerry is out there campaigning circles around us because our guy has a day job and is serious about doing it.
Perry
Is it also harder to prepare the President for debates while an incumbent?
Rove
Sure.
Perry
Not just because he has a day job, but because it’s harder to be critical?
Rove
No, not this crowd. [laughter] When you bring the High Prophet [Karen Hughes] in for debate prep, you have a critic who will say anything to the boss. But no, it’s time. There’s a finite amount of time and you’ve got to get him in the mindset. His attitude was, “I’ve got a job to do. Why am I doing this? I’ve got to go debate him? I’ve got a job to do.” I think part of the first debate was that he thought, Why am I having to do this? I have a job to do. But as I say, he’s a competitive guy, and by the second debate Kerry overplayed, Bush did better, and the third debate Bush cleaned his clock.
Riley
How did the exit polls get so screwed up?
Rove
Ben Wattenberg at AEI [American Enterprise Institute] chaired an independent review commission afterward. He wrote a revealing report, which basically says the key determinant as to whether the exits got it right or got it wrong was the age of the interviewer. If the interviewer was under the age of 35, he sought out other under 35-year-olds who had opinions like yours, and the data was crap; if you were over 35, the data was good. Fundamentally, they did a terrible job in recruiting and training their interviewers. My paranoid view is they got infiltrated. Somebody said, “These exit polls have a real impact on voting and coverage because they seep out in the middle of the day.” Let’s just say that didn’t happen and that’s too paranoid. They just did a really crappy job of training their interviewers and got people who unconsciously sought out voters who looked and acted like them. “So, you look like you eat granola and shop at Whole Foods—”
Milkis
Got out of a Volvo.
Rove
Got out of a Volvo or a Prius—[laughter]
Milkis
You’ve got Nation magazine.
Rove
“—I’m going to interview you.” They’re just unbelievably bad. It was clear they were crap. When I arrived back at the White House on Election Day and the early exits said Bush will lose, Susan Ralston had run them off. I walked into my office and there is a stack like this—
Riley
That’s a foot high.
Rove
—of all the cross-tabs. I started going through them. I can remember calling Jan van Lohuizen and Mehlman and saying, “Are you looking at what I’m looking at? We’re losing white men in Florida? Mississippi and Colorado are too close to call? Mississippi?” We were all bouncing off the walls. But I think the bottom line is they did a really crappy job. They had no systems in place to say, “Are we training the right people?” Then when they looked at the data, nobody looked at the data with a jaundiced eye.
I called Russert and raised some of these questions.
Riley
This was during the day?
Rove
That afternoon I talked to [Robert] Schieffer, too. Both defended the numbers. Russert checked them, called me back, and gave me the line that was coming out of New Jersey, where the exit pollers, Edison Research and Warren Mitofsky, were located, which was basically that Kerry had changed the nature of the electorate. Three-quarters of the voters in Minnesota and North Carolina were women in the sample. I’m thinking, Women are 52 percent of the electorate. They are not 71 percent of the electorate. “Kerry appears to have succeeded in changing the nature of the electorate.” The exits were so badly off it was a scandal.
Riley
And they were leaking out. I got a call from somebody in Washington at five o’clock telling me it was all over.
Rove
They’ve always leaked, but now they leak on the Internet and everyone can get the whole document. Somebody inside a news organization will take it and put it up on the Web at one o’clock in the afternoon, the second round of interviews.
Milkis
I can’t remember what you said about this in your book, but did you discover how bad it was in time to go and do some work on the media? Because like you say, this can affect—
Rove
The media was completely unconstructive. All of them would listen, but the exit polls had such a hold on their imaginations. You had people like Bill Kristol going on saying, in essence, it looks like Bush might lose, that kind of thing.
Milkis
Bill Kristol?
Rove
Even allies were taken by it.
Milkis
For a while you were nervous until you looked at the data.
Rove
I’m nervous because I’m on final approach to Andrews on Air Force One when Sara Taylor calls me and gives me the numbers. I’m trying to write and holding the phone with one hand, my pen in the other, and trying to scribble on a little note card on my leg, and Dan Bartlett is holding the card steady on my leg because it’s the only way I can keep it straight. I’m writing down these numbers and I want to vomit. Then I have to go up and tell Bush.
But after five minutes in my office with the data—If I was ever going to have a heart attack, that was going to be the moment, because I was so furious. It was just ridiculous. It was unbelievable. Republicans losing Florida? The last time that happened was 1964. Mississippi? There was another weakness in that they spread the exit polling. It wasn’t looking just at battleground states, it was looking at all 50 states, and I think they may have just gotten spread too thin. They may not have had the resources to mount this sort of a thing.
Riley
You get a change in responsibilities after the election; you become policy deputy. You didn’t like that job?
Rove
I liked it a lot. I liked doing it, but it was a challenge.
Riley
Tell us why.
Rove
Because I had to mute my opinion. My job was to run the process.
Milkis
I see.
Rove
I was allowed to have an opinion, but if we had a meeting on an issue, it was more likely that it would be meeting number four or five before I would actually opine. Again, it was really important not to look like I was putting a thumb on the scale. This is a job that I had to read a lot each day and react to. Now I had to do more because every day I was in charge of putting together the notebook for the President. We had all the policy stuff that had to go to him. So I really had to get in a place where I would say, “Is this worthy of going to the President today?”
Of course you had to keep ahead of it, because the object was you had meetings tomorrow on several other issues. You’d better make sure that that stuff was ready, which means you needed to be thinking several days in advance. How do you make certain that NEC and DPC [Domestic Policy Council] are fairly reflected in the memo? They’re both arguing about the same paragraph. And I’m still running these other offices. It really required me to try staying ahead of that.
Riley
Sure.
Rove
Of course then in ’05 and ’06, at the same time this is all going on, I’m making five visits to the grand jury.
Riley
Aside from the grand jury piece of it, was it too much? Was it too much to put all of these responsibilities in one person?
Rove
No. I enjoyed it. When Andy left and Josh came in, Josh wanted to bring his deputy from OMB, Joel Kaplan, with him. This person works for the Chief, is an appendage of the Chief, so I didn’t have any difficulty with giving it up. I did enjoy it, but it was a challenge.
Riley
The piece I remembered from the book was the relief over giving it up. There is a sense that in some respects, because you had the long affiliation with the President and you have what I detect are strongly held views on policy yourself, that asking you to be the honest broker of a process would have been very complicated under the best of circumstances.
Rove
There are times in life when you like to do something different and have a challenge. It wasn’t like when I gave it up that I said, “Damn, that was the worst job of my life.” But I also enjoyed being in a place after a while where I didn’t need to worry about restraining my opinion on something.
Riley
Got you.
Rove
But I’m starting to get worn out. I last another year, year and a half, but I’ve been there since 2001 and it’s now March of 2006, and it has been a long time.
Riley
Do you recall any instances where your two inclinations get crossed up, where you’re getting complaints from people that you’re putting your thumb on the scale?
Rove
No. I’m sure I did, but I didn’t get overt complaints from colleagues. Every Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy has an opinion, and consciously or unconsciously those opinions are felt. But I tried desperately not to opine prematurely.
Riley
Interesting.
Rove
One of the interesting things too is I had a couple of deputies who were policy deputies. One was a young guy named Jeremy Katz, who is now in private equity out in Chicago, and Kristen Silverberg, who went on to the State Department, and these were some of the smartest people in the White House. This was another great joy in the job; you got to work with these really smart people who were on top of five or six very diverse issues at a time and attending all these meetings and briefing you on what was going on if you couldn’t attend.
These two were unbelievable, really sharp, able people.
Riley
You mentioned yesterday that you had a passion for health care. Were there other subject areas—
Rove
Yes, seaward lateral boundaries. [laughter]
Riley
What I know about that is all you need—
Milkis
Said with sarcasm.
Rove
It was a running joke. I got so ingrained in that thing I’m reading Grotius.
Milkis
You’re reading Grotius. That’s pretty severe.
Rove
It was like, What in the hell are you doing? I got carried away with it. Health policy was a lot, Social Security modernization, immigration. All of these were topics I plunged into. Then anything that had to do with the NEC crowd was fun to participate in. Stimulus bills.
Then of course we had the group that wanted to kill Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac], of which I was an ardent member. That issue popped up a lot and came to the fore in 2004 and ’05. We have a breakthrough in the Senate when we have this unlikely conversion of Richard Shelby, chairman of the Banking Committee, who owns a title company in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which obviously depended on a healthy amount of home purchases and refinancing, so he is instinctively suspicious of reining in Fannie and Freddie.
To his he credit, he studies the issue and comes to the conclusion that something is fundamentally flawed inside Fannie and Freddie and distortions are being made in the housing system that will have really adverse consequences unless Fannie and Freddie are reined in, and he takes up the cause. That was a really great moment. Then in 2005 he gets the Fannie and Freddie reform bill through his committee, but on a straight party vote.
Riley
Barbara, we didn’t exhaust the topic of Supreme Court nominees yesterday, or did we?
Perry
We completed that.
Milkis
Are there particular topics we should be taking up? All kinds of stuff happens on your watch.
Riley
Go ahead, Sidney.
Milkis
Mike Nelson and I, a colleague and coauthor of mine, always talk about second terms because we’ve written a textbook and it seems they’ve been a problem a lot, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. In many ways I guess what happened in the second term was disappointing.
Rove
Yes, except for the surge.
Milkis
Yes. I have two questions. One you’ve already mentioned, what happened that wasn’t—and you’ve talked a bit about that, but also besides fatigue, what else is there about second terms that make them so treacherous, makes them so difficult? I remember Lyndon Johnson proposed there be a one six-year term for President.
Rove
I think one of the problems that would still remain in the single six-year term is that at some point your congressional party begins to think about its future, absent you. I think, for example, that was one of the things with Social Security. Ultimately the House Republicans said by the end of 2005, bluntly, “Don’t expect us to take this up. We want to be here after you’re gone.” So I think the support of your congressional party changes, even if you’ve worked hard at maintaining a strong alliance.
Milkis
Different timeframes there.
Rove
Then candidates to replace you on both sides emerge. Ours was complicated by the fact we had the war as well. I think the war accelerated the deterioration of the President’s political position.
Milkis
It is a huge issue in 2006.
Rove
Yes, but ironically the Democrats under Rahm Emanuel are smart enough not to wage a campaign for the House based on antiwar sentiment. “The culture of corruption” was their slogan.
Milkis
That’s right.
Rove
And they’re aided by the fact that we do have some really bad actors in the House, the worst of which was Mark Foley, who just about the time we’re getting this all past us, in late September, is revealed to have made an inappropriate approach to a young male page. The Democrats have held this information for more than a year and they pop that out in September, when we are coming back and are likely to keep the House. The bottom just falls out. But Democrats were smart enough not to wage it over the Iraq War. It wasn’t as strong an issue as the culture of corruption, because that allowed them to be anti-Washington, but it also allowed them to paper over the fact that so many leading Democrats had voted for the Iraq War.
Milkis
Right.
Rove
And of course Hillary is thinking about ’08 and does not want Iraq to be a major issue, so she is bringing pressure to bear. I want Presidents to have second terms. If nothing else, the surge and two Supreme Court Justices make Bush’s second term worth it, but it is not a pleasant time.
Milkis
And of course there’s [Hurricane] Katrina.
Rove
Katrina, right.
Milkis
It must have been a terrible experience.
Rove
Particularly because the media—Everybody thinks the federal government is in charge of disaster emergency relief.
Milkis
Except my colleague Martha Derthick, a believer in federalism.
Rove
It is a federalist system. After Katrina we attempt to strengthen the federal role in disaster emergency management, and you know who our principal opponent is?
Milkis
The guy from Vermont, right?
Rove
No.
Milkis
It’s not [Patrick] Leahy?
Rove
No. It’s [John Ellis] Jeb Bush, who says it won’t work. The sheriff of any county in Florida is going to care more about what happens in his part of the state and be able to be in charge of it rather than waiting for some guy from Washington to arrive. So Jeb says, Forget it. I’m against it, and I will do anything I can to defeat it. The change will go nowhere. Every Governor says, “Over my dead body,” except Kathleen Blanco, who doesn’t know anything about anything.
Of course then there is the problem again in the second term when certain moments characterize everything. Just like the “Mission Accomplished” becomes something, so does flying over Louisiana rather than landing in Baton Rouge. I’m part of the decision making on that and it was a mistake. I was wrong. We shouldn’t have landed in New Orleans. That would have been an enormous blunder, because they needed every single moment. We’re there on Thursday—We discombobulated flights in and out with relief aid—but we could have landed in Baton Rouge and gone to the command center. That would have been better than what we did.
Milkis
Why did you not? What was your thinking about not landing in Baton Rouge? Or you just didn’t think about it?
Rove
We were focused on should we or should we not land in New Orleans. We should have gone to Baton Rouge and we would have been better off, maybe even parked ourselves for a couple of days, given how dysfunctional it was.
Perry
We were talking on the way over. We talked about the President’s speech, his first major speech, and then it was on stem cell. So I looked up to see if it was indeed at the ranch and it was. So was there any thinking by 2005 of just that—the symbolism of being at the ranch, being on vacation. Obviously Americans usually don’t begrudge a President taking time away, but were you thinking about that for messaging purposes?
Rove
About how much time he spent at the ranch?
Perry
Or the visuals.
Rove
We felt about the visuals—But remember, we’re at the ranch as the storm is approaching. We are in San Diego at a military installation when it hits. When it comes ashore on that Monday, we’re there. Of course on the weekend prior, Bush is on the phone to Blanco and to the mayor—But he is deeply engaged on this for three days, begging them to live up to the mandatory evacuation plans that they themselves set.
Every state, every major community, has to have a plan, which must be approved by the federal government, a plan that provides for mandatory evacuation, 72 hours in advance of anticipated landfall. For Katrina, this would have meant a mandatory evacuation as of Friday morning. They don’t order it until Sunday morning. We’re spending Friday, Saturday, and Saturday night trying to convince the mayor of New Orleans that he should call a mandatory evacuation. Turns out his concern is that if he calls for evacuation, the city will be sued by the restaurants and hotels for lost revenue. Blanco will not order it, even though she could have ordered it. But Mayor [Clarence Ray] Nagin is the principal actor and he won’t call it until Sunday morning, 24 hours in advance and only then because Bush pressures him.
We have a train that leaves New Orleans like eleven o’clock on Sunday night that has the capacity to carry 4,000 people or so to safety and it has 200–300 people aboard the train. The famous picture of all those school buses sitting in floodwater—The plan was mobilize every one of those school buses, go through certain routes in the neighborhoods, fill them with people, take them to the train station. Send them back to the neighborhood, fill them up, take them to the train, and when the train was filled, start filling those buses, and heading them north to safety and shelters. Not a single one of those school buses was ever activated, despite the city’s plan. So we get blamed for the incompetence of a guy who is sitting there worried about how will the city of New Orleans get sued for lost revenue by Pappadeaux Restaurant.
Milkis
Russell asked you yesterday about Brown, that you were skeptical about him. Was he unfairly criticized?
Rove
He was unfairly criticized. He was the guy who got blamed for the incompetence of the state people. But having said that, when you read those transcripts of his conversations with his staff, he is worried more about how he will appear on television and whether he’s appropriately dressed. They did what they needed to do to bring aid to Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi because Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were run by Governors who knew what the hell they needed. But Kathleen Blanco, “Send us everything you’ve got.” I remember going into Andy Card’s office after she’d said, “Send us everything you’ve got.” He calls Blanco to ask, “What do you mean? What do you need?” She says, “Send us everything you’ve got.” Well, “What do you need? Should we send you food kitchens? Transportation? What do you need?” Whereas in Alabama and Mississippi it was, “I need the following.”
Milkis
Haley Barbour—
Rove
Barbour, I’ve got to tell you, throughout the whole process, not only in the aftermath, was extraordinary. I think we went 13 times to Mississippi and Louisiana, and it was like living in two different worlds. We would go to these recovery meetings in Mississippi—You’d walk into some bank conference room where the windows were all boarded over and there would be people all in their work clothes, no coats and ties, but they would be organized and there would be 45 of them. Five people would speak: Bang, bang, bang. “Here’s what we need your help on. We’re talking to the head of your relief effort for the Gulf Coast, but here’s what we’re doing, here’s where we have challenges.” Most of the things they wanted were policy changes, not money: “We need your help in backing off Fish and Game” on what constituted a wetlands and so forth.
I remember one of the first Mississippi meetings we went to. The guy said, “We have three counties on the Gulf Coast, and all of us participate in a joint mosquito eradication program with Louisiana. We’re getting close to the time when we need to engage in mosquito eradication and we can’t get them to return our phone calls. Will you help us get them to talk to us? We need to have a joint effort. What they do affects what we do, and what we do affects what they do, and we’ve got to talk.”
We go to Louisiana and every meeting was disorganized, unfocused, nobody in charge. They seemed to be more interested in having lunch or dinner. I remember one time we ate at Dooky Chase’s. I’m sitting next to Coach [Raymond] Blanco, Governor Blanco’s husband.
Riley
Coach?
Milkis
Is he a coach?
Rove
He was a high-school coach and you call him “Coach.”
Milkis
What does he coach?
Rove
Football.
Milkis
I was going to guess football.
Rove
We’re sitting at the corner of this big, long table. The President is over here [gesturing] and I’m sitting right here at the corner. The coach is right here and Kathleen Blanco is on the other side of him. The coach and I are talking. It’s just after it has come out that the Maryland company that had been hired to do the housing grants, when they signed the agreement, they had given out millions of dollars in bonuses to the top officials of the company. It has just come out and it stinks.
Here we are, government contract, and it turns out they’ve rewarded the guys at the top with big, big checks and they’re doing a terrible job. Mississippi has already handled over 100,000 housing applications, identified all the people, made decisions about 100 percent of them, written the checks for like 85 percent of them, got the rest of the checks programmed, bam, bam, bam. These Maryland guys have been at Louisiana’s program six months, and like 3 percent of the people have gotten their checks. Dreadful.
So I say to the coach, “What is your reaction to these corporate executives getting big signing bonuses when they cut the deal with the state on the Road Home housing program?” He said, “What you talking about, boy?” [mimics Louisiana country accent] He’s an old Cajun guy. I explained to him. He said, “I don’t know anything about that. Kathleen, Kathleen, you know about these boys getting these big bonuses?” It’s like—How out of touch are you? What are you talking about? She says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Don’t you watch the news?
Anyway, Louisiana was completely dysfunctional.
Milkis
So what are the lessons on this? On the one hand, you started by saying we got blamed for something we didn’t have any control over, but Haley Barbour did a good job—
Rove
Haley Barbour was the Governor in charge and he did a good job.
Milkis
So is federalization, centralization of power—?
Rove
I think Jeb is right. At the end of the day this really boils down to you can’t have a federal authority step in and provide these things. You have to have the New Orleans police department; you have to have a Governor or a mayor do these things. So if there is a federal role, our mistake was not to go out and say on Saturday morning, “We are deeply concerned that the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans have not ordered the mandatory evacuation as required under their own emergency plan. We plead with the state and the mayor to do this. We advise the citizens of New Orleans that if you’re able to, evacuate. If not, alert your local officials and ask for their assistance.” We should have been more proactive.
Milkis
More jawboning.
Rove
Remember, we do something that is—That is on that Saturday. The next Saturday we violate the 1807 Insurrection Act and the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act and 1918 National Guard Act and do something that no President has ever done in the history of the country, and that is order the U.S. military into action to protect the safety of a community in violation of the law.
I remember Fran [Frances] Townsend is trying to scrape up everybody with a federal badge willing to go to Louisiana—ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] agents, border patrol people, GSA [General Services Administration] security—so that there can be somebody with police authority within spitting distance of a military unit. If the army has to arrest somebody, there is a federal agent who can legally say, “You’re under arrest,” while a looter is being held at bayonet point by some 101st Airborne trooper. Again, it’s because we can’t get the state to invite the federal government in, as was done in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake by California Governor Pete Wilson, and we can’t get Louisiana to provide law enforcement supervision security, as they’re required to under the law.
Milkis
But has to make clear when the state and local officials are not living up—
Rove
One lesson is we should have been blunt about it. We should have taken the criticism that we were interfering. They would have been howling, but I think they might have called it earlier.
Riley
I’m trying, in listening to you and in my own reading, to dissect all of this, and your account focuses on the dysfunctional leadership capacities of the people in New Orleans as opposed to competent leadership in Mississippi and Alabama.
Rove
Yes.
Riley
Is it fair to suggest that the nature of the disaster in Louisiana is more profound than it is in Mississippi and Alabama?
Rove
Not necessarily. There is more population in the affected part of Louisiana, but we flew along Mississippi’s 90-mile coast, and from a chopper it looked like the hand of God had come along and created this wavy line. On the seaward side, it is just scraped clean. It’s like somebody just scraped everything off. You’re talking about tens of thousands of people who lived there, who lost their—
Riley
Of course.
Rove
Then when we got on the ground it was even more amazing, because we realized that wavy line is the high-water mark of the debris and it’s 20 feet tall. You’re talking about houses, building structures, roads, everything smashed to bits. The water hit that point and gravity took over; the water begins to recede and drops all the debris, and there is this line. Mississippi suffered a strip of complete and total devastation.
Riley
Right.
Rove
That strip took up parts of major communities. Essentially you were having a mile and a half, two miles in where the Gulf of Mexico’s waters just pulverized everything. There was nothing left.
Riley
I’m not asserting this because I have an opinion on it, I’m just trying to elicit a response: is there something materially different about the role New Orleans plays in Louisiana than—
Rove
You’re right. Pascagoula does not hold as big a piece of the national consciousness as everyplace else and there is a difference. In New Orleans they got flooded. In Mississippi there was nothing left standing. So in a way—You had people in Mississippi who could point to the spot where their home was, and in New Orleans it was “there’s my house under eight feet of water.”
Riley
Right.
Rove
The other thing was the media. My suspicion is if there had been media broadcasting from the Mississippi, Alabama, and Gulf Coast, we would have had a different sense of this than if it was strictly New Orleans.
Riley
Maybe so.
Milkis
It was like it didn’t happen in Mississippi and Alabama if you watched the coverage.
Rove
Yes. There was an ironic advantage to what happened in Mississippi. Most of the devastation involved the complete destruction of property. So God took care of it; the house was gone. You didn’t need to worry about repairing it. It was gone, stuck in a gigantic pile over there.
Perry
And you can’t have people standing on a rooftop if the whole house is gone.
Rove
Mississippi ordered the evacuation. The loss of life was less because they said “Go. Go now!”
Perry
So they were either evacuated or washed away, sadly.
Rove
And the loss of life is much less, even though Mississippi was hit by the more dangerous part of the storm. You’re talking about the eastward side of the storm, where it is whipping around like this. Of course that causes the water to come in from the north of New Orleans, but it means that the worst winds are the winds that are hitting Pascagoula and three counties in southern Mississippi. But again, leadership matters.
The federal law governing the natural disasters, the [Robert T.] Stafford [Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance] Act makes the federal government the check writer and the provider of equipment on demand. It does not put Washington in charge of disaster relief unless the state asks the federal government to take charge, as Pete Wilson did in California. We had here three state governments—Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi—able to cope not only with the initial event and with the aftermath of it, while in Louisiana both the state and the local leadership were dysfunctional.
The national media also was dysfunctional, because it pointed to Katrina being the federal government’s responsibility, when the federal government can’t act unless the state says, “This is what we need.” One of the important events after Katrina was deploying [Russel L.] Honoré, because he’s a Cajun, a Louisianan, and had a brashness that didn’t cause him qualms when he was basically bending his authority in order to get something done. Even he had to work through the adjutant general and the disaster emergency people in Louisiana, but he browbeat them into what he wanted to have done.
Riley
Karl, one other question that comes up in relation to this sometimes is about the readiness and availability of National Guard because they’re being drawn on overseas. Was that an issue at all?
Rove
It is a concern, but every state has agreements with all other Governors that in the event of an emergency they will allow the deployment of National Guard troops from their state. Under these interstate agreements, if Governor Blanco needed more personnel, she could get them, because all 50 states have agreements with all other states.
Riley
Do you recall whether it was a case where Louisiana was deficient in its own National Guard holdings because of deployments overseas?
Rove
They had people abroad, yes, but again, that is not a real issue. If I don’t have this kind of logistics unit—
Riley
You can get it from someplace else.
Rove
No state National Guard is self-sufficient in and of itself. So even in a time when they weren’t being deployed, they would probably need to call on units from additional states. I need a demolition unit, I need heavy equipment, I need food, I need shelter, all of which they were probably not able to provide with existing units.
Riley
How much of your time after August and September of 2005 are you working this problem?
Rove
For a while some amount because the intergovernmental affairs people report to me. But as soon as we had Don Powell, a banker from Amarillo, which happens within a member of weeks, IGA works with him but I’m drawn out. I go with Bush on these trips because of the IGA angle and I do talk to—I’m the guy who was trying to find Nagin before we go down there on Thursday, which was difficult after he abandoned the city’s command center. But the object is, once we get Don Powell in charge, he is the President’s representative. So we seconded the IGA people to be helpful to him, but I receded from it.
Riley
Now you got in the aftermath a messaging problem, and how are you dealing with the messaging problem?
Rove
Not very well.
Milkis
When was the speech that Bush gave in Jackson Square?
Riley
I’ll find it.
Rove
It was a really good speech. We had really cordial relationships, dysfunctional but cordial relationships, with people down there, particularly the community leadership and the parish presidents. But Blanco wants to spend the first tranche of housing money on an advertising program for tourism, not on housing assistance. We’re having to deal with that kind of stuff every step of the way.
Riley
Were there subsequent efforts to try to look at how to avoid these kinds of problems?
Rove
Sure. We looked at potential reforms to the Stafford Act, but they go nowhere, because again we operate in a federalistic system, where the actual operators are the state and communities through their National Guard and local agencies, and the federal government’s job is to be the check writer and the logistics supplier.
Governors are comfortable with that, and there is a good argument that they are much better able to handle this than Washington. Give us the tools and we’ll do the job. So their focus was: Don’t erode my authority, because it doesn’t matter to me that Bush is being blamed for this. I don’t want to be blamed for this if something happens in my state, and I need the authority to be the guy in charge. They were right. Now the question is, what do we do in the future? The problem is if the media want to say it’s the President’s responsibility, guess what? He’s stuck.
How can you argue with the narrative of somebody saying it’s the President? “Mr. President, save me.” Particularly when a lot of the equipment that you see is military equipment that may be federal, may be state, but which they consider to be military, therefore the President. Send in the choppers.
Perry
And the first thing that these Governors do after a disaster is ask the President to declare it a disaster area. So I think in the minds of the people—
Rove
And why do they do that? Yes, that is the necessary requisite to starting—
Perry
The check writing and the logistics.
Rove
—the money and the logistics. You can’t have that without a federal declaration.
Riley
So in that environment, if we get another catastrophe like this, what do you advise the Obama people or their successors about how to steel themselves for what is going to happen?
Rove
Have a robust federal presence there in the command center from moment one and do what we did not do. If somebody is not activating their disaster emergency plan, blow the whistle. We should have blown the whistle on Friday when they didn’t do it.
Riley
And you’re willing to take the heat if the storm turns and they don’t get hit?
Rove
Yes. You have a plan for a reason. It’s not, “We will call a mandatory evacuation three days, 72 hours, before the landfall of an expected category three or larger storm.” It’s not, “If we bet that the chances of that are no better than 33 percent.” That’s not what it is; these things are black and white. If the anticipated event is this bad, we will do this one. If it’s a tropical storm, we will do the following things. It’s black and white. They think about these plans and write them down and then have to be certified and occasionally recertified. So people are thinking about these things and coming to logical judgments that they’ve written their name on.
We have to hold them accountable to it. If it passes without, then we say, “Guess what? You dodged the bullet, thank God.” I would rather have taken that bullet than the bullet of—
Milkis
You go down and hug the Governor, like [Christopher] Christie. I don’t know if there was a good response to Sandy, but those pictures of Obama and Christie wandering around were of enormous benefit politically. They both got reelected, I think in part.
Rove
And what was the federal government doing? The federal government was writing checks and providing logistical support in response to specific requests by the state. Both actors did exactly what they were supposed to do. But both actors in this drama need to work together, and when they’re not, as in the case—Bush, [Robert R.] Riley, and Haley—Isn’t it interesting that two of them have a last name and one of them only has a first name—had their acts together and then Governor Blanco, “Send everything, everything you’ve got.”
[BREAK]
Riley
All right, you pretty extensively deal with the [Valerie] Plame [Wilson] investigation and your legal problems in the book, but there may have been bits and pieces of the story that you didn’t do.
Rove
I put all the major stuff in there, the important stuff, except the size of my legal bills.
Riley
You want to record that?
Rove
No, I’m not going to record that.
Riley
OK. What are the other things that you’re dealing with then? What are the major things on your plate during the second term?
Rove
Well, 2005 is Social Security; Katrina; the beginning of immigration discussions, which are wide-ranging and very complicated, and get more complicated the more we delve into it. Those are the big domestic issues.
Then of course in 2006 you get hints that Bush is unsatisfied with the progress of the war effort and begins to look for alternatives and then to gently guide the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Department in the direction of what ultimately becomes the surge. We’re also attempting to figure out whether there is an alternative to Rumsfeld. [Robert] Gates, who had earlier been unavailable, now starts to begin to signal he might be available. Then the question is, does Bush make a change before the 2006 elections?
Riley
Should he have?
Rove
No, I think he was absolutely right to wait. First, he was not certain that Gates would have been willing to take it under those circumstances, but assume for a moment that we had someone willing to take it under those circumstances. In 2006 the confirmation hearing would have been a zoo, and whoever took that job would have been damaged, and the President could have even been defeated over his nomination. The Democrats could have said, “The best thing for us to do is to defeat Bush on his nominee, find him unconstructive—”
Milkis
Even Gates? Even someone as strong a candidate as Gates?
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
But boy, it sure happened quick after the election. That was one of the first things that happened.
Rove
We had Republicans like Mitch McConnell who were pressing for it to happen before the 2006 election. But Bush thought it would be bad for the country if the new Secretary of Defense was hobbled by a brutal confirmation hearing. We had a better chance of a normal confirmation hearing after the election, when Senators wouldn’t be preening for the cameras.
Riley
There were some significant changes going from the first term to the second term in terms of personnel. Did the team work as well in the second term as it did in the first term?
Rove
I think so. You do have—Margaret Spelling leaves the White House and goes over to—That was a problem because she’d been so superb in that area. We have Al Hubbard at NEC, who does a superb job. We have the second-term economic team that was a step up in many respects. We had a much stronger Secretary of Treasury. The CEA guys who were good in the first term were really good in the second, and then NEC. I liked Larry Lindsey a lot. I thought he was very effective. I thought Al Hubbard was really superb. The proof is in the pudding that when the crisis came I think they adroitly handled it.
Riley
Condi had been with the President in a very close way for a long time and then she goes to State. Are there any problems created by her not being right around the corner, as she seems to have been for probably at least five years by then?
Milkis
That’s interesting when somebody from the White House office—like Rice and Spelling—goes out into the Cabinet, how that affects their relationship with the President.
Rove
Her alter ego remained, Steve Hadley, and Condi was in and out of the West Wing a lot and talked a lot to Bush and socialized with him. So I’m not certain how much it changed, but every change within the White House and administration creates other changes in relationships. In this case, I think the changes were inconsequential.
So you had this relationship between the White House, the Defense Department, and the State Department, and the NSC in the first term, and then in the second term you have Colin leaving State, and eventually you have Rumsfeld leaving Defense. But remember the State/Defense relationship was highly contentious. In the first term, they each had their seconds who warred on their behalf. Paul Wolfowitz is a friend of mine, a wonderful human being and one of the smartest, most decent human beings I know. But he does not have the internecine skills of his counterpart in the Defense Department, Richard Armitage, who was the consummate leaker and had spent decades building relationships with the press. So State got the better of Defense in every battle that leaked into the newspapers, because of the skill of Colin and his people.
When Condi went there, that changed the relationship. Condi and Rumsfeld had tough moments. It changed the nature of the relationship, because no longer was it the State Department leaking against the Defense Department. Whatever their disagreements, Condi was not going to be thinking about going to the newspapers, and Rumsfeld as a result didn’t need to worry about resorting to that either.
Milkis
Are there any policy advantages of taking people you really trust and admire and putting them in positions like the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Education? Is there an advantage to that?
Riley
Justice.
Milkis
Yes, Justice. I can see where you might mess things up in the White House office a little bit because you develop this teamwork, but now they’re on the ground, so to speak.
Rove
Ironically, it strengthens the Cabinet.
Milkis
Of course, because the development of the White House office weakened the Cabinet.
Rove
It clearly identified people who have the President’s ear. It strengthens their status within their departments; it gives them greater credibility on the Hill. It also makes the White House more responsible for their actions. It’s harder when Margaret Spellings is the Secretary of Education; it gives you less plausible deniability for her actions.
Milkis
I could see where there is an issue with that, but it might be some advantage.
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
I sometimes wonder whether Presidents put too little—One of the disadvantages of the modern Presidency is too little attention to the Cabinet. They deemphasize the Cabinet too much.
Rove
But they run a lot of the actual activity.
[break in conversation because of a distraction outside]
Rove
It’s an interesting question. On the one hand, it strengthens the Cabinet when you have somebody who is close to the President. On the other hand, it does raise questions sometimes—particularly the Justice Department. It made Alberto a target because he was the President’s longtime confidant. It made him vulnerable to the charges that he was taking the politics of the White House and moving it to an agency that ought to be separate and apart from the White House.
Milkis
Can’t win either way. One time you’re accused of being too insular, and then you’re accused of politicizing the bureaucracy.
Rove
Right, but I think generally a strong Cabinet and change are good things. It’s also important for a White House to have some change and it’s also important for people to understand that if I do a good job someplace I’ll be rewarded. It was a reward for Margaret Spellings, an honor, for her to be moved—
Milkis
That’s interesting.
Rove
—to move from the Domestic Policy Council to Education Secretary.
Riley
You mentioned this as strengthening the Cabinet. Was the Cabinet as a body useful or usable? I get the sense that Cabinet meetings don’t happen very often.
Milkis
That’s since [George] Washington, I think.
Rove
Exactly.
Riley
Lincoln.
Milkis
Maybe Lincoln.
Rove
Or [William] McKinley. As we’ve just seen with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the competence of Cabinet departments in executing the President’s policies has a huge impact on the President himself. There are sub-Cabinets of a smaller number of departments. Inside the Bush administration there was the War Cabinet of Defense, State, the intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, and the President. They effectively worked as we think of a Cabinet under Lincoln or a Cabinet under—albeit over one area.
In the second term you did have Homeland Security and the Commerce Department and Justice Department working with the White House on immigration reform. So you had again this close coordination with those Cabinet officials in and out of the White House frequently for meetings.
[telephone break]
Riley
Did Bush have Cabinet meetings?
Rove
Oh, yes.
Riley
Did he think they were useful?
Rove
It was useful to get the Cabinet together, but again, he was seeing the War Cabinet in person or on the phone with great frequency, once or twice a week. Immigration reform, every couple of weeks he would see Carlos [Gutierrez]. Homeland, Alberto, to talk about it. My sense is that there are important moments to bring everybody together, to compliment people, to sketch out the big challenges facing the country, to sort of give them a sense of team, but limited utility.
Riley
One of the things that we definitely want to get you to talk about is the RNC, your relationship with the chair, sort of if you could go through and talk about the successive chairs, the strengths and weaknesses of the people who were there, and what your ongoing working relationship with them was.
Milkis
How many were there? Jim Gilmore was there when you came in.
Rove
No, we put Gilmore in. He was succeeded then by Marc Racicot, Ed Gillespie,
Milkis
And Gillespie is there until after the election in 2004.
Rove
Yes. Let’s see here. Do you have a list?
Riley
I’ll pull it up.
Rove
A President generally has the ability, as long as he stays close to the national committee, of dictating their choice. So we had four or five chairmen who we in essence consulted with the national committee about, but selected. Gilmore was the first. We chose Gilmore because he had been an active leader of party building in Virginia. He had done a magnificent job of recruiting candidates for office and then giving them the necessary support, so he was able to take the House of Delegates and I think come close in the Senate, but he was an active party builder. He was also a disappointment.
Milkis
He didn’t last very long.
Rove
We had to fire him. In 2001 he was in Washington 17 days. We had put a strong executive director at the committee in the form of Jack Oliver, but Gilmore was just not active as chairman. The first job of the Republican National Committee chairman when there is a Republican President in the White House is to raise money. The second job is to run the committee, and he was doing neither of those things. So we really felt we were getting things done that we wanted to get done there.
[outside distraction again]
Riley
[R. James] Nicholson after you?
Rove
No, Nicholson was before. Nicholson was there in 2000. It’s tough to be the chairman of the party in a Presidential campaign, and he did a very good job of being neutral beforehand and then being incredibly cooperative in the general election. We had no difficulties whatsoever. Part of that was Nicholson’s attitude and that of his chief of staff, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is now in the House. But the other part of it was we sent this woman, who is about this tall, named Maria Cino, to be our point of contact and ensure seamlessness. She had the diplomatic skills and the knowledge of the building to make that work.
But along came Gilmore. We replaced him with Marc Racicot, who was unable to come into the administration. He was Bush’s first choice to be Attorney General, but couldn’t afford to do it. Racicot did a very good job. Gillespie was there for the reelect, then Mehlman after that and then Mel [Melquiades] Martinez and Mike Duncan
Riley
Gilmore, Racicot, Gillespie, Mehlman, Martinez, and then Duncan.
Rove
Martinez briefly and then Duncan.
Milkis
I remember asking you, maybe we talked about this last time, but when I interviewed you, I think it was 2001, about whether you had given any thought to being the head, like your protégé, Lee Atwater.
Rove
No. I didn’t have a real interest in being Republican national chairman. Lee, that was his sine qua non, the thing he treasured above all, but no.
Perry
In terms of teams, we haven’t talked about the First Lady. What are your thoughts about her role and how it seemed to expand into a couple of other policy areas in the second term and your thoughts about how she could help with messaging?
Rove
To me it is one of the great personal odysseys. In 1994, when he ran for Governor, Laura Bush didn’t make a single appearance. She was so shy and retiring, so unassuming. She didn’t grasp that she had this enormously appealing personality with a powerful ability to communicate. By the time he ran for President, she was more public and more active. Contrast that with her as First Lady, where by the second term she is clearly and passionately interested in the expansion of human rights for women, particularly in the Arab world, and then takes on what had seemed at the time an almost quixotic interest in Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Miramar.
Most people don’t understand the range of her activities. She was very involved in making certain that this often ignored board, the National Park Foundation, was filled with their friends who were passionate about the parks and willing to write large checks and may or may not have been Republicans. The 100th anniversary of the parks was coming up, and this foundation plays a really vital role when the board is not just being political has-beens and hacks, but people who are passionate about the parks and willing to help raise money on its behalf.
So you started to see her adopt these things. Then of course the National Book Festival, which will endure long after Washington has forgotten the Bushes. To see her adopt these things, and you saw this very quiet woman who would set the plate spinning and then go get another plate and then go back and make sure the first plate wasn’t wobbling—She really came into her own. Yet at the same time, she and her husband, I think, I’ve heard them say on a number of occasions it was the eight years where they were closest in their marriage. Then she has the third floor of the White House filled with all of their pals coming up from Texas.
Every year she is traipsing off with her gal pals to go on some big hike. It was a mix of the personal and these big public things—It was a big signal when the First Lady reaches out to this woman who is under house arrest in a third-world dictatorship. When she began to draw interest to reaching out to women in the Middle East to encourage an expansion of human rights, this is a big deal. This is work she continues through the Bush Center today.
Milkis
Karen Hughes did some of that too, right? When she came back into government as Under Secretary of State I think it was in charge of cultural stuff.
Riley
I think we talked a little bit about 41 earlier. Was he an occasional presence in the White House, and did you feel his presence in other ways?
Rove
There is a father-son dynamic there that nobody gets in the middle of. Nobody gets a chance to see it, because it is quiet moments between father and son. You do get a hint of it. He would say, “I talked to Dad.” He would check in with his old man. Of course his parents would come and visit him there.
But his father also had this remarkable attitude of “I was President and I know how much I was bathing daily in the information flow, and I’m not there, so I’m not going to have an opinion about everything. I’m going to be a father.” There were a couple of things that he asked for, like Will Farish [III] to be the Ambassador to Great Britain because his close friend had not been able to take the assignment in 41’s first term and was hopeful of taking it in the second term, but 41 didn’t have a second term. Still, it was remarkable how the father’s attitude was “I’m there for you as your father. I’m happy to be there for you as a former President, but I recognize the limitations.”
The advantage that a former President has to a current President, Bush got a lot of that by simply having the father available, but also by having seen his dad in action where a former President could be of value and where they couldn’t.
Riley
I have to ask because I think the top window up there is Brent Scowcroft’s office. There was an episode where he wrote an op-ed, I guess for the New York Times. How did that register inside the White House?
Rove
Not well received. My recollection is that Bush 43 didn’t have a heads up on it.
Riley
He did not.
Rove
Or if he had a heads up, it was like “This is coming” not “Hey, I’m going to do this unless you object.” No, Brent had problems with both Bush’s policies and with Bush’s people. He’s entitled to his opinion; Bush didn’t object to that, but he felt blindsided on this one.
Riley
The external perception, because of the closeness between Brent and the father, was that there were maybe implicit messages being sent from dad about this.
Rove
Oh, no. If the dad wanted to send a message, he had a phone number. In particular, if the mom wanted to send a message—[laughter] No, no. That’s one of the things. Bush senior had a very deferential attitude, which is, “I love you.” Two different sources of emotion. “I love you, you’re my son, I have confidence in you, I’m proud of you.” Unconditional love. “I’m a former President and I know the constraints placed on me by being a former President who is not bathed every day in the flow of information that you are. I’m for your decision. If you want to ask my opinion, I’ll give it to you, but I’m for your decision.” The special bond a former President can have.
Perry
Did President Bush 43 ever talk to you about the relationship that developed between his father, Bush 41, and Bill Clinton in addressing the tsunami in 2004?
Rove
My personal favorite is—Clinton is a rascal. So 41 and particularly Barbara [Bush] can’t help but love a rascal. For one reason, they had a slightly different kind of a rascal for their elder son. But Clinton is a complete rascal.
Bush 41 tells me they’re walking into the Indonesian Embassy. The State Department has this program called Arts and Embassies, which displays American artists and their works in our embassies abroad. Clinton and 41 are walking in this hallway with the Ambassador. Clinton is with the chargé d’affaires. There’s this painting over there. Clinton says, “What’s this?” The chargé d’affaires says, “This is Joe Jones. This is from his red period, and he’s also known for a blue period and a green period, but this is from the red period and this is supposed to be the symbolic thing here, and this is what this means” and blah, blah.
As they’re coming out, it’s Bush 41 and Clinton walking out together, and Clinton stops in front of this picture and says, “George, have you seen this? It’s from Joe Jones. He’s one of my favorite American artists. This is from the red period; he’s got a blue period and a green period that I really love, but the red period is the most important. Look at these symbols; this is what they symbolize. He’s one of my favorite artists and I’m so delighted to have his work here in the Embassy in Indonesia. Someday if you get to see some of the blue period—” [laughter] Not knowing that Bush had been close enough to hear every word that the chargé d’affaires had said to Clinton. It couldn’t have been funnier. He is who he is and he can’t help himself.
Milkis
I think the relationship between Presidents and former Presidents is really interesting. Sometimes it’s more comfortable than it is with the people in their own party because they’ve all had that shared experience.
Rove
Clinton would check in with him. One day, I think this started shortly after Bush moved into the White House, he’s sitting in the private quarters on a Sunday afternoon and the phone rings in the private quarters and it’s Clinton. “How you doing, George? What’s going on?” Therein ensued an eight-year set of conversations that happened with regularity. I think Clinton was very generous in doing it. There was a two-way street. Bush is an incredible collector of political gossip, so he would pump Clinton for political gossip, some of which was obviously tainted by the source, but everybody knew what was going on in this thing. He would share a lot of intel that Bush found illuminating. It was a great relationship. I’m sure that Obama has not had the same relationship with Clinton that Bush benefited from, and certainly has made no attempt to reach out to Bush.
Riley
So there hasn’t been any dialogue?
Milkis
None at all?
Rove
He called him to tell him that OBL [Osama bin Laden] had been killed, but even then they couldn’t help themselves; they then floated the next day that Bush had been invited to join Obama in New York later that week before they’d actually invited Bush.
Then Bill Daley called me to try to cajole me into supporting the idea of 43 joining Obama in New York that week to celebrate and I read him the riot act. I said it was despicable. “You couldn’t even bring yourself to compliment your predecessor in your remarks last night, and now you expect him to show up and serve as a political backstop for you? You have never treated him with the respect that he is due, and now you want to use him politically. You’ve gone to the newspapers and told people that you invited him before a) you invited him, and b) he accepted. You’re trying to force him to come, so screw you.” I was a little bit more polite than that, but not much.
Riley
With Daley, maybe not.
Rove
Daley I thought was a good choice. I actually wrote a column complimenting him, but in retrospect, they cut him out from the moment he walked in there.
Perry
You said President Clinton had done his outreach to President Bush 43, but we get the impression from just how the media covered it that Bush 43 is not really that comfortable in trying to be part of the mix. Would he have felt comfortable calling President Obama?
Rove
Sure.
Perry
He would?
Rove
Think about it. Even the Obama people will admit, and observers will say, this was probably the smoothest transition—Josh Bolten, whom you haven’t yet interviewed—
Riley
We’ve met. We’re in the middle—
Rove
Be sure and get into the transition, because this is an extraordinary effort. First of all, we go to the Congress and ask the Congress to allow Presidential candidates to submit a list of individuals—I think it was 50 each, maybe a hundred each, who prospectively might be in their administrations, so that the FBI can begin the process of the background check before the election so that they’re able to have access to clearances sooner rather than later.
Then we set up a bigger fund for transition expenses. Then the day after the election, the Bush White House says to the Obama transition, “What can we do?” We brought in everybody as they named them, brought them in to introduce them to the existing number inside the White House so they could literally see here is where the DPC is and here is what the space is. Between Josh and Joe Hagin, they did a superb job of preparing the transition. We had nothing. We walked in the door and barely had a map of where we were going to be, but the Obama people came into the White House, got briefed. It was an incredibly effective transition. That wouldn’t have happened if Bush hadn’t said, “Let’s think through what would have helped us be better from the moment we walked in the door and let’s go do it for these people.”
Perry
So he was willing to do that outreach to the President.
Rove
Oh, sure. Remember he calls President Obama and invites him to come to the White House? Literally it’s like, “What can I tell you? What do you need from me? What does Michelle [Obama] need from Laura?” Couldn’t have been more gracious and outgoing. So yes. If he’s not comfortable picking up the phone and calling Obama the first time, but if Obama had signaled, “I want to talk to you,” he would have been more than willing to have been available to him. The difference between Clinton and 43 was that Bush didn’t spend the 2000 campaign kicking the crap out of Clinton by name. He did say, “I’m going to restore honor and dignity to the White House,” but he did not go out of his way—both because that’s not his style and because, second of all, this was about the future, not the past.
Milkis
Clinton was also pretty popular, to be honest.
Rove
We weren’t dumb.
Milkis
He’s still popular.
Rove
No need to pick a fight with a guy who is more popular than the guy you’re running against.
Milkis
He really complimented you. I read this somewhere, maybe it was in your book, after the ’04 campaign Clinton told you he thought it was a brilliant campaign.
Rove
“Brilliant campaign. You’re unbelievable. We’ve got to get together. You come by; we’ll have a wonderful talk about politics.” [mimicking Clinton’s voice]
Milkis
He said he’d have you down to the library.
Rove
We were down at the library. Of course we were together in Nigeria a couple of years ago and it was like—“Let’s talk politics. How’s that Howard Dean? Is he crazy?”
Riley
We’re winding down. I suggested earlier, you are a student of history and you’re working on a book about a much earlier era. Can you give yourself some critical distance from this administration and look back on it and give us some pointers for how history will or ought to treat the administration?
Milkis
Or as we would ask more academically: How do we understand President Bush in a historical perspective?
Riley
Much better. I’ll strike my question.
Rove
That’s worthy of a small volume. I do think, like it or not, 9/11 will be seen as one of America’s seminal events, the biggest event of his administration, and how he responded to it, the aftermath, will frame much of history’s judgment.
I think people are going to look back at Iraq, and determine that, on balance, Bush’s War on Terror was right and successful. This will depend on what happens in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they look back and see Iraq is mostly stable, mostly democratic, mostly looking to the West, and no longer run by a ruthless dictator who supports terrorism and threatens our allies and our interests, then they will say, Bush was right.
Riley
Right.
Rove
If they look there and say Iraq is a disaster and it always has been thus so and nothing could have made it better, then they will deem his actions a failure. I do believe people will look at what he did to rally the country in the aftermath of 9/11 and provide the tools for future Presidents to confront terrorism, whether it is the Patriot Act, improvements in intelligence, the drone program, the Homeland Security Department, all of the tools he provided to future Presidents to confront this threat and give him credit.
Riley
A lot of those things will be knowable. In 30 years you will have a different reality in Iraq. I guess what you’re saying is the condition of that reality will—
Rove
I worry the road there will be harder than it needed to be because of Iran’s influence. If we had kept a 10,000 U.S. force presence helping the Iraqis fight off insurgents with logistics, intelligence, and air support, we wouldn’t be having Iranian influence growing in the region.
This is one where to some degree history’s judgment is a little bit out of Bush’s control because a critical decision was made that President Obama required [Nouri al-] Maliki to get parliamentary approval of a SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement], which has never been done before, and get it in the midst of a political campaign when he’s trying to form a government, which was impossible.
I think people are also going to look at No Child Left Behind. While it is being nibbled away at, it is nonetheless bringing about a fundamental change in education in a lot of states by giving impetus to the education reform movement. I don’t think we’re going to walk away from an accountability system.
We’re going to solve immigration at some point and people are going to be writing pieces then saying, “Gee, this bill, upon close examination, looks sort of like what Bush was putting forward in 2005 and ’06.”
Milkis
I think they’re already starting to talk about that.
Rove
And I think the same thing will happen on Social Security at some point. Something that we’re going to do on Social Security, what Moynihan proposed, and people are going to say, “Moynihan suggested this—progressive indexing and raising the age limit—and Bush was supportive of this and we finally have been forced by economic circumstances, the looming bankruptcy of Social Security, into doing this. And if we had done this earlier, these necessary changes would have been easier.” So I think he is going to be seen in retrospect as a President who was thinking ahead and suggesting things that needed to be done.
Look at his stewardship in the 2008 financial crisis. I think we’re already starting to see people, at least in the financial press, who say, “You know what? Gutsy call by Bush.” Most of the work to shore up the financial system was done on his watch with TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program]. What was done on his watch is significantly different from what was done on the watch that came after him. The money given to the banks under Bush has come back with a profit. We won’t get the money out of the car companies given by his successor. But Bush’s actions saved the system.
Milkis
Now, you weren’t there when all that was going on. Did you talk with the President?
Rove
Oh, yes, I floated in and out a lot.
Milkis
Oh, you did?
Rove
Yes, I floated in and out a lot.
Milkis
That was a tough time.
Rove
Really tough time.
Milkis
I remember sitting there watching the stock market collapse.
Rove
Yes, 777 points in one day. I think I was at the White House that day.
Riley
I was driving up to do an interview and I remember I started in Charlottesville and it was at this level and by the time I got to the Beltway it was—
Milkis
That Republican rebellion in the House.
Rove
Then they had to peel people off one by one. Bush—This is where eight years of having cordial relations with the Congress and going out of his way to develop a personal relationship was so critical. Bush is really good at remembering your wife’s name, how many kids you’ve got, developing a cordial relationship, giving you a nickname, campaigning for you, and so forth. Then it really paid off, because at the end of the day we would not have passed this had he not been able to take some Members, Spencer Bachus and others, and convince them. “You’ve got to come across to do this. I don’t like this any better than you, but the future of the country is at stake.” That personal connection really mattered. Whatever political credit he had left on Capitol Hill was exhausted by the time TARP passed. But thank God he’d built it up. Even if he didn’t understand, he was building it up.
Milkis
Yes, it’s interesting that Obama was willing to come to the White House and support that too. Roosevelt never did that with [Herbert] Hoover. He would not have anything to do with him to help ameliorate the banking crisis.
Riley
Are there other developments that a hundred years from now we’re going to look back on and say, “Boy, this was really a hinge point”?
Rove
I may be wrong about this, but I think we’ll look back at Medicare Part D and say this was the moment two things happened: health savings accounts, which inexorably led to building a consumer-based health care system; and we’ll look back and say this is the moment when we came to what ultimately became the reform structure that saved Medicare.
Of course they’ll also look back at Clinton and say Bush was able to achieve this because he stole the idea from Clinton and John Breaux, which I think would be healthy for the country. I wish the narrative on Medicare Part D was less that this is Bush’s accomplishment and more this is Bush successfully adopting an idea promulgated by Clinton’s Medicare commission, chaired by John Breaux.
Milkis
Undermined by my colleague Stuart Altman from Brandeis. He was on that commission. Do you remember that? He submarined that commission. He was—It was too moderate for him. I went to one of the meetings. I met Bobby Jindal. He was Breaux’s assistant; I don’t know if you remember that.
Rove
Yes, and brilliant, and he had to be like 21 years old.
Milkis
He looked like he was about 13. If he was Jewish, I’d say it was his bar mitzvah.
Rove
Yes, he’s Breaux’s guy, and he literally has to be like 21.
Milkis
He was very young, but so impressive.
Rove
Unbelievable.
Milkis
Such a presence about him.
Rove
He was a Rhodes scholar at that point or something.
Milkis
I really enjoyed meeting him.
Rove
Then Bill Thomas, of course, I think on that. We studied the commission’s work. Through Lott we had Breaux in to talk about it. Amazingly, it has enough components that it ought to be attractive to both parties. It’s government-provided benefit, universal in nature, and yet it is built around market mechanisms and can be means tested.
Milkis
I wanted your reflections on the development of parties as well. People like Breaux who are really thought of institutionally and not just by party, are we just likely to see them disappear? Is there a hope?
Rove
They’ve disappeared; they’re gone. Who fills that role today?
Milkis
That’s what I was going to ask.
Rove
There may be a Joe Manchin, but there’s no Joe Lieberman or John Breaux. Remember, Breaux represents a state that is overwhelmingly Democrat that has now become Republican, but Lieberman represented a state that is overwhelmingly Democrat and remains so. I think Manchin is being driven by pressures that Breaux didn’t feel, that is to say a state that has very quickly turned from blue to deep red, and Breaux was in a state where there were still Democrat Governors and Democrat legislatures and mostly Democrat Members of Congress and so forth in the ’90s.
Milkis
You were talking about the decline of parties before, but there has also been some serious decline in the institutions—
Rove
Yes, the institutions.
Milkis
—what we used to call the textbook Congress.
Rove
I don’t know how you restore that either.
Milkis
You think we’ve cut across the Rubicon?
Rove
I don’t know. I don’t want to say that. My only misgiving is Bush was so willing to engage Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, and yet there were limitations on that because of the outcome of the 2000 election and because of the Iraq War. Those were constraints on how successful that behavior was or was not going to be.
On the other hand, I had high hopes for Obama being able to engage in that, in constructive behavior, and didn’t. Maybe that’s because he had too many Democrats in his first Congress. But the next President, Democrat or Republican, are they going to be able to—are they a) willing to do it, and b) is it going to bear any fruit? I don’t know.
Milkis
After the 2004 election there was a lot of talk about you being the architect of a new Republican majority. Obviously that hasn’t happened. There is a question whether one could see that kind of realignment anymore, given how fractured—Reflect on that.
Rove
First of all, parties aren’t going to remain in this 50/50 nature forever.
Milkis
You think it is going to tilt?
Rove
It always does. Somebody gains the upper hand for some period of time. We have these periods of fractious—
Milkis
McKinley would be a good example.
Rove
In the 20 years from 1876 until 1896, we have four years where the White House and the Congress are governed by the same party. We have two minority Presidents. Yet at some point it goes one way or the other.
I do think the Republican Party is stronger today because there is a recognition, I think largely stemming from Bush’s experience, that the party has got to fight for the Latino vote. I think there is a recognition that the party is capable of erasing the gender gap in Presidential elections. If those two impulses are then melded with this Tea Party sentiment that says we’ve got too much debt and deficit and I’m afraid of the stimulus and what Obamacare is doing to me, that could be a strong combination.
Milkis
More inclusive, pluralistic sense of—
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
Sounds like McKinley.
Rove
Exactly.
Milkis
Remember, McKinley had a rabbi to give the benediction in 1896.
Rove
That’s right.
Milkis
He threw the American Protective Association out of the Republican Party.
Rove
Exactly.
Milkis
See, I know a little bit about this.
Rove
Good.
Riley
Like they threw a party and we weren’t invited.
Milkis
Just because it parallels, that’s the only reason I’m bringing it up.
Rove
My book highlights the APA [American Protective Association]. I’ve looked at all the writing on it and I really got into it in my McKinley book.
Milkis
I’d like to see that.
Rove
Chapter 13.
Milkis
I have to say, of all the writings on Karl Rove, mine’s the best.
Rove
Exactly. It’s not even in many books on the era. They pass over the APA quickly. But this is a huge threat to McKinley’s candidacy and to the Republican Party, and he adroitly handles it. You’re getting me started. It’s not only—Have you read his letter to William McKinley Osborne?
Milkis
No.
Rove
He writes this incredible letter to his cousin. Two things are happening. He clearly makes a decision: I’m going to rise above this, but I’m also going to authorize [Marcus Alonzo] Hanna to go gut these people. But I want to make certain as soon as that happens that everybody puts it in the right context. So he writes this incredible letter to William McKinley Osborne, his cousin. It’s clear he is also saying the same thing to [Charles] Dawes, who is in Ohio at the same time, where he basically says, “Can you imagine what it would be to allow a secret society to dictate policy to a candidate for President? This would be terrible for our democracy and we must not stand for it.”
So he is basically telling Osborne to put this on a bigger basis. No President should come to the Oval Office encumbered by promises made to a secret group. It is really a masterful letter. You can just sense that this is the heart of McKinley. He writes a similar letter that I’ve come across, as he is getting ready to go to Georgia in 1895. He writes this letter to Hanna that foreshadows his visit with black Republicans, saying that the day is coming when all the nation will respect the right of all Americans to the franchise, but until that moment comes, we must never forget our responsibility to stand for this. He is basically signaling to Hanna, “When I come south I want to meet the black Republicans.”
Milkis
Interesting.
Riley
I’ve got two or three things, quickly.
Rove
You can trace the black Republicans who came to Thomasville, Georgia, by looking at the registers of the local hotels.
Riley
Really? What was it that he did, Karl?
Rove
I initially traced them by looking at the hotels.
Riley
Interesting.
Perry
Where were those kept? Where did you find the ledgers for the hotels?
Rove
Many times they’re printed in the Thomasville Enterprise. They say, “Today staying at the whatever hotel are—”
Perry
So you just determined what the white hotels were and the black hotels?
Rove
And then I checked the black hotels and went through and said, “Are any of these people delegates to the Republican National Convention or active in the Republican state party?” I found two professors from the black college in Georgia who came to see McKinley, one of whom ends up being a delegate and one of whom ends up being an alternate.
Riley
That’s some serious research.
Perry
Mine was targeting 1895.
Riley
As you’re talking, the wheels have been going about things that I skipped over. One was we spent a lot of time talking about your candidate recruitment efforts in 2002. Was that replicated in 2006?
Rove
Yes, and it was replicated in 2004. One of the things about the 2004 election is that—I put this in the book—when I go down to the ranch, Bush says, “I don’t want a lonely victory.” So we are putting a lot of resources, for example, into Washington State, even after it’s apparent we can no longer win, because Bush wants to see if we can help the party there. But yes, we do it in 2004, not as robustly as we did it in 2002, just the dynamics were different and we didn’t need to do as much. People were sort of willing to run. But yes, we’re involved in 2004 and then 2006.
In 2006 we move heaven and earth to try and keep people in. Again, he is pretty active out there on the campaign trail raising money and there are fewer places we can go in the final stages of the campaign, but there are a lot of places where we can go earlier in the campaign to raise money. We’re realistic enough to have a schedule like that.
Riley
Were you proactive in trying to identify nominees, as you were in 2002?
Rove
Yes. It was different, because in 2002 we had these incumbent Democrats, about which people said, “I’m reluctant to run against an incumbent Democrat Senator,” and we said, “If you’ll get in, we’ll help you.” By 2004 it was easier, because people said, “You know what? Bush is serious about helping me.” The committees felt confident enough about it from their relationship with the White House that they’d say, “There’s a good chance we can get you a Presidential fund-raiser.” We worked closely with them on doing those kinds of things.
We were knit up from the OPA to the committees. We were knit up like this.
Milkis
So Bush likes parties too.
Rove
Yes, his idea was, “It’s easier for me to get things done if I’ve got people on my side who think I did something to bring them—”
Milkis
I guess that’s not rocket science. But still, it’s really rare not to have a lonely landslide in recent history. Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, Clinton.
Rove
Look at Obama. Obama in March 2011 sends [James] Messina and Plouffe up to Capitol Hill to say, “Don’t expect a dime from the Democratic National Committee for your efforts in 2012. You’re on your own.” That was just the opposite of what we did in 2003. We said, “We’ve got a lot to do, but let’s figure out how we can help you. What do you want in order to get what you need to get done?” Then we made generous transfers from the Republican National Committee to the Senate Congressional Campaign Committee.
Riley
There are two more things that come up in relation to your name. One is the steel issue that we just touched on, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to give your—
Rove
The steel tariffs?
Riley
Yes, the steel tariffs, give an account of that.
Rove
The President, the Governor of Texas, and former Secretary Cheney had been asked about these issues when they visited West Virginia. They said they were open to it. There was pretty good evidence of illegal trading practices, particularly on the part of the Europeans with regard to in essence government supports for steel companies in Europe and dumping steel. The International Trade Commission issued a unanimous decision that held that there had been violations of the international norms. So we had a temporary imposition of aid and assistance to the steel industry. This was all in conformity with WTO.
We got hit by the Wall Street Journal for it, which I understand. You can make the free trade case that if they’re dumping steel that is making their economy less strong, you should just accept the dumping of it. The government assistance in Europe had come to an end and this was—But we had an obligation under U.S. law to make a determination. The ITC [International Trade Commission] had come to a vote 3-0 that there had been a violation of norms. That evidence was that the Europeans had violated it, and so the question was, What is a reasonable, modest period of assistance to the steel industry by these tariffs? And we did it.
While Bush had talked about it during the election, there was another very important consideration afterward. Ask President Bush for Trade Promotion Authority and congressional support for trade agreements with Australia—and deals with Korea, Panama, Colombia, Chile, and Singapore. He said, “I can’t go to the Congress and say do these trade deals if I’m not willing to take the laws that they put on the books and enforce them.”
So we ended up getting criticized by our allies, and let’s be honest, it did not make the steelworkers our friends. They accepted that they got the assistance, but Bush took a bigger view: I need to show I’ll uphold the laws when we are unfairly treated so I can get the votes for renewal of Trade Promotion Authority, which was not an easy thing at all.
Milkis
Fast track.
Rove
Yes, fast track.
Milkis
And Clinton didn’t get it.
Rove
But I’m not certain how much Clinton pushed for it. This is like the debt ceiling. If you’re a Democrat President, you push for it, the Republicans will vote against it; and if you’re a Republican President, you push for it and Democrats will vote against it. But we had some good allies on this. In fact, a farm Democrat from California, Cal Dooley, played a big role in getting this, as did the now indicted and incarcerated Bill Jefferson of Louisiana. He played a big role in this.
Riley
So given the President’s previous position on this, there wasn’t a lot of internal—?
Rove
The economic guys said the steel action is all bad policy. My point was I get it from an economic perspective that this is bad policy, but a) we committed to it during the campaign, and b) what’s more important, our choice was being pure on this issue or enforcing the laws as written on the books and using it to gain credibility and votes on Trade Promotion Authority and on all these trade agreements.
Riley
Got you, OK.
Rove
Will we be better able to get Colombia and Australia and TPA [Trade Promotion Authority] if we say no, we’re going to dis the ITC on a 3-0 vote and in violation of something we said we were open to considering during the campaign?
Riley
OK, the last thing was the U.S. attorneys issue. You mentioned that briefly with respect to Barbara’s questions about what you were involved in doing the first term, but could you give us your account of how that comes about and what is going on?
Rove
I had a specific complaint before the 2004 election about one U.S. attorney. In July of 2004 an Albuquerque vice cop holds an impromptu news conference in his front yard brandishing the registration card received by his 14-year-old son and the 14-year-old kid across the street, saying, “Somebody has registered my son to vote and he is ineligible to vote. How can this happen? And our neighbor’s kid has been registered. How can this happen?”
This kicks off a frenzy, where the local media begin to uncover that there are hundreds of fraudulent registrations on the Bernalillo County rolls. They have a television exposé, people are registered at the culvert on the interstate, people who are registered in the convenience store, the Smiths are registered at the Gonzales’s home, the Rodríguezes are registered at the Thompsons’ home. This is a complete feeding frenzy, so much so that the Republican sheriff and the Democratic county clerk—and this is a machine Democrat county, so it is unusual to have this kind of bipartisan cooperation—both call on the U.S. attorney and ask for federal monitoring in the election of Bernalillo County.
Riley
OK.
Rove
Our U.S. attorney refuses to do so, which is shocking. You have the chief election authority of the county, a Democrat, and the chief law enforcement official of the county, a Republican, requesting federal monitors, against the backdrop of a huge exposé. Before the election ends, the same vice cop is coincidentally on a drug bust of a meth house and also in the possession of the arrestee are registration cards, absentee ballot requests, and absentee ballots waiting to be filled out and returned, and he is a Cuban national on the payroll of Acorn. Even after this, the U.S. attorney refused.
Senator Pete Domenici is hopping mad about it, I’m hopping mad about it, and so I’d previously raised this issue. We have things like—on Election Day we have, in Philadelphia, voting places in the living room of the Democrat ward committeeman and you have to crack open the machines in the morning to make sure all the counters are set at zero. We crack open machines and the counters are set at 777 for Kerry and 0 for Bush. It’s six o’clock in the morning. In one instance, the Democrat poll watcher brandishes a gun and tells the Republican election judge to get the hell out of his living room while they crack open the machines.
So anyway, there’s lots of this stuff going on. I complained to the White House counsel’s office.
After the election I’m still irritated about this U.S. attorney. I come to find out the issue is that he’s thinking that Pete Domenici will not run for reelection in 2006, so he thinks that he might run instead and doesn’t want to irritate Bernalillo County courthouse Democrats, whom he is already investigating over a corruption scandal involving the construction of the courthouse. The rumor is that his attitude is, “I don’t want to piss them off even more, so I’m going to hold off on this. I’ve got one thing I’ve got to do and then this.”
He’s also been a hot dog on the corruption thing, because after leaving the case in the hands of the deputy U.S. attorney to whom he’s handed the case, he demands that he make the closing arguments after apparently overcharging the individuals in question. Rather than charge them with three things and getting them on two or three, he has charged them with like seven things and he’s going to get them on none as a result.
It is typical that U.S. attorneys serve a four-year term. So after the election, the question is what are they going to do about the 96 U.S. attorneys in the new counsel’s office. Someone wants to replace all 96. They come to me and say, “We want to think about this. What should we do?”
Riley
The new general counsel being?
Perry
Harriet Miers, the White House counsel.
Rove
I say to Harriet I think that’s a bad idea. First of all, I get the rotation-in-office thing. We do it with Ambassadors, but U.S. attorneys are slightly different. We have 96 of these, some of them are doing an extraordinarily good job, and if we can keep them for eight years, we ought to. But the first thing is to find out who wants to leave, and the second thing is, isn’t there a process by which you can evaluate the relative competencies of these people?
There is. There is an administrative entity, run by career personnel, that works with the U.S. attorneys and is capable of saying these people are the good ones, and these are the bad ones. I said that it strikes me that if we do replace them, we should do so for cause. So thereby begins this huge process, mostly driven out of the Justice Department, to review all 96 U.S. attorneys, and they’re back and forth between them and the counsel’s office, most of which I never see. Finally, when we get down to the end of it, they’ve got a list of people.
We reviewed the reasons. They’re going to replace the U.S. attorney in Las Vegas, a huge center for Internet child pornography, for weird reasons, because he says, “I will not file any Internet pornography cases unless I get a significant increase in my budget. I’m going to use this to get a bigger budget.”
The U.S. attorney in the western district of Washington State is pushing for case management software that the Department of Justice analyzes and decides not to use. His response is an act of insubordination. He tries to go out to the other U.S. attorneys and get them to join him in signing a round robin letter saying, “We want this software”—a round robin letter so that nobody can be picked out as the first name on the list.
They have a wonderful U.S. attorney in San Francisco who is a terrific human being, but as a U.S. attorney you’re managing hundreds of lawyers, and he can’t manage his way out of the proverbial paper bag. He is a brilliant lawyer, well meaning, but the office is a disaster. There is a list of other U.S. attorneys that Justice feels should be replaced—a list that they’ve arrived at after an exhaustive process.
Milkis
The Justice Department made this?
Rove
Justice Department and White House counsel’s office. There has been input from us. I’m saying the U.S. attorney in New Mexico will not act—Even when the two appropriate local elected officials ask him for federal intervention, he won’t act—and there’s plenty of evidence that there is a problem there. But they’ve got a bigger list of some number of U.S. attorneys. They realize it and all hell breaks loose because the Democrats are saying, “You’re politicizing the Justice Department.”
First, U.S. attorneys come and go in every administration. They serve at the will of the President. Was Obama politicizing it when he relieves virtually all of the 96 U.S. attorneys appointed by Bush with no replacement named or confirmed? We came in and said to all the Clinton appointees, “Hope you’ll remain until your replacement is in place. If you can’t, let us know.” But Obama came in and said they’re gone except for [Patrick] Fitzgerald in Chicago and a couple of others. Same thing happened when Clinton came in. He removed all of Bush 41’s. Was that politicizing the department? Still this became a huge controversy.
Part of it was self-inflicted, because rather than explaining why each individual was being replaced, we had the Justice Department saying, “We can’t explain why we removed them, because they have a privacy right.” I said, “We are being skewered by the political system, the press, and Congress because you want to defend their privacy right. You don’t want to explain that you fired the guy in Washington State because he was insubordinate. You don’t want to say the guy in San Francisco was not an adequate manager. Fine. Wonderful. You think they’ve got a privacy right; we’re beyond worrying about their privacy rights. We’re getting killed on this.”
Of course the controversy provokes an automatic Justice Department review by career staff. It was done. But Obama and [Eric] Holder never released it. You know why? Because it exonerated the whole process, Gonzales, and the White House. We all have to go hire lawyers, defend our handling of the matter. But again, it was a sign that Bush was weak.
Going back to your point, Democrats sensed an opportunity and wanted to get Alberto Gonzales. This was payback time.
Milkis
That’s interesting.
Rove
So they went after him. Every one of the removals had a reason for cause why they were replaced. And we didn’t need to have a cause. Any President can say, “You know what? Four years is long enough for anybody. I want to replace all 96.” We could have replaced all 96. It’s like an ambassador. You’re there for a term of three to four years. Thank you for your service. Somebody else gets a chance.
Milkis
That didn’t come out at all. I never did any research on that, but the evaluations and all that, that never—
Rove
These were serious evaluations. Kyle Sampson at the Justice Department did a serious, lengthy in-depth review and recommended a limited number of replacements, and Democrats used him like a pincushion. Every one of those people—Poor guy, his life is ruined, and all because of Democrats playing politics. He was a great young lawyer, brilliant guy, trying to do the best job he could.
Milkis
It’s interesting. It goes back to what you were saying when you were talking about the Cabinet before. If you put somebody in the Cabinet who is deemed close to the President, it makes them vulnerable.
Rove
Yes.
Milkis
It kind of closes the circle on that conversation. If there was somebody who wasn’t as close to the President as head of the Justice Department, maybe it wouldn’t have exploded the way it did.
Perry
But how can our government operate with this constant investigation, and how will people be able to serve when they’re facing the kind of legal bills—Will this ever end?
Rove
Maybe, I don’t know. Margaret Tutwiler gave me the best advice I never listened to. I don’t know if you know Margaret, but she said, “Before you go to work in the White House, you need to get yourself a legal insurance policy. You can buy insurance because you’re going to end up having to pay lawyers.”
Milkis
There are such things?
Perry
Liability?
Milkis
A lot of people who go into government get these now?
Rove
I don’t know, but I didn’t.
Riley
They ought to.
Perry
Why didn’t you?
Rove
I thought, That’s ridiculous. That’s not going to happen to me. After I’d exhausted my life’s savings and was still staring at the biggest bill you could ever imagine, many a time I remembered her advice.
Milkis
That’s amazing. But you don’t—Obviously you loved—It was an experience.
Rove
I loved it.
Milkis
It was worth all the pain.
Rove
It wasn’t worth it to my poor wife. It just broke her. In 2005 she just crumbled. She is a really sweet individual and deserved better than Washington gave her and deserved better than she got from me.
Milkis
How did it feel when you left government? Was it a relief? Did you feel—?
Rove
I really enjoyed it. I wanted to stay. I’m so stubborn I wanted to stay ’til the end, but I couldn’t. My son and my wife—
Milkis
They wanted to get back to Texas. Your son finished school.
Rove
He had finished school here and was getting ready to go to Trinity University.
Milkis
Is that where he went?
Rove
It was time and I was broke. I had spent 18 years building a business and had sold it at the beginning of the Bush campaign and then run through my entire life’s savings and owed seven figures. I just couldn’t subject my family to that any longer.
Perry
So would you give advice to people coming in to go ahead and do it, get the legal liability policy?
Rove
Don’t be high profile. Don’t be Rove. A lot of this was brought on by the fact that I was who I was. I was a myth and people wanted to go after the myth. They couldn’t get Bush. Get somebody close to Bush.
Milkis
Why are you a myth?
Rove
I have no idea.
Milkis
When I mentioned to a few people that I was coming to interview you, they said wow—even the ones who don’t like you. You are just fascinating.
Riley
They have good judgment in the sense of admiring the—
Rove
I don’t know. Some of them don’t admire very well. Yesterday I left here and I’m walking over to have dinner with General Mike Hayden at the Old Ebbitt Grill and I’m walking through the park and there is some guy on a bicycle. He rides by me. I didn’t have any fear because literally a Secret Service car is 15 yards away, but the guy comes riding by on a bicycle, and says, “Karl Rove? Out walking? Oh, really?” I guess I don’t have the right to walk here anymore.
Milkis
I know we’re about out of time, but there is one thing I’d like to ask you about, and maybe you can reflect on it in a few minutes, because you’re involved in it, is the media. My students always bring this up. We talk about partisanship and destructive politics, that the media has changed pretty dramatically.
Rove
It increasingly becomes more partisan in its outlook and more advocate than impartial observer. They’re human beings. I get it. They’ve got their own perspective and their own value system and it’s hard to fight against that. There are some who do and there are some who do successfully for a period of time. I think Ron Fournier, for example, is a wonderful reporter and largely fair, but then he soured on the Iraq War and it began to color all of his coverage. So I think it varies from person to person and it is what it is. You have to deal with it.
Milkis
And there is a lot of preaching to the choir. People who are conservative tend to watch Fox News, people who are more liberal watch MSNBC [Microsoft/National Broadcasting Company]. So it’s not even much of a conversation anymore.
Rove
Yes, I think that’s right.
Milkis
Public opinion is like partisan opinion now.
Rove
Public opinion maybe. The part of the news business that is most unpredictable in its impact, though, is the increasing reliance on the Web. In 2008 more people said they got more of their information about the campaign from the Web than they got from daily newspapers.
Milkis
Was that all people or just one cohort?
Rove
All people. The Pew Charitable Trust Poll. If you look at it, the number on the Internet is going like this and daily newspapers like this. Network TV like this, cable like this.
Milkis
Fox News is a real phenomenon.
Rove
You may be right that they’re more conservative than the electorate, but they’re also remarkably less Republican than you might expect. They have a significant number of independents and Democrats who watch them. My sense is older, socially conservative, culturally conservative viewers. But yes, the Web is the one. At least on Fox you have editors. You may have [Bill] O’Reilly, [Sean] Hannity, and [Megyn] Kelly in the evening, but during the daytime you have news coverage that is news coverage. It covers stories that aren’t otherwise covered by the mainstream press. They were covering the issue of people losing their coverage long before CBS [Columbia Broadcasting System], NBC [National Broadcasting System], and ABC [American Broadcasting System] started going after them. But what is the Web? Who is the editor there? Huffington Post or Drudge. What aggregator are you on?
Riley
We have reached our appointed time. As Lincoln said, “I’m loath to close” [laughter]—For the three of us, we could do this day after day after day. It is just fascinating.