Karl Rove's Lessons for the Press
Karl Rove's Lessons for the Press
By Bill Israel
May 08, 2006
My friend and former colleague Karl Rove may soon be indicted, and the question for journalists, citizens and those who care about him and/or the country is why we're in this mess in the first place.
Six months ago my friend and former colleague at the University of Texas, Karl Rove, wrote he was confident the legal cloud above him in the Valerie Plame case would lift in a couple of weeks. As the cloud instead darkened, I've asked: what can we learn from Karl's plight?
The question for journalists, citizens and those of us who care about him and/or the country is not if Karl will be indicted, or when -- but why we're in this mess.
Anyone who's worked with him knows that his ready sense of humor aside, Karl takes what he does seriously. Despite a record of usually fingerprint-less political hits against opponents and competitors, Karl in my experience generally assumes responsibility for what he does and insists, even with a certain gentility, on a high standard of discipline to achieve it.
The Bush administration didn't leak for years, partly for Karl's discipline and organizational control; Karl remains the president's most important adviser. Bush's highest political priorities always go to Karl, from disposing of Gov. Ann Richards to defeating Sen. John Kerry. Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, were simply the most important bodies in the way.
Karl's immense political success led to greater policy responsibility. That may have been less damaging in Texas: Bush could be "a uniter, not a divider" in a state where differences between Republicans and conservative Democrats are narrow. But an administration damages national policy when it governs the country narrowly from podiums at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation or Federalist Society, or from military bases where constituents are scripted and commanded to salute.
For a glimpse of the politicization of Bush policy, consider the administration of Richard Nixon. Nixon hatchet man Charles Colson, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more or less distinct roles. Yet in the Bush White House, Karl's role combined Colson and Ehrlichman with (in the Plame case) a dose of Kissinger, too.
There lies the rub. Politics is the art of war in a civilized society; the news is its first and essential battlefront. But if politics is often the realm of perception, policy determines the reality of who lives and dies. In "Breach of Faith," the late Theodore White argued that Richard Nixon lost his presidency by directing the CIA to thwart the FBI's Watergate investigation to protect Nixon's foreign policy. In contrast, George W. Bush leaked classified secrets for a political hit on Wilson and his wife, to protect the political flank of an Iraq war policy Bush otherwise could not defend.
Perhaps the latest staff adjustments will re-orient this White House more toward policy, but two signs are not promising. The president's newest domestic policy adviser, Josh Kaplan, was tasked in campaign 2000 to the "Brooks Brothers riot" to thwart a re-count of the votes in Florida. Meanwhile, the president has again deployed Karl, with no change in title, to his top political priority: maintaining GOP majorities to prevent Bush's impeachment and trial.
A glimmer of the battle ahead flashed recently in the Senate Judiciary Committee, when former Nixon presidential counsel John Dean was seated to explain why he wrote the Bush record is Worse than Watergate. Before Dean could testify, Rove surrogate and former campaign advisee Sen. John Cornyn delivered the political hit. Cornyn objected to Dean, "a felon," testifying before the committee, then left the room once the hit framed the hearing.
Because Karl will have maximum impact in his assignment, it's useful to recall two things he told our students at The University of Texas:
1. "How you look is as important as what you say," he said, playing a clip from a John F. Kennedy-Richard Nixon debate in 1960. On television it appeared that JFK had won; on radio, it sounded as if Nixon won. Nixon gave a workmanlike performance, Karl said, but he didn't look presidential. The dominant medium determined the debate's outcome.
2. "Lower your expectations of how you'll perform, no matter how good you are," he added. In 1994, when Jeb Bush debated Lawton Chiles in Florida, Chiles was considered the better debater. When Chiles underperformed, Jeb Bush was perceived to have won. On the other hand, in the next debate, Chiles was in better form, and seemed to win.
It's ironic Karl made these observations about Richard Nixon, nailed by evidence he was a crook; and about Florida, where Karl and James Baker seized a Bush victory from the reality of his electoral defeat. This year, could there be any better way for an administration to lower expectations and look down for the count than to be down in the polls, and under a legal and political cloud?
Some lessons from this experience seem clear:
1. Journalists would do well to remember they're dealing with the most gifted political operative of the age, who beat all comers in 2000 even though losing the election; rolled up new majorities in 2002 after a terrorist attack for for which the president did not prepare, from a Middle East he'd ignored; and beat the Democrat in 2004 by demeaning his superior service record. Karl did much of his best work in Austin from his private office, before Bush bid him come to work full time. Whether under a legal cloud at the White House, or under indictment and better insulated from scrutiny in a new private office, Karl will likely run the works again.
2. Journalists and news institutions should remember the advice rekindled in the Plame case by journalists Ed Fouhy and Roberto Suro (St. Petersburg Times, Dec. 27, 2005): "the relationship between the news media and government is inherently adversarial because they have inherently different interests."
3. Though Karl argues that good politics make good policy, that's almost never the case in national security. The great journalist Walter Lippmann in "Liberty and the News" quoted colleague Frank Cobb just after World War I: "For five years there has been no free play of public opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war, governments conscripted public opinion&hellipthey goose-stepped it. It sometimes seems that after the armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a vow that they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They were willing to die for their country, but not willing to think for it."
Another great journalist, I.F. Stone, once warned that all governments lie. Whether George Bush in Iraq, or Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, the only protection against such lies is journalists and citizens requiring a full range of debate unconfined to Democrats and Republicans - and the complete exercise of press and every other freedom under the First Amendment, without compromise.
I wish no harm to Karl; this is among the most trying moments of his life. But I wish for our country, and we must ensure, as journalists, a full and complete accounting for the exercise and abuse of political power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Israel (
[email protected]) is a journalism professor at The University of Massachusetts Amherst who taught with Rove at The University of Texas, is completing a book titled "Stealing Reality: the Rise of the Right, the Fracture of News, the Lessons of Karl Rove." He wrote previously about Rove for E&P last July.
