Karl Rove: The Man Who Followed Ripley

On Thanksgiving in 1973, [George H.W.] Bush, through an aide, asked Rove to take the family car keys to Union Station and give them to his son, who was arriving from his first semester at Harvard Business School. Rove recalls the scene in a kind of gauzy cinematic slow-mo: “He was wearing jeans, and a bomber jacket, and he had an aura of confidence and charisma.”–Howard Fineman, Newsweek (July 17, 2005)

Errand Boy Genius

Was it gauzy? Was it cinematic?

First: noise and motion. Trains coming and going. Loudspeakers rasp arrivals and departures. Holiday travelers billow from platform to lobby, streaming under the coffered ceiling through the triumphal arch out to waiting cabs. This is Union Station of 1973—no glossy boutiques, no cineplex, no QuikTrak kiosks. This is Union Station before it closes eight years from now, before the tourist destination makeover. The building is massive in that stocky, whitish, Beaux Arts, imperial Washington, D.C. way, and it is also decaying in that early 70s way, in that early 70s yellow haze. Is it smog? Or some airborne effluvia from the morass of Watergate? This is Union Station where the carpets have molded, toadstools will sprout, and commuters flee the gaze of Saint-Gaudens’s statues, their looming faces of Electricity, Imagination, and Freedom, somber and unseen.

Where was 22-year-old Karl Rove going to spend Thanksgiving in 1973? His geologist father had left the family a few years before—not his real father, as he later learned, “news dropped into a dinner-table conversation by his aunt and uncle,” reports Julian Borger. Nevermind. Karl’s holiday plans don’t figure in this scene, in this story. Karl is shrewd. Karl is up to pranks and sleight of hand. Karl is on the move. “A vocal Nixon supporter at age nine,” by nineteen Karl is stealing stationery from a Democratic campaign in Chicago and sending invitations to homeless shelters, advertising free booze and women, and ensuring a public-relations embarrassment for the candidate. Karl may be a college dropout, but this year he wrests control of the College Republicans from the Goldwater/Reagan faction. The infighting grows so nasty that the head of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, is called in to settle the matter, which he does—in Rove’s favor, and then promptly brings the young man into his Washington fold. So, it doesn’t matter where Thanksgiving was that year. That’s not the story. The story is that Karl is getting noticed. Karl is moving up. Right now he’s waiting to hand off the boss man’s keys to the boss man’s son.

Was it gauzy? Was it cinematic? Watch and listen. Hear the clack and patter of shoes on marble, the steady swish of raincoats, the clumsy bustle of suitcases. Shot of pigeon swooping overhead. Shot of feet. Shot of luggage wheels. Shot of porter dodging travelers. Shots of grim commuters with grim grips on grim briefcases, all of them swarming forward in one rushing, surging mass.

Until now. This is slow motion. The swell of people grinds back—rears back—into a sluggish rolling wave that never actually crests, because now it’s splitting apart—a sea of coats, porters, bags giving way, commuters peeling off one by one. And there He is. Right out of a movie.

Which one? Which particular slo-mo moment was it? There are so many.

An example. Think The Virgin Suicides. Think Josh Hartnett in a high school hallway. Think sunglasses. Think jacket slung over shoulder. Think boots. Think smile. Think buckle—as in belt. Think buckle—as in knees going weak, going watery. Think sound. A curling, splitting guitar lick. Then another. Think Heart on the soundtrack. Think Nancy Wilson’s voice low in her throat, rising—a wailing, feral, curling, needing noise. Think swagger. Think hips. Think saunter. Think guitar and amp and wail and want. Think “He’s a magic man.” Try, try, try to understand.

The Purloined Letterhead

Not everyone might have seen 27-year-old George W. Bush as hunky Josh Hartnett. Depends on who was in the countershot. Someone is still gauzy. Who plays Karl Rove in this scene? One musing suggested casting Ned Beatty (“circa Deliverance”) as the presidential aide. But that’s too surface. Think guile not girth.

Think Alain Delon in Purple Noon. Think John Malkovich in Ripley’s Game. Think Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Think of Patricia Highsmith’s obsessive, shifty brainchild. Or, rather, spleenchild. Because Thomas Phelps Ripley, the thin-skinned, inscrutable murderer, definitely sprang from one of Highsmith’s internal organs, one that secreted spite and self-loathing and lymph.

The lady novelist—how she would’ve have snorted at the designation—was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, to a mother who had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. See Terry Castle’s profile for more on this “balladeer of stalking.” “Anyone,” Castle writes, “who has grown up troubled or shy or gay will instantly identify with certain parts of [Highsmith’s] story—the towering rage above all. However cruelly and ignobly she vented it, her animus toward the world was a psychic necessity, a survival mechanism.” Tom Ripley, the author’s most famous creation, may well have been a product of psychic necessity. Whatever his origins, the cool con man with the roiling hot insides makes for one of literature’s creepiest villains. “In The Talented Mr. Ripley,” writes Castle, “Highsmith’s perverse re-working of James’ The Ambassadors, the stalker is of course Tom Ripley (yet another peeping Tom), who is dispatched to Europe to bring home the scapegrace son of a wealthy American businessman.”

Think of Karl in Union Station waiting for the scapegrace son. Think of the car keys in his pocket.

But this is rushing things. When the novel begins Tom, who has “a talent for mathematics,” is living in New York City and making money by sending out letters on stationery stolen from an Internal Revenue office. He assiduously chooses outerborough residents who “would not be inclined to pay the New York office a visit” and artists who have no withholding. He writes letters informing them of adjustments to their tax returns and specifies a new address for their payment.

Karl Rove got his start in politics filching letterhead, and then he took the postal system to a new level: “Combining his geeky loves—technology, granular political detail and hard-hitting rhetoric—he learned to fashion carefully targeted, incendiary fund-raising letters that could (and did) raise millions. Direct mail remains the key to understanding Rove’s approach to politics: minutely targeted, upbeat when possible, apocalyptic as needed.”

Enough of the letterhead larceny: Tom Ripley is getting sick of the small-time—not to mention anxious about the possibility that his ruse has been uncovered. Menacing phone calls have begun. When Mr. Greenleaf approaches Tom about retrieving his knockabout son Dickie from the Italian Riviera, Tom, who is terrified of the water, is primed for the transatlantic crossing. And he is primed for the charms of Dickie Greenleaf.

With only a high school education and a drab, undistinguished upbringing, Tom is ever ready to pass himself off as upper class. He knows all about Princeton: “He had been very friendly last summer with a Princeton junior.” Beset with a piercing sense of inadequacy, Tom is also deeply convinced of his cruelly unacknowledged superiority. An autodidact with contempt and envy for others’ knowledge, Tom is touchy, always anticipating slights—imagined or real—and he is just the sort who will be dazzled by the self-assurance that comes to a handsome rogue buoyed by the steady current of unchallenged privilege.

Dickie is hardly wearing a bomber jacket when Tom finds him; the prodigal son is lounging on the beach impossibly tan, and, after a few false starts, a friendship does take root, and Tom, luxuriating in the magnetic Dickie’s companionship, feels bliss.

Close kinship with a cocky young man who basks in the easy glow of entitlement? Ripley is to Greenleaf as Rove is to Bush, but the likenesses dissolve as the novel progresses. When Dickie decides to take a vacation alone Tom, panicked by the impending ruin of his newfound idyll, is desperate. Out in a boat, Tom bashes his beautiful friend to death with an oar, and then takes flight assuming the rich man’s name and belongings, a reckless move that Karl Rove would never make.

But Tom yearns to escape himself. Once, when Dickie is out of the house, Tom parades before a mirror in the other man’s clothes, affecting the timber of the other man’s voice. Ultimately Tom Ripley disappears himself, becomes the object of his adulation—the debonair bon vivant of high-class breeding that he always wanted to be. We may not know if Karl Rove ever tried on George Bush’s bomber jacket, but clearly, Karl Rove has not re-invented himself as a pedigreed swell. The Republican kingmaker moves easily among Texas grandees and conservative elites, but he has not made extravagant Ripleyesque contortions.

Rove plays for higher stakes; he’s not after the overhaul of his own persona. Unlike Ripley, Rove’s vision is grander: it is the political culture, the electoral process, the country that he transforms. And to this end, he has not cast himself as one of his candidates—men that Nicholas Lemann describes as “handsome, forthright, vigorous, friendly, and easy, with firm jaws and great hair.” Rove is a political operative not an elected official. He is nothing if not pragmatic about voter thinking, and in an imagined battle of wits between the two strategists, fictional and real, Highsmith’s Ripley might actually meet his match.

An Austin Marriage

Highsmith is clear about her debt to Henry James. In The Talented Mr. Ripley Tom looks for a copy of The Ambassadors, a book recommended by Dickie’s father. But when imagining the particular union of Karl Rove and George Bush, I think of a different James novel, The Bostonians. It is a classic James story—the struggle to possess an innocent—but this one veers from the author’s usual theme of Old Europe corrupting Young America. The Bostonians, published in 1886, is about a battle fought entirely on U.S. ground. Set after the Civil War, it follows Olive Chancellor, a zealous proponent of the nascent women’s movement, who sets out to advance the cause by joining forces with the young, charismatic speaker Verena Tarrant.

Verena, red-haired daughter of a mesmerist healer, commands sold-out auditoriums with her magnetic persona. A 19th-century motivational speaker, she is telegenic before television. Now, no one has ever singled out George Bush for his “edifying voice,” and Verena’s charm doesn’t come from the easy self-assurance of one accustomed to wealth; it is an ineffable, classless quality. (In this story, Olive is the one with money and position.) And no one has ever mistaken Karl Rove for a Boston liberal. But Olive Chancellor is not the politico’s doppelganger in any external sense. This is Henry James, so this is a drama of internal maneuvers, of consciousness—that inmost swirl. And in this sense the Boston spinster is very much Karl Rove’s familiar. She will fuse to Verena Tarrant the way Karl Rove merges with George Bush.

Tom Ripley can’t bear to look at himself, but Olive can look at herself, and, like Rove, she has no illusions. “I have none of that sort of talent,” she says of stage presence. “I have no self-possession, no eloquence; I can’t put three words together. But I do want to contribute.” Here, Olive is too modest. She doesn’t want to contribute. She wants to crusade.

Olive’s evangelism requires a public face that is not her own, and so she turns to sweet Verena, who tells her, “ You are my conscience.” To which Olive returns, “I should like to be able to say that you are my form—my envelope. But you are too beautiful for that!”

Verena and Olive set up house. Olive even pays Verena’s less-than-charming parents to stay away. A passionate discipleship ensues. In this, the most Boston of Boston marriages, the two women throw themselves into their mission with intense discipline. Olive’s nagging worry is that Verena’s attention may waver, distracted by matters of the heart, but the two pledge themselves to a “priesthood,” vowing fervently to uphold their political beliefs. Faith-based indeed.

This is not a new story and these are not new players—think of Pygmalion, Dr. Frankenstein, Svengali. But Olive is a stage mother of a particular ilk. For her, gratification comes not from wielding God-like power but from being made complete. “To Olive,” the narrator observes, “it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds – each of them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets – made an organic whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly effective…. Olive perceived how fatally, without Verena’s tender notes, her crusade would lack sweetness, what the Catholics call unction; and, on the other hand, how weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself should not bring up the rear. Together, in short, they would have everything, and together they would triumph.”

Together, together, together. The symbiotic nature of the Rove-Bush coalition is frequently remarked. “They finish each other’s sentences,” we’ve been told. We might imagine that George Bush is in fact Karl Rove’s form, his envelope.

Olive’s mission of political autonomy for the fairer sex may not exactly align with the views of Karl Rove, a member of an administration committed to the “marriage cure,” but substance is not the point. Desire is. A desire to grandiosity, to expand one’s sense of being through causes larger than oneself, through directing those causes. As a young boy, Karl Rove slept beneath a sign of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-commie slogan, “Wake up, America.”

How did Bush and Rove spend those years before his governorship? The early 70s are now behind us. The 80s are gone too—Bush had his oil phase, then the baseball phase, while Rove steadily built up his political consultancy. Bush had yet to distinguish himself. His wayward ways were well known. But Rove saw potential before his protégé did, before anyone else did. And somewhere in those years they joined their strengths, laid the groundwork for their triumph.

“A person who might have overheard some of the talk of this possibly infatuated pair would have been touched by their extreme familiarity with the idea of earthly glory.” Is this Boston? Is this Austin?

In Texas, Bush’s 1994 challenge to governor Ann Richards was roundly dismissed. Her derisive advisors were not prepared for the political animal that had been born of the Rove-Bush merger. “We did not believe that Bush would be as disciplined as he was. He was extremely disciplined,” recalls George Shipley, who was then Richards’ campaign advisor. “Karl gave him 10 index cards and said, ‘This is what you are going to say. Don’t confuse yourself with the issues.’”

And now, again, our stories diverge. Together Bush and Rove triumph, but on the East Coast, while the two women are positioning themselves for tremendous success, Verena is inconveniently falling in love. The object of her affection is most inappropriate. Basil Ransom, Olive’s cousin from Mississippi, is an affable, headstrong lawyer who openly mocks “the woman question”—“your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing.” Verena is in an anguishing bind: “She knew [Basil] was an intense conservative, but she didn’t know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed….” Verena, distressed by her affections, implores Basil to leave her in peace, but the young man does not relent. He has his own cause now, pressing his case with a prosecutorial intensity, determined to make “the idea of giving herself to a man more agreeable than that of giving herself to a movement.”

Bush’s allegiance to his friends is well known and where other political partnerships might have fractured under strain, the President’s bond with Rove has remained steadfast. Verena’s “hothouse loyalty,” however, is not so stalwart. Much as it pains the young woman to abandon her political mastermind, she does, destroying Olive Chancellor and their mission by choosing a man who tells Verena, “You are mine, you are not theirs.”

Could Karl Rove have bested Basil Ransom? Would he have used push polls? Whisper campaigns about illegitimate children or homosexual relationships? And what if Karl Rove couldn’t outwit a determined attorney? Who would George Bush be without Karl Rove? Who would Karl Rove be without George Bush? What if a smart, vigilant young lawyer did enter the picture? Not one from Mississippi but one from Queens. What if Patrick Fitzgerald can put asunder what politics has joined together?

Political Fictions

“In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out.” So begins the excerpt of Joan Didion’s psychiatric report included in “The White Album.” The essay, written in the 60s and 70s, marks a time when the author was unable to impose any coherent storyline on the events of the day: the Manson murders, a Doors recording session, Roman Novarro’s murder, Huey Newton’s trial, and the massacre at My Lai. “[A]n attack of vertigo and nausea,” observes Didion, “does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

“In this light,” Didion writes, “all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”

In this light. In this light.

I am trying to writing about storytelling, but I keep thinking about the light.

Two young men in Union Station in 1973.

What is it about the light from the 70s? That decaying yellow haze. Why does it always seem so particular—so particulate? So grainy, so amber, so… gauzy. Is it the pollutants warming in the ozone? Or is it the film stock of a bygone era? Network, Being There, The Parallax View, Nashville, Klute, The Panic in Needle Park—all with the same yellow tint.

I am trying to write about storytelling, but someone else has been telling the story. “In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam.”

Who doesn’t like a good story?

Karl Rove started reading early and often. American history is his preferred genre. The first book he remembers reading is Great Moments in History. I don’t know what he thinks of Henry James or of Patricia Highsmith. I don’t know what Henry James would have thought of him. (I can imagine what Patricia Highsmith would have.)

The President calls his friend “the architect.” But Karl Rove is also the author of the terms and tenor of this moment. He is the storyteller, and yet, he is not outside the conventions of the craft.

So let’s go back to Union Station, to the “inciting incident” as the books on plot call it. Or maybe the inciting incident is farther back, somewhere in Utah in a house with a bed under a sign from J. Edgar Hoover. And then, in the “rising action,” the two young men meet in Union Station in 1973.

In this light all narrative was sentimental. In that light maybe.

But in this light: You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness….

In this light.
In this light all narrative is cynical.

–Liz Brown

Photos: 1) Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides, 2) Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley, 3) Robert Altman’s Nashville, 4) Robert Altman’s Nashville