Karl Rove's Memoir: Act of Vengeance
By Joe Klein
TIME
There is not much news in Karl Rove's memoir, Courage and Consequence, which is something of a moral triumph for the author. Rove is nothing if not loyal, and these sorts of books tend to create a stir only when they betray the boss. A significant amount of dirt is dished here — an astonishing amount, actually; this is a work of titanic pettiness — but it's all tossed at enemies of George W. Bush. One example: Hillary Clinton is criticized for sitting down, rather than standing, for a photo with rescue workers three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush, who had just arrived at ground zero, is standing for photos, and it simply doesn't occur to Rove that Clinton had already spent most of the past several days there, working desperately for her constituents. Rove is not always so unfair; he manages to demolish more than a few of the sillier attacks against him and the President. But this book is primarily an act of vengeance — and, in that sense, unintentionally revealing about the nature of the Bush presidency.
The nugget that did make some news was Rove's admission that Bush could never have gotten congressional support for invading Iraq without the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, Rove defends the decision to go to war. But his reason for doing so is laughably thin: everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and therefore everybody thought Saddam was a threat. Rove offers a damning list of Democratic politicians acting like politicians — making bellicose statements prior to the war, then criticizing Bush for rushing in when no WMD turned up. Touché. But then he goes a step too far. "Perhaps the most pathetic display of hypocrisy came from one of America's most embittered politicians: former Vice President Al Gore," Rove writes. He proceeds to quote a 2002 Gore speech: "We know that [Saddam] has stored away supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country." Rove's busy-beaver oppo researchers should get credit for digging up that one ... except that it was delivered in the midst of a vehement antiwar speech. Gore, in fact, was making a wise argument: war was not justified even if Saddam had WMD. But taking those sort of lines out of context is how you hammer your opponents in political campaigns — and Rove made sure Bush's White House was run as a perpetual political campaign, even when it came to war. This, not dirty tricks, is at the heart of the Rovian deficiency. (See the top 10 political memoirs.)
A good chunk of Courage and Consequence is taken up by the Joseph Wilson affair and the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent — an allotment that is justified from Rove's point of view, since he spent a good chunk of the Bush Administration fighting off an indictment in the case. In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. There was some exaggeration involved, but the bottom line was accurate. There was no uranium deal; Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. But Wilson's timing was exquisite: there was a growing realization that Bush's casus belli — WMD — was baloney. The White House went into panic mode, trying to discredit Wilson and rescue Bush's reputation; the outing of Plame made these efforts potentially felonious. The subsequent investigation devolved into a petty attempt to nail Rove and Scooter Libby on perjury charges for denying they had talked to journalists, and Rove has reason to be outraged by the fishing expedition. But it's also a diversion from the real story.
(Continued here.)
TIME
There is not much news in Karl Rove's memoir, Courage and Consequence, which is something of a moral triumph for the author. Rove is nothing if not loyal, and these sorts of books tend to create a stir only when they betray the boss. A significant amount of dirt is dished here — an astonishing amount, actually; this is a work of titanic pettiness — but it's all tossed at enemies of George W. Bush. One example: Hillary Clinton is criticized for sitting down, rather than standing, for a photo with rescue workers three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush, who had just arrived at ground zero, is standing for photos, and it simply doesn't occur to Rove that Clinton had already spent most of the past several days there, working desperately for her constituents. Rove is not always so unfair; he manages to demolish more than a few of the sillier attacks against him and the President. But this book is primarily an act of vengeance — and, in that sense, unintentionally revealing about the nature of the Bush presidency.
The nugget that did make some news was Rove's admission that Bush could never have gotten congressional support for invading Iraq without the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, Rove defends the decision to go to war. But his reason for doing so is laughably thin: everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and therefore everybody thought Saddam was a threat. Rove offers a damning list of Democratic politicians acting like politicians — making bellicose statements prior to the war, then criticizing Bush for rushing in when no WMD turned up. Touché. But then he goes a step too far. "Perhaps the most pathetic display of hypocrisy came from one of America's most embittered politicians: former Vice President Al Gore," Rove writes. He proceeds to quote a 2002 Gore speech: "We know that [Saddam] has stored away supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country." Rove's busy-beaver oppo researchers should get credit for digging up that one ... except that it was delivered in the midst of a vehement antiwar speech. Gore, in fact, was making a wise argument: war was not justified even if Saddam had WMD. But taking those sort of lines out of context is how you hammer your opponents in political campaigns — and Rove made sure Bush's White House was run as a perpetual political campaign, even when it came to war. This, not dirty tricks, is at the heart of the Rovian deficiency. (See the top 10 political memoirs.)
A good chunk of Courage and Consequence is taken up by the Joseph Wilson affair and the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent — an allotment that is justified from Rove's point of view, since he spent a good chunk of the Bush Administration fighting off an indictment in the case. In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. There was some exaggeration involved, but the bottom line was accurate. There was no uranium deal; Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. But Wilson's timing was exquisite: there was a growing realization that Bush's casus belli — WMD — was baloney. The White House went into panic mode, trying to discredit Wilson and rescue Bush's reputation; the outing of Plame made these efforts potentially felonious. The subsequent investigation devolved into a petty attempt to nail Rove and Scooter Libby on perjury charges for denying they had talked to journalists, and Rove has reason to be outraged by the fishing expedition. But it's also a diversion from the real story.
(Continued here.)
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