Karl Rove - Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight

The Road to History

On September 11, 2001, I was the first person to tell President George W. Bush that a plane had slammed into an office tower in New York City and was aboard Air Force One as it crisscrossed the country in the hours that followed. I was caught in the sweep of history, in a moment much larger than someone who came from where I did could have expected to be in. It was a turning point for a presidency and the country. The courage and conviction I saw among those aboard Air Force One and in the White House in the years ahead gave me the confidence of having been on the right side of the fight.

Politics is often considered a contact sport, and it is. But the focus on its play by play can obscure why politics is important in the first place: it provides an arena where Americans determine whose ideas will lead the country and how these will change people's lives. Leaders with conviction often shape the outcomes in that arena.

Politics is high-pressure, high-stakes, and often frustrating. It's also flooded with moments of joy, excitement, and victory. One of those moments for me came on January 20, 2001--the day George W. Bush was sworn in as President of the United States. I had made my way to the White House with my wife, Darby, to see my new West Wing office. As I approached the building, I was momentarily taken aback when a Marine snapped to attention and opened a door for us. I hesitated for just a second. I thought, Do we walk through that door? And then, When I do, I become a witness to history.

It was the start of a presidency, and a milepost in my life in politics. Along the way, there were moments where I thought I had sidelined myself--as when I quit George H. W. Bush's nascent presidential campaign in 1978. And there were moments of luck and even surprise--one of them in my twenties, when I knocked on a door only to find Elizabeth Taylor standing in front of me wearing a revealing nightgown and inviting me in.

There were also moments of peril, enormous stress, and danger. In my desk at home, I keep a copy of a newspaper clipping--a picture of I. Lewis Scooter Libby and his wife. Scooter was a friend and the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. On October 28, 2005, his world came undone when a federal grand jury indicted him for obstructing an investigation and lying to federal agents and a grand jury.

I keep that clipping because it reminds me of how brutal politics can be, and because it captures a moment that is well known but widely misunderstood. What led to Scooter's indictment was a policy disagreement that devolved into a legal fight. For me, being a subject of a federal investigation was a harrowing experience. But it was a small piece of a much larger debate about a central issue of the Bush presidency--whether it was right to have gone to war against Iraq.

I worked fifteen steps from the Oval Office. From that vantage point, this book will set the record straight. It will pull back the curtain on my journey to the White House and my years there. I will acknowledge mistakes. And I will make the case--defiantly and unapologetically--for many controversial decisions.

I have often wondered how it was that I had landed where I have in life. Growing up, I had a nerdish fascination with our political system. But that's true of lots of kids. There wasn't anything special about my family that would lead naturally to a front-row seat to history. When I was young, my family bumped around the Rocky Mountain West, living on the shabby side of the middle class. As a geologist, my dad was often gone for months at a time on work. For a time in college, I had nowhere to live and was lucky to find a space to sleep in the unheated storage space above the porch in a fraternity house. Not exactly a grand start in life.

It was, however, an appropriate one. Everyone's early life shapes their perspective. Mine grew out of Western values that emphasized limitless opportunities, even when people's circumstances constrain their lives. The experiences I had early in my life helped make me a conservative and led me both to the Republican Party and to the belief that I could make a contribution to the political battles that are the lifeblood of a democracy.