Karl Rove 'In The Fight' Again With New Memoir

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Karl Rove 'In The Fight' Again With New Memoir

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Karl Rove, was called the architect by President George W. Bush, the
architect of Bush's successful reelection campaign. A critical bestselling book
about Rove used the nickname Bush's brain, and described Rove as the co-
president. In the Washington Post, reporters Peter Baker and Michael Fletcher
describe Rove as, quote, "the primary author of President Bush's two successful
national campaigns and perhaps the most influential and controversial
presidential strategist of his generation," unquote.

Karl Rove ran George W. Bush's campaigns, beginning with his run for governor
of Texas. Rove served as senior advisor to President Bush for seven years, and
also served as deputy chief of staff during Bush's second term. He left the
White House at the end of August 2007. Now he's a Fox News contributor, and
writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. He's written a new memoir
called "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

Karl Rove, welcome to FRESH AIR. Now, you always loved politics. You supported
Nixon at the age of nine, Goldwater at the age of 13. You started off in
college, in the college Republican group. You ran for office. So what was it
like to be a young Republican at the height of the anti-war protests and the
counter-culture?

Mr. KARL ROVE (Former Deputy Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush;
Author): Well, you know, it obviously wasn't a popular position to have on
campus. I mean, we were a beleaguered minority. On the other hand, you know, in
the 1972 election, for example, which pitted Nixon for reelection against
George McGovern, the youth vote split basically 50-50.

I mean, McGovern had a slight lead among - overall, and a good lead on college
campuses, but the non-college-student youth vote sort of washed most of that
out. So it was possible, as a young person, even in the height of the Vietnam
War and the unpopularity of the war, to be a conservative on campus.

And what was also interesting was this was a time where the people who I was
involved with got a sense - and this was sort of, you know, a minority position
on campus - that we could actually affect things, that we could make a
difference.

And as a result, the group of kids that I was involved in College Republicans,
many have stayed friends in the years since, and we include in our number two
United States senators, several members of Congress, dozens of state and local
elected officials, a couple of Supreme Court justices and lots of people who
have had, you know, big roles in politics in the decades since and many who've
led very successful careers in law and the professions and in business.

And in part, our involvement in college Republicans at this very tough time for
the GOP was, you know, was an experience that confirmed we could take on big
challenges and overcome adversity.

GROSS: You are really the person who saw George W. Bush as having a political
future, as even possibly being president at a time when not even George W. Bush
saw that as his calling.

Mr. ROVE: Well, I hate to correct you on that, but he also, I think - look, he
had an interest in politics early. He ran for Congress as a very young man. He
then went off into business in both the oil business and then the baseball
business, but you know, he had political ambitions.

He thought seriously about whether or not to run for governor in 1990, but
decided it would be inappropriate with his father as president, and it wasn't
the right time for him.

But he had a political interest, in 1993 was seriously interested in running
for governor. That predated any suggestion I might have had to him. I didn't
carry to him the suggestion that he run for governor. I carried to him a
suggestion that I hoped he would run for governor, and I thought he would both
win the nomination and win the general election.

GROSS: You strike me as being opposites. He's from a kind of, you know,
pedigreed political family. You're not. He's - you're obsessed with politics.
He probably wasn't quite. He was a cheerleader, the handsome guy. You're the
bookish guy. So was this an opposites-attract thing?

Mr. ROVE: Well, there are a lot of similarities. We're both hunters and
outdoorsmen. We're both competitive. We're both readers. I mean, I don't want
to overdo the, you know, the he's all one thing and I'm completely the
opposite. There are a lot of things that we have in common. But we've been
friends for many, many years, and, you know, there are differences, obviously,
but there are things that we share in common.

GROSS: Michael Isikoff, in April of 2001, described George W. Bush as the
least-experienced presidential nominee of modern times. He says it was Rove who
shaped the agenda, message and strategy that got Bush, the least-experienced
presidential nominee of modern times, into the White House. Do you agree that
he was the least-experience presidential nominee of modern times? And if you
agree, was that a plus for you?

Mr. ROVE: I don't agree. Jimmy Carter had served one term as governor of
Georgia. George W. Bush at least was in his second term when he ran. George W.
Bush had run a baseball club. He'd been in the oil business. He put together
big deals. He'd been part of his father's presidential campaign. He had
knowledge of politics that was pretty good.

And look, he certainly had more political experience than a, you know, Democrat
state senator from Illinois who was in the middle of his first term for the
United States Senate. I mean, Bush had run a big state. He was the governor of
the second-most-populous state in the union.

GROSS: Everybody says that the governor of Texas is a slightly diminished role
than the governor of many other states in terms of the role...

Mr. ROVE: Terry, I wouldn't say diminished role. I would say - I think you'd
more correct that it was a weak constitutional post.

GROSS: There you go.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ROVE: And that's why I wanted - in part, I wanted to write the book, was
because you just said two things here that I wanted to set the record straight:
One is that Rove contrived the Bush agenda when he ran for governor, and then
second of all, that the governor of Texas is a weak constitutional office. And
the first is inaccurate.

Bush contrived the agenda. In fact, I talked about this in the book. This is
what was so attractive of him as a candidate. He had a clear understanding of
why he wanted to run. He wanted to reform education. He wanted to reform the
juvenile justice system. He wanted to reform welfare. He had thought, over the
years, about ways in which he could do it.

The number issue for him was education, and how do you have an accountability
system that sets goals and standards and holds schools to account for failure.

But he had also an interesting approach on each of these issues in the language
that he wanted to use. My only suggestion to him in the 1993-94 gubernatorial
campaign was that he add a fourth element to this. Texas was a hotbed of
lawsuit abuse, and small businesspeople were particularly concerned about
rising insurance premiums for their liability coverage, and we had a rash of
lawsuits that were making the Texas business climate unattractive. My only
suggestion was to add that as a fourth item to his laundry list.

And then, you're right, the Texas governorship is a weak constitutional
position. And you have a newcomer come to Austin like he did in January of
1995, our legislature meets every other year, biannual legislative session for
140 days, and it starts a couple weeks before the new governor gets sworn in.

So by tradition and by precedent, the new governor has very little impact on
that first legislative session, yet Bush had a spectacularly successful
legislative session in which he passed all four of his major reform packages.

And the Texas political observers and press were, you know, amazed at his
success in doing so and wrote about it in the aftermath of the session.

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove. He's written a new memoir called "Courage and
Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove. He has now written a book called "Courage and
Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

Let's talk about the kind of political campaigning that you developed, first of
all, building a majority out of micro-targeting, out of finding demographics
within demographics that would vote Republican.

Let me read something that Todd Purdum wrote in Vanity Fair in December of
2006. He described an approach of campaigning that always found villains -
gays, unions, trial lawyers, liberal, elitists, terrorists - and that
candidates could both use this to crack the electorate at a vulnerable spot and
to define themselves in sharp relief.

Do you feel like that's what you did, that you found villains that you could
use in campaigns: gays, unions, trial lawyers, liberals, elitists, terrorists?

Mr. ROVE: Yeah, he ends the article by saying splitter - Rove is the splitter,
and splitters never win. Well, he may be right that splitters never win, but I
won. So what does that say about Todd Purdum's underlying argument?

I think based on his view and the views of others, implicit in it is a sense
that the American people are easily misled and that you win elections by
appealing to their base instincts.

As you said, he suggests that it's villains that motivate people to vote one
way or the other in American politics. I have no similarly dark and pessimistic
view of the American voters. I think the American...

GROSS: Well, he's saying a motivate - like, some people. We're talking more of,
like, micro-targeting here. So...

Mr. ROVE: Well, look, let's - you know, that's not what he said. He said that
this is what changes - this is what is the determinative factor in American
elections. I don't agree. I don't agree that the American people are - those
that decide elections are motivated by fear and anger at certain, quote,
"villains," end quote.

And - let's explain what micro-targeting is to your listeners. Let's step back
for just a minute and think about the broader problem in politics. There's
never enough time, and there's never enough money. And left to its own devices,
campaigns tend to talk to the people who are already committed.

You know, it's more comfortable for a candidate, if they're a Democrat, to go
to the, you know, Upper East Side, you know, left wing Democrat Caucus. If
you're a Republican, again, it's more, you know, comfortable to go to the
Republican assembly of, you know, Orange County.

Micro-targeting is a way to help focus campaigns on voters who are up for
grabs, voters who are, first of all, up for grabs when it comes to even
participating in this political system. It allow you to - the micro-targeting
allowed you to identify groups of people who really are not disposed to
participate in American politics unless somebody goes out and touches them and
asks them to register and asks them to vote and encourages them to support a
particular candidate.

The second group are people who, while they may be registered to vote, are
really, you know, they're torn by all the things that go on in their lives. You
know, they've got to pick up the laundry. The kids have got to go to the soccer
practice - just all those things kept me from going to vote on Election Day. So
who are the people who need extra help in order to make certain that they turn
out to vote?

And then finally, who are the people out of, you know, out of all of these
people who vote in elections, where are the big swatch of people who are
actually up for grabs? And that's what micro-targeting allows you to do. It's a
way to focus your efforts in a campaign.

GROSS: One of your goals, I think - particularly in the 2004 election - was to
mobilize the evangelical vote, to mobilize the Christian right. And one of
their...

Mr. ROVE: I'd say evangelicals. I disagree with your idea that there is a
Christian right. In fact, the point I make in the book - which, you know, I
hope people will read in its entirety - is that the view of evangelicals as a
highly political, highly motivated, philosophically conservative, you know,
with a well-organized, coherent framework to approach politics is wrong.

In fact, in 2004, we were going after a lot of evangelical voters who were
skeptical of politics, some of them, particularly in the Midwest, concerned
about the war. There's a strong - particularly in places like Minnesota and
Iowa - a strong tradition among some evangelical communities to be, you know,
to be dubious about war.

And so what we were attempting to do was take people who, if forced to make a
decision between Kerry and Bush, would come down, we though, on the Bush side
and give them more information and surround them with more people to encourage
them to participate in politics. And as a result, it was one of the elements
that caused 25 percent more people to vote for Bush in 2004 than in 2000.

GROSS: One of the issues that was used to rally evangelical voters was fear of
homosexuals and fear of the possibility of gay marriage, and...

Mr. ROVE: I disagree with you strongly on the first, Terry. I think to impute
that people who have views in support of traditional are somehow fearful of
homosexuality is incorrect.

I found many, many people who have strong concerns about undermining
traditional marriage, live truly Christian lives in which they, you know,
they're not the first to cast a stone in which they love a neighbor like they'd
like to be loved themselves.

So I agree with you that the motivation of some people in the 2004 election was
the difference between the candidates over the issue of gay marriage. But
again, let's - you know, can we step back for a minute and see how this
intrudes into politics in 2004? As I say in the book...

GROSS: Well, I just want to say there was a lot of people in the leadership of
churches and of lobby groups who were very anti-gay in their rhetoric, and, you
know, the whole idea of, like hate the sin and love the sinner saw
homosexuality as a sin and made that really clear during the election period.
And I guess I'm really wondering...

Mr. ROVE: I disagree.

GROSS: ...were you comfortable with that?

Mr. ROVE: I disagree with that. Look, we were comfortable with what we did,
which was when the Massachusetts superior judicial court in November of 2003
pushed this issue into politics by saying that there was - that traditional
marriage was undermined in Massachusetts by a decision that said that gays had
a right to single-sex marriage, to same-sex marriage.

And it was the courts that pushed this into the campaign. And if you recall,
the day that the decision came down, all the candidates were immediately asked
where they were on this.

And with one major exception, all the major candidates came down in favor of
traditional marriage and against the Massachusetts decision. The one candidate
who was the outrider was Howard Dean, but even he sort of said, you know, in
essence, I'm in favor of what we do in Vermont, which is civil unions.

But at that point, people like John Kerry and George Bush had the same
attitude, which was: We support traditional marriage, and we, you know, do not,
in essence, want the courts to be making this decision.

But this was put into politics by the courts. And interestingly enough, the
decision was a four-to-three decision, a narrow decision, and the opinion was
written by the wife of the former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, and
it was the courts that put this in the middle of politics.

We didn't want it to be there. We wanted it to be decided as it ought to be
decided, by the acts of state legislatures and the people's elected
representatives meeting to determine this state by state, but it was the courts
that forced this onto the national stage. Let's just be clear about that.

GROSS: Just one more thing about this, and then I want to move on to something
else, and you'll say this isn't related, because that's what you say in the
book.

Your father, who you were very close to - this is a long story, so I'll
summarize it quickly. You father, you learned when you were in your late teens,
was not your biological father, but you were still very close to him and it
didn't seem to matter to either of you. I mean, your...

Mr. ROVE: Well, it mattered a lot...

GROSS: It was a shock, but...

Mr. ROVE: It was a shock, and it mattered a lot to me to realize that a man who
had no obligation to me adopted me and was my father and loved me
unconditionally, and what a great gift that was - And particularly coming from
where he was, which was, you know, he had - I was not his biological issue.

GROSS: So when your parents separated when you were around, I guess in your
late teens.

Mr. ROVE: Nineteen, about ready to turn 19, the day before I turned 19.

GROSS: Later, the question seemed to arise: Was your father gay? And you write:
Could dad have been gay? I didn't see it. I know he had gay friends and
volunteered for years at the Desert AIDS Project in Palm Springs, but having
gay friends or being concerned about whether someone who is sick gets driven to
a clinic appointment or gets a delivery of groceries doesn't make you gay. To
this day, I have no idea if my father was gay, and frankly, I don't care.

I know you hate this connection, but I can't help but wonder if there's any
chance that your father was gay. Did you ever think that your style of
politics, that your running against gay marriage - and I would argue against...

Mr. ROVE: Running for traditional marriage.

GROSS: ...that that might have had a negative effect on his life.

Mr. ROVE: Well, I wrote about this in the book because - I didn't want to, but
it - people, journalists and liberal commentators used allegations that my
father was gay to attack me, to suggest - and I'm not suggesting you're exactly
like it, because you're much more restrained in your rhetoric than many of them
were - that somehow or another, it was hypocritical and inappropriate for me to
defend traditional marriage when my father was gay.

Well, first of all, I don't know whether he was gay or not, and frankly, I
never saw it and I don't care. But it's also, I think, hypocritical for people
to suggest that if you have gay relatives or gay friends that you have to be in
favor of gay marriage or you're somehow hypocritical.

We can have honest disagreements about policy issues and still love each other.
And did I love my father? Yes. Did he love me? I have no doubt about it. My
father asked me to be his executor, and I don't think that you ask somebody
that you're ashamed of because you disagree over questions of sexual preference
to be your executor and to take care of your most intimate wishes as you come
to the end of your life if you somehow think they're hypocritical or don't love
them.

So I wrote about this because commentators used the rumors that my father was
gay to suggest things like that my father and mother divorced 30-some-odd years
before because my father had told her he was gay, which is absolutely not true.
And there's no evidence whatsoever of that. In fact, all the evidence in their
private letters exchanged afterwards was that their marriage fell apart because
my mother refused to follow him to a new job in Los Angeles that he had
received.

There are allegations by journalists that somehow or another, she committed
suicide 12 years later because she couldn't cope with the fact that he was gay.
Well, that was absolutely - I mean, this was all an attempt to attack me, and
the collateral damage was the reputations of two people I love very much: my
mother, who had a very tragic and unhappy life, and my father, who was a great
man who gave his children unconditional love and for which I will always be
grateful.

GROSS: So but one more thing. When you say that you didn't know if your father
was gay and that you didn't care, I guess I'm just kind of curious why you
didn't want to know, because you say you didn't want to know. And it just seems
to me if someone's gay, it's kind of who they love, who their partner is, it's
partly at the essence of who they are. And why wouldn't you want to know that?

Mr. ROVE: Because, first of all, it's my father's decision to tell me. I mean,
my father was an art collector. It was up to him to say I'm an art collector. I
mean, it was up to my father - my father was a very private man. He was a
taciturn Midwesterner, a Scandinavian to boot.

And, for example, when my wife asked him about my mother late in his life, I
was amazed. I was overcome when my father began to describe my mother and the
relationship in intimate terms and to talk about her in a way that was so
powerful about how much he loved her, and to begin to weep.

I mean, I was taken aback because it was - my father was a very private man.
So, you know, it's not like I need to know my father's private views or private
actions in order to know that I loved him. And, you know, it's sort of like -
it was his business. And if he was, fine. If he wasn't, fine. But it was up to
him to tell me what he was comfortable telling me, not for me to pry - and
particularly since, look, this was not a question until people began, in the
aftermath of his death, to make allegations about him.

At that point, he was not there. He wasn't able - it wasn't possible for me to
say: Dad, tell me, were you, in the latter stages of your life, gay or not? All
I could go on was what I knew from being around him, being close to him, having
a loving father and, at the end of his life, listening to him tell me that when
he died, he wanted his ashes spread at the family cabin, ancestral cabin in
northern Wisconsin and to have his ashes mingled with those of my mother. They
lie together for eternity along a lake in northern Wisconsin, and that was
important to him, and I honored his wishes.

GROSS: My interview with Karl Rove will continue in the second half of the
show. He's written a new memoir called "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a
Conservative in the Fight." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross, back with more of our interview with
Karl Rove, the controversial Republican political strategist who ran President
Bush's campaigns and served as his senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.
He's written a new memoir called "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a
Conservative in the Fight."

Let's move on to the war in Iraq. You write in your book: would the war in Iraq
have occurred without weapons of mass destruction? I doubt it. President Bush
would've looked for other ways to constrain Saddam Hussein.

I want to play a quote for you from a recent interview I did with Tom Ricks,
former military correspondent for the Washington Post who wrote the bestseller
"Fiasco," about how we got into the war and what happened after the invasion,
and he has a new book called "The Gamble." And so this is Tom Ricks as recently
recorded on FRESH AIR about the war in Iraq.

Mr. TOM RICKS (Author): We invaded a country on false premises, preemptively. I
think, perhaps, the worst decision in the history of American foreign policy.
And Americans, I think, still don't grasp just what a terribly expensive
decision that was, not just in money, but also in blood and moral credibility.

GROSS: your reaction to that, invading a country on false premises, worst
decision - worst foreign policy decision in American history?

Mr. ROVE: Well, I disagree. We thought he had WMD and it was a broad consensus,
bipartisan in nature. In chapter 21 in my book, I take on the argument by those
on the left that Bush lied about WMD. This was a political attack launched on
July 15th of 2003 by Ted Kennedy and later that day, Tom Daschle, and the
following day, John Kerry, John Edwards and Jane Harman.

The Intelligence failure was that we thought he had WMD. We know that he had it
as late as the late 1990s. Blix uncovered chemical and biological stocks in the
mid-1990s. We found out that he had a nuclear program in contravention of the
surrender agreement. He refused to let in U.N. inspectors into - and he refused
to account for the material that he had in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.
He thumbed his nose at 14 resolutions and there was a broad bipartisan
consensus based on a widespread agreement within the intelligence community,
not only intelligence agencies in the United States, but throughout the West
that he had WMD.

We now know two things: we know that that happened in part because he wanted us
to believe he had it. He thought that the presence of WMD, the view that he had
it made him strong in the neighborhood, kept him in power in his own country,
and was a deterrent to action by the West. We also know, through Charles
Duelfer and David Kay's reports, that Saddam Hussein retained an active
interest in these programs, believed that the sanctions put on him by the
United Nations were eroding and would be gone soon, and was literally diverting
tens of millions of dollars from the oil-for-food program to keep together the
dual use facilities and the scientists, engineers and technicians to
reconstitute these programs. The chemical and biological programs could be
restarted in a matter of weeks and he could begin again to have his nuclear
program.

We had, in the aftermath of 9-11, to act on the information we had: a man who
was thumbing his nose at the U.N., thumbing his nose at the international
community, refusing to abide by the agreements he made after he was expelled
from Kuwait. And we could not, in the aftermath of 9-11, allow him to remain in
power. And imagine what would happen, Terry, if he were in power today with a
third of the world's oil reserves and a restarted chemical and biological
program, and in a weapons race for dominance in the Middle East with Iran and
the two of them trying to prove who was the biggest opponent on the block to
the West. It would be an ugly and dangerous situation for the world.

GROSS: Well, speaking of ugly and dangerous, look at the situation we're in
now. Many experts agree that the war in Iraq created a whole new breed of
Islamic extremists and potential terrorists. That Iraq was used to mobilize
people from throughout from the Islamic world to become Jihadists, to come to
Iraq and become Jihadists. And many experts who follow terrorism...

Mr. ROVE: Terry, that happened in the 1990s when we were not in an open war. We
know that tens of thousands of people went through al-Qaida and other terrorist
training camps in Afghanistan at a point we were ostensibly at peace. And, you
know, what matters is winning or losing. People will be with us if they believe
that we're winning. They will come in against us if they believe that we're
losing.

And what happened in Iraq was - you’re right, people - al-Qaida declared that
the, you know, we removed Saddam Hussein, the country begins to sort of pull
itself together, and then in 2006, with the onset of democracy, Zarqawi warns
Osama that democracy will mean the end of their movement in Iraq and they
declare it the central front in the war on terror.

And yes, they coerced people to there. And what happens is, when the surge
begins to work and it becomes very dangerous and the risk-reward ratio turns
very badly against them, they then start dispersing their people to
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. So, yeah, this is a war we're in and
the enemy gets a voice and a vote, and they get to decide where they want to
confront us. And they did decide in 2006 - 2005 and 2006, because they feared
the onset of democracy, to make Iraq the central war, the central front in the
war on terror, you bet.

GROSS: You think it’s because they feared democracy in Iraq or because they
hated America?

Mr. ROVE: That's what Zarqawi said in his letter was if the American Iraq
succeeds in providing a democracy here, it is the end of us and we need to stop
it before it happens. And that's why they attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra
in an attempt to foment sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni and they
succeeded. It took them about six to eight weeks for that dynamic to really get
going. But when security began to fall apart in the country the president faced
a very tough decision which was, were we in essence going to surrender the, you
know, whatever success had been painfully and expensively gained in Iraq to
this or were we going to take the step that was necessary to stabilize it? And
he took the step to stabilize it, the surge, and thank goodness he did.

And I want to applaud President Obama for doing three things: for not
precipitously withdrawing troops from Iraq, but instead saying we're going to
live up to the status of forces agreement negotiated by the previous
administration by continuing the policy of increasing the delivery of defensive
technology to our partners throughout the Persian Gulf region and stepping up
the U.S. military presence to deter Iran. And by making a very tough decision
to take the principles underlying the Iraqi surge and applying them to
Afghanistan. I think he took too long to arrive at the decision but he arrived
at the right decision. And every American who's concerned about the outcome of
the global war in terror has an obligation to step forward and give him their
public support.

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove. He's written a new memoir called "Courage and
Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove, the controversial political strategist who ran
George W. Bush's presidential campaigns and served as his White House senior
advisor and deputy chief of staff. He's written a new memoir called "Courage
and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

You chaired the White House Iraq Group, which was set up in August of 2002 by
then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card. It met weekly. It included
Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Lewis Scooter Libby. Scott McClellan, the
former White House press secretary, wrote in his book: the White House Iraq
Group had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the
war to the public. The script had been finalized with great care over the
summer for a campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable
and necessary.

And he said the group was not used to deliberately mislead the public, but that
the more fundamental problem was the way Bush's advisers decided to pursue a
political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. As the
campaign accelerated, caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped all
together, contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded.

How would you describe the function of the group?

Mr. ROVE: Yeah. With all due respect, I disagree with the recollection of Mr.
McClellan, whom I don’t believe was in these meetings. I also don’t believe
they began in the fall of 2003 - August of 2002, excuse me, before the war
resolution. I think these meetings actually began after the war, and sometime
in the summer to the fall of 2003, after the war. And the fundamental problem
was we felt that a lousy job was being done in explaining operationally and
tactically what was being done in Iraq.

And the question was, what could be done to sort of unplug the outlets, if you
will, in order to get more information flowing out of Iraq? For example, there
were, you know, there was little attention made to sort of briefing people on
what was actually going on. There was little attempt to provide information
from, say, National Guard units in Minnesota that were deployed there to what
they were actually involved in doing. So this group met episodically, I
believe, starting in the summer or fall of 2003 to discuss - it didn’t meet
weekly, it met far more episodically than that, to discuss what could be done
to assist the - to encourage the military to do a better job of explaining what
was going on and to help and assist the provisional authority and then the U.S.
embassy following that, in providing information.

And some of it involved deploying people over there to, you know, there were
very few people there, particularly at the beginning, who had a press or media
background who could handle these inquiries and could properly staff such a
media operation. But I, you know, I frankly don’t recall it in the way that Mr.
McClellan does, and I think he's got the date on the start of it way too early.

GROSS: The Bush administration took us to war, saying that they believed for
sure that there were weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney
said, there is no doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. But,
in fact, they didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction. You say that we
probably...

Mr. ROVE: You know what? You got a good quote there from Cheney, but I could
give you quotes from Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bob Graham, John
Kerry, John Edwards, Jay Rockefeller, even Ted Kennedy, who opposed the use of
war - the authorization of the use of force resolution, nonetheless went out a
couple of days later and said Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.

You know, Barbara Boxer, who opposed it, said Saddam has WMD. This was a
widespread consensus that was believed by a lot of people. In fact, of the 110
Democrats who vote for the war resolution, I think it is 60 or 76 of them - 67
of them stand up on the floor of the House or Senate and say, Saddam has WMD.
So this is a widespread consensus by opponents of the war and by supporters.

GROSS: That consensus was based on information provided by the Bush
administration about weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. ROVE: No, that's incorrect.

GROSS: And for example...

Mr. ROVE: No, that's incorrect, Terry.

GROSS: Let...

Mr. ROVE: It was provided by the intelligence community.

GROSS: Exactly. So...

Mr. ROVE: They had access to that same raw intelligence that the United States
had. In fact, we later declassified what - the intelligence community, as I'm
sure you’re aware, your listeners may not, it makes its recommendations to
policymakers in the form of what's called a National Intelligence Estimate. And
we declassified virtually all of the - except for sources and methods, the NIE
that Congress had access to that detailed what the intelligence community felt
it knew about WMD in Iraq.

GROSS: Yeah. Let me quote Tom Ricks about the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate. And that's an estimate that's supposed to be - it’s a report that's
supposed to be an authoritative report representing different agencies within
the intelligence community. So Ricks says that in his - Ricks says that, in an
interview I did with him, that this report succeeded brilliantly as a political
document but as a professional intelligence product it was shameful. But it did
its job, which wasn’t really to access Iraq's weapons programs but to sell a
war.

I asked him as a follow-up question when he said that if the intelligence
community was mislead or if it had bad information. Here's what he had to say.

Mr. RICKS: You had a process, I think, where the top of the intelligence
community, George Tenet, really I think didn’t do well. Where he didn’t seek
out the best thinking and where dissents were either neglected or suppressed or
ignored or minimized. So, all the bias, as the information moved upward was in
one direction. It wasn’t like all the doubts were eliminated. It was just all
the doubts on one side of the argument were eliminated. And so all the evidence
that said, yes, he had WMD moved upwards. All the people saying no were
suddenly not heard from. And so the National Intelligence Estimate that was
presented in the fall of 2002 fundamentally did not accurately reflect what we
had spent billions of dollars trying to gather, via dated information, about
Iraq.

GROSS: So, you know, what Ricks is saying - yeah, go ahead. You heard what
Ricks said.

Mr. ROVE: Yeah, I disagree. I mean, well, first all, I'm not the intelligence
community expert. But could you imagine, this suggests that there is a
conspiracy to stifle dissent. Well, look, the one thing we know about the
intelligence community is that the intelligence community fully capable of
leaking dissent and disagreements with its own conclusions. And there is no
conspiracy. In fact, if you read the NIE, you will see that in the NIE, it
mentions dissents on specific points.

But let's stipulate, they got it wrong. And that's a problem because
policymakers make decisions on the basis of the best available intelligence and
in this instance they got it wrong. Now, part of the reason, as I explained
earlier was Saddam wanted us to get it wrong, and part of the reason was that
he was doing things that were necessary to reconstitute these programs. But I
would also remind you, Terry, that intelligence gets it wrong the other way.

For example, Western intelligence had certain estimates of Libya's weapons
program, but after the Taliban was removed, and as the United States and the
West looked like they're serious about forcing Saddam Hussein to live up to his
international agreements, Moammar Kadafi says, you know what? I - if they're
willing to be tough about those guys, I better cough up my programs - and
working with British intelligence and American intelligence - got him to cough
up those programs. And guess what? His biological and chemical programs were
weaponized(ph) far beyond the capacity of Western intelligence that we were
willing to accede to him, and his nuclear program was far more developed than
Western intelligence thought. So we got it wrong both ways.

This is troubling, particularly since there are - look there are - we're great
at getting things, you know, doing things electronically and sweeping, you
know, electrons out of the air and off of the Internet and helping to
understand, and we're good at sort of mapping the patterns. We are really not
good, particularly in facing the enemy that we face, in getting actionable
intelligence that's based on human sources. Really difficult to do. And as a
result, you know, we get it wrong, and that's a problem for policymakers.

GROSS: Since the premise of the evasion of Iraq was that there were WMD, and
they turned out to not be WMD, do you ever feel bad? Do you ever feel bad that
we started the war? That so many lives were lost? That there are millions of
Iraqi exiles now? That even in spite of the successful election that just
happened, there's still a lot of uncertainty about whether Iraq will really be
able to pull together a functioning government? Do you ever feel like maybe we
made a mistake, or maybe we should've waited longer, maybe we should've waited
longer until we had more international cooperation? Or do you feel that, you
know, we did the right thing?

Mr. ROVE: I feel we did the right thing, given what we knew at the time. And
look, I've sat there in those meetings more than you could ever imagine, Terry,
with moms and dads and sons and daughters, of people who lost their lives in
Afghanistan and Iraq. And I've been there, and I know how painful it is and it
will - you cannot go to one of those meetings and come out and be same person
ever again. But it is the right thing to do. Our country is safer for having
removed this man. The world is a safer place.

You know, the democracy and the heart of Middle East - I write about this in
the book. I was taken aback when a young aid to Abu Mazen said to me, does
America understand that the world changed when the dictator fell? That the
promise of democracy in the Middle East can change everything? And we will, you
know, having a democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East, as an ally on
the war on terror, is a symbol of what is possible.

And look, we face Islamic Jihadism today, because in that part of the world, a
life of oppression there are few outlets for expression and one of them is
this, and we need to have it, you know, democracies don’t tend to attack each
other. Democracies tend to live in, you know, safety and security with their
neighbors. Democracies tend to pay attention to the fundamental rights of every
human being to live a life in freedom, and this important. And, you know, we
had to act in the aftermath of 9-11 on the basis of what we felt we knew, and
the world is a better place for him being gone.

He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. He was a threat to us. He
was a threat to his neighbors. He supported and sponsored terrorists. He paid
the families of suicide bombers. He allowed terrorist camps within his country.
He was an avowed enemy of our country and he was undermining, you know, great
international institutions by refusing to live up to his obligations, and we
were right to remove him and the world is a safer place for that having been
done.

GROSS: But wasn’t the goal after 9-11 to conquer al-Qaida - to stop al-Qaida?
And Saddam Hussein really had - he was not al-Qaida. He wasn’t affiliated with
al-Qaida? Many people say we went after the wrong target. Sure, he was a
despot. Yes, he did horrible, horrible things. But if our goal was to fight al-
Qaida, Iraq was, many people would say, the wrong place.

Mr. ROVE: Well, I would say - I would point - first of all, I would point you
to President Bush's speech to the Congress in which he outlined the strategy in
which, you know, look, there are multiple terrorist groups around the world.
Remember, the plot to attack the Library Tower - to fly an airplane into
Library Tower in Los Angeles and bring down liners over the Pacific, it was not
al-Qaida; it was an affiliate. It was another terrorist group led by another
terrorist leader.

I mean we face, you know, this is not just al-Qaida. You know, al-Qaida is not
what we see in Somalia. Al-Qaida is not the, you know, what's doing the acts of
piracy off the Horn of Africa. You know, we face a network of groups, al-Qaida
being the principal one, you know, and as a result, we got to put this in one
frame. It's not just one individual, Osama bin Laden. It's just not one group.
It is not even a network of groups. It is an ideology of Jihadism, of a
perversion of a great religion and the outcome of our battle, our struggle with
them is going to define this century.

GROSS: Let's move on. My guest is Karl Rove. He's now written a book called
"Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

Was it your goal to come up with a plan for a permanent Republican majority?

Mr. ROVE: No, not at all. In fact, you know, nothing is permanent in politics.
That's not the nature of the American system. You know, there's competition
between two parties and nobody dominates it forever. I mean that's not been the
case at all. I mean we’ve had periods of durable dominance by one party or
another. And then look, do I want a durable Republican majority? Do I want
Republicans to win the next election? Yeah. But I've never said a permanent
Republican majority because frankly, you can't have that in the American
political system, and we don’t want it.

You have a permanent majority in places like the former Soviet Union or
Baathist Iraq. You don’t have it in a democracy. In a democracy, there's give
and take between the two parties and, you know, as that famous expression taken
from the Bible that an African-American Union soldier told his former master
when he ran across him during the Civil War. He said, you know, bottom rail on
top, and that's the way of the American political system - and thank God we
have that.

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove. He's written a new memoir called "Courage and
Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Karl Rove, the controversial political strategist who ran
George W. Bush's presidential campaigns and served as his White House senior
adviser and deputy chief of staff. He's written a new memoir called "Courage
and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight."

Now you are no longer actively working on campaigns, is that right?

Mr. ROVE: Well, I'm not a consultant. No. But I'm actively helping people by,
you know, appearing at their fundraisers and giving them advice and doing what
I can.

GROSS: But you’re not managing campaigns.

Mr. ROVE: Oh no. No.

GROSS: How come? I mean, you obviously loved doing that. Why aren't you doing
that now?

Mr. ROVE: Well, you know, Terry, you can't go back in life, can you? I mean did
you have a great job in the past that you like doing?

GROSS: God, I've been doing this for so long...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: ...it's like it's my whole adult life.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ROVE: Well, you know - and you love it. It's your passion.

GROSS: Yeah, I love it.

Mr. ROVE: But you can't go back and I did that, you know, and I enjoyed it, but
you got to go on to the next chapter in life.

GROSS: Are you enjoying being a commentator on Fox?

Mr. ROVE: I am. And I like writing for the Wall Street Journal. It's probably
the most interesting thing I do, because I've got to say something that's
interesting and do so in a small number of words. I write for Newsweek. I'm
making speeches, and then I'm doing things that, you know, I'm helping the Navy
Special Warfare Foundation and I'm on the board of the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Foundation. I'm on the board of the McDonald Observatory. I'm doing things that
I, you know, they're serving my personal passion.

GROSS: When you hear your colleague on Fox News, Glenn Beck, talking about his
conspiracy theories, does it - are you ever troubled at the vitriol in some
political dialogue now - how toxic some political dialogue has become?

Mr. ROVE: You know, it’s interesting, whenever I feel like politics today has
gotten too vitriolic, and I do think on the right and the left that there's,
you know - I mean MSNBC, I mean the ugly things they say about me there, I
mean, you know, it's pretty remarkable. But go back to 1800. I love reading
about the 1800 presidential election, because we think we’ve got it tough
today, that in our early democracy, boy, they were really tough.

In fact, the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranges to hire an editor for a
newspaper in Richmond, Virginia for the expressed purpose of then having him
write the most scathing editorials questioning everything from the manhood to
the mental stability of his opponent in the presidential election, John Adams.
A famous libelist named Caldwelder(ph). And this works tremendously during the
1800 election, in which he writes all these editorials which then get reprinted
in Republican - Democratic Republican newspapers around the country, just
libeling John Adams in the most personal of terms.

I mean, it’s particularly vicious stuff. But after the election, Caldwelder
wanted to be rewarded by having a sinecure in the government and when it didn’t
happen, he then turned on Jefferson and became, of course, the first person to
say - suggest that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally
Hemings. And, so I guess it's a reminder that what goes around comes around,
and, you know - but it's also a reminder that this isn't the first time in
American politics in which we’ve been concerned about the coarseness of the
language used by the people in the media.

GROSS: Karl Rove, I really want to thank you for your time today. Thank you
very much for talking with us.

Mr. ROVE: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: Karl Rove's new memoir is called "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a
Conservative in the Fight." He's now a Fox News contributor. You can read an
excerpt of Rove's book on our Web site, freshair.npr.org, where you can also
download podcast of our show. You can join us on Facebook and follow us on
Twitter at nprfreshair.

I'm Terry Gross.

We'll close with a preview of a new CD by singer Catherine Russell, who joined
us on FRESH AIR a couple of years ago. The CD is called "Inside This Heart of
Mine," and it will be released April 13th.

(Soundbite of song, "Inside This Heart of Mine")

Ms. CATHERINE RUSSELL (Jazz and blues singer): (Singing) Outside it's sunny but
in this heart of mine, the world is gloomy, the sun refuse to shine. I've done
the best that I do, all for you, now we're through. Sunshine brings danger
inside this heart of mine. Blue skies told me. Memories haunt me. You don’t
want me. Let me be alone with my pride. Outside is sunny but that's a real bad
sign. Love is...

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: On the next FRESH AIR, how profit is driving nuclear proliferation. We
talk with David Albright, author of the new book "Peddling Peril: How the
Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies." Albright is the founder and
president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which
investigates and monitors nuclear proliferation.

Join us for the next FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)
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