The Destructionists, page 10
Rove was right: squandering national unity and politicizing war would win Bush seats; Republicans regained the Senate and added to their House majority. But in winning seats, the party lost its soul. Putting party before country would become routine.
In the past, figures in both parties had fallen short of the famous 1947 admonition by Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge.” Claims that opponents were soft on communism were a staple of the Cold War. But Bush and his allies took the politicization of war to a whole new level, with ugly and corrosive results. Opponents weren’t just wrong; they were disloyal to their country. It wasn’t enough to criticize opponents’ policies or even their personal character; Bush, who advertised himself as a “uniter, not a divider,” was instead impugning his opponents’ patriotism.
Over time, people representing Bush or with ties to his campaigns accused a Vietnam War hero of being mentally unstable because of his time as a prisoner of war, portrayed a decorated Vietnam War veteran as a war criminal, and portrayed a triple amputee from the Vietnam War as an enabler of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Rove got his start during the Watergate era as a specialist in dirty tricks—landing himself in the pages of The Washington Post at the ripe old age of twenty-two. “Republican National Committee Chairman George Bush has reopened an investigation into allegations that a paid official of the GOP taught political espionage and ‘dirty tricks’ during weekend seminars for College Republicans during 1971 and 1972,” the Post reported on August 10, 1973. “Bush said he will urge a GOP investigating committee to ‘get to the bottom’ of the charges against Karl C. Rove, 22, who was executive director of the College Republicans National Committee.” Rove, it turned out, had “organized 15 regional conferences, attended by 300 members of the College Republicans,” on “campaign espionage and disruption.”
Rove and a colleague regaled the young Republicans with tales of dumpster diving in opponents’ trash and disrupting Democrats’ campaigns. In one such instance, Rove used a false name to pose as a supporter of a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois. He gained access to the candidate’s headquarters, stole stationery, then used it to fake invitations to a party at the Democrat’s offices. He distributed the invitation to hippies and street drunks, at a rock concert and soup kitchens. “Free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing,” it said.
Rove evaded punishment for the dirty tricks seminars with the help of Lee Atwater (later of Willie Horton infamy), who had helped Rove become chairman of the College Republicans. George H. W. Bush hired Rove as his special assistant at the RNC, which led Rove to his future client, George W. Bush.
The dirty tricks continued, as Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater detailed at length in their Rove biography, Bush’s Brain:
In 1982, working for a gubernatorial candidate, Rove pushed suggestions that the Democratic opponent got into a wreck as a drunk driver.
In 1986, working for the same gubernatorial candidate, Rove appeared to have bugged his own office—and then announced the “discovery” on the day of the first debate, a month before the election. Rove, claiming the Democrat in the race had obtained secret information, called in a private security company that “found” a listening device, and Rove claimed “the only ones who could have benefited from this detailed, sensitive information would have been the political opposition.” But it turned out the information was publicly available. The battery indicated the bug had been placed the same day it was “found,” and Rove’s caper followed closely the script of a movie that had just come out, Power, in which Richard Gere’s character is a political consultant who finds a bug in his phone.
In 1990, in the agriculture commissioner’s race, the Democratic incumbent was served with subpoenas the day he had planned for his reelection announcement. Rove had spoken of a possible “indictment” before the matter became public, and he had assisted the FBI agent involved in the case. The Democratic commissioner was never charged (though two aides were convicted).
Curiously, the same FBI agent also kept a probe open for two years into the Democratic Texas land commissioner (no illegal activity was found) and on the eve of an election requested campaign contribution reports for the Texas agriculture commissioner and state comptroller, both Democrats. Later, in a Texas State Senate hearing, Rove was asked: “Do you know why agent Rampton conducted a criminal investigation of Garry Mauro at the time you were involved in the campaign, pulled the finance records of Bob Bullock at the time you were involved in that campaign, pulled the campaign records of Jim Hightower at the time you were involved in that campaign?”
Rove had no idea, naturally.
But he would go on to end the political career of the state railroad commissioner, another Democrat, over her false claim that she graduated from college. Then, when Bush ran against incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards in 1994, a whisper campaign broke out that Richards was promoting gay lifestyles. A regional chairman for Bush criticized Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs and predicted religious voters would reject her because homosexuality was not something to “encourage” or to “reward.” Bush, who obliquely invoked the issue by referring to Richards appointees “who have had agendas that may have been personal in nature,” said the gay-bashing chairman spoke for himself but was a man “of great integrity.”
With Bush in the governor’s mansion, it was time for Rove to take the whispers and smears to the national stage. Bush vowed to run a “positive” presidential campaign—he would rally the “armies of compassion” and “change one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time”—but beneath the surface, the tone was rather different. Retired Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate, disclosed in November 1999 that he got a call from a friend “close to the George W. Bush campaign soliciting comments on Mr. McCain’s ‘weaknesses.’ ” As such, Stockdale said he was “not surprised by reports that Senator John McCain’s political enemies have been spreading rumors that his famous temper is a sign of a broader ‘instability’ caused by his imprisonment in Vietnam.”
Bush campaign surrogates in the Senate had also encouraged the unstable McCain slander, and Republican candidates Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer joined the McCain campaign in blaming Bush for the attacks. McCain was pressured to release detailed medical records proving his fitness. Wayne Slater wrote in The Dallas Morning News that the episode was similar to Rove’s many dirty tricks of the past. The day the article came out, Rove physically confronted Slater, poking him in the chest, and, as journalist Carl Cannon and others reported in their Rove biography, Boy Genius, told Slater: “You broke the rules!” Many took that as an acknowledgment that Rove was behind the McCain smear.
Things got markedly worse after McCain beat Bush in the New Hampshire primary. The campaign moved to South Carolina, and Bush shed his “compassionate conservatism.” To appeal to the far right, Bush scheduled a visit to Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating and called Catholicism a “cult.” (Rove later said he “came down on the side of going” to Bob Jones.) Bush also sided with those who wanted to keep the Confederate flag flying over the state capitol. One Bob Jones professor, Richard Hand, widely shared an email with “fellow South Carolinians” claiming that McCain had “chosen to sire children without marriage.” Voters received mysterious calls suggesting McCain had “fathered an illegitimate black child.” (The “black” child was McCain’s daughter, adopted from a Bangladesh orphanage.) Other callers told voters McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict. (She had conquered a painkiller addiction years earlier.) In Spartanburg, South Carolina, McCain heard from a distraught mother who said her fourteen-year-old son got a phone call saying “Senator McCain is a cheat and a liar and a fraud.”
At a rally in Sumter, South Carolina, Bush shared the stage with J. Thomas Burch Jr., from an obscure Vietnam veterans group, as Burch told the crowd that McCain “has never, ever sponsored or cosponsored a piece of veterans legislation that means anything to Vietnam or Gulf War veterans.” Burch said McCain “had the power to help the veterans. But he came home, forgot us.” Other veterans demanded Bush condemn this slander of a war hero. Bush’s response? Burch was “entitled to his own opinion.”
Such sleaze carried Bush to victory in South Carolina and essentially gave him the nomination. A real estate developer in New York must have been taking notes, for Donald Trump would revisit the anti-McCain calumny, and embellish it further, fifteen years later.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that similar whisper campaigns and legal shenanigans followed Rove to the Bush White House. Rove made the decision to inject gay rights into the 2004 race as a cultural wedge issue by pushing for Bush to campaign on his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Mailings and robocalls claimed, falsely, that John Kerry favored gay marriage—at the time a politically unpopular position. (Cheney, who has a lesbian daughter, disagreed with Bush’s decision to inject the issue into the 2004 campaign and blamed Rove.) Rove also was accused, in an affidavit by a Republican lawyer, of contacting the Justice Department in 2002 about probing Alabama’s Democratic governor, Don Siegelman. The affidavit said the purpose was to get Siegelman to withdraw his challenge to contested election results in which he was narrowly defeated. (After a prosecution tainted with allegations of partisanship, Siegelman was eventually convicted of bribery years later.)
Rove, it should surprise no one, denied wrongdoing in all matters.
The presence of a dirty trickster at the highest level of the White House gave critical mass to the stockpile of political animus that, with the exception of the weeks after 9/11, had been steadily building since the Gingrich era.
In the House in 2003, after Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee staged a walkout because the Republicans had rewritten a pension bill in the middle of the night, the Republican chairman of the committee, Bill Thomas, called the Capitol Police to evict the Democratic lawmakers, by force if necessary, from a nearby library where they were meeting. He later admitted to “poor judgment” in sending police to break up the meeting.
On the Senate floor in 2004, Cheney, who as vice president was also the president of the Senate, encountered Senator Patrick Leahy and berated the Vermont Democrat for alleging the oil-services business Cheney had run, Halliburton, was war profiteering. Leahy reminded Cheney that the vice president had called Leahy a bad Catholic for opposing a Bush nominee who was Catholic. “Fuck yourself,” Cheney said to Leahy.
Racial politics, too, were getting ever uglier. Trent Lott of Mississippi lost his position as Senate Republican leader in late 2002 after saying his state was “proud” to have supported Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential bid in 1948. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either,” he said.
In Georgia, Republican Sonny Perdue scored an upset victory over Democratic governor Roy Barnes because of his promise to allow Georgians to restore the Confederate battle flag to the state flag. Barnes had demoted the Confederate emblem, which had been added to Georgia’s flag in 1956 in defiance of court-ordered school desegregation. The flag issue proved decisive in the 2002 election, aided by Bush-hosted rallies and a get-out-the-vote push among rural white men led by Republican state chairman Ralph Reed, late of the Christian Coalition. At Perdue’s victory celebration, where somebody displayed the Confederate version of the Georgia flag, the governor-elect had the audacity to quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last.”
But Rove’s singular contribution, and that of the Bush presidency generally, was the routine portrayal of political opponents as traitors. John Ashcroft, appointed attorney general after losing to an opponent who died before Election Day, said of Democrats who disagreed with some of the increased law enforcement powers in the Patriot Act: “Your tactics only aid terrorists…. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.” In response to Leahy’s quibbles with parts of the Patriot Act, White House officials privately called him “Osama bin Leahy,” the journalist Peter Baker reported. Congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, who ran the National Republican Campaign Committee, accused Daschle of “giving aid and comfort to our enemies.”
DeLay, the House majority whip, accused Democrats of “constantly throwing up hurdles to keep us from doing what we have to do to protect the American people” and said Democrats “don’t want to protect the American people.” Instead, “they will do anything, spend all the time and resources they can, to avoid confronting evil.”
When Scott Ritter, a former Marine who later served as a United Nations arms inspector in Iraq, said that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons were false, Republicans called him “the Jane Fonda of Iraq” and asked what he would call his exercise videos. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said Democrats’ attempts to learn what warnings Bush received before the 9/11 attacks were doing “exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.”
In the summer of 2002, Democrats looked to be in a strong position for the midterm elections; the economy was slumping, the stock market had taken a beating, and corporate malfeasance was in the news. But when reporters in August asked Jim Jordan, who directed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, how the war might affect the election, he answered: “You mean when General Rove calls in the air strikes in October?”
He wasn’t far off the mark. The White House began to beat the Iraq war drums after Labor Day. Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, explained to Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Meanwhile, Time magazine reported at the time, Rove was telling friends: “Let me put it this way: If you want to see Baghdad, you’d better visit soon.” Rove, though his portfolio didn’t include national security, had been photographed with the president in meetings about Iraq.
Karen Hughes, another top Bush adviser, said that because of 9/11 Bush shouldn’t be on the campaign trail in 2002, but Rove opposed her—and prevailed. White House spokesman Scott McClellan later wrote: “Soon the president began campaigning openly again for Republican congressional candidates, including against incumbent Democratic members of Congress, touting his and GOP leaders’ management of the war. As governor, [in contrast,] he’d maintained good relations with friendly legislators by refusing to campaign against them, even if they were members of the opposing party.”
Bush demanded the Democratic-controlled Senate hold a vote before the midterm elections authorizing him to use force in Iraq. Daschle told the Los Angeles Times he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the election to “depoliticize” the matter—as Bush’s father did before the Gulf War of 1991. But the younger Bush “looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face,” Daschle recounted. “And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’ ”
Bush publicly warned Democrats not to wait for a United Nations resolution before authorizing an attack on Iraq. “If I were running for office, I’m not sure how I’d explain to the American people—say, vote for me, and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I’m going to wait for somebody else to act,” he said.
Tom Davis, the head of the House Republicans’ campaign committee, put it bluntly: “People are going to want to know, before the elections, where their representatives stand.”
Republican candidates eagerly joined in, portraying Democrats as terrorists’ allies. In Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, trying to unseat Democrat Cleland in the Senate, accused Cleland of “breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution” because of his position on Iraq weapons inspections.
Next, Chambliss ran a television ad that opened with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then immediately switched to similar, grainy photos of Cleland. “Since July, Max Cleland has voted against the president’s vital homeland security efforts 11 times,” the ad announced. In reality, Cleland had introduced legislation creating a Department of Homeland Security over Bush’s objections—and he voted against various Republican efforts to gut the department.
The ad was obscene, aimed at a man who lost three limbs in Vietnam by a man who avoided the war with five deferments. But they worked. Cleland accurately blamed “Bush-led, Karl Rove–inspired Republican politics” for his defeat. He felt that his opponents “took away my service” in Vietnam. “Another grenade had blown up in my face—this time on the political battlefield rather than the military battlefield. But it felt the same way,” Cleland wrote in his memoir, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove. “When I lost my Senate seat, I lost my way of coping with life after Vietnam…. The afternoon of Thanksgiving 2002, I started crying, and I was to keep crying off and on for the next two and a half years as the worst depression of my life swallowed me whole.”
Rove liked the ad that doomed Cleland. “I thought it was effective because it was factual,” he later wrote.
Rove enjoyed the smear so much that the next year, even though it wasn’t an election year, the Bush-controlled Republican National Committee ran an ad against the Democrats, just for the heck of it, claiming that “some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.”
The Bush campaign used a similar script in 2004. They picked New York for the convention to highlight 9/11, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a speech that mentioned “terror,” “terrorist,” or “terrorism” forty-four times and suggested that Democratic nominee John Kerry didn’t see terrorism “for the evil that it is.” Zell Miller, a disaffected Democrat from Georgia who was retiring from the Senate, told the convention that Democratic leaders are “motivated more by partisan politics than by national security” and believe that “America is the problem.”
