Karl Rove

Rove stood out at Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, if for no other reason than that he wore a coat and tie and carried a briefcase. He became a champion debater and was known to bring boxes of blank index cards to tournaments to intimidate his opponents.

Vietnam

Rove got a student deferment from the Vietnam war draft after enrolling in the University of Utah in 1969. Rove attended three other colleges - University of Maryland, George Mason University and the University of Texas - over the next several years but never received a degree from any of them.

College Republicans

Though he never graduated, Rove spent his college years laying the groundwork for what would become a lifelong career in politics - and the first hints of his take-no-prisoners style began to emerge.

In 1970, Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign offices of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon, who was running for state treasurer, and stole Dixon's official stationery. Rove used the letterhead to create fake invitations to a real Dixon fundraiser that said "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," which Rove then circulated among Chicago's homeless. Hundreds of them showed up at Dixon's event. Dixon may have been embarrassed, but he still won.

Rove first got involved in the College Republicans at the University of Utah, but left in 1971 to take a paid position as executive director of the group's national committee in Washington D.C. In 1973, with the help of another future, hardball political consultant named Lee Atwater, Rove ran for the chairmanship of the College Republicans and the duo traveled for five months through the South lining up support. Sensing a tight race, Rove and Atwater started challenging the credentials of College Republicans at the state and regional level conventions. By the time the national convention was held, there was chaos and Rove and his opponent both claimed victory.

Brush with Watergate

The disputed vote was sent to the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, at the height of the Senate investigation of Watergate.

Just as Bush began his review, a tape recording was leaked to The Washington Post on which Rove could be heard instructing other young Republicans about how to use dirty campaign tricks. The Post in August 1973 ran a story, headlined "GOP Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks," adjacent to its daily story on the Watergate investigation, angering Bush who had pledged to protect the GOP from the taint of Watergate. Citing the inappropriateness of the leak, Bush erroneously blamed Rove's opponent for providing the tape and not only awarded Rove the College Republicans chairmanship but a full-time job at the RNC, too. They've been together ever since.

Nearly a decade later after that controversial election, John Zemaitis, the outgoing College Republican chairman who was supposed to remain neutral in the race to appoint his successor, and confessed that he had actually been working on Rove's behalf during the campaign.

Karl Rove & Co.

After a brief stint as finance director of the Republican Party of Virginia, during which Rove used direct mail to raise more than $400,000 for the destitute party, Rove moved to Texas in 1977 to help George H.W. Bush raise money for the 1980 presidential race. While Democrats dominated Texas at the time, Rove took leave from Bush to help Republican Bill Clements become the first Texas Republican governor in 100 years. It proved a transformational moment for both Rove and Texas Republicans.

Rove worked briefly as Clements' chief of staff, but left government to start his own direct-mail business, Karl Rove & Co, whose clients went on to win both of the state's U.S. Senate seats, a majority on the once all-Democrat state Supreme Court and most other statewide offices. The biggest names in Texas politics, including the Bushes, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, former Sen. Phil Gramm and future governor Rick Perry, were all Rove clients.

Reputation for Dirty Tricks

Rove is credited with winning 80 percent of the races he ran. But he also built a lasting reputation for underhanded campaign tactics.

Rove was blamed for starting a rumor that Democratic Gov. Ann Richards was a lesbian during her 1994 race against Bush. A Democratic state judicial candidate active in causes to help abused children was accused of being a pedophile by a Rove-run campaign. Rove also was said to have helped spark an FBI investigation of the state Agriculture department while his candidate, now-Gov. Rick Perry, was running against Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. Perry won.Though virtually every opponent of a Rove candidate tells of similar shenanigans during the campaign, Rove has always denied that he was involved in such dirty tricks.

Tracking campaign attacks back to Rove is sometimes difficult. Loyalists to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) still insist, without proof, that Rove was behind a whisper campaign in South Carolina in 2000 that claimed, among other things, that McCain fathered an illegitimate black child (actually a Bangladeshi girl he adopted) and that McCain had betrayed his country while a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam. Bush's defeat of McCain in South Carolina put him on the glide path toward the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.

Working for Bush

Rove remembers gushing when he first met George W. Bush. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow." Two decades later, Rove, helped elect Bush as Texas governor, then in 1999 sold his company so he could work full time shaping Bush into a "compassionate conservative" and "different kind of Republican," who won the presidency in 2000 in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. Rove helped steer the second Bush to re-election in 2004.

In the White House

Once ensconced in the West Wing, Rove quickly amassed power as head of the new Office of Strategic Initiatives, with virtual control of the Republican National Committee and White House relations with state and local officials. He was given power not only over political matters, but policy as well. Indeed, Rove had so much influence that Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card once publicly fretted over how he would "balance against Karl" during internal policy debates.

Congressional Elections

A student of history, Rove has long been fascinated by President William McKinley and McKinley's own political Svengali, Marcus Hanna, who helped make McKinley governor of Ohio and then president, and who created a realignment in American politics in the 1890s that allowed Republicans to hold the White House for 28 of the next 36 years. Like McKinley, Rove as early as 1998 saw the turn-of-the-millennium elections as an opportunity to create a lasting Republican majority.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Rove used Bush's "war on terror" to political advantage to make historic gains in the 2002 and 2004 congressional elections. But in 2006, a voter backlash over Bush's post-9/11 policies and the Iraq war ended the GOP's momentum, provided Democrats with significant gains in Congress and fueled Republican anger toward Rove. In 2008, Democrats stole the White House and tightened their hold on Congress.

Rove was stripped of his policy-management duties in 2006 and resigned from the White House in August 2007.

Post-Bush Years

Rove, at least for now, no longer runs political campaigns.

But he's an active conservative pundit, writing for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek and making regular appearances on Fox News. He also makes paid speeches at colleges, trade associations and other groups. Though he closed his political consulting firm, Karl Rove & Co., years ago, his web site still invokes the company name., as it did when denying that Rove endorsed an unnamed cell-phone company.

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