The 'Curious Life' of Florence Nightingale

DATE September 8, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Wayne Slater discusses the book he co-authored, "Bush's
Brain," about Karl Rove's influence on George W. Bush
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Wayne Slater, is the co-author of the book "Bush's Brain." It's
about Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser. The book not only
describes Rove as the political mastermind of the administration. It
describes him as a new species of adviser, a political adviser who is so
influential on policy he is a co-president. Rove has been advising George W.
Bush for over 10 years and has worked with his father. Wayne Slater is the
Austin bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News. He covered the
administrations of Texas Governors Bill Clements, Ann Richards and George W.
Bush. Slater also covered Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and every
Democratic and Republican convention since 1988.

Let me read a couple of things that Karl Rove has said about his techniques
when it comes to campaigning. And the first is from a memo that he wrote in
1986 when he was representing Bill Clements in his campaign for Texas governor
against Mark White. And Karl Rove said in this strategy memo, `Anti-White
messages are more important than positive Clements messages. Attack, attack,
attack.' And then in 1994 when describing his techniques, he said, `I don't
attack people on their weakness. Thathj usually doesn't get the job done.
Voters already perceive weakness. You've got to go after the other guy's
strengths. That's how you win.' Are these techniques unusual, or is this
something that Karl Rove originates, or are these kind of typical techniques
for political strategists?

Mr. WAYNE SLATER (Author, "Bush's Brain"): They're not typical techniques.
Attack, attack, attack is obviously something that candidates like to do. But
what Karl Rove has done in the current race and in this long series of events,
as we've chronicled in the book--what he has done is sought out the strength
of your opponent. If John Kerry's strength is that he was a war hero, you
seek out that strength and destroy it or damage it. If John McCain's strength
was that he was a prisoner of war and a hero by that, then you seek that
out--in this case, there was an independent group that emerged, you may
remember, in 2000, a veterans' group, that raised question about whether John
McCain had the temperament to be president or not. That was code. In effect,
they were saying that his years as a prisoner of war make him crazy. So you
sought the strength of McCain, not the weakness.

In the case of Ann Richards, in 1994, when George Bush ran against Ann
Richards, her strength was her openness, her tolerance, the diversity of her
administration. She brought women in, she brought minorities in, she brought
gays and lesbians into positions of authority. And so a whisper campaign
emerged in east Texas, a very conservative but Democrat part of the state,
that began to raise questions about whether Ann Richards, who surrounded
herself with homosexuals and lesbians--that damaged her efforts in a key part
of the state. Ultimately a key Bush person went public with those comments,
and may have cost, at least if not the election, certainly damaged her enough
where other elements in the campaign did not save her.

In every case, and in others as well, you attack not the weakness of your
opponent but the strength. Although it's probably been done before, Karl Rove
has made this a sort of new way in which political consultants operate. And I
guarantee you that others, younger, on both sides are watching this model and
we'll see it again and again.

GROSS: Now you say one of the techniques of Karl Rove is to leave no
fingerprints. If you're--what do you mean by that?

Mr. SLATER: Well, you know, the amazing thing about Karl--I can remember
during the whisper campaign in 1994 with Ann Richards, and I tried to engage
Karl from time to time--we would talk, if not daily, at least weekly--try to
engage him in his role as part of this whisper campaign, and he took great
pains to distance himself from that, as he does in most other things.
Throughout his career it has been difficult for me and Jim Moore, my colleague
on the book, to find absolute, rock-solid, on-paper evidence that Karl Rove
was the key instrument which went after these dirty tricks or this hardball
politics or whatever. But what we see is a pattern of activity which is
always the same, where Karl's tough, sometimes dirty tricks, sometimes what we
call smash-mouth politics. But in each case you see another group emerge,
another organization, a whisper campaign independent of the candidate. And in
almost every case, Karl has been successful in saying, `I had nothing to do
with anything that's going on here,' even though over the course of a decade
and a half, each episode bears a striking resemblance to the episode before
it.

GROSS: You have no evidence that Karl Rove has anything to do with the Swift
Boat campaign...

Mr. SLATER: That's right.

GROSS: ...the campaign against John Kerry, right?

Mr. SLATER: That's absolutely right. What I know is there's this pattern of
activity, and this fits perfectly into that pattern. I absolutely do not have
evidence that Karl Rove was personally responsible for the Swift Boat
campaign, but you begin to look at two things. One is the links between the
Swift Boat veteran organization, not the vets themselves, but sort of the
Republican apparatus that assembled itself around the Swift Boat veterans and
really helped organize and push the effort forward. Those are all people who
Karl Rove has dealt with in the past, in some case. In one case, the big
early funder, a guy named Bob Perry, a home-builder from Houston, Texas,
worked with Karl Rove in the Clements race, a Republican governor's race, in
the mid-'80s. So you have these links, these Republicans who have links with
Karl over the years, involved in Swift Boat veterans.

But I think even more persuasive than that is that it is--the Swift Boat
Veteran attack on Kerry is an absolute pristine model of the exact kind of
attack--go after the strength, leave no fingerprints. Very often the attack
is done by an independent group with some ties but no absolute proof, to Rove,
that we have seen for a decade and a half.

GROSS: Now you know, as a journalist, where is that line between saying that
there are clues here that Karl Rove might be involved, the line between that
and just either, you know, smearing Karl Rove or, you know, accusing him
through innuendo, the equivalent of what you're accusing him of doing?

Mr. SLATER: Yeah. That's a really good question, and I'm not sure that I
have a satisfactory answer. But let me say two things: One is sort of I look
at this as a scientific method; that is to say if you do an experiment 10
times and in every case the pattern is exactly the same, then one must--then
it's either an extraordinary coincidence that these episodes that have
remarkable similarity keep happening with the same figure or a couple of
figures in charge, or it is really that's somewhat evidence, even if it's, you
know, indirect evidence. But more important than that, the thing about
Karl--and I know him very well--is that he is in charge of everything. Ask
anyone who knows him. Watch him run a campaign from the '80s to the
presidential race in 2004. He knows how many districts--how they voted in
Orange County, Iowa, in 2000, and, frankly, he probably knows how they voted
in 1972 in the Nixon race.

He also knows every detail of every campaign; he works 18, 20 hours a day.
He's a marvel. He's an absolute extraordinary person, who I have watched over
the course of years, who knows everything about every campaign. And so for
him to then say, `I didn't know about this one moment, but I know about
everything else,' in every campaign, I think, is simply not credible.

GROSS: Now one of the tactics that you've said he uses is the whisper
campaign. What is a whisper campaign?

Mr. SLATER: It's really--you know, the key to a whisper campaign is it has to
resonate against something else. In the case of McCain, for example, in 2000,
we began hearing in places like South Carolina, where Bush was in trouble
after the loss in the Republican primary in New Hampshire--we began hearing
two things: one, a whisper campaign that raised questions about McCain's
stability, his intellectual stability; secondly, we began to hear, I guess, a
whisper campaign about whether or not McCain and his wife had a black child, a
minority child. In fact, he and Cindy McCain do have a child. It is a child
they adopted from a Mother Teresa-related orphanage. But in this sort of heat
of battle in South Carolina, you began hearing telephone calls made. Sort of
these anonymous groups would make calls and leave messages raising questions
about McCain and his wife.

GROSS: What? On your machine? They'd leave messages on your answering
machine?

Mr. SLATER: Absolutely they would. Absolutely. And South Carolina voters
got that in 2000 in the primary. They would hear what basically is called a
push poll or a push campaign, where someone would leave messages or talk to
the person at the end of the phone--these are Republican voters--some
anonymous group or some group that would give some innocuous name that doesn't
really exist, and say, `Did you know that Senator McCain and his wife have a
black child?' Now this is a Southern state, a Republican primary and stakes
were very high. And there was some truth to it; they did, indeed, have a
minority child. The calls were made and left on some campaigns. E-mails were
sent. Some people--I saw some of those in 2000--raising questions of whether
or not John McCain's wife had problems with drugs. In fact, Cindy McCain
talked publicly after this about having a problem with prescription
medication. So there was an element of truth to this whisper campaign, but
the savage part of it is it distorts reality. It simply isn't true, even
though there's a modicum of truth.

GROSS: Now in 1999 you got into a big argument with Karl Rove after you wrote
a story for your paper, The Dallas Morning News, saying that Rove was
behind the smear campaign against John McCain. And Rove said that you were
trying to ruin him.

Mr. SLATER: Right.

GROSS: And I think you nearly came to blows.

Mr. SLATER: Yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: Well...

Mr. SLATER: (Laughs) In fact, I took--apparently he was allowed to hit me on
my--well, I mean poke me on my lapel. When I poked him, he said, `Don't touch
me.' So I'm not sure we would ever have gone to blows, but it was a very,
very vigorous conversation on the Tarmac of an airport. But be clear about,
I think, what this conversation was about. He was unhappy that I had raised
an issue. I had an historic perspective that many brand-new members of the
national press corps, newly assembled to cover this Bush campaign early in the
campaign, did not have. And so I was able to kind of begin to connect some of
the dots and raise questions about these kind of activity, so he wasn't really
very happy about that. But, Terry, that wasn't what that conversation was
about.

When he, I say, yelled at me--when we had our vigorous conversation on the
Tarmac, after it was over he turned around and stormed away. And I looked
over, and just a few, you know, dozen yards away there was the entire national
press corps behind barriers waiting for the arrival of George Bush. And what
they had seen was Karl Rove dressing down a reporter vigorously, and the
message that Karl was trying to send was, `Don't mess with me. Don't mess
with me if you're a reporter because if you do something that I don't like,
you will pay for it, you will hear from me.'

GROSS: Do you feel like you paid consequences for writing the story that you
wrote about Karl Rove? Did you lose any access?

Mr. SLATER: (Laughs) I did not because--I mean, I'm being honest. The truth
is Karl talked to me later because I think we knew what this was about. I had
very, very good connections with others in the administration; these are
people I had known--Karen Hughes, Scott McClellan and others I had known for
many, many years. Moreover, I know the president, and I knew George Bush
very, very well. And we, at least during the early part of that campaign,
would talk a lot, pretty much daily.

GROSS: My guest is Wayne Slater, co-author of "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential." It's the basis of a new documentary film.
Slater is Austin bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Wayne Slater. He's the
co-author of the book "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush
Presidential." And Wayne Slater is Austin bureau chief for The Dallas Morning
News.

Now you think, although you can't present hard-core evidence, that Karl Rove
is behind the Swift Boat anti-Kerry campaign. You think that that campaign
has all the trademarks of Karl Rove tactics. What is your analysis of how the
press has covered the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry?

Mr. SLATER: You know, I've thought about that. I think many of us in
journalism have tried to think, `How might we have done this better?' because,
ultimately, if you look at the initial charges by the Swift Boat Veterans in
the first ad, those charges essentially, with respect to the medals, have been
disproved by the public record. But it didn't end the story. In fact, the
story's continued to develop.

An alternative would have been somehow for all of us to have taken a breath
and waited until we could evaluate the specific charges with respect to the
medals and then write what ultimately did happen with a series of stories in
The New York Times and The Washington Post and elsewhere. And that's that the
charges themselves about the medals lacked merit. But we didn't have time to
do that. Talk radio was full of the story. The cable television channels
were talking, especially FOX News, about it a lot. It reminds of an old
phrase that Karl Rove and his mentor, Lee Atwater, the famous Republican
operative, had years and years ago in the '70s: `If you're explaining, you're
losing.' And what they mean by that is if you can get your opponent on the
run, where you make a charge and you leave your opponent involved in
explaining why the charge is wrong, that's fine; you've won. The person who
makes the charge wins if the other looks defensive in trying to explain why
the charge is in error.

GROSS: You make an interesting contrast between Karl Rove and President Bush.
You say that President Bush didn't become interested in politics until shortly
before he was elected governor but that Karl Rove was--it almost seems like he
was born interested in politics; he was always interested in politics. And,
in fact, even when he was in college, he became the executive director of the
College Republican National Committee. Now during his tenure at the College
Republican Committee, he was responsible for, well, a dirty trick, something I
think...

Mr. SLATER: Yeah.

GROSS: ...could be classically described as a dirty trick, against who?

Mr. SLATER: Well, he--there are a number of things. In one case while he was
a young College Republican, he thought it would be a good idea to, in effect,
break into or go into the headquarters of a guy running for public office in
Illinois, a Democrat, to steal some copies of the stationery of the campaign
to type up a fake sort of invitation to the opening of the political
headquarters of this Democratic opponent. And he made about 1,000 copies or
so and distributed those to homeless shelters, hippie communes--again, this is
some time ago--and other places in order to, basically, encourage a whole
bunch of people to show up for this event. He wrote in this invitation--I
guess it was an early indication of Karl's style--as I recall, it was
something like, `Free food, free beer and free women,' I think--I don't
know--or girls, I believe, some reference to that effect. It certainly
encouraged a number of people to go and spoil the opening of this candidate's
headquarters. It was funny stuff.

And what happened in the case of Rove was in those years, as a young College
Republican, he and his pal, fellow collegiate Lee Atwater, ran for the head of
the--president of the College Republicans. That was an important job in those
days because it was an organization that actually had an office in the
Republican National Committee. And during the course of this effort when he
was elected--or before he was elected, he and Atwater would hold these
seminars for young collegiate Republicans. And during these seminars he would
talk about dirty tricks, including that one: `Here's what you can do. You
can steal the stationery. You can go through the garbage of your opponents,'
and various other dirty trick techniques. Now...

GROSS: So you know he did this because he had talked about it...

Mr. SLATER: Oh...

GROSS: ...at seminars that he gave.

Mr. SLATER: ...absolutely. There are tapes of him doing this. It then
became--got public notice in The Washington Post. There was a brief story in
The Washington Post at the time. You have to remember this moment. This was
in 1972 near the height of Watergate. And so this whole business in '72 and
'73 about a person associated with the Republican National Committee who was
talking about dirty tricks had a sensitivity then that probably we don't have
today.

So the head of the Republican Party, chairman of the National Republican
Party, agreed to investigate to see what this young guy, Karl Rove, was doing
and this fellow, Lee Atwater. He investigated this for a month or two and at
the end decided, the chairman of the Republican Party, everything was fine.
He had looked into it. There hadn't been any breaches of any kind of problem.
He then hired Karl Rove at the Republican National Committee. That man was
George Herbert Walker Bush, who was then chairman of the Republican Party.
And that was how Karl Rove and the Bush family got together.

GROSS: Are you suggesting there at all that George H.W. Bush went easy on
Karl Rove?

Mr. SLATER: Well, he did (laughs). He absolutely did. I think he probably
had the same admiration for Karl that I do, and that's that he's an
extraordinarily competitive person. I think at the time this looked like
fairly minor dirty tricks that weren't very important. I think the father saw
in Rove an extraordinary intellect, a strategic thinker and, even in those
stages, that--I think it's turned out to be true. But, yeah, the father did
that. In those days, incidentally, Karl's job, as a young person at the
Republican National Committee, this being in the early '70s, was to hand the
car keys to the chairman's son, George W. Bush, who would come in from
Harvard and want to get the family car, a Gremlin, and cruise Georgetown for a
weekend.

GROSS: Wayne Slater is co-author of "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George
W. Bush Presidential." It's the basis of the new documentary film "Bush's
Brain." Slater is Austin bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. He'll be
back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, how Karl Rove convinced George W. Bush to enter politics.
We continue our conversation with Wayne Slater, co-author of "Bush's Brain."
And Maureen Corrigan reviews a new biography of Florence Nightingale.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with Wayne Slater, co-author of the book "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential." It's about the president's chief political
adviser, Karl Rove. Slater is the Austin bureau chief of The Dallas Morning
News and started covering George W. Bush during his successful gubernatorial
campaign.

You give Karl Rove a lot of credit for being the one who convinced George W.
Bush to actually enter politics. You don't say that he did it all alone, but
that he had a lot of sway in that decision. What did Karl Rove do, to your
knowledge, to help convince George W. Bush to enter politics?

Mr. SLATER: You know, I remember back in 1988 when the father won the
nomination to run--the presidency, in that case. And Karl was in the hall
encouraging some Texas reporters about the prospects, future prospects of
George Herbert Walker Bush's son, George W., who most of us never heard of.
We didn't even know who the son was. But Karl was already working out sort
of this blueprint, this political calculus that he hoped, obviously, one of
these days, would lead the son to higher public office.

In February of 1990, in Austin, Texas, Karl sat down with a fellow political
operative, and they talked about a number of campaigns that they were both
running. One of those campaigns was not George W. Bush, but that's who Karl
Rove wanted to talk about. And he talked about George W., `This is the guy I
really wish was running, he was really great, he's extraordinary. This is
how I could make him governor of Texas.' And he explained how he could do
it. `And this is how I could make him president of the United States, and
here's why.' And he explained--this is February of 1990. At that time,
George W. Bush was with the Texas Rangers baseball team. He had never held
any public office, and already Rove had in his mind a fairly specific
blueprint about how he thought this man could become president; and more
importantly, how he, Karl Rove, would lead to this process, beginning with a
race for governor, which ultimately happened in 1994.

GROSS: Now, you say that before George W. Bush ran for governor of Texas, he
really didn't know much about state politics, but Karl Rove began an
extensive series of tutorials. What were those tutorials?

Mr. SLATER: It was very, very smart. What basically Rove did was--again,
understanding that George Bush, even though he had grown up in a political
family and was astute politically, did not know a lot about the nuts and
bolts of state government, how big is the budget, how do you pay for highway
transportation in some detail, how are social services really funded and by
whom and what percentages and so forth. And so what he did, what Karl did was
assemble some people who he knew and trusted, a very small coterie of
experts, most of them lobbyists in Austin, and he began a school that lasted
for months. Effective--what would happen is, these people would come in and
explain to Bush, here's what a budget is, and here's how big the budget is,
and here's what all funds are, and here's the state funds and so forth and so
on. Here's how transportation, here's how education is funded. Here's how
our testing system works. And they had months and months of basic schooling
in which George Bush was schooled on what Texas government was.

I watched this process close-up, because even though the schooling was secret
at the time and I didn't realize at that moment it was going on, early on I
had talked to Bush when he was very early a candidate for governor, and began
to ask him in San Antonio one day some questions about public education. And
he simply could not answer them. He simply didn't know. It was shortly
after that that Rove, in effect, began this schooling process and dispatched
Bush to what I call the B markets, very small towns where he would meet with
Rotarians and others who were sympathetic audiences, where he could build
some confidence in his ability as a candidate.

When I saw him in the summer of 1990, after the primary was over, he, George
Bush, was a different man. He truly understood state government in great
detail. Schooling, which I later learned had happened, had been very, very
successful.

We saw exactly the same thing as Bush approached the presidency, where Karl
Rove was involved with others in bringing in Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz
and others to Austin, Texas, to meet at the mansion and to tutor the
governor, George Bush, in 1998 and early 1999, on the details of both
domestic policy and foreign policy.

GROSS: Now, you've described a little bit the whisper campaign that you
suspect Karl Rove was behind during George W. Bush's campaign for governor
against the incumbent, Ann Richards. As part of Karl Rove's strategy,
apparently, the campaign prepared an ad for George W. Bush with Bush saying
that Ann Richards had attacked him personally...

Mr. SLATER: Yes.

GROSS: ...before any such attack was made. But the ad was ready to go in
case such an attack ever happened. Would you discuss the ad and the strategy
behind it, and how it was used?

Mr. SLATER: Oh, it was nicely done. What you see again and again--and this
is just good politics--you've seen in this relationship between Karl Rove,
this political genius, and George Bush, this extraordinarily good
candidate--he really was a wonderful candidate in Texas and was a pretty good
candidate in 2000 and, I think, has emerged in many ways as a sort of open,
gregarious candidate who's won over at least some folks--what you see are two
different parts of the same whole. But key to that is that George Bush
always pursues the high road. `My opponent is great and, you know, I'm
approaching these things, and the issues are important.' Rove has always sort
of involved himself with the political, strategic details, often what one
would call the low road, you know, the media attacks and the political detail.
Bush himself has tried to stay away from it.

Now, one of the things that was important in 1994, and I know this, because
obviously I was there and talked to campaigns on both sides, various people,
was that there was a extra sensitivity about George Bush running against Ann
Richards, in part because she was a beloved figure in Texas among many people.
Moreover, she was a woman. And whether we like it or not, the Bush people
fairly calculated that for Bush to attack her too vigorously, in a way that
appeared to be personal, would be a mistake. We saw that in 1990 when Ann
Richards won for governor against a guy who really kind of attacked her, and
we Texans didn't like that. And so what Bush did was maintain the high road
throughout the campaign. `Oh, I respect my opponent, she's done a good job
for Texas, but there are some policy issues that divide us.'

Meanwhile, you saw the whisper campaign going on in other efforts by the Bush
staff and others to bother Richards, to encourage her to maybe pop off and to
attack Bush in some way. Anticipating that that might happen, they put
together a commercial before Ann Richards had ever said anything about him,
in which George Bush looks directly at the television, at the camera, and
very solemnly says, `I am sorry, but that my opponent has chosen to attack
me personally.' Very effective commercial.

At that point, they made the commercial, had it done, and actually distributed
to various television studios and held there, no one had attacked him.
Richards had not said anything. But at the appropriate moment, when Richards
popped off, when Ann Richards popped off--I think this was the point where she
said some jerk or something comes around and says something about you. At
that moment, the Bush campaign pulled the trigger. And this commercial--very
effective commercial--appeared all over the state, just instantly. And in
that one moment, it sort of helped create an environment in which Bush was
telling people--and people, the polls show, they believed him--Ann Richards is
attacking George Bush personally. And--very, very effective.

GROSS: My guest is Wayne Slater, co-author of "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential." It's the basis of a new documentary film
of the same name. Slater is Austin bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News.
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Wayne Slater, co-author of "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential."

Now, something else you say about Karl Rove and his relationship to George W.
Bush, you say it was Rove who was the architect of George W. Bush's turn to
the right. What...

Mr. SLATER: Yeah...

GROSS: ...did he do to influence that?

Mr. SLATER: You know--I was just talking with a friend in New York at the
Republican National Convention. And it's so extraordinary for many of us
here in Texas to see the situation as it is now. George Bush had no enemies
in Texas. Obviously, he had some, but by and large the political environment
he operated in as governor was one of bipartisanship, one of working with
people--in part, that was by necessity; in part, it was frankly just good
politics in the way the state operates. But he created an environment--and he
operated in that environment--in which he was really able to talk about
conservative ideas, but did so in a way that compassionate conservatism sort
of manifested itself. He was conservative. He didn't talk much about
abortion. He did talk a lot about education in Texas as governor. But these
were the elements that would help him win in Texas.

Once he became a candidate for president and certainly as president, what you
saw was Karl Rove putting together the numbers. That's what he's good at.
He's good at what constituents will produce these numbers. In the case of
the turn to the right, what Rove saw politically was the extraordinary value
of what Bush had from the beginning as a Republican, and certainly has now as
a Republican president. And that's a socially conservative base, by and
large Christian conservatives who are the key--who are important for his
re-election--but they are absolutely the key to his re-election. In the event
that George Bush talks about abortion, it is a message to this group. It's a
group his father never had. And one of the lessons that both the president
and his political adviser, Karl Rove, have learned is that you have to have
this group, socially conservative Americans--by and large, Christian
conservatives in the South but also in places like southeast Ohio, or in
portions of Missouri and Wisconsin--who are going to be a key part of your
political base.

And if George Bush wins re-election, I think what we'll see in those numbers
is that Rove was right; that the effort, whatever effort the Kerry people have
to win over persuadable or undecided voters on economic issues over the next
two months will be more than dwarfed, in Karl Rove's arithmetic, by the
increased turnout by Bush's base, social conservatives, those who have found
his positions on the right appealing. And it's a purely political
calculation, it is a policy movement over time designed to maximize the number
of votes he gets on November 2004. And Rove was thinking about this in 1999.

GROSS: The fact that George W. Bush was born again is a very important part
of his personal story. Do you think that the emphasis that he's placed on
that has anything to do with Karl Rove?

Mr. SLATER: I have to say that that's yes and no. I know the president.
I've talked to him as governor privately, a lot about religion, early on. He
came, I think, to talk publicly about religion. A lot of people, I think,
would think that he's always talked publicly about his religious faith and
so forth in an easy way.

It was actually sort of a development that happened. In 1999, he felt more
comfortable, as he began to run for president, talking in really open ways
about his faith and so forth. I believe it's real. I believe this is
something that's heartfelt for the president. I believe when he uses the word
`wonder-working power,' when he talks to Christian groups and pastors about
faith, when he asks people to pray for him in the White House in the Oval
Office, as some pastors I've talked to say he has, this is heartfelt and real
and authentic.

At the same time, I think Karl Rove, who early on hired Ralph Reed in the
initial presidential race--Ralph Reed, after he had been Christian Coalition
chairman and brought him on board on the Bush side--understands the political
benefits of this kind of expression. So I don't want to be misunderstood. I
don't believe that the president talks about religion in a very open way
because he simply wants to be re-elected and it's for political purposes. At
the same time I believe that Rove understands that there's gold in `them thar'
religious phrases, in places where the president needs those votes.

GROSS: It's clear that Karl Rove is a brilliant strategist. Does he have
political beliefs beyond strategy? Does he have strong beliefs about abortion
or gay marriage or the war in Iraq?

Mr. SLATER: My experience with Karl over the years is that he is
conservative. He tends to support the kind of fiscal conservative policies
that Republicans do. He's mildly interested in the issues of abortion. He is
amoral in the sense that he's not religious in any fundamental way. Karl's
element is to win. That is his religion. That is his politics. He doesn't
oppose abortion because abortion's bad. He likes to support efforts to oppose
abortion because it's a winning strategy. He is all about winning and putting
together the elements, whatever the policies are, that will reach that end.
He's not an ideologue, really. What he is is a winner.

GROSS: Karl Rove has said that this presidential campaign will be his last
national campaign because the only president or only presidential candidate he
feels he could work for is George W. Bush. So what do you think happens with
Karl Rove after this campaign?

Mr. SLATER: I think Karl probably will put a shingle up in Washington or
maybe come back to Austin to teach. But more important than that is a vision
that Karl Rove has. He doesn't just want to re-elect the man he first helped
elect president. He wants to do something more fundamental, a realignment of
our government, the politics of America. He saw in the pattern of William
McKinley, who won at the end of the last century and began what became, I
think, a 30-year period of Republican dominance, largely Republican dominance
of politics, with the exception of the Wilson years--he saw in that a pattern
that ended only with the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt and another
realignment of our government. Rove would like to see with this president and
with this Congress the beginnings of a process where American political life
is realigned fundamentally for the Republican Party, so that it's not just a
president or two, it's not just a few Congresses, but 20, 30, 40 years of
Republican dominance, business dominance in American political life. And if
that, although it's unlikely to happen, does happen at the beginning, you'll
see Karl Rove as the mentor for future Karl Roves and future advisers of what
he sees and hopes to be decades of Republican dominance of American politics.

GROSS: Does Karl Rove have financial business connections that he stands to
profit from with Republican victories, outside of the fees that he makes?

Mr. SLATER: Karl Rove basically has given up the kind of money that he could
have made had he not just stayed with the president of the United States, at
least in the short term. In the past years he has had business connections
with direct-mail business, which he started, and others where he made money as
a consultant. But over the last six years he has represented this president
alone and has made relatively little money, based on what I've seen. But, of
course, the moment he's out of office, the moment the president is finished,
Karl Rove is worth millions.

GROSS: Have you heard anything from Karl Rove about your book, "Bush's
Brain"?

Mr. SLATER: You know, the funny thing about Karl is he understands that, on
the one hand, the book is critical, but it has sort of fed the myth. What's
wrong, after all, with the idea of a book that says that you're
extraordinarily powerful, close to the president of the United States and that
you're the right hand of power and you will do anything to defeat your
enemies? In Washington, that's the kind of credential you want. One day Karl
called me from the White House and said, `I know where you live. I know where
you live.' And he does. `I know the highway you're on,' and I happened to
actually have been on it at that moment. `We can send Patriot missiles and
hit you there--boom, boom, boom!' And we laughed. And yet there was
something kind of odd about that. The guy was calling from the White House
and did know where I lived, and it is a place that controls the Patriot
missiles. But I think he was kidding.

GROSS: Since Karl Rove played such hardball and he's out to win--and, of
course, who isn't out to win in politics? But some people go further than
others in that effort to win. Do you know enough about him personally to know
what's behind that drive?

Mr. SLATER: You know, the interesting thing about Karl is not only is he
intellectually brilliant--and we saw that as I talked to some of his friends
in high school. Even then he was driven, he was brilliant, he was smarter
than everybody else, he had more energy than anybody else. Two things, I
think--and this is probably pop psychology, but his father was not around.
They had a difficult problem when his father finally left. And ultimately his
mother, who he was close with, killed herself. He found, I think, in the
Republican Party early in Salt Lake City a kind of father figure in the sense
that there was stability and force and strength and a masculine policy that I
think fit this young man, as he had all this energy and this intellect at a
key time. And the way he's directed it is to become the strongest, toughest,
meanest, most extraordinarily brilliant, I think, political operative that
we've seen in a number of years.

GROSS: Wayne Slater, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. SLATER: Great to be with you, Terry.

GROSS: Wayne Slater is the author of the book "Bush's Brain."

Coming up, a new biography of Florence Nightingale. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Gillian Gill's "Nightingales"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Biographer Gillian Gill, who's chronicled the life of Agatha Christie, has
turned her attention to another woman of mystery, Florence Nightingale. Her
book, "Nightingales," is a biography of the Nightingale family as well as an
intensive crash course in Victorian culture. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has
a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN reporting:

The lady with the lamp--that's the solitary, ethereal image that's come down
to us of Florence Nightingale. Walking the hospital wards in the dead of
night, she was a beacon of benevolence to her patients, the thousands of
ordinary British soldiers who were felled by cholera and pestilence during the
Crimean War. But even saints have families. If Gillian Gill's erudite, funny
and deliciously overwhelming biography called "Nightingales" can be said to
have one overarching thesis, it's summed up in that assertion; that even
saints like Florence Nightingale, whose life was so profoundly other it seems
to transcend the mundane-shaping forces of family and society, in fact, had a
family with whom she was lovingly, painfully enmeshed.

There was her plain-Jane, invalid, older sister named Parthenope, whose
adoration Florence alternately sought and shunned; her mother, Fannie, who
fruitlessly schemed for her two daughters to make brilliant matches; and her
broad-minded father, William Edward, who encouraged his second daughter's
forays into classical literature and mathematics and then became flummoxed as
he saw how far afield her intellectual curiosities led her.

Florence Nightingale, as Gill and other biographers have documented, was a
mystic. She claimed she first heard the voice of God at 17 calling her to his
service. Thereafter she yearned to be on her own. But up until age 34, when
she escaped to the Crimea and into legend, Florence was well-nigh choked by
the daily attentions of her family. Here's how Gill describes that
relationship: `It wasn't that Florence's family was cruel or neglectful. It
was their utter predictability and lack of vision she could not bear. They
were all three so boring, so satisfied with their lives. Her father read
interminably from the newspapers, force-feeding her like a goose. Her mother
and sister dashed about to parties. If her family had disowned her, like so
many daughters in popular fiction, her road to heaven would have been easier.
But, instead, the other three Nightingales persisted in loving Florence. The
burden of their love and need was insupportable, as was their inability to
understand why she could not be happy with them.'

That passage gives you a taste of Gill's style: vivacious without being
distracting. Throughout "Nightingales" Gill interjects her own first-person
voice to weigh in on crucial debates about Florence's life, like, `Was she a
lesbian or wasn't she?' Gill says Florence was more celibate saint than
sapphist. And good thing, too, since one of the men who unsuccessfully
proposed marriage to her was Richard Monkcton Milnes, whose double life,
Gill dryly comments, `would have made Oscar Wilde green with envy.'

In addition to her thoughtful first-person interjections, a subtler but
ultimately more striking feature of Gill's biography is how it veers away from
devoting most of its attention to Florence's public accomplishments in the
Crimea. Instead, Gill is fascinated by the long, odd gestation of this
ambitious woman. When the biography does at last arrive at those
transformative 21 months that Florence spent in the Crimea supervising nursing
operations for the British government, we readers have a vivid understanding
of just how this proper Victorian virgin wound up in the nightmarishly huge
and filthy Barrack Hospital at Scutari tending, in the most intimate of ways,
to men's bodies.

Incurring the wrath of army medical officers for her hygienic and dietary
reforms, Florence had to be meek in person. But in private letters, like this
one to ex-Cabinet Minister Sidney Herbert, she was an angry, avenging angel:
`A great deal has been said of my self-sacrifice, heroism and so forth. The
real humiliation, the real hardship of this place, is that we have to deal
with men, who are neither gentlemen nor men of education nor even men of
business nor men of feeling, whose only object is to keep themselves out of
blame.'

Florence spent most of the 52 years after the Crimean War as a furiously busy
invalid recluse. She refused visits from her family, ate her meals alone in
her bedroom and, as Gill says, successfully fled her body and turned herself
into paper. Gill is referring to the mountains of pages Florence generated on
the topic of army medical reform as well as on her religious beliefs and
family. The lady with the lamp--after you read "Nightingales," you may well
feel as I do: that that accolade belongs not just to Florence but to her
latest biographer, who shines light into the shadows of the life story of this
most singular of eminent Victorians.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan reviewed "Nightingales" by Gillian Gill.

I'm Terry Gross.
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