Karl Rove defends his former boss, President George W. Bush, in his new memoir on issues from the missing WMDs to runaway deficits.
Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight
Publisher: Threshold Editions (596 pages, $30)
Excerpts of reviews
Rove rejects accusations Bush lied
Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to President George W. Bush and architect of his two successful campaigns for the White House, says in a new memoir that Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq had he known there were no unconventional weapons there.
Rove adamantly rejects accusations that the administration deliberately lied about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But he acknowledges that the failure to find them seriously damaged Bush’s presidency, and he blames himself for not countering the narrative that “Bush lied,” calling it “one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years.”
Rove’s book offers the most expansive account yet of the Bush presidency by one of the people most responsible for it. Addressing the most controversial and consequential moments of Bush’s eight years in power, Rove takes responsibility for the widely criticized Air Force One flyover after Hurricane Katrina and writes that he secretly cried in his White House office when he learned he would not be indicted in a CIA leak case.
For the most part, his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” is an unapologetic defense of Bush and his presidency, and takes aim at Democrats, the news media and disloyal Republicans for what he describes as hypocrisy, deceit and vanity. He also recounts his hardscrabble upbringing in a family broken by divorce and his mother’s suicide.
– Peter Baker, New York Times
Brain: Bush was misunderstood
What to make of a memoir called “Courage and Consequence”?
That’s the title of Karl Rove’s new volume, and the bookstore browser might easily conclude that the courage and consequence Rove refers to are his own.
It’s impossible to know his intentions, but let’s give Rove the benefit of the doubt. The predominant theme of this book, after all, is the courage and consequence of former President George W. Bush.
There are two protagonists to this tale, Rove and Bush, and a good portion of this volume is an exploration if not explanation of the ways of W., which can be summarized thus: He isn’t lazy. He isn’t intellectually limited. He didn’t tell Americans to go shopping after 9/11. He didn’t authorize torture. He didn’t invade Iraq to finish the job his father started.
In this rendering, the 43rd president is a good and simple man who was, to use a favorite Bushism, misunderestimated, and, among Democrats and the press, misunderstood.
Now to the other guy in this book. Rove sees himself as one part intellectual, one part ideologue, steeped in conservatism and seasoned with common sense – overall, a fair assessment. He is, no question about it, a political pugilist, and the carnivorous among conservatives will find between these hard covers ample red meat to masticate.
– David M. Shribman, Bloomberg News
Ex-White House scribe sees the light
As a White House reporter during the Bush presidency, I often worried that I wasn’t getting the whole story. Now, Karl Rove has finally given it to me.
His new book, “Courage and Consequence,” promises to “pull back the curtain on my journey to the White House and my years there.” What he divulges nearly made me choke on a pretzel.
That business about President George W. Bush misleading the nation about Iraq? Didn’t happen. “Did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” Rove writes.
Condoning torture? Wrong! “The president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite.”
Foot-dragging on global warming? Au contraire. “He was aggressive and smart on this front.”
You thought Bush was responsible for turning a budget surplus into a record deficit and nearly doubling the national debt? That he was in charge when the economy plunged into the worst collapse since the Great Depression? Guess again. Spending was “far below average” under Bush, who led the nation through “the longest period of economic growth since President Reagan.”
Even Bush’s televised claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Michael “Brownie” Brown was doing a “heckuva” job after Hurricane Katrina wasn’t what our lying ears told us it was. “Bush was responding to compliments others had offered to Brown.”
Heckuva job, Architect. In fact, these new disclosures call for a correction of some of my past reporting:
CORRECTION – Every article about George W. Bush ever written by Dana Milbank was wrong. The Post regrets the error.
Rove’s book is 600 pages thick, the work of a man with a lot of scores to settle.
– Dana Milbank, Washington Post
