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CIA LEAK PROBE: LIBBY INDICTED

Powerful aide Rove could still feel heat from investigation

Saturday, October 29, 2005

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(10-29) 04:00 PST Washington -- Karl Rove, a fabled practitioner of political hardball, first learned about bare-knuckle politics the hard way at age 9.

The boy, born in Denver on Christmas Day 1950, was an avid backer of Republican Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential race against Democrat John F. Kennedy. A girl across the street, a Kennedy backer, took exception. "She put me down on the pavement and whaled on me and gave me a bloody nose. I lost my first political battle,'' Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff and political guru, told an interviewer.

The controversial and powerful Rove now is embroiled in the fight of his life. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is still investigating the top Bush aide as he continues to look into how the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame became public, Rove's lawyer said. On Friday, Fitzgerald charged Lewis "Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, in a five-count indictment, but he said his investigation continues.

Rove is still in "a precarious position," said Rory Little, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

"Let's assume this was a Mafia case and not the case it is," he said. "This is exactly what you would do, indict somebody below the person at the top and then see if (the indicted person has) an interest in cooperating."

From leaks about Fitzgerald's two-year investigation, it appears that Rove has had a hard time recalling details of a 2003 conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. Whether Rove really had a faulty recollection or whether he might have perjured himself could be at the heart of Fitzgerald's probe.

Such inability, or unwillingness, to talk about unpleasant incidents in his past is a pattern throughout Rove's 30 years in politics, according to two of his biographers, Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater.

"For all of his ability to recall the most minute electoral detail and obscure historical reference, Rove often says he cannot remember generalities about controversial matters in his career and the campaigns he has conducted,'' they wrote in their 2003 book, "Bush's Brain.''

To Republicans, Rove is a hero who helped turn Texas into a Republican bastion, then ran Bush's two presidential campaigns and now wants to create a long-lasting GOP majority. To Democrats, he is the mastermind of unfair campaign tactics who is behind the scenes pulling Bush's strings.

Critics have charged that when Bush ran against Democratic Texas Gov. Ann Richards in 1994, Rove was connected to a whispering campaign that she was a lesbian. Other political operatives say he helped spread rumors during Bush's 2000 GOP primary campaign against Sen. John McCain of Arizona that McCain, while a POW in Vietnam, had betrayed his country to his captors and that later he had fathered an out-of-wedlock African American child.

Another biographer, Joshua Green of the Atlantic Monthly, said Rove is at his most powerful when, as after McCain defeated Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, he was fighting for political survival.

"Anyone who takes an honest look at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado common to professional political operatives,'' Green wrote in the Atlantic.

Bush's faith in Rove is so strong that early this year, as his second term was getting started, the president broadened Rove's responsibilities from political strategist and senior adviser to include the post of deputy chief of staff. That job includes oversight of the National Security Council, Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council and Homeland Security Council.

Published reports say Rove's lawyers have participated in talks with Fitzgerald, trying to convince him that Rove didn't perjure himself during his appearances before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak. So far, that strategy may have prevented Rove's indictment, showing another Rove trait, the ability to look ahead.

As fellow GOP strategist Mark McKinnon has put it, Rove is "the Bobby Fischer of politics. He not only sees the board, he sees about 20 moves ahead.''

Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail Edward Epstein at eepstein@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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