Pay extra attention to the third paragraph. Rove is gushing and practically orgasmic when remembering meeting * for the first time.
:puke:
<snip>
Maybe most notably, he's not a Mormon in Utah. He's got no religion in an orthodox world—how unsettling is that? Perhaps looking for his sect (or, possibly, he's striking a secular blow), he becomes an obsessive teenage Republican. He drops out of college and heads to Washington during the height of the Watergate investigation to pursue his young-Republicanism.
He's Briefcase Bob. Not just a nerd but an aggressive nerd—a mean nerd. Forty years later people still have hurt feelings over Rove's moves and countermoves in the organizational power struggles among the young Republicans.
The reward for his obsessiveness is that he gets to run errands for older Republicans (there's a GoodFellas sense at this point in the Rove story—his hanging around, driving the boss's car, getting to perform a few small-time dirty tricks). The big guy he's working for, a wealthy former Texas congressman, tells him to deliver car keys to his son who's down from Harvard B-school. This is Rove's road-to-Damascus moment, similar to Clinton's shaking hands with J.F.K.—similarly transforming, similarly erotic. Says Rove about his first glimpse of the 27-year-old George W. Bush, "I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, blue jeans.... He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have." Or, in another telling: "huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma—you know, wow." Rove even remembers the car: "A purple Gremlin with Levi interior." A testament, he always takes the opportunity to point out, to Bush-family frugality.
In every variant of the Rove early-years tale, he comes off as Sammy Glick, hustling, sucking, dealing. In the middle of Watergate, The Washington Post even writes a story (the Post has been dropped a tape by one of Rove's young-Republican antagonists) about Rove's giving a tactical seminar on dirty tricks. (In one instance, Rove passed out free-food-and-drink invitations to the local homeless for an opponent's campaign event.) He's this close to being now forgotten Watergate dirty-trickster Donald Segretti instead of Karl Rove.
more...
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/050704roco03?print=true
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