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The New York Times
Rove Strategy Paper
Found in Nixon Archive
By SHERYL GAY
STOLBERG, nytimes on the Web, July 15, 2007
WASHINGTON, July 13 — The year
was 1973, and Karl Rove was looking for help — from the Nixon White House.
Tucked away inside 78,000 pages of documents from the Nixon administration,
released by the National Archives earlier this week, is a little gem: a strategy
memorandum from the man who would go on to become the architect of President
Bush’s rise to political power.
Mr. Rove, then a 22-year-old aide on Capitol Hill, was planning a run to become
chairman of the College Republicans, a position he would ultimately win twice.
So he wrote to Anne Armstrong, then counselor to Nixon. Mrs. Armstrong had
been co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, and therefore Mr. Rove’s
ultimate boss the previous year when he was executive director of the college
group.
In the memorandum, he thanked her for “taking time out of your busy schedule” to
talk with him, and offered up his musings — in the form of a nine-page typed
outline — on how to strengthen the Republican Party by motivating students.
“Appreciate anything you might be able to do for me,” he wrote, on simple
stationery with only his name, Karl C. Rove, at the top. “I have taken the
liberty of enclosing the rough outline of my platform. Of special interest
is the ‘New Federalism Advocates’ mentioned in the campaign section.”
The document, intended to develop an election program for the 1974 midterm
campaigns, suggests that even then, Mr. Rove had a keen eye for organization,
and a propensity for slicing and dicing the electorate, the kind of
microtargeting that has since become a hallmark of his campaigns.
In his memorandum, Mr. Rove offered suggestions, from having college Republican
clubs show “nonpolitical films for fund-raising (e.g. John Wayne flicks, ‘Reefer
Madness’)” to developing a “Student Guide to Lobbying” with a “forward by
Bush/Nixon.” That, of course, would be the elder George Bush, then
chairman of the Republican National Committee, through whom Mr. Rove first met
the current occupant of the White House.
Mr. Rove’s memorandum also proposes building a group of “New Federalism
Advocates,” modeled on “Friends of Nixon,” a Nixon campaign committee. The
group would have representatives from each state who, Mr. Rove suggested, could
meet in Washington for “extensive briefings” with top administration officials
like John D. Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman.
“That didn’t work out,” Mr. Rove said in a brief telephone interview Friday.
(Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman resigned in April 1973 amid the Watergate
scandal.)
As to the reference to “Reefer Madness,” a torrid antimarijuana propaganda film
later revived as a countercultural favorite, the 56-year-old Mr. Rove pleaded
forgetfulness. “God, this is 1973!” he said. “You work the math.
I don’t remember it all.”
The letter is a walk back in time, and a reminder that in Washington, where
relationships often span the decades, the seeds of power are planted early.
Mrs. Armstrong went on to become an ambassador to Britain, and then returned to
Texas, where she owns a ranch — the very same ranch where Vice President Dick
Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter last year. Mr. Rove said he went
hunting there every year.
Mr. Rove said he long ago lost his only copy of the campaign platform. But
he said he was not surprised that the document had turned up in the Nixon files.
“When you send something to a White House person,” he said, ‘‘it tends to be
collected and remain.”
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