The brains behind Bush

But the fact remains that three of Hightower's assistants were ultimately indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison. So Rampton's investigation was apparently justifiable. The authors retell the story of Rove's evasions and Clintonesque parsing during a 1991 state senate hearing when Rove, nominated to the East Texas State University's board of regents, was asked how long he'd known Rampton. "Ah, Senator, it depends," Rove responded. "Would you define 'know' for me?" But this is old news, blast-faxed to reporters by Democrats in September 2000, and no dots are connected.

Likewise, "Boy Genius" produces no smoking gun from the scandalous South Carolina primary campaign against McCain, and it's filled with reheated dish from others' reporting. (That includes my own, I should disclose, something I realized only after I came to the book's final pages, where sources and acknowledgments are listed). For a December 2002 New Yorker profile of Senator John Kerry, D-Mass., writer Joe Klein followed the presidential hopeful to South Carolina, where Kerry happened to run into Jim Gunn, president of the Coalition of Retired Military Veterans. At the beginning of the 2000 GOP primary campaign, Gunn had launched the opening salvo against McCain on Bush's behalf. Later Gunn approached Kerry to repent. "I just want you to know, Senator, that you were right about McCain and I was wrong," he told Kerry, who had defended McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran. "Bush lied to my face and I'll never support him again."

Klein gleaned this just by flying to South Carolina on another story; what might Dubose, Reid and Cannon have stumbled upon if they had actually gone to Columbia, S.C., magnifying glasses in hand, to search for Rove's fingerprints? The most we get is this:

"Someone started floating rumors that McCain was mentally unstable as a result of being tortured in Vietnam, and that the pressure of the presidency might cause him to snap. Wayne Slater, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, wrote a piece ruminating about the origin of this whispering campaign, in which he recounted a number of questionable practices that had been attributed to Rove over the years ... Slater also reported that candidates Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes had fingered the Bushies as the McCain rumormongers.

"In early December, Rove -- who had not returned Slater's phone calls about the story -- confronted the reporter in the New Hampshire airport, poking a finger in his chest and saying, 'You broke the rules!' The outburst had an effect that Rove had perhaps not reckoned on. A reporter who was present said that as a result of the incident, 'everyone on the campaign charter concluded that Rove was responsible for the rumors about McCain.'"

That doesn't amount to much. And neither does "Boy Genius" when trying to explore the mystery of the man himself. Rove's father left his mother for good on Rove's birthday when he was a teenager. This subject is addressed in one sentence only. Rove's mother's suicide is dispatched with another sentence, his four-year first marriage ending in a 1980 divorce in another, his Vietnam-era avoidance of military service in a phrase.

"Boy Genius" leaves the disappointments and challenges of Rove's life unexplored, but that's not all. It ignores the fun, too, such as a 1973 cross-country road trip Rove took with Lee Atwater in Atwater's brown Pinto while Rove was running for national chairman of the College Republicans. Or Rove's first campaign manager's job in a Nebraska congressional race a year later. In stark contrast, John Brady's superb "Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater" makes no such omissions, exploring the contradictions of the blues-loving race-baiter and even offering a harrowing account of the death of Atwater's little brother Joe, who was killed at age 3 in the family kitchen when a deep-fat fryer tipped over on him.

The white-trash chip on Rove's shoulder gets alluded to here and there in "Boy Genius" -- most notably in connection with his other nickname -- but is not delved into enough to explain the man's drive. We hear, again, that Rove loves Myron Magnet's 1993 treatise against liberalism, "The Dream and the Nightmare: the Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass" -- he famously hands it out to visitors with the fervor of the Gideons printing out Bibles and shipping them to motels -- but why? What life experiences led to Rove's anger against liberals and hippies and flower children?

The book even loses its focus on Rove for pages at a time in describing the aftermath of Sept. 11. Yes, this White House is secretive and disciplined, and it's understood that Rove didn't want to participate in the book's creation, but I have no doubt that a little more effort would have gone a long way. Cannon, for instance, steps up with information about how annoyed Rove's superiors are with his star status. Following a National Journal profile of Rove in April 2002, Cannon -- who writes for the National Journal -- reports that Bush told one of its authors that he didn't like Rove getting so much attention in the media. Additionally, there is this juicy tidbit in which, at a Washington reception, someone asks Vice President Dick Cheney if he'd seen the story.

"Yes, I did," the laconic veep said.

What did he think?

"Grossly excessive," he replied.

With "Boy Genius" out, and "Bush's Brain" on its way, I can imagine what Cheney is grumbling about these days.

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