Karl Rove was born in an elevator in Denver, on Christmas Day 1950. He was one of five children. He would later learn that his father, a geologist, who left the family on the Christmas Day that Karl turned nineteen, was actually not his real father—he had adopted the two children that Rove’s mother had in a previous, secret marriage. She was an unstable woman who eventually took her own life. According to reports, Louis Rove Jr., Karl’s stepfather, lived the remainder of his life as a gay man. Karl was close to him until he passed away in 2004.
Karl grew up in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, and he imbibed the Republicanism of the Rocky Mountain West. At age nine, he stuck a Nixon bumper sticker on his bike, only to be attacked by a neighborhood girl who made her Democratic preferences known by giving him a bloody nose. It was his first political fight.
He attended the University of Utah, although he never graduated; his focus was on getting elected president of the College Republicans. It would prove to be a legendary campaign. Managing the vote on Southern campuses for Rove’s presidential bid was Lee Atwater. The two of them would one day reshape American political campaigns—Atwater, most notably, as campaign manager for George H. W. Bush in his brutal victory over Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign; and Rove, with his involvement in George W. Bush’s two gubernatorial victories, in 1994 and 1998, and his presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. But their first victory was getting Rove elected, in 1973, in the rawest political contest the College Republicans had ever seen. Both Atwater and Rove came away with a reputation for using dirty tricks to win.
Rove moved to Texas in 1977, at a time when the demographic changes in the state had not made themselves felt politically. But he was keen enough to recognize the trend. He was twenty-six years old, baby-faced, with wispy blond hair and pinkish skin. He went to work for George H.W., who had lost two races for the U.S. Senate but had formed a political action committee in preparation for an unlikely presidential run. John Tower was a Republican senator from Texas, but no other Republicans occupied statewide office. That changed the following year, when Bill Clements, a gruff and extremely wealthy oil-services provider who had been Nixon and Ford’s deputy secretary of defense, got elected as the first Republican governor in Texas since Reconstruction. He ran against John Hill, the courtly former attorney general and chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Steve, who once profiled Clements, observed then, “Nobody really wanted a gentleman as governor of Texas when it was possible to have a roughneck. On election day the world as Texas had known it for a hundred years came to an end.” Clements hired Rove to be his chief of staff.
In 1981, Rove started a direct-mail business in Austin and began running campaigns in Texas. Many of the earliest Republican victors in Texas owe their success to him. Rove also turned his attention to down-ballot races that the Republican Party had never taken seriously. In 1988, he consulted on the successful campaign of Kent Hance for the Railroad Commission, a powerful agency that, despite the name, actually regulates the oil-and-gas industry. That same year, he got Thomas R. Phillips elected to the Texas Supreme Court (yes, we even elect judges in Texas). Although Republicans were still just getting established in the state, “we won in a landslide twice when Karl was helping me,” Phillips told me. Moderate and conservative Democrats began following voters into the Republican Party, and Rove was there to get them elected. Rick Perry, for one, served three terms in the Texas House as a Democrat, and even campaigned for Al Gore in his 1988 presidential bid, before changing parties the following year. With Rove’s guidance, he became agriculture commissioner in 1990. Eventually, Rove would elect seven of the nine justices, both Texas senators, the land commissioner, the lieutenant governor—nearly every statewide office had a Rove Republican inside it. “What he did in twenty-five years is remake the political face of Texas and give shape and substance to a ruling political class,” Bill Miller told me. In 1994, Texas elected its last statewide Democrat. “It was a complete rout of a political party,” Miller said.
I asked Karl where he thought the Republican Party in Texas, which he had done so much to create, was headed. “Look at the House,” he said. “Jonathan Stickland and the Freedom Caucus are a minority faction. The only reason they got that much traction this session is that Joe [Straus] didn’t have his act together.” He pointed out that there is still a bipartisan tradition in the legislature. This was true even under the extremely conservative Speaker Tom Craddick, who was overthrown by the coup that put Straus in the Speaker’s chair. “Joe’s election, I hope, portends the future,” Rove said, “where you have a reasonable Republican who’s backed by reasonable Democrats”—with the partisan extremists pushed to the sidelines.
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ABOUT 1,100 NEW LAWS went into effect after the 2017 legislative season. Among them: children under the age of sixteen will no longer be allowed to marry; faith-based adoption agencies will be permitted to deny placing children with gay parents; and Texans can now openly carry swords, a welcome development for the samurai in our midst.
The special session of the legislature that Governor Abbott called was a disappointing end for cultural conservatives, however, concluding without property tax reform, a compromise on school finance, or the bathroom bill. Dan Patrick blamed Joe Straus. “Thank goodness Travis didn’t have the Speaker at the Alamo,” Patrick said. “He might have been the first one over the wall.” The state did commit to continuing to study the high rate of maternal mortality, at the same time passing new restrictions on abortion and doing nothing to improve access to health care. The special session passed a law limiting local ordinances on trees, although it was not as comprehensive as the governor had wanted. Large cities will be required to hold elections for residents in areas targeted for annexation. These measures were part of a larger attempt to disempower cities, which Dan Patrick said were responsible for all the problems in America. The reason: “Our cities are still controlled by Democrats.” He cheerfully observed, on the Fox Business Network, that “almost a thousand Democrats were defeated running for the local state houses and state senate and governors and lieutenant governors…We own the turf state by state, and Texas leads the way.”
Not addressed by the legislature was the low quality of education in Texas, which is near bottom nationally in most measures of overall achievement. Texas spends $10,000 a year per student—$2,500 below the national average—an indication of where education stands in terms of the state’s priorities. Racism may play a role in the steadily decreasing state support for public schools, but whatever the motivation, the workforce of the future has already been handicapped.
Texas also ranks low in terms of its infrastructure—the roads, dams, pipelines, parks, railroads, energy systems, wastewater treatment, and drinking water that modern civilization relies upon. It’s not just a matter of aging structures and poor maintenance. For a state that is projected to double in population in thirty years, Texas has done little to prepare itself. For all of the boldness that Texans often boast of, there is timidity about confronting the challenges in front of us. But that’s not the direction the social conservatives who rule the state are facing. They instinctively look backward, to a time when homosexuals were unseen, minorities were powerless, abortion was taboo, business and industry were largely unregulated, and science stood respectfully in the shadow of religious belief. Texas is not alone in its assault on diversity, nor in its determination to shove government out of civic life, but without high-quality education and modernized infrastructure the knowledge-based industries of the future will find other states, and other countries, in which to plant themselves. The refusal to face these challenges head-on seems to me not only imprudent but decidedly un-Texan.
Joe Straus received a vote of no-confidence by his own chapter of the Republican Party in San Antonio, a gesture repeated in a number of other caucuses in counties around the state. The ostensible reason was Straus’s failure to advance the Texas GOP plat
form. That platform includes demands that the U.S. government surrender all of its authority over abortion back to the states, and that until then federal laws permitting abortion be ignored; that U.S. senators be appointed by state legislatures, rather than elected by the citizens; that the IRS, Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and a number of other federal agencies be abolished or defunded; that traffic-enforcement cameras be removed; that a photo ID be required of all voters; that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling permitting gay marriage be overturned; that Social Security be phased out; that federal gun laws be ignored; that the Federal Reserve System be abolished and precious metals be reinstituted as the standard for the U.S. dollar; that the minimum-wage law be repealed; that the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations and from international trade agreements, such as NAFTA; and that a high border wall be built along the Mexican border, wherever it is deemed “effective and cost-efficient.” This document is a template for the future agenda of the Republican Party not just in Texas but in the nation.
Straus seemed to give the rebellion in the party caucuses little thought. He promised to run for a record-breaking sixth term as Speaker. Then, on the morning of October 25, he held an impromptu press conference in his office and announced that he would not seek another term. “I didn’t want to be one of those people who held on to an office just because he could,” Straus said. “There are new players and they deserve to have their voices heard.”
Perhaps he was bowing to the inevitable. The House Republican Caucus was pushing a plan that would allow them to designate the candidate for the post, making Democratic votes irrelevant. Straus’s enemies were exultant. “We did it!!! Speaker Straus is gone,” Jonathan Stickland tweeted. “The future of Texas has never looked brighter.” Julie McCarty, the president of the NE Tarrant County Tea Party, a statewide organization headquartered in Fort Worth, took credit for Straus’s departure. “No, I will not allow Straus to waltz off in celebrated thanks for his ‘service,’ ” she wrote on her Facebook page. “I will be David. I will mount Goliath’s head on a sword—the saber I was awarded by Empower Texans for being a grassroots hero—and I will dance! I will display this victory for all to see, for the birds to peck at, for my fellow warriors to recognize God’s hand in delivering our enemy and to be motivated that God is not done yet, for others who wish to follow in Goliath’s footsteps to be warned what awaits them.”
ELEVEN
Borderlands
Mexico defines Texas in a way that no other state experiences with any other nation. We are like a couple still living next door to each other after a particularly bitter divorce. Imagine the wealth and power that would have been Mexico’s had Texas remained a part of it—a genuine rival to the gringo colossus. Our history and our populations are intermingled and complexly mirror each other. You’ll find paired cities strung like beads on either side of the river: Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, McAllen and Reynosa, Brownsville and Matamoros. El Paso and Juárez are the ones most closely aligned. El Paso Street crosses the international bridge and becomes Avenida Benito Juárez. Physically, it’s one city, straddling a political and cultural divide that has never been bridged.
Growing up in Texas, I was always aware of our festive and treacherous neighbor next door. As a young reporter, I wrote about the narcotics trade, and came to appreciate the peril that my Mexican colleagues experienced while covering the crime and corruption in their country. They were often under death threats, and many were actually killed. An Austin writer friend of mine was shot in Mexico City when his cab was hijacked. One can’t understand Mexico without acknowledging the violence that is part of the atmosphere.
Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, once cataloged the differences he observed between his country and mine. “The North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends,” Paz writes. “They are optimists and we are nihilists—except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. We are suspicious and they are trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions.”
There is another distinction that Paz draws—this one between the North American’s avoidance of death and the Mexican’s willingness to contemplate horror: “The bloody Christs in our village churches, the macabre humor in some of our newspaper headlines, our wakes, the custom of eating skull-shaped cakes and candies on the Day of the Dead, are habits inherited from the Indians and the Spaniards and are now an inseparable part of our being.”
The first time I went to Mexico was on a family trip to the little fishing village of Topolobampo, on the Pacific Ocean, in the state of Sinaloa. We flew to El Paso, then caught a bus to Chihuahua City, and from there took the train across Copper Canyon, in the heart of Tarahumara Indian country. I was sixteen; my sisters, Kathleen and Rosalind, were fourteen and eleven. This was the summer after the Kennedy assassination. I remember that because when we were at dinner one night in Mexico an American couple at the table next to us overheard us talking about Texas, and asked where in Texas we were from. When Daddy said, “Dallas,” they got up and just left their meal sitting there.
Before the trip, I had a startling nightmare, one of the worst dreams I’ve ever had in my life. I was on an airplane, and suddenly I was floating above my seat. I looked around to find my mother, and saw her head come off. The next morning, I was sufficiently upset to tell Kathy and Roz about it. None of us had ever had a dream come true, and anyway we were children, and what did we know about Mexico? So we went.
On the way home, we retraced our steps, catching the train again at Los Mochis and crossing the Sierras to Chihuahua. Then we got on the bus to Juárez.
I was trying to nap, with my head against the window. The road was empty and the monotonous bleached landscape stretched out from nowhere to nowhere. It started sprinkling, and the drops shot across the windowpane like bullets. We were going really fast.
The road was wet, and when the driver came to a curve he didn’t even begin to make it. Suddenly, we were off the road, bouncing in our seats. Weirdly, the driver never slowed down. I heard later that he was sixty-five years old and had had his license for only two weeks, which might have accounted for the fact that he didn’t simply stop and back up. Instead, he tried to navigate the bus back to the road, in a big loop through a field, going at the same wild clip, flying past cactus and over boulders. Ahead was a bridge crossing a dry arroyo. There was a slanted concrete abutment at the base of the bridge, which the driver hit, launching the bus into the air.
It was then, as I was hurled into the luggage rack, that I looked back and saw my mother’s wig come off.
The bus flew across the road and landed with such force that everyone over thirty broke their backs. My sisters and I were the youngest passengers, and although we were shaken, we were able to stand and walk.
We were in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. There were maybe forty injured passengers. No cars on the road, no way to call an ambulance, nothing to do but wait for the next bus.
The adults were splayed out on the floor or on their seats, groaning in pain. Daddy was stoic, but I could see he was suffering. My mother had also broken her breastbone and was gasping for breath. The driver was the most gravely injured. I later heard he went to prison. When the next scheduled bus finally came, about four hours later, we rode another hundred miles or so to Juárez, every bump in the road eliciting agonized choruses from the wounded passengers. It was sobering to hear the adults weeping. I didn’t speak Spanish at the time, and I didn’t understand why the police wouldn’t let us take our parents to the hospital in El Paso. It turned out that accidents are often treated as crimes in Mexico, and we were all being held as witnesses.
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I RETURNED to Juárez after Thanksgiving 2016. Mónica Ortiz Uribe, a freelance radio reporter in El Paso, accompanied me as we walked across the international bridge. “I like living in a place that allows me to experience both sides of myself,” she told me.
The Rio Grande here is little more than puddles inside a concrete culvert, nearly all the water having been diverted to farms on both sides. What is left runs through an irrigation canal paralleling the river. Mónica pointed out where a U.S. Border Patrol agent, who was on bike patrol, shot a fifteen-year-old boy just across the river, about sixty feet away, in 2010. According to American authorities, the boy was with a group who were throwing rocks at the agents, a frequent complaint. Because the bullet crossed an international boundary, the case is legally complicated. (The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments as to whether the agent who shot the boy can be sued, and returned the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
The cartel wars in Juárez made it the most dangerous city in the world between 2008 and 2012, even worse than Baghdad. More than 10,000 people were slain during that period. When Mónica and I visited, Juárez was experiencing another killing spree, with nearly a hundred murders in October alone. Throughout Mexico, the homicide rate had surged 18 percent over the previous year. Everyone on both sides of the river was on edge.
Downtown Juárez was desolate. Mónica pointed out the pink crosses on the lampposts. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Juárez women, most of them teenagers, have been kidnapped, many of them in plain sight on the streets where we were standing. Some of their bodies have turned up in mass graves. Each of the crosses on the lampposts represents one of the missing women. “Now you can hardly find a streetlamp without one,” Mónica remarked. “Women are still disappearing to this day, dozens every year.”
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