Rove's Unfinished Memoir

Karl Rove should have produced one of the outstanding White House memoirs of all time. His work though has many scores to settle and these understandable feelings have led the book into a series of strange omissions and memory lapses.

Has there ever been anyone as intimate with a president and as historically knowledgeable as Karl Rove? By all rights, he should have produced one of the outstanding White House memoirs of all time, to stand on the shelf alongside William Safire's, Peggy Noonan's and Robert Sherwood's.

Perhaps someday he yet will. In Courage and Consequence, he has a lot to get off his chest, many scores to settle, and who can blame him? But these very understandable feelings have led the book into a series of strange omissions and memory lapses. I'll be blogging about these, but here's one to open with:

Rove's two-page discussion of the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court ends thus:

Democrats then piled on a questionnaire she [Miers] filled out for her 1989 Dallas City Council race that demonstrated she was pro-life. Apparently, Democrats think some litmus tests are appropriate.

Harriet could see she would get approved only with a tremendous expenditure of the president's political capital - and even then confirmation was unlikely. A nomination that started with such high hopes for those of us who knew Harriet was turning into a disaster. On October 27, she withdrew her name, acting with enormous grace.

That account leaves the impression that Miers was finished off by her pro-life commitment. This is the exact opposite of the case.

What killed the nomination was this Oct. 26, 2005 story by Washington Post reporter Jo Becker:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers said in a speech more than a decade ago that "self-determination" should guide decisions about abortion and school prayer and that in cases where scientific facts are disputed and religious beliefs vary, "government should not act."

In a 1993 speech to a Dallas women's group, Miers talked about abortion, the separation of church and state, and how the issues play out in the legal system. "The underlying theme in most of these cases is the insistence of more self-determination," she said. "And the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes sense."

In that speech and others in the early 1990s when she was president of the Texas Bar Association, Miers also defended judges who order lawmakers to address social concerns. While judicial activism is derided by many conservatives, Miers said that sometimes "officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: I did not want to do that -- the court is making me."

The nomination was finished by the revelation that Miers in fact was probably not pro-life - and that the president's "trust me" assurances were likely to end in disappointment.

Memory is fallible always, and Rove's may very pardonably have failed him in this instance. But it's not the only such instance.

More to come.