The Busiest Man in the White House

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The courtship grew more intense when Bush and Rove got to the White House. Each Wednesday Rove dispatches a top Administration official to attend the regular conservative-coalition lunches held at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. When activists call his office with a problem, Rove doesn't pass them off to an aide. He often responds himself. When Weyrich heard a few weeks ago that Bush's budget slashed funding for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives scholarships and training to police cadets, he complained to the White House. To Weyrich's surprise, Rove called back. "We've taken care of it," Rove said. "The problem is solved." Weyrich, who says his memos to the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses were rarely read, was impressed. "That," he gushes, "is what it means to have friends in the White House."

Rove is intimately involved in the selection and nomination of federal judges, a project conservatives are watching closely. Bush's first round of nominations will be announced in May, and many on the right view it as the most important early test of his commitment to rescuing American culture from liberalism. Already there is grumbling about the process. "The emphasis on racial and sexual quotas is as pernicious in this Administration as it was in any other," complains a conservative involved in the discussions. In meetings of the White House Judicial Selection Task Force, Rove has to make sure that the choices satisfy not just the purists of the conservative legal community but also the desires of local politicians. At one meeting, Rove turned to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush's most conservative Cabinet member, and joked, "John, did you ever think that you and I would represent the left in a meeting like this?"

Rove seems embarrassed about some of the attention and perks his new life has brought him. But there is one he clearly enjoys. Last Thursday night, with his boss upstairs and most likely asleep, Rove ushered a group of old high school friends from Salt Lake City through the White House for a private tour. Rove's tired, pale-blue eyes danced as he showed off the Cabinet Room. "I love this painting," he said moments later, unspooling the history of a Norman Rockwell that hangs next to the Oval Office door. In the Roosevelt Room, he told how F.D.R. used the space to house his aquariums. Down the hall he expounded on a print showing Lincoln at the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout, he was a manic bundle of energy. Near the end of the tour, Glade Curtis, an obstetrician, had to laugh. "Karl was always really into politics and history," Curtis said. "And he was always a nerd."

Rove conceded that he was "the biggest dweeb in my high school" and allowed as how he hasn't changed much in the intervening 32 years. But as he walked to his car outside the West Wing, it was clear that at least one thing had changed. Famous for driving beat-up heaps in Austin, Rove climbed into a metallic-blue Jaguar and roared into the night.