Rove insists that Bush's quality was not that he fit a political formula but that he came up with one. As Bush finally got serious about running for Governor in 1993, he took a few days to consider what kind of race he wanted to conduct and made a list. "I wish I'd kept it. He wrote it down on a yellow pad," Rove says. "It was like the template for what followed."

Bush came up with three issues: education reform, welfare reform and juvenile criminal justice. "I remember being particularly struck by the second issue on there, where he said, 'A dependency on government saps the soul and drains the spirit,'" Rove says, the wonder fresh in his voice nearly a dozen years later. "You know, this was not 'Welfare is bad because people cheat and drive around in Cadillacs.' And when he talked about juvenile justice, it wasn't 'Lock the little buggers up.' It was 'We're going to lose a generation of children to lives of despair and violence unless we intervene, and our object is to show them love.' I thought it was very unusual. You had a Republican candidate for Governor talking about criminal justice, and his answer was 'Show them love.'" That was all the more remarkable at a time when the rest of the Republican Party was falling under the tough-but-no-love sway of Newt Gingrich. Bush's list became the basis of what would come to be called compassionate conservatism.

Rove insists his only contribution was to add a fourth issue, legal reform, which in Texas is shorthand for cutting down on lawsuits against business, and not incidentally, choking off the income of the trial lawyers who are major contributors to the Democrats. Rove recalls telling Bush, "'We've got a big problem in Texas with our judicial system.' And he said, 'Yeah, absolutely right.' And he added it on."

Even in Texas, their partnership was the subject of intense curiosity and speculation about whether the political consultant was the dark side of a shining politician. Throughout Rove's career, there had been whispers of dirty tricks, like the suspicion that he engineered the 1986 bugging of his own office to create a distraction in a Governor's race in which the Democrat was gaining. "He doesn't fight clean at all," says Garry Mauro, who claims Rove sicced the FBI on him when he was Texas land commissioner in the 1980s. Rove denies all such charges, occasionally at the top of his lungs. (The Mauro case stayed open for two years, although Mauro was never charged with anything, and Rove's connection is circumstantial.)

As Governor Bush turned his attention in late 1998 to the prospect of a presidential race, he asked Rove to sell his business and sever his ties with all his other clients. Bush told him, "If I do this, I want you free and clear." It should have been a hard decision, Rove says, but it wasn't. So Karl Rove & Co. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Dynasty Inc.

Then again, had Rove ever been meant for anyplace but the White House?

The folklore by now is so established that even Rove's relatives subscribe to it. Family legend has it that as a 3-year-old, Rove announced he would be President someday, says his younger sister Reba Hammond. And there's a story of how he had a poster over his bed exhorting, wake up, America.

Not true—any of it, says Rove, who was the second of five children. "With all due respect to my sister, whom I love dearly, her recollection of these things is a little suspect." Rove does own up to being a know-it-all who wore a tie and carried a briefcase every day to Dilworth Middle School in Sparks, Nev., in the late 1960s. "I did write my fifth-grade civics paper on the theory of dialectical materialism," he says. "My son asked me last night what that was, and I told him, and I remember it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis."

The family moved around because of Louis Rove's job as a geologist. Karl was a star debater and the supremely confident student-senate president at Olympus High in Salt Lake City, Utah. His history teacher Eldon Tolman made his class go see the procession of presidential candidates and national hopefuls who came through town in 1968. "In one year, I saw Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey speak," Rove recalls. "In fact, this is where Humphrey makes his famous speech breaking with Johnson on the war." Rove fancied Rockefeller enough to get a few posters, was smitten with Reagan but ultimately settled on being "a Nixon man."

Rove's tidy world started crashing as the family prepared to follow Louis to yet another job in Los Angeles. On Christmas Day 1969, which happened to be Karl's 19th birthday, Louis announced he would be leaving alone. "I had a wonderful childhood. I had wonderful parents," Karl says. "You never really know what goes on in the private lives of your parents. They overcame big things in their lives. My dad would never speak about why the marriage broke up, but it clearly pained him till the end of his days that it did."

The shock of his parents' separation, however, didn't compare with the one Karl got the following fall, when an aunt informed him that the man who had raised him was not his biological father. Louis had adopted his wife's two oldest children, Karl and his older brother Eric. To this day, Rove says, he doesn't know the circumstances or even the timing of their adoption. "My supposition is that I was less than 2 and he was less than 4," Rove says. Karl was the trustee of Louis' estate but says he found no record that would shed any light on the adoption. The two brothers later met their biological father once, but they have not pursued the relationship.

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