"You know, you could psychoanalyze this," Rove says with breathtaking understatement. When Karl asked Louis about it, "he said, 'It didn't matter to me, and I hope it didn't matter to you.' Here was a guy, at this point they're now divorced, and he's sending a check to help me get through school. My father was living on nothing because he was supporting his children. And it turns out he didn't need to."

In 1981 a third devastating blow struck what remained of the Rove family. Karl's mother committed suicide in Reno, Nev. She had surmounted much in her life, Rove says, starting with poverty. Her father had worked on a road crew in the San Juan Mountains and sold knives from the back of his truck to grocery stores in little out-of-the-way towns. "They lived in a house in southern Colorado where, when they finished reading the evening newspaper, they'd take flour paste and slap it on the wall for insulation," he says.

After persevering through all that, the disintegration of a marriage and the challenge of raising five children by two fathers, why had Reba Wood Rove reached a point where she couldn't go any further? "Again, it's hard to figure out," Rove says. "You can speculate on what demons she just wasn't able to overcome, but she couldn't. And it's very sad for my sisters, who were very close to her."

As for Rove, he had not considered himself particularly close to either parent. It wasn't until after his mother's death that Rove began to seek out a new relationship with the man who had raised him, maybe because the son who had lost so much needed this bond for the first time. "It was in the '80s that I started seeing my father more, and we ended up vacationing every year in Santa Fe," Rove says. In 1998 they explored Louis' roots in Norway together, and in 2001, as the rest of the Bush White House was riveted by California's energy crisis, Rove was on the phone with his siblings trying to figure out how to keep his emphysema-stricken father's oxygenator running in Palm Springs. Louis died last July, and Karl keeps a little picture of him in a star-shaped frame in his office. As he studied the beaming image recently, Rove pronounced his father to have been a happy man: "He lived life exactly the way he wanted to live it."

Did the mysteries and eruptions of his own family draw him to one that never seemed to have a day of doubt about itself? "No, no. I mean, that suggests they're a substitute," Rove says. "Look, [the President] is my boss and my friend. I have benefited enormously by my association with him and his father. Both of them are great men. But you know, I had a great father."

The president and the architect have a jokey little ritual. When Rove comes across a book he thinks Bush might like to read—most recently, Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton—Rove lends it to him with the understanding that both will write something in it. Bush's inscriptions are often wry turns on all the speculation about who's the real brains of the operation. "He'll return it to me saying, 'I heartily recommend that you read this book,' like he came up with the idea," Rove says, laughing. "'I'm happy to loan you this book from my private library. Please return when finished.'" Bush recommends reading material to Rove as well. The latest is Israeli politician Natan Sharansky's book on democracy. "Being the cheapskate that he is," says Rove, "he simply told me to get a copy."

Rove is settling in for a second term, during which he says Bush will achieve big reforms that will fortify the Republican Party's hold on power well beyond Bush's presidency. But it's hard not to wonder what lies ahead for Karl Rove. There's already talk of a "Rove primary" in which a wide open field of G.O.P. hopefuls would vie for his talents. Rove misses Texas, McKinnon says, "but I don't know if it's in the cards for him to ever go back. It's gravity and physics that keep him here now."

So is Rove planning to pick a horse in 2008? "I don't know," he says. "I don't believe I will. I mean, I'm a Bush man." But there are other Bushes, and the Architect did buy a house in Florida a few years back. Rove says he takes that state's Governor, Jeb Bush, at his word when Jeb says he isn't running. But of course, you wouldn't expect Rove to be closing any options. "I don't think Marvin is running," Rove says, a sly smile creeping across his face. "I can't speak for Neil."

—With reporting by Peta Owens-Liston/Salt Lake City and Stacy J. Willis/Las Vegas

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