Karl Rove

From Philosopedia

Karl Christian Rove (25 December 1950 - )

Rove was Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush until 31 August 2007, when he resigned. After resigning, he has worked as a political analyst and contributor for Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

Rove's purported biological father was Louis Claude Rove Jr., a geologist, and his mother, Reva Louise Wood Rove, was a gift shop manager. In December 1969, the man Rove had known as his father left, divorced Rove's mother. According to The Huffington Post (5 September 2006) and Newsweek (13 August 2007), that man in December 1969, left the family and divorced Rove's mother soon afterward. It was later found that he was homosexual, his aunt and uncle telling him that the man who had raised him was not his biological father, that both he and his older brother Eric were the children of another man. Rove, meanwhile, expressed great love and admiration for his adoptive father and for "how selfless" his love had been. In 1981 Rove's mother committed suicide in Reno, Nevada.

Rove married Houston socialite Valerie Mather Wainwright on 10 July 1976. They divorced in 1980. In 1986 he married Darby Tara Hickson, a breast cancer survivor, a graphic designer, and former employee of Karl Rove & Co. Their son, Andrew Madison Rove, born in 1989, is an undergraduate at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

In 2005 Time named him one of 100 most influential persons in the world.

James Moore and Wayne Slater identify Rove as an agnostic in their book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. Slater reaffirmed this claim in a National Public Radio interview. However, on 20 August 2007 Chris Wallace on Fox News asked Rove about it and Rove responded, "I'm a Christian. I go to church. I'm an Episcopalian."