Karl Rove, former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, spoke about his career in the White House in Cohen Auditorium last night as part of the Young America's Foundation (YAF) Wendy P. McCaw Lecture Series.
The Tufts Republicans worked with YAF to bring Rove to campus after former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain canceled his lecture, which was supposed to take place April 12. The club asked Rove to discuss his experiences at the White House as well as what he learned about the job of a president, Rove told the Daily.
"There's no average day at the White House," Rove said in his lecture. "You better understand who you are and what your values are because you're going to be bombarded when you get there. There will always be something unexpected."
According to Rove, Bush spent many days in a series of meetings every 15 to 20 minutes, each on a different topic. Rove noted that none of the decisions the president had to make in situations, from national security to international affairs, was easy.
"As president, you have to prepare the country for big challenges because if you don't, who will?" Rove said. "It's a serious place to work, sometimes more serious than you'd like."
In his seven years at the White House, Rove had a device that told him where the president was at all times. As Bush was en route to begin his day in the West Wing each morning, Rove said he had to get to the president quickly to find out what he would be responsible for that day.
"My job was to limit the politics," Rove said.
Rove also discussed the history of the West Wing, which was created in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt to separate the president's living quarters from his office. The building is a lot smaller than people may expect, Rove said. With Secret Service officers stationed around the building and historical rooms in every corridor, it was impossible to ignore the significance of working in the White House, he noted.
"You always have a sense of history in that building," Rove said. "You also learn that this place has a sense of structure that's been defined for decades and will be defined for years to come."
Beyond the plethora of meetings, presidents have a continuous list of responsibilities. Rove said that it's important that the president maintain an environment where people feel comfortable telling him he's wrong.
"Compromise doesn't start from the bottom up, it starts from the top down," Rove said. "It takes the president saying he's willing to compromise in order to get things done."
Rove said he was surprised by the significance of the president's personal relationship with foreign leaders. He noted that there was a particular protocol to preserve positive relationships between the president and the international, as well as domestic, spheres.
"You as the president cannot demonize the other guy," Rove said. "When you blame others you look weak."
During Rove's lecture, students from Tufts and other Boston-area schools protested outside of Cohen Auditorium, citing his work promoting state-sanctioned torture. The group called itself the "Karl Rove Un-Welcoming Collective" and organized the protest through word of mouth, fliers and a Facebook event, according to Margaret Young, a participant in the protest.
The protest was not directly affiliated with any campus group, according to Young, a sophomore.
The protestors wore white facemasks and held small cardboard signs with names of Iraqi war victims in a line facing Cohen Auditorium. Other protestors held a banner that included a quote by Rove - "I'm proud of the use of these techniques" - and another banner that read "No dialogues with apologists for war crimes."
"My reason for attending was just to call attention to some of the things that Karl Rove has done during his career that people might not be aware of," Young said. "I have an issue with my student activities fee going to pay someone who has promoted torture, the institutionalization of torture and been part of the machine that created this war overseas that is so unpopular and so contrary to the wishes of the American people."
The protest included a variety of chants as well as a few demonstrations. One female student was chained to a table and had water poured over her masked face by a male student in a suit with a mask of Rove's likeness to simulate waterboarding. The protestors also performed a "die-in" in which students lied down and pretended to be dead while continuing to chant. Around 30 protestors made up the line, and the members dispersed before the end of the event.
After the lecture, Rove answered questions from several members of the audience who had emailed their inquiries to the Tufts Republicans beforehand. The questions covered a variety of topics, such as the purpose of government and the influence of Super PACs in the Republican primaries.
"The problem was that the Republicans were thinking like Democrats," Rove said about the primaries. "Too many of the races were proportional and not enough were winner-take-all."
Rove said he looks forward to watching the 2012 presidential election play out. Although he said he thinks Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will win, he believes the results will be close.
"It's time to give a new guy a chance," Rove said. "It's going to be one hell of an election to watch."
- Patrick McGrath and Elizabeth McKay contributed reporting to this article.
