BOB Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were dubbed the Berlin Wall by their detractors in an allusion to their German-sounding surnames as well as their penchant for restricting the access of other advisers to Richard Nixon. Haldeman served as Nixon’s chief of staff — a White House post that’s potentially more powerful than the vice-presidency.

Ehrlichman was presidential counsel and Nixon’s adviser on domestic policy. Neither of them enjoyed inordinate name recognition outside Washington political circles until the Watergate scandal broke.

Both of them consequently lost their jobs and were sentenced to spells in prison – unlike Nixon, who gave up his job to avoid impeachment and, thanks to the indemnity generously offered by his successor, was spared the indignity of a trial and incarceration.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman sprang to mind during an attempt to recall the last time US presidential aides outside the cabinet gained a degree of international notoriety. Another key figure in Watergate was John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House counsel but subsequently redeemed himself somewhat by becoming a witness for the prosecution. A couple of years ago, Dean produced a tome on the Bush presidency titled ‘Worse Than Watergate’, a verdict with which there is widespread concurrence in liberal as well as conservative circles.

The fact remains that the likes of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean Gordon Liddy would have remained relatively anonymous but for Watergate. It is only in recent years that a couple of the closest aides to Gerald Ford, have attracted a spot of retrospective scrutiny: during his brief stint in office, Nixon’s unelected and unremarkable successor boasted a chief of staff and a deputy chief of staff whose names have lately become bywords for administrative malevolence: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Years before he disastrously reprised the role from 2001 to 2006, Rumsfeld also served as defence secretary under Ford. Cheney filled the same post under the elder George Bush.

In his capacity as vice-president, as we noted a couple of weeks ago, Cheney has reputedly wielded greater power than any previous deputy chief executive of the United States. Thus far, however, his influence on presidential decision-making has not exactly been unrivalled.

Among the members of the Texas mafia that accompanied George W. Bush into the White House, no one has attracted quite as much attention as Karl Rove, whose role as a key policy adviser was embellished two years ago with the additional post of deputy chief of staff. Rove’s significance was underlined when news of his resignation last week was accorded lead story status by the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post and the main television networks.

The upshot is that as of August 31, Rove will cease to be a White House employee. He cited the cliched excuse of wishing to spend more time with his family as the main reason behind his decision. American media organs perceived it as a somewhat more momentous occasion: an indication that the Bush presidency, with 17 months still to run, is effectively over, that grand initiatives on the part of the present administration are a thing of the past. It’s done its worst, and the remainder of its tenure will be devoted primarily to perpetuating its extant follies rather than perpetrating new ones.

There may be something in that, although it would be unwise to underestimate this administration’s capacity for malevolence. It is widely presumed that had Bush insisted, chances are Rove would have been prepared to hang on until the bitter end. Then there’s the equally plausible presumption that Bush will be a lot less comfortable on his perch without Rove around to provide advice and solace.

The two of them, after all, go back a long way — to the days when Bush had nothing more to his credit than a mediocre baseball team. Rove has been known as Bush’s Brain since 1994, when he defied the odds by helping to catapult the unworthy scion of a politically influential family into the gubernatorial slot in Texas.

His relationship with the family goes back considerably further. As a college dropout back in the early 1970s, he became chairman of the College Republicans — a stint that earned him a headline in The Washington Post: “Republican party probes official as teacher of (dirty) tricks”.

A few years later he was involved in Bush Sr’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, but lost his job after it turned out he had leaked information to the press. A decade or so later, he suffered the same fate in a similar capacity, as a member of the team propelling the elder Bush’s 1992 re-election bid. This time the punishment was a response to his success in persuading the conservative columnist Robert Novak to write negatively about Rove’s rival Robert Mosbacher Jr, the campaign’s chief fundraiser.

Two years later, he was considerably more successful with the younger, more malleable Bush under his command. They had met some two decades earlier, when Dubya’s dad was chairman of the Republican National Committee and Rove, as a junior special assistant, was detailed to deal with the chairman’s eldest son.

On Rove’s part, it was love at first sight. As he noted later, he spied plenty of potential in junior: “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma — you know, wow!” Perhaps its no coincidence that an attempt was made to replicate that image for the infamously choreographed Mission Accomplished moment aboard an aircraft carrier in May 2003.

One of Rove’s insalubrious tactics in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign was a whispering campaign against the Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards, implying that she was a lesbian. Half a dozen years later, a similar tactic was deployed against Bush’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain, suggesting that the Vietnam veteran and prisoner-of-war was not quite a patriot.

Then, four years later, Democratic candidate John Kerry, another Vietnam veteran, was bombarded with imputations of cowardice. He never quite recovered from the blow, not least because his campaign was based on stressing his role as a combatant rather than his incalculably worthier subsequent incarnation as a peacenik.

For all of Rove’s efforts, however, the 2000 election would have been a lost cause for George W but for the undemocratic intervention by Daddy’s appointees in the Supreme Court. Had the results in Florida been accurately tabulated, Al Gore would have scored a majority not only in the popular vote but also in the electoral college.

Four years later, the focus of attention was on Ohio and there is some evidence of manipulation. The result in that particular state is by no means irrelevant, given that Bush managed to score only 51 per cent overall. But there’s little question that he wouldn’t have got that far had it not been for Rove’s success in bringing out the evangelical vote.

Although the millions of Americans who are votaries of the ‘Cristian Taliban’ vehemently oppose anything that can be construed as liberal, they tend not to bother with the material task of casting ballots. Rove’s efforts managed to convince large numbers of them that failure to vote for Bush would be an abomination unto the Lord.

At the same time, a large number of crucial states were persuaded to schedule referendums on abortion on the same day as the presidential election. In the absence of such initiatives, it is quite likely that Kerry, for all his flaws, would have managed to gain more than 48 per cent of the vote.

Small wonder, then, that the re-elected Bush hailed Rove as The Architect, replacing the longstanding epithet Boy Genius. It is also well known, however (although one wouldn’t know it from the “respectable” American press), that Dubya has yet another term of endearment for his favourite political consultant: Turd Blossom.

It isn’t, apparently, intended purely as an affectionate insult: the phrase is said to be Texan slang for a flower that thrives on dung. Hence it probably isn’t a reference to Rove’s propensity for flinging faecal matter at perceived ideological opponents.

However, Rove didn’t quite live up to the tag once his boss was truly chest-deep in problems of his own making. Ahead of last November’s congressional elections, the odds were well and truly stacked up against Bush. Had Rove managed to come up with a successful strategy for preventing Congress from falling into Democratic hands, he would have consolidated his status as a Republican legend.

After all, one of his guiding political motives was to create a Republican majority that would last for a generation. He failed, and his failure is Bush’s failure. Other initiatives associated with Rove have also floundered, notably in the context of immigration and the privatisation of social security.

The Bush administration’s biggest failures, of course, have been Iraq and Afghanistan. The extent of Rove’s involvement in determining foreign policy is questionable, although he clearly wasn’t out of the loop.

After announcing his resignation in an interview with the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s extreme-right opinion page, Rove has, in his appearance on various television networks, sought to convey the impression that his significance in the Bush administration has been inflated by the media. That may well be the case. What’s less dubious is that his influence has consistently been baleful.

American liberals and quite a few conservative bloggers have greeted Rove’s exit with comments of the “good riddance” variety, but they shouldn’t be surprised if he resurfaces some years down the line as the Svengali to another extremist hopeful.

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