President Bush had just moved into the Oval Office when Karen P. Hughes, his closest aide for the past seven years, dropped by to chat about her new job as “counselor to the president.” With characteristic terseness, Bush said, “I want you in every meeting where major decisions are made.”
Hughes, 44, is Bush’s security blanket. She spent more time with him than any other staff member when he was Texas governor and during his presidential campaign. Now she works in the West Wing with a view of the White House residence and has been given broad authority by a president who puts a premium on image and tone.
She tinkers with speech drafts to make them sound more like him. She goes on most of his trips to be sure the television pictures look right. And she is one of the few people in the White House who can–and will–say, “Mr. President, you’re wrong.”
This baseball mom and Presbyterian elder, transplanted from Austin to Arlington, is a key to the discipline and insularity of the Bush presidency. Her brash, protective style has combined with Bush’s acute sense of order to produce a White House where the official line drowns out the dissent and intrigue that seep from most administrations. Largely because of Hughes’ example, officials in this White House generally refuse to acknowledge even obvious Bush shortcomings or setbacks.
“I feel that I have a duty to let people know the things that I know about him, which are good things,” Hughes said. “I’m sure there are plenty of people who are available to criticize. That’s not my role.”
Highest-ranking female aide
Hughes is one of the three most powerful aides in the White House, along with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and senior adviser Karl C. Rove.
She is also the highest-ranking female aide to a modern president. Bill Clinton promised an administration that looks like America, but it is Bush, a Republican, who has installed more women in top White House positions than any other president. At the senior staff meeting at 7:30 on weekday mornings in the Roosevelt Room, eight of the 18 attendees are women.
Before Bush had the Secret Service to form a bubble around him, he had Hughes, a 5-foot-10 former television reporter. When he seemed at a loss at a news conference, she answered. Texas reporters considered that standard operating procedure. So did Bush: Occasionally, he turned to her and she jumped in.
Hughes is known for a robotic devotion to Bush and his agenda, and she engages in none of the winking or off-the-record leveling that is typical among political operatives.
“Even after a glass of wine, she’s `on message,”‘ said Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, who has known her for 11 years and has socialized with Hughes and her husband, Jerry, a retired lawyer.
Bush calls her “the High Prophet”–a play on her maiden name, Parfitt, and on her sixth sense for what Bush would do, which she ruefully calls “the insight thing.”
Card said Bush frequently asks him, “Has Karen seen this?” or “What does Karen think?”
That is never much of a secret. Asked to describe her voice, she laughed and said, “Loud!”
At the ceremony in December where Bush named her counselor, she said, “I promise I will always give you my unvarnished opinions.” Bush broke up the room by interrupting to joke, “No question about that.”
After serving as Bush’s public face and voice for all three of his campaigns and during his term and a half as governor, Hughes now works behind the scenes, leaving the briefing to others. “You can’t do the day-to-day spokesman work and provide the more strategic advice and counsel, think through the policy, think through the message, recommend ways to deliver the message,” Hughes said. “In the state office in Texas, I was able to do both.”
Hughes runs a 42-person staff consisting of the press, communications, speechwriting and media affairs offices. Mary Matalin, the “Crossfire” co-host turned counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, says Hughes is “everywhere, into everything and indispensable.”
“Any public utterance of this White House–of whatever size, for whatever purpose–is her responsibility,” Matalin said.
The president often has about 90 minutes a day on his schedule that is labeled “Personal/Staff Time.” He often phones Hughes or she pops down to the Oval Office.
West Wing colleagues say Hughes practically channels Bush. She knows what he would or should say in a given situation, and calls on a memory for nuances in his statements at particular stops over years of campaigning. In 1999, when Bush became dissatisfied with the Texas columnist who was ghostwriting his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep,” Hughes took five weeks off the campaign trail and wrote it herself.
Subtle influence
Hughes’s influence is fundamental and subtle. She took the first draft of last month’s budget address to Congress, which had begun by trumpeting Bush’s proposed tax cut, and flipped the logic so that the president emphasized all the places he would spend money, then turned to the tax cut. Working on a computer in the staff office at Camp David, she printed out each version and shuttled it to Bush for changes, then typed them in. Knowing he likes self-deprecating humor, she added a joke about the close election.
Cheney marvels at Hughes’s speed in writing statements after brainstorming sessions. “I’ve been around a lot of White Houses, and it’s a unique role when the president has total confidence in someone,” Cheney said. “Karen is the first woman I’ve seen in that role.”
Other women on Bush’s staff include his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; Matalin; Margaret Tutwiler, the former State Department and West Wing official who is schooling the Texans in the ways of Washington; and Margaret LaMontagne, Bush’s domestic policy adviser.
Anne Wexler, a lobbyist and public affairs consultant who was a top aide to former president Jimmy Carter, called the number of women in Bush’s White House “a milestone on a long road.”
Hughes gets to the White House just in time for the 7:15 a.m. super-senior staff meeting, and hurries home about 7 or 7:30 p.m. to her 13-year-old son, Robert, an 8th grader at St. Albans School.
On Wednesdays, she leaves about 5:30 for what she calls a “midweek moment” with Robert.
Hughes, the daughter of a major general in the Army Corps of Engineers, graduated summa cum laude in 1977 from Southern Methodist University, where she majored in English and journalism. For the next seven years, she was a reporter for the NBC station in Ft. Worth, and traveled to New Hampshire and Iowa to cover the unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign of former President George Bush.
She met the current president in 1990 when she was producing a state convention for the Texas Republican Party, where she worked first as a consultant and later as executive director.
“He made decisions fast, and he went over things fast,” she said. “I would send him the script and it would be OK’d right back.”
