Portal:Utah/Selected biography/16

Karl Rove (born December 25, 1950) was Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush until his resignation on 31 August 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. For most of his career prior to his employment at the White House, Rove was a political consultant almost exclusively for Republican candidates.

His family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah in 1965 when Rove was entering high school. While at Olympus High School, he was elected student council president his junior and senior years.

Rove began his involvement in American politics in 1968. In a 2002 Deseret News interview, Rove explained, "I was the Olympus High chairman for (former United States Senator) Wallace F. Bennett's re-election campaign, where he was opposed by the dynamic, young, aggressive political science professor at the University of Utah, J.D. Williams." Bennett was reelected to a third six-year term. Through Rove's campaign involvement, Bennett's son, Bob Bennett — a future United States Senator from Utah - would become a friend. Williams would later become a mentor of Rove's.

In the fall of 1969, Rove entered the University of Utah as a political science major and joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

Through the University's Hinckley Institute of Politics, Rove got an internship with the Utah Republican Party. That position and contacts from the 1968 Bennett campaign, helped Rove land a job in 1970 in Illinois, helping on the unsuccessful re-election campaign of Ralph Tyler Smith for Senate.