Small world.
We noted earlier that little more than an hour after the Cheney shooting incident, Karl Rove was on the phone with Katharine Armstrong, the ranch owner who witnessed the incident and was designated as the person who would speak to the press. Turns out her dad helped Rove set up his first business.
This from a 2003 article in The New Yorker …
Rove left the Bush pre-Presidential operation to work in the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, an oilman who in 1978 became Texasâs first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Rove was appointed Clementsâs chief of staff. In 1981, he left to set up a direct-mail business in Austin called Karl Rove + Company. This put him in a position to make more money than you can as a politicianâs full-time employee, and allowed him to work for many Republican candidates at the same time. Rove had the imprimatur of Texasâs Republican aristocracy from the beginning, through his connection to the Bush family and to Clements. An early financier of Karl Rove + Company was Tobin Armstrong, the owner of a Texas ranch (it was on land leased from Armstrong Rove and Bill Frist were planning to go hunting) and the husband of Anne Armstrong, a former Republican Cabinet officer. Becoming chairman of the College Republicans provided Rove with an introduction to such people, which may be one reason that winning mattered so much to him; it also seems that Rove, the self-made man, gets pleasure as well as practical advantage from his association with the Texas upper crust, people who give off the glow of ease, charm, and connection which he detected in George W. Bush the first time they met.
I guess they go way back.
