As published for The New York Times on March 11th, 2010:

By Peter Baker

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy White House chief of staff under President George W. Bush, on Tuesday published a memoir, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.” The Times caught up with him in New York to talk about democracy in Iraq, the impact of the C.I.A. leak case and questions about his mother’s suicide and his father’s sexual orientation. This is an edited transcript:

Question: You’ve said you wanted to use the book to set the record straight and you write about the “Myth of Rove.” What do you think is the biggest misconception about you and about President Bush?

Mr. Rove: One of the biggest myths is that Bush needed a brain. Bush is a very smart, able leader and people who didn’t like his policies tried to diminish him by depicting me as his brain. The second thing is the myth that Bush got there by – he got there by running a campaign that was based around big ideas, running into a headwind and won, and then won reelection in a year with a lot of headwinds, again by emphasizing big things. This was not mini-ball.

Question: And what about you personally?

Mr. Rove: The thing that always gets me is that people say, well, Rove wins elections and has won elections in the past consistently by smashball politics, dirty, backhanded, underhanded campaigns that vilify his political opposition and distort reality. Which is all based on the assumption that people are easily fooled and manipulated by such tactics, whether it’s the South Carolina primary or the 2002 elections or my races in Texas. People are not as dumb and stupid as some of those advocates of the myth of Rove assume they are.

Question: History often reduces complicated presidents to a single line – Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union, FDR beat the Depression and the Nazis, Reagan won the Cold War. A hundred years from now, what will be President Bush’s one line?

Mr. Rove: Bush laid the foundation for victory in the Global War on Terrorism and the expansion of democracy abroad. And at home he was a bold reformer who moved to solve the big challenges facing boomer and post-boomer America.

Read the full interview here