It's been a sensational news-making month for grads of Salt Lake City's Olympus High. First, David Zabriskie, Class of '97, comes out of nowhere to lead the Tour de France. Then, just as Zabriskie crashes out of the Tour, Karl Rove, Class of '69, is exposed as one of the White House sources who clandestinely talked to reporters about CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Amazing how quickly publicity can go from fabulous to uh-oh.
Rove, of course, isn't used to being on this end of a news story. As George W. Bush's chief political strategist through two presidential campaigns, the onetime Utahn has gained a reputation as an orchestrator of tales that make other people, usually political opponents, squirm.
Rove almost certainly will not be convicted of a crime. Proving that someone violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — the focus of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who outed Plame — appears to be even more difficult than proving an NBA franchise exceeded the salary cap.
But he has nonetheless been exposed as a White House leak, leaving him now in the unaccustomed position of damage control. And not just for himself but for the president of the United States, who went on record long before Rove's name entered the game that he would dismiss anyone in his administration involved in identifying Plame.
Bush fire Rove? Obi Wan Kenobi fire Yoda?
This is all mildly amusing out here in the hinterlands — and in the shadow of old Olympus High — because the local press knows full well that getting an audience with Karl Rove is about as easy as getting face time with Big Foot.
Despite his Utah background — Rove lived here for six years, from 1965 to 1971; after graduating from Olympus he spent two years at the University of Utah — Rove has routinely denied requests for interviews from a variety of reporters at the Deseret Morning News. When fellow columnist Doug Robinson recently suggested an in-depth profile on the famous but somewhat mysterious ex-Utahn, he remembers the editors chortling. "They looked at me like I was proposing cold fusion," he recalls.
"It isn't that he (Rove) doesn't want to talk to reporters," says Deseret Morning News editor John Hughes, "it's just that he doesn't want to talk to us."
Meaning he prefers to talk to people with much bigger audiences.
In the case of Plame, Rove reportedly talked "off the record" to, among others, reporters from the Washington Post and Time Magazine and to Robert Novak, whose syndicated column appears in more than 300 publications.
All of this would mean nothing if not for the underlying subject matter of this whole convoluted, complicated caper, which can be summed up in four words and three initials: weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Exposing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative effectively cast aspersion on criticism from Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, that the Bush administration, prior to invading Iraq, may not have built a sufficient case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed or was building WMD.
The tactic, by Rove and other Bush loyalists, was to smear the messenger instead of listen to what he was saying — which, not incidentally, happened to be right.
Whether Rove can weather the ethical storm that has erupted remains to be seen. But of the two Olympus grads in the headlines this month, I'd say it's the bike rider David Zabriskie who has a much better chance for full recovery.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.