[10] On September 11, 1981, Rove's mother died by suicide north of Reno, Nevada, shortly after she decided to divorce her third and final husband, to whom she had been unhappily married for only three months.

In a 2002 Deseret News interview, Rove explained, "I was the Olympus High chairman for (former U.S. Sen.) 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.

"[15] In June 1971, after the end of the semester, Rove dropped out of the University of Utah to take a paid position as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee.

[18] In July 1999 he told The Washington Post that he did not have a degree because "I lack at this point one math class, which I can take by exam, and my foreign language requirement.

A CBS report on the organization of the Nixon campaign from June 1972 includes an interview with a young Rove working for the College Republican National Committee.

He left the job to spend five months, without pay, campaigning full-time for the position of National Chairman during the time he attended George Mason University.

While resolution was pending, Dolan went (anonymously) to The Washington Post with recordings of several training seminars for young Republicans where a co-presenter of Rove's, Bernie Robinson, cautioned against doing the same thing he had done: rooting through opponents' garbage cans.

[21] On August 10, 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Post broke the story in an article titled "GOP Party Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks".

As part of the investigation, Atwater signed an affidavit, dated August 13, 1973, stating that he had heard a "20 minute anecdote similar to the one described in The Washington Post" in July 1972, but that "it was a funny story during a coffee break".

[23] Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, has been quoted as saying "based on my review of the files, it appears the Watergate prosecutors were interested in Rove's activities in 1972, but because they had bigger fish to fry they did not aggressively investigate him.

In November 1973, he asked Rove to take a set of car keys to his son George W. Bush, who was visiting home during a break from Harvard Business School.

[29] Critics, including other Republican operatives, suspected Rove had bugged his own office to garner sympathy votes in the close governor's race.

In 1989, Rove encouraged George W. Bush to run for Texas governor, brought in experts to tutor him on policy, and introduced him to local reporters.

[32] In 1991, United States Attorney General Dick Thornburgh resigned to run for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, one made vacant by John Heinz's death in a helicopter crash.

It ended when a federal appeals court judge ruled that disputed absentee ballots could not be counted, and ordered the Alabama Secretary of State to certify the Republican candidate for Chief Justice, Perry Hooper, as the winner.

Rove has been accused of using the push poll technique to call voters to ask such things as whether people would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians".

Rove says his work for the Bush campaign included direct mail, voter contact, phone banks, computer services, and travel expenses.

[44] In April 2006, Rove was reassigned from his policy development role to one focusing on strategic and tactical planning in anticipation of the November 2006 congressional elections.

WHIG was charged with developing a strategy "for publicizing the White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.".

[47] Members of WHIG included Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio, and communication strategists Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, and James R. Wilkinson.

Quoting one unnamed WHIG member, The Washington Post explained that the task force's mission was to "educate the public" about the threat posed by Saddam and (in the reporters' words) "[to] set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad".

Rove's "strategic communications" task force within WHIG helped write and coordinate speeches by senior Bush administration officials, emphasizing Iraq's purported nuclear threat.

[49] The White House Iraq Group was "little known" until a subpoena for its notes, email, and attendance records was issued by CIA leak investigator Patrick Fitzgerald in January 2004.

[63][64] On October 24, 2006, two weeks before the congressional election, in an interview with National Public Radio's Robert Siegel, Rove insisted that his insider polling data forecast Republican retention of both houses.

Rove argued that, without corruption and complacency, the Democrats would have gained around a dozen seats and Republicans could have kept narrow control of the House regardless of Bush's troubles and the war.

[54] Due to investigations into White House staffers' e-mail communication related to the controversy over the dismissal of United States attorneys, it was discovered that many White House staff members, including Rove, had exchanged documents using Republican National Committee e‑mail servers such as gwb43.com[70] and georgewbush.com[71] or personal e‑mail accounts with third party providers such as BlackBerry;[72] evasion of U.S. government record-keeping was determined to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

[74][75] On February 23, 2009, Rove was required by congressional subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee concerning his knowledge of the controversy over the dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys, and the alleged political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, but did not appear on that date.

[80] The controversial book inspired a grassroots rock and roll compilation of a similar name, Courage and Consequence,[81] that was released a week before the memoir.

[87] In 2010, with former RNC chair Ed Gillespie, Rove helped found American Crossroads, a Republican 527 organization raising money for the 2012 election effort.

[94] On November 6, 2012, Rove protested Fox News' call of the 2012 presidential election for Obama, prompting host Megyn Kelly to ask him, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?