Politics is a field with a lot of former practitioners: there is a high failure rate, and success comes tinged with a gnawing nervousness that makes it not worthwhile for everybody. Robert Edgeworth, a Virgil scholar who teaches at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, is in politics purely avocationally these days. Edgeworth is practically a museum-worthy example of what is connoted by the word “professorial”: at fifty-six, he has white hair and parchment skin, he wears tweed, and he speaks with great precision. It’s hard to imagine him as a budding politico, but, then, his most active period ended nearly thirty years ago, when he placed himself in the onrushing path of Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser. This has never been a smart thing to do, but Edgeworth, as one of the first of many to find that out, had the excuse of not having been as well informed on the subject as people in Washington are now.

The story of Edgeworth and Rove is a well-burnished legend within a very small circle—well burnished enough that just saying “Lake of the Ozarks” is enough to evoke it. The circle is made up of people connected with College Republicans, a group tight enough (it became an independent organization in 1971) that all its significant figures at least know one another’s names. Theirs is a subculture that took form in the mid- to late sixties, at a time when what was officially going on in the United States was a great uprising of rebellious youth and a flowering of liberal politics. The College Republicans were young people who believed that the coming thing was a resurgence of the political right. They felt this so strongly, and loved politics so much, that they devoted a ruthless, all-consuming effort to gaining advantage in a small student organization that today seems a little eccentric. The history of College Republicans is like that of a left-wing group, full of coups and counter-coups and intrigue. And the most College Republican of all College Republicans was Karl Rove.

Rove had come out of nowhere—to be specific, Utah, from a nonpolitical and not very well-established family that he didn’t talk about much. As a seventeen-year-old, Rove made the leap beyond high-school politics by volunteering in a United States Senate campaign. In 1969, at the University of Utah, he signed up for the College Republicans, and showed enough promise that the organization dispatched him to Illinois the following year to work as a campus organizer in the unsuccessful United States Senate campaign of Ralph Tyler Smith, who had been appointed to the seat of the Senate’s Republican leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen, after Dirksen died. This amounted to hitting the big time, because Illinois was the most active College Republican state. In 1971, Rove became a protégé of Joe Abate, the College Republican chairman, who hired him as the organization’s national executive director, a position that paid very modestly.

Rove, who is fifty-two, has always appeared to be affable and extroverted—he has a foghorn voice and an innocent face, with pale-blue eyes, a tuft of flyaway blond hair, and light skin that flushes when he’s angry—while, at the same time, being very hard to know well. His few close friends knew that in the period preceding his roaring entry into the College Republican world he had been through a tough, even searing, time. His parents’ marriage had ended on his nineteenth birthday—Christmas Day, 1969—when his father walked out. Then, shortly afterward, Rove received a second and more unexpected blow. In Illinois, he had dinner with an aunt and uncle, and, during a discussion of his parents’ divorce negotiations, they casually mentioned that the man he thought of as his father actually wasn’t. “I literally, I think, dropped my soda,” Rove told me, in one of three long interviews we had in his office in the West Wing of the White House. In a family of five siblings, he and an older brother were the children of another man, whose connection to his mother had been kept secret, at her insistence, all the time he’d been growing up. Among his friends in College Republicans, the story, to the extent that it circulated, took the form that he had been adopted—which is somehow not quite as upsetting. One person remembers Rove saying to him, “Whose birthday is on Christmas Day? You have to be kidding! They didn’t know exactly when I was born, so they just took a guess.” But when I asked Rove about it he said the real story is that he was, as it were, half-adopted. I asked him if he’d ever found out who his real father is, and he said that he had, but didn’t meet him until many years later, when he was in his forties. He got in touch with the man, arranged to visit him, and was greeted with a chilly reception. Rove spoke of his adoptive father in a tone of fierce admiration, love, and loyalty, for, as he put it, “how selfless his love had been,” as shown by his willingness to play, persuasively, the part of a blood parent for two decades. The bond between Rove and his adoptive father became even more important, no doubt, after Rove’s mother committed suicide, in Reno, Nevada, in 1981.

Edgeworth was the head of College Republicans in the Midwest, and later the vice-chairman of the organization. Not long ago, he and I had lunch at a quiet restaurant in Baton Rouge. Edgeworth told me that he’d had it in mind that, in 1973, Joe Abate would step down, Edgeworth would become chairman of College Republicans for a two-year term, and Rove would become vice-chairman; then, in 1975, Edgeworth would step down and hand the chairmanship over to Rove. For Rove, as Edgeworth saw it, this would not only be gentlemanly; it would mean that if he was willing to invest two years in being patient he would be rewarded with a coronation as chairman. He wasn’t willing. A race for the chairmanship began, between Rove, Edgeworth, and Terry Dolan, who went on to found the National Conservative Political Action Committee. Of the three, Dolan was the most conservative and Rove the least. “If you asked a question like what to do about the United Nations,” Edgeworth told me, “Terry would say, ‘Withdraw immediately.’ I’d say, ‘Scale it down and pay less in dues.’ Karl would say, ‘Leave it alone, the voters won’t understand the issue.’ He put pragmatic considerations higher than us.”

A campaign for the College Republican chairmanship was a serious matter; Rove left his job as executive director in order to spend five months, without pay, campaigning full time. (Rove was consumed with College Republicans for so many years that he didn’t spend much time actually going to college; he never graduated.) Rove and his chief assistant, Lee Atwater, later another famous hardball-playing Republican strategist, drove across the South lining up delegate support. Meanwhile, Terry Dolan and Bob Edgeworth decided to form a ticket, with Edgeworth as chair and Dolan as vice-chair. So it became a two-man race: Edgeworth versus Rove.

The national convention was in June, in the mountain resort of Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. All through the late spring, Edgeworth and Dolan were hearing stories about the Rove forces staging credentials challenges at state and regional conventions, using some technical pretext. Shortly after the Midwest regional convention, for example, according to Edgeworth, the Rove forces, in order to justify the unseating of the Edgeworth delegates on procedural grounds, produced a version of the Midwestern College Republicans’ constitution which differed significantly from the constitution that the Edgeworth forces were using. The net result of all the challenges was that a number of states sent two competing delegates to Lake of the Ozarks, one pledged to Edgeworth, the other to Rove, each claiming to be legitimate. Then the meeting of the credentials committee, before the convention itself, turned into a donnybrook. Edgeworth told me that when the Southern regional chair of the College Republicans, who was officially uncommitted, cast his first pro-Edgeworth vote in one of the credentials disputes, a Rove person left the room for a minute. After he returned, another Rove person announced that a different person was actually the Southern regional chair, and proposed and passed a resolution to have Southern Regional Chair No. 1 thrown out. It went on like that until morning, with the person running Rove’s convention operations, John Zemaitis, an ostensibly above-the-fray Republican figure from Illinois, secreted in a room at a Holiday Inn in Jefferson City, thirty miles away. “It was so raw,” one venerable College Republican figure told me, shaking his head wonderingly at the memory. In the end, there were two votes, conducted by two convention chairs, and two winners—Rove and Edgeworth, each of whom delivered an acceptance speech. After the convention broke up, both Edgeworth and Rove appealed to the Republican National Committee, each contending that he was the new College Republican chairman.