Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

But Rove had a hard time seeing Bartlett as a peer, not the kid he had hired right out of college, and the younger man resented what he saw as the patronizing attitude. Eventually, Bartlett stopped returning Rove’s calls, infuriating the older man, and the two were barely speaking outside of meetings. A no-better-friend, no-worse-enemy kind of figure, Rove could be funny, charming, and fiercely loyal to his colleagues, but some privately thought the college dropout had an inferiority complex that sometimes manifested itself in condescension. When someone was on his bad side, he did not hide it. His feud with Bartlett spilled over to Wallace, whom he seemed to resent for siding with Bartlett. At one point, he berated her brutally, a “big screaming match,” as one colleague termed it, that echoed around the West Wing. “Karl kicks the shit out of me because he is too scared to kick the shit out of Dan or he’s afraid he would push back,” Wallace complained to Andy Card over lunch in the White House mess one day. Card dunked his grilled cheese sandwich in his tomato soup. “I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “He doesn’t listen to me.”