Portrait of a bastard as a young man

Karl Rove shows up in the Nixon archives.

Tucked away inside 78,000 pages of documents from the Nixon administration, released by the National Archives earlier this week, is a little gem: a strategy memorandum from the man who would go on to become the architect of President Bush’s rise to political power.

Mr. Rove, then a 22-year-old aide on Capitol Hill, was planning a run to become chairman of the College Republicans, a position he would ultimately win twice. So he wrote to Anne Armstrong, then counselor to Nixon. Mrs. Armstrong had been co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, and therefore Mr. Rove’s ultimate boss the previous year when he was executive director of the college group.

In the memorandum, he thanked her for “taking time out of your busy schedule” to talk with him, and offered up his musings — in the form of a nine-page typed outline — on how to strengthen the Republican Party by motivating students.

“Appreciate anything you might be able to do for me,” he wrote, on simple stationery with only his name, Karl C. Rove, at the top. “I have taken the liberty of enclosing the rough outline of my platform. Of special interest is the ‘New Federalism Advocates’ mentioned in the campaign section.”

The document, intended to develop an election program for the 1974 midterm campaigns, suggests that even then, Mr. Rove had a keen eye for organization, and a propensity for slicing and dicing the electorate, the kind of microtargeting that has since become a hallmark of his campaigns.

In his memorandum, Mr. Rove offered suggestions, from having college Republican clubs show “nonpolitical films for fund-raising (e.g. John Wayne flicks, ‘Reefer Madness’)” to developing a “Student Guide to Lobbying” with a “forward by Bush/Nixon.” That, of course, would be the elder George Bush, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, through whom Mr. Rove first met the current occupant of the White House.

Mr. Rove’s memorandum also proposes building a group of “New Federalism Advocates,” modeled on “Friends of Nixon,” a Nixon campaign committee. The group would have representatives from each state who, Mr. Rove suggested, could meet in Washington for “extensive briefings” with top administration officials like John D. Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman.

“That didn’t work out,” Mr. Rove said in a brief telephone interview Friday. (Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman resigned in April 1973 amid the Watergate scandal.)

As to the reference to “Reefer Madness,” a torrid antimarijuana propaganda film later revived as a countercultural favorite, the 56-year-old Mr. Rove pleaded forgetfulness. “God, this is 1973!” he said. “You work the math. I don’t remember it all.”

The letter is a walk back in time, and a reminder that in Washington, where relationships often span the decades, the seeds of power are planted early.

Mrs. Armstrong went on to become an ambassador to Britain, and then returned to Texas, where she owns a ranch — the very same ranch where Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter last year. Mr. Rove said he went hunting there every year.

Mr. Rove said he long ago lost his only copy of the campaign platform. But he said he was not surprised that the document had turned up in the Nixon files.

“When you send something to a White House person,” he said, ‘’it tends to be collected and remain.”

Except for Rove's RNC emails.