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WASHINGTON - Karen Hughes has always been the personification of the good-news Bush White House, the presidential adviser who tried to turn every loss into political gold. In Hughes' world, Bush's shellacking by Sen. John McCain in the New Hampshire primary in 2000 showed his graciousness in defeat.
By the time he reached the White House, the happy staff never disagreed.
What is surprising, then, is that Hughes, in a new memoir and in an interview on Tuesday in Midtown Manhattan, made clear things were not quite so smooth.
The president, her adored boss, could be impatient and short tempered. She and Karl Rove, the president's powerful political adviser, had arguments. And she and the White House were slow to react to Democratic accusations that the president shirked some of his National Guard duty in the 1970s.
"There are comments that there's not enough disagreement in the White House," Hughes said. "Well, there's plenty of argument. There are plenty of disagreements."
As an example, Hughes cited a dispute she had with Rove in 2002 over how the president should sign a bitterly fought bill to overhaul campaign finances. As Hughes recounts in her book, Ten Minutes From Normal, she wanted a public signing that would let Bush embrace a sponsor of the bill, McCain, and "not allow the pettiness that had dominated the debate on Capitol Hill to spill onto him."
Rove hated the bill, a ban on large "soft-money" donations to the parties, and he argued signing it publicly "would be the biggest mistake we ever made," Hughes wrote. Bush sided with Rove and signed the bill without ceremony. He then immediately undermined its intent by leaving for what his critics said was a strikingly cynical fundraising trip that collected $4-million for Republicans in two days.
Hughes continues to say she was right, at least "in terms of public perception."
Of course, no one should confuse Ten Minutes with another White House memoir, Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke, who says Bush ignored dire warnings about terrorism before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Hughes' book, which hits bookstores in a blaze of publicity this week, is an antidote for a White House that has been reeling from Clarke's accusations.
Bush, Hughes writes, "was such a decent and thoughtful person, a person I would trust to make a decision for my own son or husband if I couldn't, because I knew he would listen, think it through and do the right thing."
On the other hand, he was the boss. When he arrived in Washington from Texas as president-elect, Hughes accompanied him on the Air Force plane with her cat and golden retriever, who traveled in the passenger cabin because there was no pressurized hold.
"I couldn't help but think what the Air Force crew must be thinking," Hughes wrote. "These Texans, bringing along everything but the chickens and goats."
On landing, Bush, who hates to wait, had to idle in his limousine while Hughes was taking her pets off the plane.
"Thanks for holding up the whole motorcade,' the president said, not really teasing," Hughes wrote.
At another point in the campaign in 2000, when she was 20 minutes late from a meeting in New York with the president of CBS News, Bush's only reaction, Hughes wrote, was, "Did you have fun shopping?"
Since Bush became president, Hughes said, he has been intimately involved in the daily "message," or chief talking points, out of the White House. "People say that "well, it's the message shop or Karen,"' Hughes said. "It's really the president who understands the importance of a focused message."
Hughes, 47, will spend the next six weeks on a 16-city book tour, in effect a campaign trip for her boss, talking about her story as the presidential aide who left the White House to spend more time with her family, then made it work as the woman who advised the president from her home in Austin.
She will begin traveling with Bush for his re-election effort in mid August, when she will get a salary from his campaign of $15,000 a month.
But her base will be in Texas, not Washington, a city she never liked. And even though there is a big book party for her in the capital on Thursday night, she understands the nature of political fame in a crowded room two blocks from the White House. "When people came up to me in Washington to talk to me, they would by and large talk to me, and ignore my husband," Hughes said.