Slater, Wayne

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Slater, Wayne

PERSONAL: Education: West Virginia University, B.A.; Ohio University, master’s degree.

ADDRESSES: Home— Austin, TX. Office— Dallas Morning News, 606 Young St., Dallas, TX 75202.

CAREER: Journalist. Parkersburg Sentinel, Parkersburg, WV, reporter; Associated Press, West Virginia, Kansas, Illinois, Colorado, reporter;Dallas Morning News, Austin, TX, bureau chief for fifteen years, currently senior political writer and reporter; University of Texas at Austin, adjunct professor of public affairs, 2006.

WRITINGS

(With James Moore) Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, Wiley (New York, NY), 2003.

(With James Moore) The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2006.

(With James Moore) Rove Exposed: How Bush’s Brain Fooled America, Wiley (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to newspapers, including the Dallas Morning Herald.

SIDELIGHTS: Wayne Slater is a senior political writer and reporter for the Dallas Morning News, where he also served for fifteen years as the Austin bureau chief. Slater is known for his sharp commentary on current U.S. politics, and has written several books that take a close look at the administration of George W. Bush and the involvement of Bush’s advisor Karl Rove in Bush’s achievements and political agenda. Slater has followed Bush’s career from its earliest days, and spoken with the president about how his religious faith has influenced his conservative political outlook. In an interview posted on the PBS Web site, Slater explained: “Bush believes very much in the core ideas of Christianity—the belief that you must believe in Jesus in order to go to heaven, that there is no other way to salvation.... That’s a fundamental Christian belief, and he embraces it. He believes in the absolute nature of God. Fundamentally, he believes in the existence of evil, not as an abstract idea, a philosophy, but as something that’s real and tangible. It’s something we’ve seen really most recently when he talks about the terrorists.” In Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, Slater and coauthor James Moore discuss how political strategist Rove is credited with assisting Bush in his various campaigns and helping to turn him into a candidate capable of winning elections. Rove also helped to orchestrate an attack on the Democratic Party that made Bush look the better choice because his opposition appeared weak and ineffectual in comparison. Gerald F. Kreyche, in a review for USA Today, remarked: “This book provides a hearty welcome to realpolitik.”

In The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power, Slater provides a follow up to his earlier book on Karl Rove and his relationship to George W. Bush in which he and coauthor James Moore suggest that Rove carefully targeted the religious right in his attempt to make Bush a marketable candidate, and in the process Rove professed beliefs that were not in actuality his own. Vanessa Bush, in a review for Booklist, called The Architect a “probing look at the personality and political strategizing of Karl Rove,” and concluded that the result was “riveting investigative journalism.” A contributor for Publishers Weekly called the book “a compulsive page-turner that’s bound to be divisive.”