Valued Bush Confidant to Leave White House

WASHINGTON —  Karen Hughes, the longtime advisor to President Bush who became the most influential woman ever to work on a White House staff, said Tuesday that she plans to resign this summer and return to Texas with her “homesick” family.

Her departure, the first significant change in the White House staff since Bush’s inauguration 15 months ago, will deprive the president of his closest political confidant and sounding board and most trusted wordsmith.

Hughes, 45, holds the title of counselor to the president and manages the White House press and public relations offices. But her roles as an all-purpose presidential advisor and relentless enforcer of Bush’s wishes has made her one of the administration’s most powerful figures.

“I don’t think it can be replaced,” a senior White House official said of the Bush-Hughes relationship. “I think new structures will have to be put in place.”

Hughes said she decided to leave because “I thought it was important for my family to live in Texas.” Associates said her husband, Jerry, a lawyer, and her son, Robert, 15, a high school freshman, wanted to return to Austin.

Hughes and Bush said she would continue to advise the president after she moves, though not as a full-time member of his staff.

“She may be changing addresses, but she’s not leaving my inner circle,” Bush said.

But other aides said her departure would inevitably alter the workings of the Bush White House, which has been a notably disciplined operation, with fewer leaks and internal rivalries than most of its predecessors--in part because of Hughes’ ceaseless insistence on discretion.

“You can’t take someone that important out of the day-to-day operation and not have it change,” said a former Bush aide.

Move May Cause Drop in Staff Efficiency

Hughes’ departure might make the Bush staff less efficient and sure-footed, at least temporarily, other associates said.

“She is in some ways his alter ego,” a White House official said. “He relies on her a lot and trusts her a lot, and she has an uncanny knack of knowing what he’ll like.”

“They might lose a step for a while . . . because they’ll have to run more questions past the president,” a former aide said.

But current and former aides said they do not expect the White House staff to become looser and less disciplined after she leaves.

“That part comes from the president,” said one. “She doesn’t need to be there for it to be enforced. It’s the culture.”

As if to prove the point, the aides and former aides refused to be quoted by name, except when offering praise for Hughes.

Hughes’ departure will leave Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor, as the sole remaining member of his innermost circle of aides--those who served him during his years as governor of Texas and his presidential campaign--at the top of the White House staff.

But a former campaign aide noted that communications director Dan Bartlett--Hughes’ apparent successor in responsibilities if not in title--worked for Bush in Austin even before Hughes joined the staff in 1994. “Don’t underestimate Dan,” he said.

When Hughes took up residence 15 months ago in a corner office on the second floor of the West Wing, she dismissed suggestions that her gender might influence policy.

Despite occasional indications that her Republicanism might be a shade less conservative than Bush’s, Hughes saw her role not as changing the president’s views but as helping him articulate them in a way that would appeal to voters in the political center.

Still, it is now clear that the White House will soon lose its most powerful and ardent champion of women and working mothers.

It was Hughes who wrote into Bush’s address to the nation nine days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks a line urging parents to “live your lives and hug your children.”

Trip to Austin Leads to Decision

As one of several senior White House staffers who are mothers of children still at home, Hughes made it a point to leave work by 5:30 p.m. at least once a week to spend time with her son, often at his baseball games.

Hughes said her family’s longing to be back in Texas crystallized while she was in Austin on the first weekend in April, watching a close friend’s son play soccer.

“I realized that I was missing seeing my friend’s children grow up and that my son, likewise, was missing the opportunity to go to his friends’ homes and be in touch with his friends’ parents,” she said.

Her son, Robert, attended Washington’s exclusive St. Albans School, whose alumni include many children of political figures, but he never felt comfortable there, associates said.

Hughes said she made her decision now because she faced a May 1 deadline to inform St. Albans whether Robert would be returning.

“My son is going into his final three years of high school . . . and we wanted him to have his roots in Texas,” she said.

During much of the 2000 presidential campaign, Robert joined his mother on her travels with Bush and was home-schooled aboard the campaign plane.

Prominent figures in Washington often cite family concerns as their reason for leaving office, even when facts point elsewhere.

But Hughes has been open for months about her family’s discontent at living in Washington, and no one doubted her explanation Tuesday.

“I’ve always prided myself that this is a family-friendly White House, and I think this is a family-friendly decision,” she said. “My commute is going to be a little longer, but you’ll still be seeing me around frequently.” She said she would also stay in touch with the president by telephone.

Hughes has often said that she brought Bush the perspectives of “normal people,” meaning people beyond Washington’s inbred professional political community.

In her Northwest Washington neighborhood, near the Potomac River, Hughes did much of her own grocery shopping and often walked the family dog, stopping to chat with friends and neighbors--and strangers who recognized her.

“The three big things in her life are family, faith and the president,” said Austin-based political strategist Mark McKinnon, who worked for the Bush campaign. “But her ultimate responsibility was her family.”

Hughes was born in Paris, the daughter of an Army major general who was the last U.S. governor of the Panama Canal Zone. Hughes, a self-described “Army brat,” had moved seven times by the time she enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

After college, Hughes worked as a reporter for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth. She left journalism in 1984 to work on the reelection campaign of then-President Reagan and then-Vice President George Bush, the current president’s father. After a stint as executive director of the Texas Republican Party, she went to work for George W. Bush in his first campaign for governor in 1994, “back when . . . the motorcade was one car and he was sometimes driving it,” she recalled Bush joking.

As Bush was weighing a 2000 White House bid, he told her: “I’m not doing this without you.” Hughes later downplayed that comment, saying Bush was only pressuring her.

Bush, who has a penchant for assigning nicknames, called her the High Prophet, a play on her maiden name, Parfitt.

But journalists who covered Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign had a different nickname for her: Nurse Ratched, after the hard-line head nurse in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Hughes was quick to confront journalists who, in her view, had not given Bush a fair shake, and she spared no words in defending her candidate.

“Her entire and complete loyalty is to the president,” said chief presidential speech writer Michael Gerson.

As he ran for president, Bush entrusted Hughes with writing his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep.” Shortly after moving into the White House, Hughes remarked in an interview: “I don’t know that I have a voice different from his anymore.”

But she also felt comfortable telling Bush when she thought he was wrong. At the public announcement of her appointment to the White House staff, Hughes told Bush: “I promise I will always give you my unvarnished opinion.”

Bush grinned and shot back: “No doubt about that.”

Announcement Catches Some by Surprise

Hughes was part of a triumvirate of longtime Bush confidants in Texas who came with him to Washington. Besides Rove, the third is Joe Allbaugh, now head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In past administrations, women also have held senior White House jobs, including two who served at different times as Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff: Evelyn Lieberman and Maria Echaveste. And in the current White House, Bush’s national security advisor is Condoleezza Rice.

But no other female staffer has enjoyed the degree of influence that Hughes wields.

Some White House aides were surprised by Hughes’ announcement.

But many echoed the words of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who told reporters, “It came as a surprise to me. But then when I started thinking about how some of the things I’m privy to, the things I know about Karen and the closeness of her family and the importance of her family in Texas, it wasn’t a surprise for long.”

Bush hailed Hughes’ decision.

“She has put her family ahead of her service to my government. And I am extremely grateful for that approach and that priority,” he told reporters.

“I know that he will miss her,” Gerson said of the president. “Karen often is, and will continue to be, the last person the president talks to when he makes important decisions. She’ll continue to be involved. But there is going to be a hole there.”

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Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.