Only if the president himself had resigned would the headlines have been bigger. White House aide Karl Rove's announcement that he was leaving at the end of August was covered live, including the tears caught in the throat, the presidential hug at the end.

As the tributes piled up during the day, I felt bad about having once called Rove a "thug," a word I've not used before or since. Was it time to take it back?

When I resorted to name-calling, Rove had put my former colleague, Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, through hell. Rove was Cooper's anonymous source for the smear aimed at undermining former Ambassador Joe Wilson, painting Wilson as being sent on a junket arranged by his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency.

When Wilson returned to say that Saddam Hussein hadn't tried to buy yellowcake there, the "anonymous sources" went gunning for him. In the process, they outed a CIA agent, which in some circumstances is a crime and in all circumstances is wrong.

It would have been hard for Rove to come forward once President George W. Bush had said he would take "appropriate action" once he "got to the bottom" of who the leaker was. But it would have been the honorable thing to do given that a reporter's freedom was at stake.

Rove was safe because he knew Cooper would honor his promise of confidentiality. It was two years after the ordeal began and moments before Cooper was about to be jailed for refusing to testify that Rove agreed to waive the promise.

"Thug" didn't enter into anyone's assessment this week. As the resignation was being treated like the retirement of a statesman, Jay Rosen, former head of New York University's School of Journalism, suggested that Rove had been inducted into Washington's "cult of savviness."

Such an anointment elevates winning above all, and eschews being "good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere" in favor of being "perceptive, ironic, with it, and unsentimental."

It also doesn't hurt that Rove was one of the only White House officials to give out the colorful detail, like what the president had for dinner or how fast he went on his mountain bike, just the sort of nuggets that make a reporter look good to his editor.

Rove has more to answer for than forcing a reporter to explain to his son why the newspaper said he was going to jail. From sworn testimony, we know Rove was involved in the firing of nine federal prosecutors, all loyal Republicans who failed to be partisan enough for Rove's taste.

From Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, we know that Justice Department officials went to the White House for political briefings, some of them led by Rove.

From the chief of the General Services Administration, Lurita Alexis Doan, we know that Rove's deputy, Scott Jennings, talked to Doan and 40 regional administrators on the 2006 elections, answering questions on how to "help" candidates by "opening federal facilities around the country."

In his new life in Texas, where he intends to spend "more time with his family," Rove is likely to keep stonewalling Congress about his actions.

With a disdain for government in general and a royal attitude toward the legislative branch in particular, Rove is withholding everything on a shaky claim of executive privilege. Any e-mails that haven't mysteriously — and helpfully — vanished are none of the Senate's business.

The end result of all this activity isn't the major political realignment Rove predicted, but a Republican Party that is weaker than when he helped Bush win in 2000.

Rove leaves office in August with the country mired in a war that shows no prospect of turning Iraq into a viable political state. He so bungled immigration reform that it may be dead for a decade.

In the process, the "boy genius," as Bush called him, contributed to a military so stretched that generals now talk about a draft and a treasury so depleted that bridges collapse with no money to fix them.

Rove wasn't even that much of a winner on the national level. The exception was the midterm elections of 2002, which may have been attributable to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, perhaps even the vote in Florida where his father was victorious in 1988 and his brother, Jeb, was governor. The victory was salvaged by Bush-family consigliere James Baker and a partisan vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The latest midterms were a debacle partly because Rove didn't pressure congressmen tainted by the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal to resign, demand cuts in pork-barrel spending, or tend to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

The measure of a man isn't just what he does when everyone is looking, although it's amazing what Rove did with the lights on — everything from accusing his critics of emboldening the enemy and harming the troops to unleashing rumors that Sen. John McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his black love child. What really reveals a man is what he does when he thinks he can't be caught. That's what got me to name-calling.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rove said he wasn't timing his departure "based on whether it pleases the mob." If that makes me a mobster, maybe we're even.

Margaret Carlson, a former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist.