Weapon of Mass Communication
If not for sixteen specious words about African uranium, George W. Bush's post-war P.R. would be humming along. Instead, the man responsible for coordinating the White House media effort, 32-year-old Dan Barlett, has spent the past few months in crisis mode. Can he get the message—and the messenger—back on track?
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IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAS a true wunderkind, whiz kid, or whatever you call a young person who manages to dazzle his older colleagues with abilities that seem well beyond his years, that person is, unambiguously, Daniel J. Bartlett. He is among the youngest people in the history of the White House to have Oval Office walk-in privileges. Though he denies any such ambition, many of his friends in the Bush administration have predicted he'll one day run for office. (The Washington Post speculated that he might run for Texas governor, for which, he says, he caught no end of teasing.) He has a relationship with Bush that has conspicuous father-son overtones. The age difference is right: 25 years. Bush has no son. Bartlett's father moved out when he was a child, and by his own description, Bartlett spent his formative years seeking out the company of older, self-sufficient, professionally competent role models.
This is not to say that Bush is soft on Bartlett. On the contrary, by all accounts, Bush is a taskmaster, a bottom-line, goal-driven guy who wants answers in meetings with no fuss or chatter. "He's fast and hard and direct, and he doesn't pull any punches," says veteran political operative Mary Matalin, who resigned last year as counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward writes that when Bartlett went to Bush to suggest new wording for his post-9/11 television speech, Bush barked, "What? No more changes!" Bush was also sharply critical of Bartlett for not making bigger news out of the president's decision to freeze the assets of terrorists. According to Bartlett, "He was very tough on me early and at different junctures in my career when I took on more responsibility." But Matalin says that Bartlett responded well. "He's so methodical and unflappable," she says. "He's complementary to the president."
Bartlett has actually been the Bushies' version of a wunderkind for a long time. It is only now, in the nearly sixteen months since he took over the reins of the communications office from Hughes, that the rest of the world has begun to pay attention. He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, and grew up in the North Texas town of Rockwall, about 25 miles northeast of Dallas. His parents divorced when he was in seventh grade, and his father left the area. He and his siblings—two brothers and a sister—were raised by their mother, who ran a school for gifted and talented minority children in the South Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff.
Rockwall, which has since become a bedroom community of Dallas, still had plenty of pigs, cows, chickens, and planted fields when Bartlett was growing up. "It was a city in transition," he said. "There were people commuting to Dallas, but I was attracted to and got involved with people who were farmers and ranchers." He took agricultural classes at school and became active in the Future Farmers of America. "The dirty secret of the ag classes was that they were not very rigorous," he said. "If you were in advanced ag, your first period was basically going off campus to take care of your animals." Bartlett purchased, raised, and sold three steers while he was in high school, ran a feedstore, and played varsity football and basketball at Rockwall High. He loved hunting, especially dove and quail hunting.
He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where, he said, "I was always good at doing enough to get by. I didn't excel much in academics and didn't become intellectually focused until late in college. I have always been the type who got on well with a lot of people and was kind of pleasant to be around." He did manage to figure out that he was more politically conservative than many of his classmates. "In my political science classes, just outrageous conclusions were being drawn from current events as well as history," he said. "They had a very pacifist view of foreign wars, and they were passionately against Reagan. It wasn't even so much my peers as it was the faculty. I remember sitting there scratching my head and thinking, 'You've got to be kidding me.'" Bartlett and two friends who likewise spoke their minds became known in one class as Public Enemies One, Two, and Three.
While he was still in school studying political science, Bartlett began to dabble in politics. He went to work in the Texas Senate for his local state senator, Democrat Ted Lyon, and in 1992 took a job with a little-known political consultant named Karl Rove at Rove's small direct-mail business in Austin. Bartlett had barely heard of Rove, but he immediately realized that this was no ordinary operative. "My first day on the job, thirty minutes after I got there, the guy next to me picked up the phone and said, 'The president of the United States is on the phone for Karl.' All of a sudden I was very interested in knowing who this guy was." In 1993, working for Rove and still taking courses at UT, Bartlett signed on to the fledgling campaign of an untested gubernatorial candidate named George W. Bush. The campaign, which was run out of Rove's office, had only two paid employees. Bartlett was 22.
He quickly made himself indispensable. "He came up on the Bush radar early," says his boss at the time, Vance McMahan, Bush's main policy guru. "The campaign was such a lean organization, and he had direct access to the candidate. It was apparent right away that he thrives on being at the center of the action. If the team is down by one point with three seconds to go, he wants the ball."
Bartlett's wish was fulfilled when, in September 1994, he was charged with managing the press event at which Bush, hunting doves, accidentally and illegally shot a protected bird called a killdeer. A gleeful Capitol press corps jumped all over the story, and Bartlett had his first taste of crisis communications. "I saw Karen Hughes's talents for the first time," he said. "She told Bush, 'You need to personally get on the phone with reporters.'" Bush did and made light of what had happened. "He came up with some good quips. He said, 'I'm glad I wasn't deer hunting; I might have shot a cow.' It was pivotal in East Texas—I mean, growing up there and knowing how people react to things. I think it humanized him." Says Hughes: "I remember Governor Bush telling Dan to go find a justice of the peace and pay the fine [for killing the bird]. We left Dan to take care of that. There were a lot of times when we left Dan to take care of things." After Bush's victory, Bartlett was given what for a 24-year-old was a position of great responsibility in the governor's office: deputy director of policy. "It was clear from the get-go that this was a person of enormous talent," says Rove. "We identified him very early, and he was sort of fought over after that."
Friends and colleagues say they noticed back then that Bush and Bartlett had a great deal in common. They were both sports nuts ("UT football-obsessed" is how one friend describes Bartlett); they both liked to hunt; they both played golf (and still do together). And people who know them well say that Bartlett's personality is similar to Bush's. "Of all the people in the presidential universe, he is the one most like the president in demeanor, character, and wit," says Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon, a managing director at the Austin public relations consulting firm Public Strategies. "They both have a sort of towel-snapping, jock sense of humor." Bush once bet Bartlett $100 that he could beat him in a ten-kilometer race. Bartlett trained hard, won, and collected the $100.
Then there was the nickname. "Around the office we called him the Vice, as in vice governor," says McMahan. "It was a lighthearted acknowledgment that his style was very similar to the governor's." Indeed, they both fracture syntax. They use common expressions, such as "like I said." They both mispronounce the word "nuclear" as "nu-kyuh-lar." And they share a fondness, apparently, for Yule-related pranks. As a junior at Yale, Bush and some frat brothers were caught stealing a Christmas wreath from a hotel. As a freshman at UT, Bartlett and some frat brothers were caught trying to steal Christmas trees.
Former associates say that Bartlett came into his own during Bush's 1998 reelection bid and 2000 presidential race, when he was made the keeper of the governor's personal background files. This meant that, to prepare for the inevitable press scrutiny, Bartlett had to do his own investigative reporting into sensitive areas of Bush's background: his National Guard service, his career in the oil patch and with the Texas Rangers, and his youthful high jinks. He met and talked to almost all of Bush's family and old friends, and he eventually knew everything about him, including the highly secret details of his 1976 arrest for drunk driving.
That's why it was Bartlett, principally, who drew the rapid-response duty when news of the DUI broke during the last week of the presidential campaign. "I could literally feel the blood draining from my head," he says of the moment he learned that a reporter had gotten onto the story. "I said to myself, 'No! This is not happening!' I remember going into a room where [campaign chairman and now Commerce Secretary] Don Evans was talking to Karl. I closed the door and told them, and there was just silence. Then I called Karen and the governor, who were traveling. I had never seen Karen speechless before." Bartlett got on the phone with the press; Hughes held a press conference.
By that point, he and Hughes had developed a close working relationship. "When Karen was on the road and he was in [Austin], it got hard to tell where one started and the other stopped," says Rove. No one was surprised when, after the election, Hughes asked Bartlett to be her deputy. He had successfully incubated with both Rove and Hughes, which made him exceedingly rare among the Bush loyalists. In April 2003, when Hughes announced she would be quitting, he got her job.
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