WASHINGTON — During his first four years at the White House, longtime Bush aide Dan Bartlett majored

in crisis communication with a minor in damage control.

For the next four years, Bartlett, recently elevated from communications director to counselor to the president, hopes to "be able to look around the corner a little bit more."

His new role vaults him to the top level of presidential advisers and gives him a bigger role in formulating and implementing policy.

Can anyone at the top level of an administration, especially one navigating through a thorny war, ever

escape the crisis du jour?

"We'll see," Bartlett said, who, as a battle-tested political veteran at age 33, understands the difference between textbook politics and how that world really works.

In the West Wing office where he now holds the title formerly held by Karen Hughes, Bartlett said the

best way to learn about controlling damage is to encounter it. And the best way to learn about crisis

communication is to live through one.

Lesson One came about 11 years ago in the parking lot of a Houston-area motel.

"Bartlett!" he remembers hearing then gubernatorial candidate George W. Bush scream at him. "Did I shoot the wrong bird? Did I shoot the wrong bird?"

Yes, he did. In a photo-op gone bad in front of reporters and TV cameras Bush shot a protected bird

instead of a dove. Young Dan had the dubious distinction of being the event planner.

"That was my first kind of introduction to crisis communication," Bartlett said.

Bush recalled the event in his book, "A Charge to Keep."

"I sent Dan Bartlett, a young staff member who had helped organize the trip, to find a local justice of

the peace, determine the proper fine for shooting the wrong bird and pay in full, yesterday if possible,"

Bush wrote.

Bartlett also helped Bush work on the combination of contriteness and humor he used to try to make the best of the mistake. And he relied on some inside information to keep panic at bay.

Bartlett knew that on that same day, then-Gov. Ann Richards also was engaging in a photo-op dove hunt.

She was doing it on land owned by Texas state Sen. Ted Lyon. Bartlett, having worked for Lyon and hunted on that land, knew there was little chance she would shoot any birds that day.

She didn't, opting instead to fire into the air for the cameras.

The Bush side figured their guy, at worst, came out in a draw. At least he shot at some birds.

"Particularly in East Texas," Bartlett said about a crucial region in the 1994 election, "there are a lot

of people who identified with Bush in the sense that we make mistakes, and he lived up to his mistake."

"It was a lesson in the sense that sometimes you can take an unfortunate event or something you can't

predict and turn it into an advantage," he said.

At a White House that frequently has had to respond to the unexpected, Bartlett says the dove-hunt lesson—and the value of information—has come in handy.

"Through luck and I don't know what I started becoming the keeper of information on his business career, his Guard career, all the aspects of his personal life," Bartlett said, labeling himself as "the repository" of that information.

Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary, said Bartlett's "institutional knowledge of the president is deep."

Bartlett has been the go-to guy every time Bush's National Guard career comes under fire. It was

Bartlett who was interviewed by CBS' John Roberts as the network prepared its now-famous story based on now-questioned documents indicating Bush did not fulfill his Guard obligations and benefited from

preferential treatment.

CBS had noted that Bartlett did not question the authenticity of the documents. Bartlett said there was

no way he could have in the brief time he was given to examine them prior to the interview.

He classifies any attempt to spin his non-questioning of the documents as authentication as "absolutely absurd."

Now, with Bush's final campaign behind him, Bartlett is hoping he's done his last damage control on the Guard issue.

"I can't tell you how many times I've said, 'Well we are finally over that issue,'" he said.

Small-town boy

Bartlett is not without first-hand knowledge of what it's like to be president. He was president of the Future Farmers of America at Rockwall High School, where he said he was a solid middle-of-the-pack student.

"Smallest county in Texas," Bartlett said of Rockwall, offering a boast not often heard in the state where the only thing better than big is bigger.

The son of a salesman and a teacher who divorced when he was in seventh grade, Bartlett played high

school basketball and showed steer in the livestock shows in Rockwall, just east of Dallas.

As a political science student at the University of Texas, his friendship with Lyon's nephew led to a

Capitol internship. Another friendship led to a gig at Karl Rove and Associates, the Austin firm run by Bush's top political hand.

"I didn't even know who Karl Rove was when I went over there for the interview," Bartlett said, recalling that George H.W. Bush happened to call Rove during the 1991 interview. "I said, 'Oh my God, this guy must be pretty important.'"

He got the political bug and nurtured it by working as a policy researcher on Bush's 1994 gubernatorial race, one of the campaign's first employees.

"I thought it would be a fun campaign to work on but it was just kind of an experience to kind of give

me time to figure out what I'm going to do with my life," Bartlett said.

Since then, George W. Bush is what Bartlett has been doing with his life, though Bartlett seems to

have found time for R and R during the most hectic times. He married wife Allyson during the 2000

presidential campaign they had twin boys during last year's campaign.

And like many Bush aides, he has steadily risen through the ranks of advisers for a man known to value loyalty.

Communicating crises

In an administration known to covet control of information, Bartlett gets points in some quarters for

sharing information.

"He has been a force for openness, bringing the case out," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson

University political scientist who shows up at the White House to study presidential communications. "One

of the problems in this administration is they have taken too long a time. He has been one of the forces

for handling things in an open and complete manner."

Bartlett scores points for Bush when he speaks on the president's behalf, according to Kumar.

"I remember an appearance he had and (White House Chief of Staff) Andy Card on the same day on different Sunday morning programs. And Bartlett was so much better than Andy that I couldn't get over it," she said. "He was car more articulate and had a sense of how to respond to the second level of questions."

Bartlett said crisis response has been a team effort, sometimes with heavy input from the top. He

recalled Bush summoning him and Hughes to the White House shortly after 9/11.

"He said, 'This war is going to be unconventional, which is going to put pressure on me to educate the

public about it and explain it over and over and over.' He started the meeting by saying, 'Now it's time for me to tell you how to do your job.'"

"The biggest example was ... he pulled Karen (Hughes) out of church and it was a Sunday when it was the first executive order on terrorist financing and we were just going to have him sign the executive order and issue a statement."

"He blew up on Sunday afternoon, I'll never forget it, and says, 'Y'all don't get it. This is the first bullet being shot in the war on terror,'" Bartlett said.

They then got it. The event was bumped up to a Rose Garden announcement.

The lesson, he said, helped them navigate other war-related crises, including the Abu Ghraib prison

scandal.

"The principles remain the same. Get as much of the information as possible and tell your story as quickly as possible," he said.

Part of Bartlett's new role is high-profile promotion of the president's agenda. Last Sunday, he did that on "Meet the Press" and "Fox News Sunday."

Though he has Hughes' old title, McClellan said Bartlett is not replacing her.

"She is always a phone call away of the president needs her advice," McClellan said. "She is not at his

side day-in and day-out anymore. (Bartlett) provides the president with valuable insight and trusted advice

on a daily basis."

"He has accomplished much at a young age, but I don't think any of the president's closest, most

trusted advisers spend any time thinking about how young he is, and it's not because of his gray hair,"

McClellan said. "They view him as a peer because he has earned it."