An NYT profile of Nicolle Devenish, the new communications director of the Bush White House.

An excerpt:

ASHINGTON - Maybe it's one of those tales that have grown taller in the telling, maybe it's not, but Nicolle Devenish, the new communications director of a White House not known for its love affair with the press, says she was once fired for being too nice to reporters.

"I was seen talking and laughing and looking too trusting of the California press corps," said Ms. Devenish, who at the time, 1998, was a spokeswoman for the Republican caucus of the California State Assembly. She was dismissed by a staff member for an assemblyman - she won't say who - and responded by crying for an hour and a half in the car of a friend, Dan Schnur, a Republican political strategist who has worked on four presidential campaigns.

Mr. Schnur was sympathetic. "There's a whole strain of Republicans who think that reporters are evil, and Nicolle had the nerve to be nice to them, and some of her bosses didn't like that," he said in an interview last week. So he counseled Ms. Devenish to take the long view.

"I told her, 'A few years from now, you're going to be doing something so incredible you're going to look back and laugh at those idiots for firing you,' " Mr. Schnur said.

On Friday, the second day of Ms. Devenish's job as a new public face of the White House, she still wasn't laughing about the firing. But she was talking about it in a brief telephone interview as a way of suggesting that her intentions were to improve the contentious relationship between a secretive White House and the press.