From Jeb Bush to Sarah Palin

Nicolle Devenish was born in Orange County, Calif., the eldest of four children, and raised in Orinda, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where her father was an antiques dealer and her mother a third-grade teacher. She received her undergraduate degree in mass communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School.

She worked briefly as an on-air reporter in California, before switching to politics, working for the Republican Caucus of the California State Assembly.

In 1999, she moved to Florida to be the press secretary for the newly elected governor, Jeb Bush, and later worked on the recount effort for his brother, George W. Bush, in the contentious 2000 presidential race. It was while working on the recount that she met her future husband, Mark Wallace, then the general counsel for the Bush campaign in Florida. (The two married in 2005 and have a 6-year-old son, Liam.)

When George W. Bush moved into the White House, Ms. Wallace joined his staff as director of media affairs, and was named communications director in 2005, the start of his second term. Ms. Wallace maintained an easy relationship with the White House press corps, even as the Iraq War became an increasingly divisive issue and the administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina crisis was widely criticized.

Though Ms. Wallace still reveres the Bush family, and says that George W. Bush respected the “traditions and norms” of the presidency (unlike, she implies, you-know-who), she frequently reminds people that she knows what it is like to work for an unpopular president.

In 2006, President Bush appointed her husband as ambassador to the United Nations, and the couple moved to New York, where Ms. Wallace was signed on as a political analyst for CBS News.

As the 2008 elections approached, a call came from Steve Schmidt, then in charge of the fledgling presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, whose candor and accessibility aboard the Straight Talk Express in 2000 Ms. Wallace greatly admired. The Wallaces signed up to work on Mr. McCain’s 2008 presidential race. And that’s when Ms. Wallace met Sarah Palin, who was plucked from the relative obscurity of the Alaska governorship to be Mr. McCain’s running mate.