Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  I specifically chose to go to a school where I didn’t know a single person, wanting to meet new people and “broaden my horizons” (whatever that meant to an eighteen-year-old). Once the recount started, I wondered if that was the right choice. At Yale, everyone walked everywhere. All of a sudden, I could feel people looking at me. Their heads would twist or they would stare just a little too long. I was grateful so many other kids on campus were a bigger deal. Claire Danes, the actress, was a Yale student, and she was much more exciting to spot than me. I don’t know if I made it easier or harder to adapt by averting my eyes and staring down at the ground as I walked.

  Nevertheless, the election and the recount were hot topics, as I’m sure they were on most campuses. Students were respectful if I was around, but they were also humans sharing their political beliefs. I didn’t, however, hear anyone stand up for my dad. Instead, I listened to people accusing him of stealing an election. To me, though, these were not just abstract discussions; they were talking about my father, someone I loved. My heart cracked a tiny bit at each comment, thinking of my dad, who called every week eager for details about my life at Yale, picturing me where he had happily spent four years.

  In many ways, I was fortunate that it was the year 2000. These were the last days of dry-erase message boards on dorm room doors, where people left notes when they dropped by rather than sending texts from down the hall. There was no Facebook, no Twitter; whatever my friends might have thought or said when I wasn’t around, I never saw them post anything. Few students had cars on campus, so there were no bumper stickers to advertise their political beliefs. The only way to start a protest was to tack flyers to lampposts and entryways.

  As the recount dragged on, I became quiet, silent behind a smile when I was with strangers. A humanities professor invited me to see him during his office hours. He wanted to know why I barely spoke in his seminar. In high school, I had always been an eager participant, confident in myself, in my questions and answers. I was embarrassed that he had called me in and pretended everything was fine, telling him that I was just a soft-spoken student. But he kindly prodded. For the first time with anyone at Yale, I acknowledged my dad might become president. In a seminar of twelve, it seemed as if any word I uttered was suddenly loaded. I didn’t want to have every phrase dissected by eleven other students. I didn’t want to be second-guessing everything that I might say. I didn’t want to call attention to myself.

  I had the sweetest roommates. As a freshman, I was matched up with three other girls I didn’t know. We lived in a two-bedroom dorm containing two sets of bunk beds. I have no idea who they voted for; we never talked about it. Perhaps this would be a very different chapter if I’d had different roommates. In many ways, they were my own Secret Service—always loyal and protective. Looking back on it, I wonder if they helped me avoid some of the commotion. They’d usher me out of a party, claiming they were tired, if someone pulled out a bulky digital camera and pointed it in my direction. Off we’d go, arm in arm; they played the role of the ones needing me as an escort, when secretly I knew it was for my own sake. Were there protest marches on one street when they took me down another? Hallways with certain anti-Dad posters that they made sure I avoided? Sometimes friendship is about opening your eyes to new places; sometimes it’s about making sure that you don’t see too much.

  Throughout the recount and for years after, I became a turtle of sorts, a hard shell of self-protection over vulnerable love.

  I was studying for finals when my parents called me on a Tuesday to tell me about the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount and awarded Florida’s electoral votes to my dad, making him the forty-third president of the United States. He went on television that night from Austin to give his acceptance speech from a podium in the statehouse, asking everyone to move on from the uncertainty, the divisiveness. I don’t remember if I watched or if I was completely absorbed in my studies.

  I returned to Austin to spend one last Christmas in my childhood home, the governor’s mansion, where Jenna and I had lived since we were thirteen. Packing boxes were stacked in corners; my parents were moving to DC. I went to bed at night knowing that I would never be coming back to my bedroom.

  The last day I spent at home was also my first day of Secret Service protection. I met Steve, a thirty-six-year-old father and the new head of my security detail, as we got into the car to drive to the airport after I turned around for one last good-bye. Steve says that at the time he thought I was quiet; but I was likely sullen, unaware of what lay around the bend.

  Upstairs at 1600

  JENNA

  People ask us all the time: What was it like to live in the White House? I certainly didn’t believe in ghosts before we moved into the White House; nor did I imagine that people who were strangers when we met could end up feeling so much like family.

  When I think about the White House as a place, one image always returns to my mind. As children, Barbara and I were in love with a dollhouse shop in Maine. The store itself was located inside an old gabled Victorian house, and once a summer our mother would take us there to wander among the beautifully created miniatures of classic Cape Cod and Victorian houses. We would stop at each one, open the roofs, and peer into the rooms filled with shrunken antique furniture, so different from our one-story ranch home in Dallas. (One year for Christmas, Santa gave each of us an unfinished dollhouse to decorate. Although we played with them often, our houses remained construction zones. To this day, they sit unfinished in Texas. My mom now promises she will complete them for my girls.)

  Walking into the White House for the first time when my grandfather was elected president felt like stepping into a very elaborate, fully completed dollhouse. The antique furniture was so similar to the tiny doll furniture that had enchanted us in Maine. Everything was formal, except for the hallways and passageways. There, with our cousins, we played epic games of hide-and-seek in the alcoves and stairwells and spent hours competing in contests of “slide down the back banisters.”

  Our first weekend visiting, Barbara and I went down to the single-lane bowling alley in the basement and used the big phone to call up to the kitchen and request two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We were like Eloise in our own Plaza! When the door opened, it was not our sandwiches, but our Ganny, who appeared and told us in no uncertain terms that we were not in a hotel, but temporary guests in a historic home, and we were never to do that again. We never did.

  We did understand, too, even at an early age, that a house is not automatically a home. Living in the White House is time-limited; a family has four or at the most eight years within its walls. Everything is temporary; even most of the White House furniture is stored in warehouses and you are merely borrowing it from the country. (Our personal furniture was moved to my parents’ ranch, and all my mom brought with her was a chest of drawers.) What made the space a home were the people, past and present. The people who worked at the White House became a second family to us. They turned what could feel like a cold museum into a place filled with life.

  Our greeter as seven-year-olds at our grandfather’s inauguration was Nancy, the White House florist, who ushered us in from the cold. She helped us make colorful bouquets of winter flowers to place at our grandparents’ bedside for their first night under this historic roof. Twenty years later, I could see the love she poured into every gorgeous bouquet that she created for my wedding.

  Every morning, Buddy and Ramsey, two of the White House butlers, were the first people we saw when we walked into the family dining room to eat our oatmeal, which they carried in. Their presence was what warmed that very formal room, where the dark, carved-wood chairs were stiff and the glossy table was unbearably fancy. When Gampy was president, they had played games with us. Now that my dad was president, they were our friends. We knew that Buddy was a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan who rode his Harley to work. Every week, Ramsey brought magazines for my mom to read, and if there was an article about her, he marked the exac
t location with a Post-it note. With Barbara and me, he talked about his many girlfriends. When I brought Henry around, Ramsey said to him, “We love this girl. Take good care of this girl.”

  Because we were away at school, we visited the White House only for holidays and school breaks. When we did come home, Barbara and I slept in the same side-by-side bedrooms that Caroline and John Kennedy Jr. had occupied before us and Malia and Sasha Obama would after. My mother put out silver picture frames filled with our baby photos and photos of college friends and boyfriends. She also had two queen beds placed in each of our rooms, with the hopes that we would return often and bring our friends.

  We did invite our friends, and we tried to embrace the old times, literally. Every year around July 4, Barbara and I would host an olden-times party, where each guest had to come in costume as a historical figure. One year, I was Martha Washington. The next year, Barbara and I went as a pair of saber-toothed tigers. (What’s older than prehistoric cats?) One butler’s cousin was a DJ, and he provided the music for the party. “Martha Washington” and “Davy Crockett” danced to the sounds of OutKast and 50 Cent in the East Room. Barbara and I invented a move we called the “Bucking Bronco” where I rode Barbara across the dance floor like a horse.

  We were always nervous that someone might break a glass or the fancy White House china, but fortunately for us, our guests were probably more intimidated than we were. The only party “foul” occurred at a Christmas get-together when one of our guests tried to leave with a tree ornament hidden in his hand. The Secret Service agents manning the door stopped him. He was reprimanded and removed—and the ornament returned. (Stealing things from the White House is, sadly, pretty common. For years, guests have taken place-card holders, silverware, even printed towels from the bathrooms. My mom always rolls her eyes slightly when she recalls how one very well-known journalist would stuff her bag with official towels every time she went to the ladies’ room!)

  Our favorite party of the entire year was the staff Christmas party, when the men and women who worked there brought their families and were the guests. No matter where we were, Barbara and I tried to return for that evening. Our saddest day was the tea on the morning of President Obama’s inauguration, when everyone who worked at the residence said good-bye. We hugged every single person in the room: Dale, the grounds expert who also looked after Barney, Beasley, and Spot; Bill, the dessert chef who baked the best White House cookies; and Cris, the head chef, whose food and smile lit up the house.

  Not long after my dad left office, one of the loveliest butlers, appropriately nicknamed Smiley, passed away. Smiley was a cheerleader for everyone, always encouraging, and known for having an endless supply of hugs. Barbara, my mom, and I went back to Washington for his funeral. We sat in our pew sobbing over the loss of this lovely man who had been such a part of our lives. Mrs. Obama was there, too, and, a few years later, she mentioned to me that she didn’t completely understand at the time why we were so upset at Smiley’s passing, but now she did. She said that the men and women in the residence had become like family to Malia and Sasha as well, which prompted me to recall that one of the best afternoons Barbara and I spent in the White House was when we showed Malia and Sasha around what was soon to be their new home.

  While the White House is perhaps the most public house in the world, at the same time it is one of the most private. It is a house that has seen so much; the more nights you spend there, the more you wonder about what happened before.

  One summer night after my junior year of college, I had gone to sleep until my phone rang with a late-night call from a friend in Texas. As I closed my eyes again, I heard sounds coming from the fireplace in my room. I shot bolt upright in bed. I could distinctly hear a female opera singer’s voice ringing from the fireplace, I ran into Barbara’s room, slipping on the glossy wooden floors. I leaped into her bed and woke her, exclaiming, “Sissy, there was opera singing coming from my fireplace! I have goose bumps all over my legs. Sissy!”

  My practical sister simply said, “Okay,” and added that it was probably just someone listening to music somewhere else in the house. She told me to go back to sleep. As Barbara drifted off, I lay there, wide awake, slowly talking myself out of what I had heard. Barbara must have been right. It must have been someone working upstairs and listening to music. Did workers spend the night in the White House?

  Several nights later, Barbara was sleeping in my room. After we turned off the lights, we talked quietly for a few minutes. Then we both heard it: 1920s piano music streaming from the same fireplace in my room. This time Barbara was the one who jumped out of her bed and ran into mine, her heart pounding. “What was that?”

  We knew that if anyplace was haunted, it was this house, but we tried to rationalize it. Maybe it was Willard, our cat, walking across the piano in the hallway. The next morning, I saw Buddy as we walked out of my room, and I noticed that the piano cover was down. It couldn’t have been Willard, and if it had been, she would have become some sort of Internet sensation, playing jazz piano with her paws.

  “How did you sleep?” Buddy asked.

  “Not great,” I replied. Then I explained about the eerie piano music and the opera singer I had heard the week before. “It sounds crazy, I know,” I said.

  “Oh, Ms. Jenna, I believe you. You wouldn’t believe what I have seen and heard over the years.” Buddy hasn’t yet told me his ghost stories, but I keep hoping.

  Today, all I have of the White House are my memories, including my first kiss with Henry, which was up on the third-floor balcony overlooking the South Lawn, the same place where President Dwight Eisenhower liked to make steaks on a tiny grill. Whenever I see a shot of those white pillars and fountains, I always linger on it an extra second, still faintly feeling the pulse of all those other families who have lived there, with their secrets, stories, and memories—and now ours, too—that have seeped into the foundation, to forever be a part of the house itself.

  Code Name: Turquoise

  BARBARA

  For more than eight years, until I was twenty-seven years old, someone, or rather, many someones, always knew where I was. I could never casually saunter across Yale’s sprawling campus or walk down a New York street, or even walk along a hard-packed dirt path in rural Texas and not glance over my shoulder to see familiar faces trailing me. The perpetual helicoptering meant that any carefree and impulsive road trip with friends to Myrtle Beach—which I did one year with a group of girlfriends—was followed by a requisite tail of brooding black Expeditions. Not even a lane could be changed without an exact copycat movement by my Secret Service. The adage that warns, “Never drive faster than your guardian angels can fly,” took on profound meaning for my driver friends because they actually couldn’t drive faster than my Secret Service angels could fly or drive.

  I was not fully aware of all the ways they watched over and watched out for me. They intercepted my mail and read it first, so that I never received a nasty or threatening note. If someone lingered too long at my entryway or later at my apartment door, an agent appeared and suggested that the person move on. After I was no longer under Secret Service watch, I had my share of stalkers, strange people who repeatedly turned up on my doorstep. I learned to walk down the other side of the street on my way home so I could see from a distance if someone was already standing on my doorstep, waiting. It was scary at age thirty. There is no way I could have handled these incidents at nineteen or twenty-one, and I will always be grateful to have had my protectors. In the same breath, though, there was also something a bit unnatural about other people knowing every detail of my life, and me knowing so little of theirs.

  My agents lived a dual life—“living” mine along with me (from a distance) and also living their own lives when they returned to their wives and husbands and homes during off-duty hours. Yet they would still be debriefed on my every move—they knew if I spent the night out and wasn’t coming home until the next morning, and if I made a late-night run to a
diner for pizza. I would even bet they knew who my crush was. It was a bizarre type of comfort that they fishbowled my life without judgment.

  It could not have been easy for my detail. Most people living under Secret Service protection—dignitaries, presidents, officials, actual adults—go to offices and have predictable schedules. I was an eighteen-year-old college student, so my schedule was about as predictable as the motions of asteroids. The agents in cargo pants and heavy jackets, waiting for me in all weather conditions and at all hours of the day and night, were not in the forefront (or even the back) of my mind. I couldn’t tell them in advance where I’d be studying or when, or where I’d be going at night, so they spent a lot of time just keeping up.

  Steve, who headed my detail for years, has joked that I was the most protected girl on the Yale campus; and my roommate, Laura, “was the second most protected girl.” Laura and I both had long brown hair, we both had blue eyes, and we both had the same black North Face jacket. And we were both habitually late to class, darting out of the same dorm room entryway at a dead run. The agents would see a brown-haired, black-jacketed girl dash by and they would start sprinting to “get a visual.” If it was Laura, they stopped moving, but if it was me, they continued the chase.

  After 9/11, I traveled under a fake name: Holly Crawford, so that if anyone looked at a passenger manifest they wouldn’t see “Barbara Bush” and know which plane I had boarded. Early on, Steve and I took a Southwest flight out of Austin. We’d gone through security unnoticed (several men revealing their guns), and “Holly Crawford” slid onto the plane. It was smooth and completely natural; no one recognized me, but then Steve looked over and saw that I had taken off my shoes and was sitting with my socked feet showing. My crossed legs exposed the underside of my white socks, where my mother had diligently written “B. Bush” in permanent marker before I went to camp. My socks were a more blatant advertisement of my identity than any boarding pass. Busted. Steve groaned and whispered to me to put my shoes back on.