Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  It was my agents’ particular bad luck that I chose to attend a college that was also a major tourist destination. Sightseeing buses would pull up and discharge throngs of visitors with telephoto lenses, eager to explore the third-oldest university in the United States. Architecture students sought out the many distinctive buildings on campus, including Davenport College, which happened to be my residential dorm. Yale is a small place, and it was easy to discover that I lived in Davenport. My agents used to sit on a bench in the courtyard, pretending to read, while their eyes darted back and forth, watching for anyone with a camera. After a few clicks of the shutter, an agent would approach and ask the person why they were taking pictures and insist upon seeing the photos. I was mortified, but to my question of “Do you really have to do this?” they would reply, “We just don’t know how it could be used.”

  I understood this safety measure after Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay were killed in June 2003. Uday’s personal zoo held lions, cheetahs, and a bear; the storehouse next to his home held $1.65 million worth of fine wines and liquors, as well as heroin. He was known as a rapist, prone to “homicidal rages,” and was even called a serial killer by some. Among his public displays of violence, he shot and killed an army officer whom he accused of flirting with his wife, and he beat his father’s valet to death in front of a crowd of partygoers. He and his brother were best known inside Iraq for overseeing the killing of their father’s political opponents. Uday’s house was stocked with Cuban cigars and cases of champagne; and, plastered on the walls of the brothers’ gym, American troops found photos of Jenna and me. Our images were scattered among hundreds of photos of naked women—“the biggest collection of naked women I’d ever seen,” according to US Army captain Ed Ballanco, who added that it “looked like something at the Playboy Mansion.” (Even though we were clothed, the news was terrifying as the gravity of it sank in.) It was chilling. Suddenly, I needed to be worried for myself in a way I had never imagined. The “threats” I understood intellectually had become real. Steve was even more worried. For an extended period, he barely left my side.

  I can’t say whether we would have spent so much time in close proximity and gotten to know one another as well if 9/11 and the events that followed had not occurred. My agents even comforted a number of my friends’ broken hearts—who better to ask for male relationship advice than the two guys sitting in the front seat of the car with you?

  I traveled often, even in college, and particularly after graduating, when I lived in South Africa and worked in a children’s hospital. On long layovers for transatlantic flights, Steve and I played Scrabble or just talked. During one long flight, I asked him why he had joined the Secret Service. He didn’t look like the stereotypical secret agent. If you were casting a movie, Steve probably wouldn’t get a callback. The first impression he gave was of someone kind and earnest, rather than muscular and macho.

  He became interested in the Secret Service when Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. Steve had gone to college at the University of Maryland and studied psychology, and each year, the students spent time in a different psych ward. In his third year, he went once a week to a hospital that housed the criminally insane. He spent his time with one man there: John Hinckley Jr., the man who had shot Ronald Reagan. They watched television together and Steve met John’s girlfriend, who was another patient. Steve decided that he wanted to protect future presidents and their families from men like Hinckley and others who were determined to do them harm.

  After Steve, Scott was appointed as my detail lead and accompanied me on many overseas trips during my dad’s second term. Inevitably, when we were traveling together, people would ask how we knew each other. If Scott or any of my agents answered truthfully, it would immediately expose us. Therefore, Scott became fictitious family when he would reply, without even thinking about it, that he was my brother. Finally, I had a brother! Forget that we looked nothing alike, and the age difference was substantial, but people nodded and accepted our fiction. We looked like one big, happy, disproportionately male-dominated family.

  And like any family we had our awkward moments. When I was in college, several of my dorm mates convinced me to go to a World Wrestling Federation event at Madison Square Garden. (I’m still not quite sure why I said yes.) The Secret Service was following behind us when we went through a tollbooth. The driver of my car had an E-ZPass, but for some reason my agents didn’t; their vehicle hadn’t been issued one. They were stuck in the Cash Only lane. It was dark. I sailed down the road, having no idea that they had lost us and were far behind. Only when I got back to my room did I learn what had happened; and, not long after that, stories of my “ditching” my agents made the press. But by far the biggest and most public debacle with my agents occurred during a trip that Jenna and I took together. When I was twenty-five, I went to visit Jenna, who was living in Latin America with some friends, for our birthday. We arrived in Buenos Aires and went straight to a restaurant in San Telmo, the city’s main square. It is one of the most touristy areas, but we were excited to catch the Sunday market and have a leisurely wine-filled lunch.

  I put my purse under the table, felt it with my foot, and then suddenly it was gone. Someone had reached under and stolen it. The couple next to us had their suitcases and passports stolen too. They were crying and I was shocked. My wallet and cell phone were in my bag, and my agents started calling my phone, hoping the thief might be persuaded to give it back. A man’s voice answered once and hung up. He never picked it up again. Suddenly an incident that happens hundreds of times in crowded cities became international news—because someone was now in possession of the numbers on my flip phone, and a genuine “bad guy” had been able to get close enough to touch me.

  Commentators began questioning the Secret Service. That made me angry—angry that they were unjustly criticizing their competence. They had followed us to a spot we chose—a touristy destination—and now they were being blamed by a judgmental media and even their bosses. Protection did not absolve us from commonplace happenings, yet being in the limelight suggested it should have. For three long days, the story refused to die. I had become familiar with the harsh ways of the press, and I had blocked it out. Finally, my mom intervened and reminded everyone that the agents’ job was not to watch my purse, but to watch me. I could always buy another purse.

  Sadly, that lunch was the last incognito moment Jenna and I spent in Buenos Aires. From then on, we were met with shutter-clicking paparazzi. In the United States, aside from our embarrassing party pics, photographers largely left us alone. We didn’t sell magazines or provide clickbait online. In Argentina, it was different. The theft was news. We checked into our hotel, and when we came down to see the city, the lobby had the feel of a Hollywood red carpet. There were live news trucks, with their exoskeletal satellite dish antennas; and a throng of photographers, their shutters rapidly clicking and chronicling our every move. Occasionally, a blinding flash would hit our confused eyes. We changed hotels and the paparazzi followed; it was the hotels who were phoning, giving away our location on what must have been a slow Argentine news day.

  Even worse, when we arrived in Argentina, no one knew what we looked like, but now with our photos splashed on the front pages of newspapers, everyone did. People were actively looking for us. It was as if we had suddenly been transformed into Princess Diana or Paris Hilton. We gave up on hotels and retreated to an apartment belonging to family friends of one of our Secret Service agents, unable to go anywhere, unable to fall in love with Argentina. As we stayed holed up, it felt as if Buenos Aires had made us an attraction rather than the other way around.

  Federal law mandated that Jenna and I have Secret Service protection for a few months after our dad left office. At the end, a female agent named Genie was in charge of my detail. Her parents were Greek and she spoke Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and English, and she was also very motherly. For eight years I had bypassed the worst of airport security—with at least
one armed agent, we always went through a separate security line. Because of that, I hadn’t ever had to pay attention to the hassle of the three-ounce liquid plastic container rule—it didn’t apply to us.

  For my first “solo” flight, which coincidentally was my last day with protection, I was flying to Malawi. I was packed and ready to go, armed with the confidence that I could do this without my unique posse, but Genie was waiting outside my apartment. In the sweetest gesture, and on her off-duty day, she insisted on showing up in her own car to drive me to the airport. On the way, she gave me a pep talk about how I was going to be “great” when I went through security, probably silently wondering if I’d be pulled aside for the name on my driver’s license. The Holly Crawford alias had been put to rest, and now I was back to the challenges of being named Barbara Bush. When I did finally turn around and see no one behind me, it was an odd, unexpected feeling: an overwhelming sense of being free.

  Now I travel around the world by myself often (and I know all the TSA rules and regulations, along with the specificities of the Southwest boarding process). But no matter how far I travel, hindsight wields its magic power and I think back on that last day, that expression of “I just want to take care of you one last time,” and the images return of all those years when someone truly did watch over me, my United States Secret Service angels.

  Two Sisters Walk into a Mexican Restaurant…

  JENNA

  The first time Barbara and I got into trouble, really big trouble, we were three and a half and at our grandparents’ house in Maine. We had been kissed good night and safely tucked into bed before sunset. But we knew that everyone else was still up, the grown-ups at dinner, the older kids talking, reading, or watching TV. Lying there, watching the dimming light seep in through the edges of the curtains, we conspired to get up right at that moment and tiptoe outside to the yard to play. Down the stairs and out a side screen door, we raced in our billowing nightgowns and bare feet over to the seawall high above the rocks that led to the ocean.

  And that’s exactly where the Secret Service, patrolling the grounds of the vice president’s summer home, found us, sandy and a bit damp from the ocean’s spray. They hoisted us up into their arms and carried us into the house, straight into the dining room, where they announced, “Look who we found on the seawall.” The adults were shocked, our parents horrified, thinking about what might have happened to us had we fallen the ten feet to the rocks below. But more than their stern words telling us, “Never do this again,” what chastened us was the awful sense that we had deeply disappointed our mom and dad. We cried in unison, and we never did do it again, never snuck out of our rooms to play by the rocks and stare at the sea.

  We were hardly the first Bush children to fall short of the mark and receive a parental reprimand. My dad tells the story of the time that he drove home a bit inebriated and plowed into a neighbor’s trash can. Ganny saw and heard the whole thing. When he walked in the door, she told him, “Your behavior is disgraceful,” and sent him upstairs to see his father. Dad walked in, defiant, and Gampy, who had been reading, took off his glasses, stared hard at my dad, and then put his glasses back on and returned to reading. The knowledge that he had disappointed his own father stung so deeply that there was nothing left to say. That devastated my dad more than any harsh words could have.

  My parents, both of whom had grown up in homes with unconditional love and high expectations, opted to raise us in much the same way. There are many modern theories of parenting, but George and Laura Bush didn’t see a great need to deviate from what had worked to raise them. We were expected to be good people, to care about others, and to be responsible. Not unlike with Gampy, all it takes from my mother is a single look to know when you have fallen short.

  But Barbara and I are also our dad’s daughters. For years, we tried to walk right up to that line. And sometimes we truly discovered its location only after having crossed it.

  As teenagers, we were serial pranksters, putting emerald food coloring in an unsuspecting houseguest’s shampoo, thinking it would dye his hair green. (It did give it a slight greenish tint.) If we saw a prank on TV, we would try it together, or egg the other on to perform solo. Once when we were riding on golf carts at Camp David, at the supposedly mature age of nineteen, I told Barbara to fall off the cart to see what Mom would do. She did, but the only ones we ended up scaring were the Secret Service, who came racing over to her rescue. They were so fast our mom missed the whole thing.

  While we were still in high school, we had rules and a curfew—we had to wake up our dad to say good night when we got home. But our lives were not micromanaged; Barbara spent a semester going to school in Rome, completely out of our parents’ view. For better or worse, we were free to make our own mistakes, and hopefully to learn from them. And, as everyone knows, mistakes were made.

  When your parent is inaugurated president, no one from the White House usher’s office helpfully steps forward with a manual for presidential children. The role is undefined. When our dad became president, he assured us that we could continue to be normal college kids, saying, “You can do anything that anybody else does.” And we took him at his word. (Obviously, he didn’t get a manual either!)

  Like at most colleges, one of the big things to do at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a first-year student, was for older girls, who had already turned twenty-one, to give the younger ones their IDs. Of course, the reason why you might want an ID before you were twenty-one was to drink alcohol. Most of my friends had IDs from older girls, and I didn’t think anything about it. When you’re a college student, you are more preoccupied with who’s having a party or who’s playing beer pong than if your fake ID will land you in the tabloids. I never stopped to consider, “Oh, wait a minute, now that my dad is president, people are going to recognize me.” I just wanted to be like my friends, and I was—although when I went wild, I ended up on a double-page spread in the National Enquirer, with a huge caption reading “Pals say she’s a hard-drinking party animal.” The headline: “Get Ready America, Here Comes George W.’s Wild Daughter.” Now, as a thirty-something mom of two daughters, a mom whose clothes are usually sticky from someone’s leftover juice box, I almost can’t believe that there were ever photos of me in mid-fall next to one of my girlfriends, both of us holding cigarettes. About the only thing I’m grateful for is that I had the foresight to choose a big cross-body bag, which blocked a full-on view of my twisted skirt.

  There were two constants in the articles that popped up throughout the spring of 2001: I was always accompanied by an “unidentified friend.” When I was charged with an MIP (minor in possession), CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all noted that, according to the police, Bush and the unidentified friend “were not arrested.” (Today, my “unidentified friend” would probably be a meme on Twitter and Instagram.) The last line of every story was invariably: “Her twin sister, Barbara, attends Yale University.”

  The apparently previously innocent Yalie was publicly corrupted in May. After school and exams were over, Barbara and I went out to dinner with a high school friend at Chuy’s, a Mexican restaurant in Austin. Everyone was ordering margaritas. So Barbara and I did, too, and I helpfully pulled out my adult ID. Yes, I was actually that naive. Knowing me back then, I had probably requested the table for Jenna Bush, party of three. Even Barbara, the Ivy Leaguer in our group, didn’t stop to consider how much more recognizable we were as our twin selves, two together rather than one. Of course, the restaurant’s manager dialed 911. In the police report, the officer who arrived quoted the manager as saying, “I want to get them in big trouble.” (For anyone wondering why the Secret Service didn’t intervene right away, managing teenage antics is not their job. They weren’t there to be our babysitters, just to make sure we didn’t end up in any unduly dangerous situations. Tex-Mex food, even with a somewhat hostile manager, wouldn’t qualify. They were sitting outside in a parked car while we went in.)

 
; Barbara and I did get magazine cover stories and a forever line in our respective Wikipedia entries, but the thing I dreaded most didn’t happen.

  I called my dad that night, waking him up. I felt that same crushing disappointment I had felt as a three-and-a-half-year-old in Maine. As I began saying how sorry I was, he interrupted and said, “No, I’m sorry. We promised you normalcy, and this is not normal.” My parents did make it clear that they weren’t thrilled with our behavior, but I’m sure they also recognized that another type of punishment was about to descend. Barbara’s and my faces were suddenly everywhere, and the words accompanying them were almost universally negative.

  There’s probably no greater humiliation for a couple of nineteen-year-old girls than to land on the cover of People magazine in a badly angled inauguration photo, where we looked particularly round-faced, with the headline “The Bush Girls’ Latest Scrape: Oops, They Did It Again.” People was the magazine I read in every checkout line, and I don’t think I bought anything for a week to avoid seeing my face when I went up to the counter to pay. I personally preferred the cover of the New York Post, which used a much better photo (thank you very much) and dubbed me the pithy “Jenna and Tonic.”