Josefine and I were emboldened by our newfound sense of independence. Perhaps a little too emboldened. We would hitchhike across Rome to make curfew—just two sixteen-year-old girls putting their lives in the hands of complete strangers to avoid getting into trouble with our school. We worked out a fail-proof system: We’d hail down a driver, pile into the car, and pull out a disposable camera. The unsuspecting driver would turn around to a flash in his eyes before he drove his English-speaking cargo down the road. With a photo of our driver, we were sure nothing could go wrong. And, luckily for us, nothing did.
Words of wisdom: Always photograph your hitcher.
Rome was the first place I created an identity apart from my sister. When roll was called, I was the only one named “Bush” on the roster. In an era before widespread e-mail and Internet, our only link was a two-hour nightly window when I could use the shared phone in the dorm hallway, the same two hours that Jenna was in class in Austin High. We talked in snippets, and, for a few months, our lives diverged. It made us independent. When we were together again after that, it felt like a choice, not a habit or even an obligation. Our bond was better, stronger, and more sure.
Yet my life in Rome became more real once Jenna could experience it alongside me. When she and my parents came for an Italian Thanksgiving, she met my new friends and wandered the streets, she tasted steaming pizza from our favorite pizza cart, and she heard the echo of her own feet through the dining hall. She could meet my Italian boyfriend, who wondered about this so-called “twin” of mine. (Note to men around the world: Do not arrive late to meet a Texas girl’s father because you are buying flowers. This will not win him over. Nor will it win her over.)
As much as I missed her, Rome also gave me the confidence that I could be part of a wider world.
Years later, I did go back to Rome with my mom, as a stopover on the way to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. But as lovely as it was, it wasn’t the same as my private Rome in high school. A walk to the Spanish Steps required four Secret Service agents and four Italian security agents. People turned around to look, wondering who the famous person they didn’t recognize was. On one particular day, instead of going out to sample the street pizza, I was invited to a private tea with Pope Benedict. Everything was rigidly preset, right down to the specific minutes allowed for the courtesy gift exchange.
It was memorable, surreal even, but it also made me eager for the chance to once again explore the world alone, as just Barbara.
Happy Valentine’s Day
An ode to da sista
Roses are Red
I have a big head!
You and Jay may wed…
I may be dead
Let’s go to Club Med
Ganny loves Keds
My heart is red
YOU ARE THE BEST SISTER
FROM HERE TO MADRID!!
—Jenna
You Win Some, You Lo(o)se Some
JENNA
At the start of 1992, in my loopy, oversized fourth-grade handwriting, I wrote a short entry in my turquoise faux-vinyl diary listing my most pressing New Year’s resolutions: “loose four pounds and join the Preston Hollow Elementary student council.” (“Loose”? Maybe one of my resolutions should have been to practice my spelling!) The election was months away, and yet I wanted to win it with that great rush of single-minded focus. (I also told my diary that I would be writing entries only on the weekends.)
Perhaps I thought of elections as a family business or I wanted to please my parents. Or maybe I thought the position would make me popular. Or I just wanted to be on the student council in the same way that I wanted a perm because I didn’t like my straight, uninteresting hair.
This being Texas, where everything is always bigger, our elementary school election wasn’t about simply making cute posters and casting a vote during morning meeting. Each candidate had to have a running mate and a costume and make a speech in front of the school. I picked a fifth-grade girl as my running mate, thinking that an older partner would give me an advantage, and my costume was Uncle Sam, with the slogan “I want you to vote for me.” My platform was about school lunches and bake sales, which might also have related back to those four extra pounds.
I thought the speech went well, and then we got the results: I had lost to a beautiful sixth-grade girl.
I came home and wedged myself into the tiniest, darkest place I could find: a crawl space under our rear patio where all the watering apparatus lay tucked away. I lay down on the dirt floor, amid the leaves and bugs, and cried. Eventually, my mom and Barbara came outside and peered in—it would have been too early for my dad to be home, although he had the most experience with losing. His marriage to my mom began with a failed run for Congress in West Texas. My mom, in her calm, soothing way, talked about how it was almost a certainty that the older girl would win, and how there was always next year.
It was years before I considered running for school office again.
There were plenty of other Bushes up for election. Just a few months later, my grandfather, our Gampy, would lose his race to be reelected president. I don’t recall much about the campaign, except for one afternoon after my mother had finally given in and allowed me to get a perm. She drove me out to the Regis Salon, located inside a sprawling Dallas mall off one of the city’s big expressways. I remember the heavy black cape draped over me and the anticipation as the stylist pumped up the chair. I was so overjoyed by the smell of the putrid chemicals and their sting on my scalp, promising lush blond waves and large hair, that at first the red, white, and blue Ross Perot campaign button pinned to the stylist’s denim jacket barely registered. It was only when I looked over at my mom and noticed how rigidly she sat, clenching a magazine she was barely reading, that the full connection sparked. The pin stared back at me in the mirror. Ross Perot was the Texas oilman running as a third-party candidate against Gampy, who was in turn campaigning against both Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. Suddenly, some of the magic disappeared from this long anticipated day.
There are many breathless moments when your loved ones run for political office. We spent November’s presidential Election Day in Houston, swimming in the hotel pool and eating an early pizza dinner with our cousins, but deep down, we felt the gravity of the situation. The next morning, it was like an existential death, where there was no wake or funeral, but the adults walked around grim. I remember my dad with tears in his eyes. Then two years later, my father ran and won his race for governor of Texas. In the spring of 1999, he sat Barbara and me down on the brick patio of the governor’s mansion in Austin and said, “I’m going to run for president, and I want your approval.”
There was no crawl space then.
Diary Entry 5/2/96
Today has been a hard day for me. This morning there was a picture of Me + Barbara in the newspaper—and an article—on us going to AHS—how dumb is that? There are 1000 freshman going to AHS so what makes us special—my last name—how unfair is that? The thing that really sucks is I’ll be known for “Jenna Bush” the thing instead of Jenna Bush the person. I’ll be known as the Governor’s Daughter—not as who I am. There are a lot of people at AHS + I know I won’t be friends w/ all of them so even by the time I graduate, to some of those unknown faces I’ll still be known as the governor’s daughter. I know it’s not my parents’ fault but I’m taking it out on them because there is not anyone else to blame—and I always have to blame someone! Also—being the Gov. Daughter stereotypes me as a rich, snobby bitch—so I think people at AHS think that. I’ve had a horrible week—my best friend Kate and I have had some trouble—or we’re not that close—she is spending a lot of time w/ this girl named Bridget. I <3 Bridget too. But it’s hard not to get jealous—I feel like I’m losing her. I’m glad the wk. ends here, almost. School is almost out—I’m so sad but I can’t wait until summer—at least you will know me for the real “Jenna Bush.”
Despite the feelings in my journal entry, Barbara and I lived normal live
s, even as the governor’s children. We had our driver’s licenses and an old, slightly beat-up Jeep that we shared to drive to Austin High School, where we were two of about twenty-five hundred. We knew all of that would change. We tried to lobby my dad not to run for president, the way we did to go to a school party or to be allowed to drive the car somewhere, thinking if we made our case persuasively enough, he might cave, because occasionally he did. But not this time. His desire to serve was not going to be undone by our teenage angst. (In retrospect, I can see how naive we were, not appreciating that we would truly get to live history.) When we went off to college, our parents were on the campaign trail. Your life changes once you become presidential children. By second semester, we had Secret Service following behind us. Our faces were on the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers. People knew who we were; it felt like there was a spotlight illuminating us. We traveled under fake names, like Barbara’s Holly Crawford (which sounded vaguely like an exotic dancer); and mine, the much blander Sarah Jackson, so if anyone got ahold of a passenger list or a hotel registration, we would be all but impossible to find. Even just walking out of a dorm, anything could happen. Someone could say something that would break our hearts. The first couple of years of my dad’s presidency, I felt nervous to be alone; I didn’t want to go to class by myself. I took huge introductory classes so I wouldn’t have to sit in a small circle around a seminar table and say my name. It wasn’t until about junior year that I finally started to feel safer in my own skin.
At first, we were unsure on how to be presidential children. But we found out quickly that as awkward as our new role was, it gave us the world. We traveled to Africa and Europe, met heads of state and kings and queens, and had a front-row seat to an entire decade simply by being born.
And then, of course, ironically, it would be during my dad’s reelection campaign that I would meet the love of my life and my future husband. But that is a new story for another page.
BARBARA
I ran for treasurer of the student council the same year Jenna ran for vice president. I chose a fifth-grade boy as my running mate, a daring move, as talking to older boys wasn’t something fourth-grade girls did. My teacher, Ms. Flowers, had thoughtfully suggested it—broadening our “ticket” to both genders and two grades. Strategic. Unlike many others in my family, I lacked any innate political instincts and was very much in need of her outside consulting.
I didn’t care all that much about the actual election. I was mostly interested in the crafts that could accompany a campaign. I liked making campaign buttons, and I was particularly excited about my costume. Yes, my sister and I felt it appropriate to dress up for our one political foray. Our theme was the tortoise and the hare: I dressed up as a turtle; my running mate, the hare. My mother’s friend Pam, a professional artist, helped me make my own turtle shell—it was textured, it was rhinestoned, it was a Texas hot-glue-gun dream. The only problem was, the shell looked best from behind. When practicing my speech in front of my mom, I struggled with how to show it off in all its glory. I had to incorporate a turn. The moment I fell silent with my back to the audience was the highlight of my speech; I was genuinely terrified about speaking to the entire school.
When it came time to vote, I marked the ballot for all of my friends. It didn’t occur to me to vote for myself. When I told my parents, they smiled and said, “Well, that’s why you lost.”
Some eight years passed before the next consequential election, and the first one in which Jenna and I could vote. We had turned eighteen during our dad’s campaign, so my ballot for him was the first I’d ever cast. Rather than dressing up and heading to the polls, I was away at school and mailed in my absentee ballot. No “I Voted” sticker, but I was proud nonetheless.
For election night in November 2000, I flew to Texas from New Haven, Connecticut, where I was in college at Yale. My first flight out was canceled due to weather, and I was panicked I wouldn’t make it back in time and would have to watch the results on the terminal’s TV. Luckily plane number two took off for Austin. A family dinner was planned—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins all flying in to wait for the results. We gathered at the Shoreline Grill, just a few blocks from where, win or lose, my dad and our family would take the stage for him to speak. We cloistered ourselves away in a private back room blocked off by thick velvet curtains. It was as if our Maine dining room had been transported to Texas, except instead of shorts and relaxed beachwear everyone was dressed up and our typically high-energy crew was even more energized.
As usual, Jenna and I sat at the “kids’” table, excited to ditch the adults and catch up with our cousins, who wanted to know everything about life in college; for our part, we were curious about our cousin Sam’s new girlfriend. There was an underlying tension, but we cracked jokes to ease it. We hardly even spoke about why we were gathered—we had no control at that point, so it was better to adopt a Zen Buddhist approach to the whole evening—though we’d regularly glance at our dad, who was quietly entertaining his siblings and parents and flashing his easy smile. As a family, we had been through two other presidential elections, one that ended in victory, and the most recent one, which had ended in defeat. We knew from Gampy’s election nights that either outcome would be okay for our family, that we would get up in the morning and life would go on, but that knowledge didn’t dull the buzzing sense of anticipation.
The year 2000 was just on the cusp of widespread cell phone use, so only a few people’s pockets rang, while the multiline stand-alone phones on a side table blinked and trilled. It seems foreign now, when most of the world vibrates or chimes with texts, but Jenna and I were not connected. The room only started crackling when there was a personal update. As voting ended, Karl Rove ran in and out, sharing information about exit polls and early returns. Jenna and I made small talk to pass the time, but it gradually became unfocused, the kind where you drop your train of thought because your mind has veered off onto other things. Some moments, we’d be celebrating and hugging our dad, and then with the breathless delivery of another piece of news, we would retreat to our chairs.
Dinner—parmesan-crusted chicken—was just being served when NBC called Florida for Al Gore (meaning my dad would likely lose), and my parents quietly left for the privacy of the governor’s mansion. It was almost unnoticed; no formal good-bye, but rather the hosts slipping out so as not to cut the dinner short or ruin everyone else’s evening: an Irish Exit. Uncle Jeb and my grandparents soon followed. We stayed behind and ate a bit more. Realizing that the governor’s mansion apartment was tiny and would be packed with political adults, we retreated to our cousins’ hotel rooms. The only thing we knew was that everyone, from the media to both campaigns, was confused.
Riding the hotel elevator felt like we were part of a Super Bowl team down by one point at halftime, escaping the thunderous stadium for the seclusion of an underground tunnel. But we assumed that within a few hours, the anticipation and the uncertainty would end. The United States would have a new president. Then the networks retracted their calls for Al Gore, and the momentum swung again.
Jenna and I ended up lying in our cousin Wendy’s hotel bed watching the news and saying next to nothing. Florida was going back and forth. After 1 a.m., Florida was put into the “Bush column,” and Al Gore called to concede. Our parents phoned, telling us to get ready so we could be onstage when Dad accepted the presidency. We jumped up, got out of our dress clothes, put on bathrobes, and started freshening our makeup and ironing to look presentable, rather than smudged and wrinkled, for the cameras and the crowd. An hour later, Vice President Gore called back and retracted his concession. It was now close to three in the morning. Jenna and I headed home. The governor’s mansion was empty and the lights had been turned off; our parents were waiting up in their PJs ready for bed. It was just like any other night—no hysterics—we just didn’t know who had won. They kissed us good night and we fell asleep down the hall, hopeful that by later that day we’d
have an answer. When we woke, nothing had been decided. There was going to be a recount, even though Jenna and I didn’t know exactly what that would mean.
Jenna and my parents stayed behind in Austin, but I got on a plane back to New Haven in anticipation of my first college exams, uncertain and completely alone.
Now we live in an era of twenty-four-hour news cycles and breaking news alerts, but I can’t remember ever having a political discussion with my high school friends twenty years ago. We would bring in our carefully clipped newspaper articles and discuss current events in class. I was often passionate about a particular event because, as a human, I wanted to make the world better. But our discussions were never heated or intense or partisan. When we left the class, it was over. We were focused on the minutiae of high school: school dramas and school lives. Even at the governor’s mansion, my dad rarely discussed politics at the dinner table; like a doctor, lawyer, or business owner, he wanted to unwind with his family, not bring work home. We were far more likely to hear a passionate exchange about the Texas Rangers, or questions about our day at school, my parents digging deeper when we would reply with the standard, “It was fine.”
So I was unnerved to discover that Yale was the opposite, a very political campus. Intellectually, I knew it would be, but emotionally, I was unprepared. The students living in the dorm across from mine had Al Gore signs in all their windows. I couldn’t look out my window without seeing one. The only way to avoid them was to stare at the ground. I knew the signs were not personal, but it still felt like a stab each time I saw one, because for me it was unavoidably personal. It was Bush versus Gore; my dad versus another man. Who would be a better president? Who was more worthy? The person on the other side of the recount was my father.
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