Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  The next day, I went back to school. That weekend, I headed to Camp David to be with my parents, and also, if possible, to distract them, to lighten the burden that had descended upon my dad. I wanted the comfort and safety of my parents. I secretly hoped it would allow us all to feel normal again, like our protected pack. Jenna arrived from Texas and we were briefly our usual foursome once again.

  When I returned to campus, the weather was beautiful, the atmosphere grim. Going to school in the Northeast meant many people were from New York—one of my roommates was a Manhattan-bred New Yorker who used to pat me on the head, amused by my Texas “quaintness” when I asked questions. So many of them knew family members or a friend’s father or mother who had been in the Towers that morning. There was nervousness and fear and a sense of hunkering down. Everyone was shocked and sad. It was sunny in New Haven, but it was quiet, silent at the core, as if there were no breeze or birdsong.

  Yale, like the United States, eventually returned to the new normal. The sophomores hurrying to class across the Davenport quad today are about the same age as Steve’s daughter is now, his daughter who once jumped on the motel bed with the pure joy of a five-year-old. I will never forget the sounds of those days and the following weeks and months, the sterile rooms and the terrible quiet, when everything changed.

  First Pitch

  BARBARA

  Baseball has always been our family sport. Though Jenna and I were pathetic, dare I say shitty, players, we spent hours practicing with a yellow plastic bat while our dad threw slow pitches in the front yard. In our team softball games, we’d play our positions, but I preferred to get lost in left field—making rings out of long grass stems or practicing dance moves until a ball bounced in my direction. I’d panic at both my delayed reaction and the distance I had to throw, while my parents watched, elbowing each other, laughing.

  Before politics, professional baseball was front and center in our lives. We went to baseball games the way other families sat down to a nightly dinner. We had four seats in a row, and when the Texas Rangers were in town, we would be in the stadium. Our dad was one of the owners, but more than that, he loved (and still loves) to sit beside our mom and watch the game. Jenna and I, however, could stand to sit in our assigned seats only for the first few pitches and then we would take off, winding our way through the concourse and the stands—a huge playground for almost nine innings. We stopped to have our baseball cards made. We almost always got ice cream scoops in miniature baseball hats—exotic flavors like white chocolate macadamia nut—or when it was deep into summer, the delicious frozen lemon chill. At home we watched very little television, since it was off-limits on school nights, so one of our favorite things to do was to sneak into the owner’s box and turn on the TV. We’d watch scandalous Lifetime movies like Love, Lies and Murder, which we’d never be allowed to watch at home. We got away with it, too, until the seventh-inning stretch, when my mom would stand up and turn around to look for us. She would invariably see Jenna and me, dancing the do-si-do together to whatever country song was playing over the loudspeaker in the stadium. She would also see the TV glowing in the background. If we caught her eyes, she would shake her head and mouth “off,” and we would sheepishly find the remote and head back down to our designated row.

  While my friends were into boy bands or teen heartthrob actors, Jenna and I were obsessed with baseball players. When we walked through the underground of the stadium with my dad, we would peek around a corner or pause outside the locker-room door, hoping for a glimpse of the catcher, the outfielders, the shortstop, or the second baseman. To us, they looked like movie stars. Jenna’s favorite was Rubén Sierra and mine was Julio Franco. We would go crazy whenever they were at bat. We would cheer and cheer, “Go, Rubén!”; “Go, Julio!” until we were hoarse. I still remember Julio Franco’s wedding; he wore a gold tux and kissed us each on the cheek. I considered it my first real kiss; the fact that he was marrying another woman meant nothing.

  We knew all the players down the roster: their names, some of their stats, and what position they played. Every spring break, we traveled to Rangers spring training in Florida, where the tropical sun turned our arms and shoulders a heated pink. We watched almost all the games and memorized the new players’ names. (Baseball was so baked into our family culture that our first password for our family online accounts, Prodigy and then AOL, was “Ranger,” which each of us could easily remember.)

  My dad loved baseball, but the rest of us loved something more than the sport. It was the rhythmic slowness of the game, the rituals, and the shimmering dome of Texas heat that slowed time to a crawl from the moment we took our seats. Win or lose, my dad was always relaxed, taking it all in. People often came up to him when we sat in the stands. Each season, the line of people asking him for his autograph grew longer, and increasingly they would ask, “Are you going to run?” It became so common that I stopped paying attention, and after a while it seemed like any other question: “How’s the team going to do this season?”; “Do you think they can beat the Angels?”; “Will the rain hold off?” But looking back, that question planted the seed that our easy nights were going to change.

  We went to the games occasionally after my dad was elected governor and we had moved to Austin, but it was different. My dad had to travel with security, and even though we could still have the run of the stadium, we were older. We were no longer thrilled by peanuts and chili dogs and stadium snacks or awed with finding nooks and crannies beside the stairwells. No longer regulars, we discovered that many of the people we knew had also moved on.

  In college, I didn’t pay attention to baseball. Except for one game, the only one I ever attended with my parents while my dad was president. It was played in New York City in the fall of 2001.

  When you are in college, you don’t see your parents much. Jenna and I had both gone home to be with our dad and mom on the weekend after 9/11, but I hadn’t seen them since. Then on October 30, my dad was invited to throw out the first pitch at game three of the World Series, which featured the New York Yankees versus the Arizona Diamondbacks. Jenna was in school in Austin, but Yankee Stadium was a short ride from Yale, so I decided to go.

  I brought a couple of friends who I knew liked baseball. One, Teddy Pataki, was the son of the governor of New York, George Pataki. It was a Tuesday, and Teddy had football practice. We waited and waited with my Secret Service agents outside Yale’s football stadium, but Teddy had to run more laps for his coach, so we left without him.

  The drive down was quiet, or at least I was. I was worried about what might happen in New York, about what might happen at an event with so many people gathered together, and about what could happen when my dad walked out in front of everyone. In one corner of my mind, I assumed the worst, although I didn’t really know what the worst was. As the buildings and billboards came into view, that fear became palpable; I could touch it, just as I could touch the solid, dark glass on the SUV’s window. I tried to play it cool, but I was nervous, nervous to the point of tears.

  We almost missed the start of the game. Even though I was with Secret Service, the other Secret Service were triple-checking our IDs and holding us back out of caution. Finally, we made it up to the owner’s box, which was packed with Secret Service agents. Otherwise, it was a sea of famous New Yorkers—Billy Crystal, Regis Philbin, baseball legend Whitey Ford, and Donald Trump. George Steinbrenner was not pleased that I’d brought two college friends along, taking up more space in an already-crowded room. All around me, people were talking, but in that slightly elevated way most do when they are nervous underneath. For a long time after 9/11, whenever there was a large gathering in New York City, people probably had a nervous feeling in the pit of their stomachs or the back of their minds, the What if…? I saw my mom across the box and made a beeline in her direction.

  I didn’t feel like mingling, and I could tell Mom felt the same way. We huddled together off to one side of the box to protect each other from making small
talk about the thing we did not want to mention: my dad warming up beneath the stadium and then waiting in the dugout to walk out, by himself, onto the open field, exposed in front of everyone. The only thing my mom could bring herself to say was “How was the drive down?”

  We heard Yankee announcer Bob Sheppard’s voice: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Dad walked out of the Yankees’ dugout to the pitcher’s mound. Earlier, he said he wasn’t sure if he would be able to throw a decent pitch because he’d be wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his New York Fire Department jacket. The vest was constricting and made it hard to throw a strike, let alone a strike from the pitcher’s mound. But the Secret Service had insisted he wear it. My dad wanted to throw a perfect pitch because of all that moment symbolized, and he wanted to throw it from the toughest spot on the field: the top of the mound.

  The stadium was alive; the floor shook beneath us as tens of thousands of people chanted, “USA! USA!” With every decibel, the pit in my stomach grew. I wanted to turn my eyes away, but I stayed focused on the mound. My dad was there; he rotated around, gave a thumbs-up. And then he pulled back his arm and threw a pitch, a perfect pitch. It sailed fast and true right across home plate and into the catcher’s mitt, a strike.

  With the pitch, I exhaled all the breath I had been holding and started to cry. These days, I cry all the time at anything moving, but back then, as a sophomore in college, I didn’t want to cry, I wanted to be cool.

  For all of us—for my mom, for me, for everyone who felt vulnerable that evening—that one pitch was so much more than just a ball uncorking and spinning through the air.

  It was also a profound moment for me as a daughter. I was watching my dad step up and do what he needed to do to comfort others. That’s what he had always done for me as my father; I knew that about him. I depended on it. But in this moment, that’s what he did for everyone. They could feel some of what I had always known.

  My dad came up to the box afterward. He had taken off the bulletproof vest. He went directly to my mom and they hugged and kissed. My parents are not affectionate in public; it might have been the only time I’ve ever seen them kiss in front of others, so I knew that they had both been nervous, both needed comfort. Just knowing that they had been anxious, too, was deeply consoling to me.

  My dad watched some pitches and at-bats—this was the first World Series game that he had ever attended—until he left after the third inning.

  But for that brief time, those three innings, baseball brought us together again.

  Reflections on War

  JENNA

  When my grandfather went to war against Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait, he wrote a heartfelt letter to my dad about his worries and his fears. I remember the yellow ribbons tied around the trees throughout our suburban Texas neighborhood, and my dad remembers the gravity of the words his father penned: “I guess what I want you to know as a father is this: Every Human life is precious. When the question is asked ‘How many lives are you willing to sacrifice’—it tears at my heart. The answer, of course, is none—none at all.”

  When my dad was weighing whether to go to war against Iraq, when intelligence reports were telling him that Iraq had chemical weapons and when Saddam Hussein refused to allow weapons inspectors into his country, he wrote his own heartfelt letter to Barbara and me: “Yesterday I made the hardest decision a president has to make. I ordered young Americans into combat. It was an emotional moment for me because I fully understand the risks of war. More than once, I have hugged and wept with the loved ones of a soldier lost in combat in Afghanistan.” His words spoke of how much he didn’t want to go to war, how he had hoped the battle could be averted. We felt the same.

  Throughout my father’s time in office, we had families and faces to put with the words: Americans in uniform, especially at Camp David. The presidential retreat at Camp David isn’t just a retreat, it’s a military installation. The people we saw whenever we visited were primarily active-duty members of the Marines or Navy. Many were our age, twenty or twenty-one, youthful and strong, with their lives still ahead of them.

  We knew them, we knew their wives and husbands, we knew their children. We sat next to them at church on Sundays inside the camp chapel. On Christmas Eve, we saw them in their uniforms, with baby girls in fancy dresses and boys in cute sweaters balanced on their laps. We watched their older children act out the Christmas pageant, dressed as sheep and wise men. We heard them caroling. And sometimes they told us good-bye as they were being deployed.

  I worried about them, worried about them coming home safely to their children. I prayed for them. And when I glanced at them across the pew, there were times when I felt completely inadequate. They risked their lives to keep everyone I love safe.

  I remember the night the bombing started in Iraq. I didn’t know when the war would start. I was in college and out with friends when I saw the images flash on a television screen. It was a dark, grainy picture with flashes of bright, greenish light. Some of the people were applauding, but I felt sick. I got up and left to go back to my apartment. All I could think of were the faces of those men and women at Camp David and of the many other service members we had met.

  When the war began, Barbara and I were miles away from each other at school. We talked on the phone almost daily—this was before texting took over our communication—and thank goodness, because I wanted to hear Barbara’s voice.

  It’s hard now to remember just how anxious those months and years were after 9/11. In the summer of 2002, I had gone to Camp David for the weekend with my dad and a few of my best friends from Texas. It was early on a Saturday morning and we were still asleep in our cabin when my dad and the Secret Service burst in, waking us up and telling us that there was a plane approaching. In our pajamas, we jumped from our beds and headed down to a network of underground tunnels. There wasn’t even time for me to put in my contacts, so I couldn’t see. My dad took my hand and led me, as if I were a little girl, through the half darkness down to the area below.

  It was a false alarm; a plane had violated the airspace. It was not an attack, but that didn’t mean the next time it wouldn’t be real. We just never knew for sure.

  Throughout my father’s years in office, the feelings and emotions were often raw. When Henry went to business school while we were still dating and not yet engaged, we came home more than once to find manila envelopes left by protesters at his door. Each one was filled with threatening notes about how he should be at war, how he should be in combat. He was the only person at the school to get them, and it was only because he was dating me.

  I remember when Matt Damon went on TV in 2006 and said that maybe Barbara and I should be sent to Iraq. I had always had a kind of celebrity crush on him; my favorite movie was Good Will Hunting. But at that moment, his words stung, in part because I did like him so much, but I also understood the meaning of his words.

  There were limits to what Barbara or I could do during those years. After 9/11, the Secret Service restricted where we could travel. There was a Secret Service rule to protect us first, no matter where we were, and even if I was the adult in charge. I know it was for our own protection, but this rule brought its own set of difficulties. In 2007, I took my DC charter school class to visit the Capitol Building. While we were touring, there was a bomb threat. Everyone was ordered to evacuate. My Secret Service detail tried to follow protocol and put me in a secure car. But I insisted that I wouldn’t leave my students, that we would all head back to school as a class, together. It was a hard moment for me and for the agents.

  One consequence of having come to adulthood in a time of war, a war that began under my father’s administration, has been that I will always look at my life and wonder if it is meaningful enough. And I will never forget that the reason I feel safe and free is because the dads and moms of other daughters did not return home.

  BARBARA

  To write about a war is a difficult task; to wr
ite about a war that your dad launched when he was president is almost impossible. I never questioned my dad’s intention to do the right thing. But when the subject at hand is war, what is the right thing? Is there even a “right thing”? And however much I might agonize over these questions, it is nothing compared to the agonies felt by my dad.

  Once the Iraq War started, there were protesters wherever my dad went on official business. Small clusters would often line the route of his motorcade. Whenever I traveled with him we never looked away, but gazed out the windows, taking in the people and the signs. It was their freedom of speech. One time, as we were traveling down a major street in Washington, I was looking out the window and all of a sudden I spotted a high school friend, Blair. He was standing with the other protesters holding a sign against the war. I wasn’t surprised to see him there; although we had never talked politics in high school, I had always known his views. But suddenly, as I saw him, he saw my dad and me. Simultaneously, Blair lowered his sign and started smiling and waving as my dad and I smiled and waved back, mouthing “Hi, Blair.” It was exactly like running into an old friend, which is in fact what happened. It is a reminder that in any debate there are humans on all sides.

  The war never left my dad. Sometimes I went with him when he visited injured troops at Walter Reed. One Easter we traveled to the large military hospital in San Antonio, Texas. The troops didn’t know my dad was coming. We walked in and saw them sitting up in hospital beds surrounded by their families. My dad went from room to room, thanking each one for his or her service and checking on them. It was moving to me, watching them, knowing they were in pain, and yet seeing that they were honored to have my dad visit, while my dad said he was the one who was honored to know them. He was always aware that each of them served because of a decision he had made, and he felt that they were more deserving of his honor than he was of theirs.