In Italy in 2001, I accompanied my parents to the Vatican to meet Pope John Paul II. I followed the strict dress code and wore long black sleeves, but I was allowed to leave my hair uncovered because I was still considered a girl. We were ushered in and my breath was taken away as we walked through the enormous, intricate, sacred Vatican to reach our meeting room. While the tourists got to pause and look around, we were rushed through elaborate spaces. There was only a set amount of time on the schedule allowed for walking. After we arrived at our papal audience, I tried my best to focus on the conversation while also slyly glancing around, hoping to absorb every detail. Sadly, we saw the Pope late in his reign—when Parkinson’s had taken hold of his body and his ability to communicate had been hampered. With a clock and twenty other people in the room, there was no time for me to say much of anything. The questions I wish I could have asked—what were his hobbies, his regrets, his passions, who did he miss the most—would have been met with silence as he was hardly able to speak.
But the few times we stepped outside the strict official protocol, it was a very different story.
On a trip to Italy in 2006, to accompany American athletes to the Olympic Winter Games, my mother and I had a private lunch with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. Almost immediately, Berlusconi, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man, began calling me “Bella” and musing over my blue eyes. He told me that I should have children with his son, right after telling me, “If I was younger, I’d have children with you.” A few sentences after that, the female translator stopped translating.
Then there was the one night I will puzzle over for the rest of my life, a night in the summer of 2008, when I found myself in Maine at Walker’s Point at the same time as Russian head of state Vladimir Putin. During my dad’s presidency, no other heads of state were invited to Walker’s Point (minus Sarkozy, who stopped by in shorts to say hi, as his family was vacationing and boating nearby). Putin stayed in my great-grandmother’s house across the street, barely fifty feet from the main house’s front door. It is the house my aunt and cousins stay in—and one I’ve stayed in myself. The invitation to Walker’s Point was intentional, designed to be a chance for Dad and Putin to talk about missile defense in Poland in a relaxed setting. (Russia was opposed; Dad was pressing that the missiles were meant to protect Europe from Iran and were not being directed at Russia.) My father, Gampy, and Putin had been out on a boat fishing—the Russian president caught the only fish.
I arrived with my mom for dinner in the familiar dining room, in a white linen dress and my hair still wet from a day in the ocean. Like every other dinner, Gampy was at the head of the table, but this time there were two interpreters and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Putin came dressed for Maine, a collared polo shirt beneath a sports jacket. The meal was messy lobster. And as the table-seating gods would have it, I was seated near President Vladimir Putin.
My mind froze. What does one say to make small talk at dinner, especially when one does not speak Russian? I asked about his two daughters, both talented musicians living in Moscow. I needed another line of conversation, so I asked, “President Putin, do you have any siblings?” “No,” came his reply. I had an image in my mind of big Russian families, like the endless nests of brightly painted matryoshka dolls, and so I said, “Wow. You’re an only child?”
“No. I had a brother, but never knew him. He died before I was born.” And in English, without a translator, Putin told me the story of his family’s life before his birth. His father, a Russian soldier, had fought against the Nazis during World War II on the frigid battlefields near what was then Leningrad and is now once again St. Petersburg. After being injured by a grenade thrown directly at him by a Nazi soldier, Putin’s father struggled to safety and eventually managed to reach a hospital. The Putin family already had a son, Putin’s older brother, who had been born during the war. But food was scarce and conditions were terrible. Leningrad was being starved. The Putins’ baby was taken from his home and placed in a form of foster care, where he became ill and died. The Putins never laid eyes on their child again. Putin’s mother, mourning her son, returned home and fell ill. In the bitter cold, death was rampant. Russian medics with carts moved from building to building, removing dead bodies and rolling them off for burial. Putin’s mother’s limp body was added to the cart. Walking home, Putin’s father saw his wife, and saw her take a shallow breath. He pleaded to keep her, to which the medic replied, “That’s just more work—we’ll have to come back for her dead body soon.” But Putin’s father prevailed. He carried his wife back to their frigid home. She survived and after the war gave birth to a second baby boy, Vladimir Putin. “And so,” said the Russian prime minister, “I have no siblings.”
Perhaps my favorite international journey was the last one I took with my dad, to the Olympics in Beijing. We knew before we landed, as the US media often reported, that electronic devices would likely be bugged and each room probably had a listening device. We didn’t bring our cell phones. I’d wake up at 3 a.m. with terrible jet lag and wander into the suite’s living room for breakfast, only to find my dad doing the same thing. Punchy from lack of sleep, we laughed hysterically, knowing we needed to keep our conversation to the most mundane topics, such as please pass the cereal. Everything else had to be pantomimed, which made for many moments of muffled laughter as my dad, my uncle Marvin, and I played a three-way game of charades. One time we returned to the hotel and found three men in Marvin’s bathroom, fixing “something.” Were they really fixing something, or adjusting a listening device or retrieving a tape of our shared conversation? We will never know.
During that trip, my father spent time with many of the American athletes. The US men’s basketball team wanted my dad to stop by before a game. I went with him and stood in the huddle next to LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Jason Kidd—these giant, athletic stars—feeling like a doll-sized miniature. My dad looked over as I was wedged next to LeBron for a photo and said, “She’s your little mascot.” And for some reason, these iconic basketball players started laughing and calling me “our little mascot.” I’m sure they’ve long since forgotten, but I never will. When I’m ninety, I’ll still remember the day when I was, however briefly, a US Olympic basketball team mascot.
Don’t Go. Stay Here.
JENNA
My first kiss was in the fourth grade during a game of spin the bottle played in my friend Lindsay’s backyard. It was also the first coed party I had ever been invited to. I had spent the afternoon leading up to it lying on the white fluffy carpet in my bedroom, listening to Wilson Phillips on my purple CD player, and scanning the pages of an Archie comic book, searching for an outfit inspiration from the raven-haired, daringly dressed Veronica and the somewhat preppy, perky blond Betty. (I probably ended up wearing something I had worn to school earlier that week.)
Lindsay seemed worldly to me; she had an older sister and her parents were puppeteers. Adding to the aura of preteen sophistication, the party was at night. All the guests were prompt, and by the time the sun had barely dimmed, we were standing in the backyard. The boys and girls had clustered on opposite sides of the patio, divided by anxiety and opportunity.
Egged on by Lindsay’s older sister and the fact that the boys were fifth graders, we agreed to play spin the bottle, a game so daring we had only heard of it on television. The big glass bottle would rotate around the circle and slowly stop. One by one, couples ran behind a bush and then returned, blushing and laughing. I was kissed by John Henderson, who was enough of a gentleman to ask me to rollerblade with him to 7-Eleven before moving on to greener pastures and a prettier girl named Catherine. (In the perfect postscript to fourth-grade spin the bottle, he recently messaged me on Twitter!)
I recovered from that first encounter, but dating and boys didn’t seem to become any less confusing as I grew older. There was the middle school boyfriend who gave me a cute silver frog ring on a horse carriage ride in Central Park when we went on a cla
ss trip. Was he the prince? There was an older high school boyfriend whom I adored. We would talk late into the night, on my own phone line. It was a secret we shared. He asked me to the prom, and I went on a special trip to Dallas with my mom to search for the perfect dress. I finally settled on a long black sequined gown that I hung expectantly in my closet. I had circled the date on my calendar. Then my boyfriend and I had a rocky week, and he disinvited me. He flew in a beautiful girl, who had already graduated from Austin High, to be his date. I stayed home. Eventually, my dad convinced me to put on the dress and play a CD, and we danced around the governor’s mansion living room, our own makeshift prom.
In college, I faced an entirely new set of complications. Dating in general can be awkward. Dating while men pretending to be college students, dressed in khaki pants and carrying backpacks and the occasional fanny pack, followed me in black Suburbans was not all that fun. I always felt a hint of embarrassment when I brought a new date around. Was I being subtly judged? If I went out with a few boys, was I playing the field? All of this led me to stay in an imperfect relationship for too long. I continued to date one college boy for years, even after he kissed another girl in front of my face.
When I was twenty-three, I met Henry Hager. He is six foot four, so there was almost no way not to notice him when he walked into an office at my dad’s campaign headquarters in Washington, DC. I’m fortunate that he also noticed me. We survived our first hilarious dates. Pretty fast, I was smitten with him, and I hoped he was smitten with me too.
I invited him to a White House Christmas party. At one point when we were dancing, most likely caught up in the festive spirit, he whispered, “I love you.” He blushed; instead of playing it cool, he had inadvertently let the words slip. But I took those three words and ran with them. I said, “I know! Let’s get married!” At which point, Henry turned bright red. We had been dating for three months.
But there were two not-so-small truths that led to my desire to get married: I did love him, and I had been steeped in my own parents’ crazy love story, which was a whirlwind. For years, Barbara and I heard stories of how our dad went to Maine to visit his parents about a month after he met our mom, and as soon as he arrived, he was already on the phone, trying desperately to reach her. When he heard that she wasn’t home, he left Kennebunkport and got on a plane back to Texas because he couldn’t stand to be away from her and didn’t want her to fall in love with someone else. He proposed barely six weeks later and they were married in three months. I had heard the stories for so many years that I basically assumed I would follow the same romantic path, never mind that my parents were turning thirty-one during their romance and I was twenty-three.
Henry is rational and levelheaded. He didn’t propose after six weeks or three months, and we continued to date over an entire blissful winter. It was my first long winter on the East Coast, and I often went out without a jacket; I didn’t even feel the cold. The next winter, I said to a fellow teacher that it seemed frigid, and she replied that the previous winter had been worse. I hadn’t noticed. All I could feel was the heat and happiness coming from Henry. We dated all of 2005 and into 2006. I was teaching, and Henry was working for the Department of Commerce. Then came the moment of truth: Henry was going to go back to the University of Virginia to get his business degree and I had decided to move to Latin America to work for UNICEF.
Except I hadn’t quite decided. I said to Henry, “I won’t go to Latin America if you propose; I will stay here.” Almost every time Henry would say something sweet, such as, “Oh, I can’t believe we’re going to be apart,” my response was to raise the stakes: “If you propose to me, we won’t have to be apart. I will just cancel my plans.”
This had been our running dialogue when one random Tuesday in early May, Henry suggested that we go to dinner. But this wasn’t a “Let’s grab a burger or a salad” dinner. He had made reservations at Asia Nora, which was a well-known downtown restaurant in DC across from the Ritz-Carlton hotel, and he asked me to meet him there. I started thinking: It’s fancy; it’s a Tuesday; I have school; a lot of thought has gone into this date. It was also very unusual for us to go out to a fancy dinner, and definitely not in the middle of the week. And it was not long before I was supposed to leave for Latin America. So even before the hostess showed us to our table and handed us our menus, it felt like an occasion.
Asia Nora was known for many things, but one of its signature creations was homemade fortune cookies. You could call the restaurant and get the fortune personalized. Henry had read about this and thought it would be romantic to have one made for me.
Over organic Asian food, our conversation was light and full of laughter. The entrée plates had been cleared; we were at the end of the meal, finishing chocolate mousse, when out came a server with two glasses of champagne. Henry Hager is many things, but he is not a champagne guy. And did I mention it was a Tuesday? As I stared across the table at Henry, whose face looked perplexed, I noticed that tied to my champagne glass was a little piece of paper. The paper looked just like what you might find inside a fortune cookie. I uncurled the piece and read in tiny typed letters: “Don’t go. Stay here.” The miniature message could mean only one thing: Henry was proposing, and that was exactly what I said.
Now Henry looked worried. His next words were “Wait! What? No, no!”
It turned out that Asia Nora either ran out of cookies or Henry didn’t call early enough, because instead of having a piece of paper inside a cookie, they had used champagne glasses. More than that, they had messed up the message. Henry had told them to write, “Go, and when you come back, I’ll be right here.” It had been dramatically shortened to: “Don’t go. Stay here.”
So, I’m sitting at a table, in a public restaurant, saying, “Are you proposing?” while Henry is shaking his head furiously and saying, “No, no.” He couldn’t get the words out fast enough. He kept trying to tell me, “This was supposed to be a fortune cookie and they got it wrong. This is the wrong message.”
The whole event was a lot like those posters that you use to teach kids about emotions: I started off shocked, surprised, happy, saying, “Yes, yes, I will marry you.” And then I realized he was not asking, so I was mortified, and then angry, followed by hysterical laughter. After that, it was “Check, please. As fast as possible.”
When your dad is in the White House, it’s not just you and your boyfriend having a conversation in a restaurant. It’s you, your boyfriend, and every other patron within earshot. (Thankfully, this was about two years before the advent of the smartphone.) The two women sitting next to us called the Washington Post and relayed the whole moment, including, apparently, their views of what we ate. So two mornings later, I awoke to a write-up in the Reliable Source, the gossip column in the Post’s Style section.
A Champagne Bottle Was Popped, the Question Was Not
Jenna Bush has been stepping out with Henry Hager for a year and a half now, a point when any young couple might start mulling questions about the future, so it’s natural if there was maybe a little frisson as they sat down to dinner Tuesday at Asia Nora.
The 24-year-old teacher (beaded light-green tunic, dark slacks) and her beau (who turns 28 next week) ordered a lavish meal, fellow patrons said. Then, as they shared a chocolate mousse, the wait staff brought champagne—Jenna’s flute with a mysterious note taped to the bottom. She read it and burst out laughing. “I thought you were proposing!” she hollered. “I nearly [soiled] my pants!”
Who knows what the note said; witnesses gleaned that it was an inside joke Henry wanted to deliver in a fortune cookie but didn’t get ordered in time. The restaurant’s not saying.
I don’t remember actually saying any of that. I also didn’t stop to think about people listening. But whatever I did or didn’t say or do, the story, as reported by “witnesses,” lives on in the Washington Post archives. Asia Nora closed a little over a year later, and although still not yet betrothed, Henry and I remained happily together.
It was the summer of 2007, and Henry and I joined my family at Camp David, the presidential retreat, for the weekend around the Fourth of July. At Camp David, everyone has their own little cabin. The first evening, when Barbara was in her cabin, Henry called her, asking if she was alone and if she could talk.
Barbara wondered why her sister’s boyfriend wanted to have a heart-to-heart. Henry said, “I’m going to tell your dad I want to marry Jenna, but I wanted to make sure it was all right with you.” This is why I adore Henry. He knows me well enough to realize that my heart is intertwined with Barbara’s. He wanted her blessing first.
The next day, Barbara and I and Henry and a few friends who were visiting were going to watch a movie. The only ones who weren’t going to watch were my parents. Just as we were about to sit down, Henry said, “I don’t feel that well.” I rolled my eyes in a slightly unsympathetic way and said, “Why, what’s wrong?”
Henry said his stomach hurt. He went back to his cabin while we started the movie. And by now his stomach had really started to hurt. He was planning to ask my dad for his permission to marry me while we were distracted by the movie. Right away, he called my dad’s cabin and asked to walk over to speak to President Bush. In the background he heard my dad say that he was napping and to tell him to come by in about an hour and a half. Henry put on the television to watch tennis. He started pacing back and forth in the cabin. By now, his stomach was tied in macramé knots. He found a Bible next to the door and started reading it, hoping there would be some sort of miraculous intervention.
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