People Magazine Oops They Did It Again Barbara Jenna
The Bush Twins Desire to Gear up the Record Straight
The other morn, after too little sleep and with too much to do, Jenna Bush-league Hager plant herself dragging, and kicked herself for it. "I virtually called myself Low-Energy Jenna," she told me.
Ring a bell? Low-Energy Jeb was Donald Trump'due south taunting nickname for her uncle during the 2016 campaign. I asked her and her twin sister, Barbara, what they made of that.
"A bit like bullying on the playground," Jenna said. "We'd seen it before, only nosotros were in the start grade." She smiled, then winced, wondering aloud if she'd just been besides political, given her task on the "Today" show.
"I don't know," Barbara said. "I'm not with NBC."
Jenna the irrepressible blonde. Barbara the reserved brunette. In that one exchange, the but two people alive who are both children and grandchildren of American presidents played to the stereotypes that they were assigned long ago.
But not during the residuum of a recent dejeuner near their homes in downtown Manhattan. It was Barbara who told me with fiddling hesitation that she'd voted for Hillary Clinton and Jenna who demurred. Jenna's answers were often the thoughtful mini-essays while Barbara naughtily thrust her smartphone at me to brandish the text messages that their father, the 2nd President Bush, routinely sends them.
Those missives included memes: a cartoon bunny that blew kisses before the words "I Beloved You" exploded similar a Roman candle; a snippet of Jason Alexander every bit George Costanza in "Seinfeld." At that place were long, silly strings of colorful, giddy icons. From George Westward. Bush, who had ever worked and so hard on that Texas swagger?
"He has gone deep into the emojis," Barbara said. In her contacts he'southward identified as Popsicle. In Jenna'due south he's Jefe, which is Spanish for "boss."
Image
Nosotros but call up nosotros know the people who wind up, intentionally or not, in the spotlight. We categorize them. Trivialize them. That's maybe the main plaint and preoccupation of a joint memoir, "Sisters First," in which Jenna and Barbara each nowadays reminiscences that alternate with the other's. It will be published on Tuesday.
"What we wanted to write nigh in the book was the nuance of people that we honey," Barbara said, and they've washed just that, charting the altitude between public image and private reality. The stories that they tell are ofttimes self-serving, and they skim over the failures and wages of their father's presidency. Only they exercise make you question the caricatures that nosotros blithely traffic in, the assumptions that we breezily make and our reluctance to permit for how much the objects of our curiosity can change.
Their father's tardily-blooming obsession with painting: Even they didn't come across that one coming. He skipped the trips to art museums that their mother, Laura, took them on when they were kids.
But after his presidency ended in 2009, he got an iPhone, Barbara said, and "discovered this little drawing app and would do little sketches and send them to the states."
Jenna added: "We would say, 'Hey, Dad, Happy Lord's day, what are you up to?' And he would stick-figure a lilliputian airplane."
"With his footling face waving out of information technology," Barbara chimed in. That meant that he was flight somewhere.
The book is stippled with insider anecdotes, my favorite of which recounts a repast that Barbara and her female parent shared with Silvio Berlusconi in 2006, when he was Italy's prime number minister and Barbara was 24. (She and Jenna are at present 35.) Berlusconi complimented her on her blue eyes, told her that she should mate with his son and, for good mensurate, announced: "If I was younger, I'd accept children with you." Barbara'southward loss, apparently, just she has somehow soldiered on.
I told her that when I read that function, I immediately idea of Trump, and of his diverse comments over the years about the hotness — in Daddy's eyes — of Ivanka. She didn't accept the bait.
They're careful, she and Jenna. They accept fabricated clear over the years that they're not perfect political overlaps with the rest of their family, which is the Republican Party'due south great mod dynasty. Barbara, for example, appeared in a video endorsing aforementioned-sex marriage dorsum in 2011.
Paradigm
But that'southward not the kind of attention they usually court, and during our hours together at Café Altro Paradiso, where Jenna had ricotta dumplings and Barbara swordfish, they repeatedly registered their disgust with the divisiveness of our national conversation. They don't want to add to the ugliness, which pains Jenna all the more, she said, because she has 2 daughters, Mila, 4, and Poppy, ii.
"This moment, as a mother, feels a lilliputian frightening, because I'yard nervous to have the TV on to hear some of the rhetoric that is coming from the highest position," Jenna said, clearly not uttering the syllable "Trump" itself. "The way I speak about elections and the way I speak almost everything has inverse, considering I'g at present a role model to two footling humans who I want to teach about love and empathy and compassion."
She and Barbara, who is single, woke up together in Jenna's bed on the morning subsequently ballot nighttime, because Jenna's hubby, Henry Hager, was away, and Barbara had come over to watch the returns, which were still being counted into the wee hours. Jenna wouldn't say if those results disappointed her, but she and Barbara both expressed a fierce wish to see a female president presently.
"One hundred percent," Jenna said, and again mentioned her girls. "Mila, the other day in the car, goes, 'Mommy, Poppy rules the world,' about her baby sister. And I become: 'Well, Poppy could dominion the world. Maybe i day she could exist president.' And Mila goes, 'But, Mom, presidents are men.' She said that."
From mid-1999 to late-2001 I covered their father'southward campaign and the showtime of his presidency, and I remember seeing them on the fringes of events. I also remember the media's sometimes cheap fascination with them when they went off to college — Jenna to the Academy of Texas, Barbara to Yale — and were repeatedly defenseless consuming alcohol before they were legally quondam plenty to.
"Jenna and Tonic" was a headline in The New York Mail. People magazine went with "Double Trouble," while Newsweek opted for "Busted Again in Margaritaville." They were embarrassed, yes, but also frustrated by what they insist were exaggerations in many accounts.
Back and so I was never formally introduced to either of them. But perchance five years ago, Barbara visited me at The Times to discuss the Global Health Corps, a public-health analogue to the Peace Corps and Teach for America that sends more than than 100 recent college graduates annually into the well-nigh impoverished areas of the world. She founded it, raised coin for it, is its chief executive and spends plenty of time in those places herself.
Partly because of her focus on health but largely to stir up trouble, I asked her and Jenna, whom I was meeting for the outset time, nigh Trump's move to make it easier for employers to deny coverage of birth command. He'd appear that just hours before our lunch.
"It does feel like we're going backwards in some ways," Jenna said, "and that'south probably as much as I tin can say."
Is she pro-choice?
"I tin't say," she answered. "I'd exist in problem at work."
Barbara?
"I am very for women having everything they need to live healthy, dignified lives," she told me.
"Is that a yes?" I asked.
"I call up women should be able to make the right determination that would allow them to alive — truly allow them to alive," she said.
Jenna shook her head: "He might have wanted a yes or no." Indeed he might have.
Epitome
Their father opposed ballgame rights but their mother stayed mum, vaguely identifying herself as pro-option merely afterwards the couple left the White House. That approximated the trajectory of her mother-in-law, the erstwhile first lady Barbara Bush, who pops upward often in "Sisters First" and, like the rest of the association, isn't exactly who you expect.
Regal? Entitled? Not according to the account of the twins' visit to the White Firm shortly later the first President Bush-league's ballot, when they were 7. They discovered the bowling lane in the basement and, using the phone in that location, asked a staffer to bring them peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
"We were like Eloise in our Plaza!" Jenna writes. "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 dwelling house, and we were never to do that again."
Laura Bush-league is "tranquility and bookish," Barbara writes, but and so again non: "Below her flats and cardigans, my mom is in fact our cupboard hippie and Rastafarian." She dragged Barbara, and then a teenager, to a reggae concert in Austin, Tex.
Barbara also writes that while her father can be "loud and unthoughtful," he "outreads us all." After Barbara went through her start devastating romantic breakup a few years ago, he called or texted her daily, "just to check in, just to share the brunt with me."
The twins portray him as surprisingly self-effacing.
During his presidency, they spotted an anti-Bush bumper sticker with a withering put-down, and they not but told him well-nigh it merely turned information technology into a running family unit joke. "Now," Barbara writes, "this line comes upwardly regularly when we want to rib our onetime-leader-of-the-gratuitous-world father: 'Well, somewhere in Texas a hamlet is missing its idiot.' "
Subsequently Jenna, covering the Golden Globes for NBC, conflated two movies near African-Americans by referring to "Hidden Fences," he quickly texted her to remind her that where exact pratfalls were concerned, he'd been in that location, done that and survived. She would, as well.
Jenna and Barbara told me that for every bit long as they can remember, he has brought their mother coffee in bed every morning, including when he was in the White House, because he'due south ever up first. He brings them coffee in bed when they visit.
They seemed to me a long, long way from Margaritaville. They're not the Manhattan party fixtures they could hands be. They show considerable restraint. They too show generosity.
Back in January, as Malia and Sasha Obama prepared to motion out of the White House, Jenna and Barbara wrote them a letter that best-selling the challenges that they'd already faced and that they would continue to confront, including "harsh criticism of your parents by people who had never fifty-fifty met them."
"Your precious parents," the Bush twins wrote, "were reduced to headlines."
And so were their parents. Their grandparents. Their low-energy uncle, Jeb. It goes with the territory. But it's besides part of what makes that ground so forbidding, and scares many good people away.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/bush-jenna-barbara-sisters-book.html