Is a White House
wedding in the works? Jenna Bush, one of President
George W. Bush's twin daughters, is engaged to be married to
her longtime boyfriend, Henry Hager, the White House
announced Thursday. Asked if the two were getting
married in the Rose Garden, Sally McDonough, press
secretary for first lady Laura Bush, replied: ''They have
not set any details, date or place.''
Jenna Bush, 25,
and Hager, 29, were engaged Wednesday in Maine, she said.
The two have been dating for several years, and Hager is
often seen at Jenna Bush's side at Bush family
functions and formal events, such as a White House
dinner in November 2005 in honor of Britain's Prince Charles
and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Hager will be
returning to school this fall to complete his master's
degree in business administration at the University of
Virginia. He has an undergraduate degree from Wake
Forest University. Hager, who has been a White House
aide and worked on Bush's reelection campaign, is the son of
John and Maggie Hager of Richmond, Va. His father is
chairman of the Republican Party in Virginia, former
assistant secretary of the Education Department's
office of special education, former lieutenant governor of
Virginia, and former director of Virginia's Office of
Commonwealth Preparedness.
After earning a
degree in English in 2004 from the University of Texas at
Austin, Jenna Bush spent a year and a half teaching at Elsie
Whitlow Stokes, a public charter elementary school in
the Washington area. After that, she worked for 10
months in Latin America as an intern for UNICEF. She
worked with adolescents in Argentina, Paraguay, and Panama,
where she taught at a shelter. She spent this summer
teaching at the charter school and traveling to Africa
with her mother, first lady Laura Bush. She and her
mother, also a schoolteacher, are collaborating on a
children's picture storybook to be published in spring
2008. Proceeds are to be donated to two education
programs: Teach for America and the New Teacher
Project.
Jenna Bush also
has her own book coming out September 28. Ana's Story, based on her time working for UNICEF,
tells of a 17-year-old single mother who is
HIV-positive. Some of the book proceeds will go to UNICEF.
The twins, each
named for a grandmother, spent most of Bush's first term
avoiding the media glare but did not always succeed. There
was an embarrassing run-in with the law in Texas for
underage drinking in May 2001, their father's first
year in the White House. It was Jenna Bush's second
offense for violating state alcoholic beverage laws, coming
after a no contest plea two weeks earlier, and the
first for Barbara, who holds a degree in humanities
from Yale University. And Jenna, full of spunk, was
photographed sticking her tongue out at the media during a
campaign stop in Missouri in 2004.
The last time
there was a White House wedding was in 1994.The Rose Garden
was crammed with 250 chairs and a white canopy for the
wedding of Nicole Boxer, daughter of Sen. Barbara
Boxer, a Democrat from California, and Tony Rodham,
the younger brother of then-first lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton, now a senator from New York and Democratic
presidential hopeful. In 1971, President Nixon's
daughter, Tricia, was married in style to Harvard law
student Edward Cox. She walked down the staircase of the
columned South Portico and danced at a reception in the
ornate East Room.
Other
presidential daughters to have all or part of their weddings
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue include: President
Johnson's daughter, Luci Baines Johnson Nugent, who
had her wedding reception at the White House in August
1966, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, who married her husband in
the East Room in December 1967; and Alice Roosevelt
Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore
Roosevelt, who was wed at the White House in the early
1900s. (AP)