August 17, 2007
White (House) Wedding Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 AM EST From the White House this week comes the news that one of the President’s daughters, Jenna Bush, is engaged. Ms. Bush will be marrying Henry Hager, a former White House intern and Bush campaign worker four years her senior. The President’s daughter has received no small share of grief from the press during her father’s time in the White House, and this hasn’t exactly stopped with the wedding announcement. The Washington Post, for example, takes care to remember Laura Bush’s description of Mr. Hager in February 2005: “This is not a serious boyfriend.” Then again, it’s probably not right to blame the Post for dredging up that quote—after all, the First Lady was the one who offered it on national television. The Post also speculates on whether a Bush wedding would take place at the White House: “Jenna would be the first presidential daughter to wed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. since Tricia Nixon married Ed Cox in 1971. Glamorous, sure, but the smart money is on Texas or Maine—the White House just isn’t the place Jenna considers home.” It’s true that Ms. Bush would be the first presidential daughter to marry at the White House in 36 years. Hers would not be the first wedding to take place there in that interval, however. In 1994 Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, was married to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, in an event at the White House. Perhaps Jenna Bush will avoid a fully presidential wedding because of the unlucky precedent Rodham and Boxer set: The couple divorced in 2001. The history of White House weddings is a mixed one. When Cox and Nixon married in 1971, it was indeed a glamorous affair that brought favorable coverage to the First Family. The couple remains married, with a son, and Cox briefly ran for the U.S. Senate in New York last year. The White House wedding most deserving of fame is surely the only one with a President as the groom: In 1886, Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in a ceremony there. The wedding was not untouched by scandal. Folsom was 27 years younger than the President and was the daughter of one of his former law partners. Folsom and the President seemed an ungainly match, not least of all because of the rumors of a shady personal life that dogged Cleveland’s first national election campaign. Despite this shaky start, Frances Folsom Cleveland ended up as a successful first lady and gave birth to two little Clevelands in the White House. I wonder, if the Bushes decide against a White House wedding, whether it might not be in part in order to avoid comparisons with one that took place almost exactly 40 years ago. In 1967 Lynda Bird Johnson wed there, marrying the Marine Corps veteran and Bronze Star recipient Charles Robb. A newsreel about the event is available here. In the midst of an unpopular war, and as his own popularity gradually disintegrated, Lyndon Johnson’s daughter married a dashing example of the best the military had to offer. As her father struggles with a Johnson-like predicament, Bush’s daughter is engaged to a former aide to Karl Rove, who is also the son of a tobacco lobbyist and GOP apparatchik. (John H. Hager, coincidentally, served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor in the 1990s, while Chuck Robb was its junior senator.) There’s something appropriate about that contrast, but I doubt it’s one the President would want to highlight.
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