JENNA BUSH WEDDING
Bush wedding quite different from past celebrations
Private event, held away from Washington, a marked contrast from Beltway nuptials of the past.
By Peter Mongillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The weddings of first children have historically been so public and political that Jenna Bush's quiet Crawford ceremony planned for tonight is a significant departure from the norm.
Today's wedding of the first twin to Virginian political heir Henry Hager at the family ranch has unleashed a barrage of images and stories on past presidential weddings, from Luci Baines Johnson's large-scale ceremony and White House reception to Tricia Nixon's classic Rose Garden event — mainly because the Bush family has released few details about the wedding plans, and the public seems eager to latch on to something.
 Rayc/STF Jenna Bush
The bride chose an outdoor wedding.  Henry Hager
The groom also has political roots.  LBJ LIBRARY Lynda and Charles Robb's military-style wedding happened while President Johnson faced a country at odds about war.  Warren K. Leffler/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS When President Richard Nixon watched his daughter Tricia marry Edward Cox in 1971, it was seen as an image boost for Nixon. |
America has always been somewhat infatuated with the lives of first children — think of the images of "John John" hiding under President Kennedy's desk or the media attention bestowed upon Amy Carter, who was 9 when her father entered the White House. The weddings of presidents' children represent, among other things, an opportunity for the public to share in a practice that is distinctly human and widely valued.
"The White House is basically seen as America's house, so if something happens there, it is a public event," says Katherine Jellison, associate professor of history at Ohio University and author of "It's Our Day," an examination of America's fascination with the white wedding. "It's like a nationally sanctioned pageant."
But Jenna Bush's wedding does not arrive amid a blizzard of Washington insiders bickering over assigned tables and photos ready for public consumption. The 27-year-old teacher and author has expressed her desire for a private affair for months, and this event is in a sense a final whisper in what has been a very quiet decade for the Bush twins. Until Bush's recent foray into books (she's now the author of two, including a new children's book written with her mother), she and sister Barbara's most prominent moments in the nearly eight years of their father's presidency have been related to mishaps at bars in Austin and elsewhere.
This penchant for privacy stems in part from the president's own experience.
"George W. Bush was himself the child of a president and is uniquely equipped to understand how intense the emotional toll and how thorough the collateral damage can be to members of the family who are within proximity of the president," says former Austinite Robert Draper, author of last year's "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush."
Draper, a correspondent for GQ, adds that the Bush family's desire for privacy for the nuptials is also rooted in the twins' reluctance to assume a public role during their father's political career. This feeling was so strong that Jenna and Barbara did not attend the inaugural ceremonies for their father when he became Texas governor in 1995. Only during the 2004 presidential reelection campaign did Jenna and Barbara get involved politically out of a desire to do all they could to help their father.
Even if Jenna Bush's wish had been for a White House wedding, it is unclear whether the president would have had much to gain from such an event, despite the controversial assertion from historian and author Doug Wead that "only finding Osama bin Laden could do more" to help the president's approval rating. Wead, author of "All the Presidents' Children" made this claim in August, when he predicted that cable news outlets would fight each other over rights to broadcast the nuptials.
The wedding comes at the end of George W. Bush's presidency rather than as he is gearing up for a possible re-election, as presidents Johnson and Nixon were when their daughters wed. Lynda Bird Johnson's 1967 marriage to Marine Charles Robb in the East Room of the White House came as the furor over the war in Vietnam was escalating and before her father's March 1968 decision not to run. There was a distinctly martial element to the event, evident in the title of NBC's coverage of the event: "Candlelight and Crossed Swords."
"Johnson could showcase a wedding that emphasized the fact that members of his family were fighting in the war," says Jellison of Robb, who was about to enter battle in Vietnam at the time of the wedding.
Likewise, Tricia Nixon's 1971 wedding at the White House occurred at an opportune moment for an administration that was thinking about ways to get the country to vote for another four years. Nixon's infamous White House recordings reveal strategizing related to the wedding, and a memo written by chief counsel Charles Colson relates his opinion that the wedding was one of the biggest events of the year in terms of selling the image of the president, according to Jellison.
Bush's wedding lacks the timing of the Johnson and Nixon weddings, although it's also taking place during an unpopular war.
"This is as apolitical a social event as the wedding of a president's daughter can be," Draper says. "It comes in 2008, at the very end of his presidency, when there's frankly not much that can be done to salvage the president's low approval rating." Draper, who covered Bush for many years as a reporter for Texas Monthly, thinks that even if there was a way for the president to play the event for political gain, it's not in his nature to do so.
The importance of the state wedding can be traced back to the rule of monarchies, when a wedding could play a role in deciding what language or religion would be dominant, says Wead.
The first White House wedding was that of President Monroe's daughter Maria Hester in March 1820 — a highly formal affair that left out even the president's Cabinet. Efforts to heal some of the resulting wounds by offering additional receptions were thwarted when one of the hosts, naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur, died from injuries suffered in a duel, according to Wead.
The 1906 wedding of Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice (who later attended the weddings of both of President Johnson's daughters) was likewise a sought-after ticket, with politicians and dignitaries clamoring for invitations. "The story covered every single line of the front page of The Washington Post," says Wead.
pmongillo@statesman.com; 445-3696
