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| It is Mother's Day, and Barbara and Jenna Bush, the president's twin daughters, are, fittingly, spending the evening in Manhattan with their mother. The first lady's in town for official business the next day, and her daughters have some too, sort of: a photo shoot, their first ever, for which they're trying on clothes in a room at the Central Park South hotel where all three are staying. Barbara, who like her sister will graduate from college in two weeks, is a bit preoccupied—she has a long night ahead finishing a paper on Czech novelist Milan Kundera, and another to write the next day for the same English seminar at Yale. Still, she manages to find a shimmery fitted Zac Posen to step into, while Jenna goes straight for a pair of Joe's jeans and a white jacket that accentuates her tan. The girls, who call each other "Sister," are having fun rifling through the racks, approving or nixing each other's choices, but then they get to a flotilla of enormous debutante-style ball gowns. This is clearly not their preferred look—both arrived in skinny jeans and little tops; Barbara, the avowed clotheshorse of the two, says she "lives" in her jade-green, pointed-toe Marni flats and is far more drawn to the elegant chiffon evening looks of Narciso Rodriguez and Carolina Herrera. But they are unfailingly polite and apparently good sports, so they agree to give the gowns a go. When their mother sticks her head in to say she's about to order dinner from room service, she takes in Jenna's poufy cream tulle: "That looks like what I wore to my seventh-grade dance." Jenna looks at her sister, whose tight-bodiced white satin number boasts a skirt better suited to a Velazquez infanta. "Mom," she asks, "do we look like cupcakes?" "Yes," says the first lady, "you do." They are laughing, but the image of privileged debutante—not to mention cupcake—is one that the sisters, with the help of their mother, have long tried to avoid. Unlike their first cousin Lauren Bush, a model who was presented in Paris at the Crillon Haute Couture Ball (in miles of Dior tulle) and who is represented by the Elite agency's celebrity division, they have shunned the spotlight and all the finery that it requires—Barbara doesn't own a long dress, and Jenna says her school uniform consisted of flip-flops, jeans, and C & C T-shirts. ("I wear Lela Rose," she says, speaking of the Texas-born designer both girls wore to their father's inauguration. "And I dress up when I'm in New York, but in Austin there's really no need.") College freshmen when their father was elected, they were granted privacy by the mainstream press largely because their parents worked hard to keep them from becoming fair game, not once using them in political ads or trotting them out on the campaign trail. When Jenna accompanied her mother on an official trip to Europe in 2002, the Secret Service shielded her from view as she emerged from Air Force One by holding up long garment bags on each side of her. And when Barbara joined her parents a year later on a five-country tour of Africa it went largely unreported. Before they embark on their own careers, however, Barbara and Jenna are about to make a different kind of debut by joining their father's campaign. "It's not like he called me up and asked me," Jenna says. "They've never wanted to throw us into that world, and I think our decision probably shocked them. But I love my dad, and I think I'd regret it if I didn't do this." The president himself is naturally delighted. "The thing I'm most excited about is that I get to spend the last campaign of my life with two girls I love," he tells me in a June interview. "It's an experience we'll be able to talk about for years to come." Despite their enthusiasm, the girls also had to consider that any other job they might take would almost certainly be viewed through the prism of politics. Barbara, who majored in humanities at Yale, plans to sign up for a program in which she'd be working in Eastern Europe and Africa with children afflicted with AIDS; Jenna, who got an English degree from the University of Texas, plans to teach at a charter school. But neither wanted her choice to become campaign fodder. "We thought it would be better," Barbara says, with typical reticence, "to wait until after November." So it is that in these months before the election, the country will get their first real glimpse of the first daughters. Until now, they've been best known for their inevitable but sparse tabloid appearances and the much-mentioned reports of their 2001 run-in with the law for underage drinking. Into this void has stepped everyone from late-night talk-show hosts to journalists, all of whom have felt free—sometimes shockingly so—to define the twins themselves. The first lady's unofficial biographer, Ann Gerhart, went so far as to condemn them for a long list of imagined offenses ranging from not showing "their faces at the White House" often enough to lacking "empathy toward the struggles and responsibilities facing their mother and father" (they are, she wrote, all "noblesse" and no "oblige"). This is tough, presumptuous stuff. "I'm sure it's annoying sometimes," says Jenna's close friend and fellow U.T. grad Mia Baxter. "But she just doesn't let it get to her. I don't think I could handle it as well, but she stays totally herself." In their new roles—which will include everything from pitching in at the Arlington headquarters of the Bush campaign to making occasional appearances on the trail—they will finally have the chance to define themselves. Many political observers think their presence may also help redefine their father, that the bright and unjaded first daughters will serve to humanize and soften the image of a controversial wartime president. If it works, it won't be the first time. In 1969 so staunch an enemy of Richard Nixon as Norman Mailer was forced to admit that "a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad" after observing Tricia and Julie Nixon at the Republican convention. The elaborate White House weddings of Luci Baines Johnson and Tricia Nixon made the covers of Time and Newsweek, glowing coverage that stood in stark contrast to the batterings their fathers routinely received. Chelsea Clinton, who did not turn eighteen until the middle of her father's second term and was thus granted even more privacy than the Bush daughters, nonetheless served to put a brave face on the Clintons' family life: the day after her father admitted to the nation that he had lied about Monica, she became the literal link between her parents as they walked to the helicopter on the White House lawn. Karenna Gore Schiff did more than just make campaign appearances; she was an influential adviser, famously urging the employment of Naomi Wolf to turn her father into an alpha male. And this go-round, from the start of the Democratic primaries, John Kerry's daughter Vanessa and stepson Chris Heinz have traveled extensively to rouse the youth vote on the candidate's behalf. There will likely not be any political advice from either Bush twin—they say they love their father, not the game—but at 22, they should definitely be able to connect with America's young electorate. They drink soy lattes from Starbucks, and their favorite restaurants serve sushi; they are not averse to such adjectives as awesome, and one of their highest compliments is that someone is "hilarious." They are far better traveled than their parents were at their age—on Barbara's graduation trip, she and three friends visited Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Prague; Jenna went with Mia Baxter to Spain, where they walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela (the Way of Saint James), a five-day, 75-mile segment of the spiritual trek through the Pyrenees on a medieval footpath. But both twins remain essentially all-American girls who grew up going to summer camp and public schools, who profess to "love" costume parties and Mexican food, who spent four years in college while their father was in the White House and still managed to come out well educated and unscathed. "Laura and I did everything we could to take the pressure off them, but they're the ones who handled it well," the president tells me. "They were relaxed about it. They made friends. They worked hard in school, and they enjoyed themselves. What I worried about most was if they'd be able to have a rich college experience, and they did. It was really their doing." Of the two, Barbara generally has been viewed as the quieter, more bookish twin, while Jenna is seen as more boisterous and fun-loving—the White House expressed irritation last year when the Associated Press revealed that her secret service code name was Twinkle. But their mother says that each shares some of the more obvious qualities ascribed to the other, and it's true that they often finish each other's sentences, falling out laughing when they do: "See, we are twins!" Barbara, says Mrs. Bush, "is also fun-loving and fun to be with, while Jenna loves to read and is a very good creative writer." In fact, both are described as "comedians" by their friends; it's just that Barbara is rarely first on the stage. "She is very self-deprecating and doesn't like a lot of attention," says Blair Leake, who spent a year with Barbara in Rome on a high-school study program. "But once she knows you and feels intimate with you, she can be really funny." Jenna, likewise, "is not one bit pretentious," says Baxter. "But she is the lively character of our group." Indeed, when Jenna hosted a circus-themed costume party at the family's ranch in May, she went, not surprisingly, as the ringmaster. "I hung out with the bearded ladies," she says, while Barbara opted for a Yale post-exam trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "Jenna's more out there, more gregarious," says Regan Gammon, a lifelong friend of Laura Bush's and the godmother of Jenna. "She is not so guarded. Barbara, by nature, is going to think about it a little longer before she says it. Jenna is like her father and Barbara is like her mother—I think that's apparent to anybody who meets them." Jenna Bush, named after her maternal grandmother, was born one minute after her sister on November 25, 1981, in Dallas. (Jenna Welch, whom Barbara refers to as "such a cute little grammy," is 84 and still lives in Midland, though she is a frequent visitor to the White House.) When Vogue's photographer expresses "amazement" at the precise timing of their births, Jenna wisecracks that "it's not that amazing—it was a C-section." But their delivery was no joke. During Laura Bush's pregnancy she developed toxemia, a potentially life-threatening condition for both mother and child. In an interview during the last campaign the president told me he'd been beside himself with worry, but that his wife had given him confidence: "She turned to me and said, 'These babies will be fine; they will stay with me until they're big enough to emerge.' There was a determination and grit, an unbelievable will to protect the children." In 1987, the young family moved from Midland to Washington, where George W. Bush worked on his father's presidential campaign. Two years later, when they returned to Texas, it was to Dallas, where Bush was part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. When the girls were thirteen, their father became governor, and they moved to Austin. Through it all, the twins say, they have remained "best friends," but as they grew older their differences sent them in different directions. When Jenna was sixteen, for example, she forwent camp in favor of a study program in Spain, where she lived with a family in Cadiz, learned Spanish, and met her friend Mia (after their recent Spanish trek, they traveled to the coast, where they had a reunion with other participants in the program). "The man was a soccer announcer, and I shared a room with their little girl," she tells me. "It was great." At sixteen, Barbara, who also studied Spanish (she took it every semester at Yale), chose to spend a year at the St. Stephens School in Rome, which made news during her father's first presidential campaign when it was revealed that the only European country the then-governor had ever been to was Italy—to visit his daughter. By the time Barbara rejoined Jenna at Austin High, it was already time to apply to college, so she applied to nine, including Princeton, Columbia, and, of course, Yale. She didn't yet know where she wanted to go ("I knew my grades were good enough that I'd get into at least some of them"), but she knew it wasn't home. "I love Texas, but I wanted a change. I like going to places by myself, and I knew so many people who were going to U.T.—all my friends from junior high and high school." Jenna, on the other hand, was attracted by exactly what turned Barbara off. "I knew I wanted to go to a big Southern school. And at U.T., I had a great set of friends from high school and camp. I knew I'd have a built-in support system. Plus, I love Austin. Even now, after ten years, leaving is going to be hard. I definitely think Barbara and I both made the perfect choices. We had awesome college experiences." "We were really happy that they were able to go to college and have pretty much of a private life," the first lady tells me, adding that it never occurred to her or her husband to "use" their daughters during an election that was held during their freshman year. "All college freshmen want to be pretty much anonymous." While not anonymous—each has secret service protection, after all—they were aided immeasurably by the loyalty of those around them. "Their classmates were contacted [by the tabloid press], of course," says Mrs. Bush, "but they were both so lucky to have really good friends who shielded them." Their friends could protect them only so much, though, and when they did make the tabloids, they were portrayed as out-of-control party girls, barely restrained by the agents who guarded them. Rumors also flew that their grandmother Barbara Bush had given them a stern talking-to after initial press flurries; true or not, they landed firmly on their feet. Jenna proudly tells me that Barbara returned to Yale early from spring break this year to work on her senior thesis, that her sister took six courses in her last semester compared with her own three. "As far as their day-to-day choices, theirs are pretty much like anybody else's," says Regan Gammon. "There was never any 'You better not do that, because your grandfather's president or your father's governor or president.' I mean, I'm sure they were hoping that the girls would make good choices, but it was never held over their heads. It was normal parenting—here's what you can and can't do, and here are the reasons why." Gammon says they got through the rough patches much as their mother handles her own demanding role: "Laura's approach is 'Yes, it's stressful, but this is the task at hand, I'll get it done and still have fun.' Laura keeps things in perspective. You can see how much they're like their mother." If the Bushes have achieved "normalcy" for their daughters, it helped that they themselves knew, as Mrs. Bush says, "what it is like to be the children of the president." When the twins were born, their grandfather was Ronald Reagan's vice president. "All their lives someone in the family was in public office. That's why we really wanted to give them a life of their own." It seems to have worked. "Strangely, politics and family life never crossed," says Jenna—which is all the more of an achievement since for the last four years family life has been conducted in the very political locales of the White House and Camp David, with occasional forays to the family ranch in Crawford. Their twentieth-birthday party took place at Camp David, less than three months after 9/11, during their Thanksgiving break. "We had 20 of our friends, and there was a really nice dinner and a karaoke machine afterward, and of course my dad had a sports tournament for the guys," Jenna tells me. "He's so competitive, so active. He was stressed out, I know, but we still had the party. People ask me if I ever see my father and I say yes, because he puts in the effort. He calls all the time to tell us he's proud of us." Taking time for family is something of a tradition. "Most of our visits with our grandparents were in Maine," says Barbara, "and we were usually there with fourteen cousins. We had built-in playmates." (They also had "Ganny's" rules, Barbara says: "She's strict about some stuff, but she's hilarious.") "As a family, when we get together we've always managed to leave the politics aside and get on with our lives, our private lives," former president Bush says. "There are public demands, of course. But for the most part when we're together it's just us, uninhibited by outside pressures." Bush 41 writes the girls "very, very sweet letters," Barbara reports, "and now he's into E-mail." Their grandfather has one complaint: "It takes them a month to answer. They're very naughty girls." The girls' frequent conversations with their mother (two or three times a week) are usually conducted by phone, and by all accounts it's an especially open relationship. "They're both just no-holds-barred in their relationship with Laura," says Gammon. And like most mothers, she bears the brunt of her daughters' teasing. Jenna says that proof of her parents having the "best marriage" can be found in the fact that "my dad thinks my mom's funny even though she's really not—she's cute, she has funny quirks." Such as? "When we were little, she'd say, 'Let's clean the third drawer in your bedroom,'" says Jenna, laughing. "I call her OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] to her face, but I'm glad now because some of it's rubbed off on me." Both twins remain highly amused that just after the sixth grade, when they were off at camp, she responded to their request for music by sending them Bob Dylan's At Budokan. "All our friends were like 'What is that?' " The future first lady also took the girls to see Dylan in concert twice, and to a stop on Paul Simon's "Graceland" tour when they were only in the first grade. While still finding such things wildly funny, these days they appreciate their mom's musical taste. "Her record collection is awesome," says Jenna. "She's got Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. When we have parties at the ranch, we play them and all our friends love it." Their father has been known to do some teasing himself. "He has the best sense of humor, and he is very funny with boyfriends," Jenna says. "He's not the shotgun-dad type, he's the joking-around-to-the-point-where-he-scares-the-heck-out-of-them type." They all seemed to have survived it, since one of Jenna's exes is now a personal aide to her father, and three others showed up for the White House Christmas party. "I'm the serial monogamist, and Barbara's the dater. I'm the one that rushes into this long-term, two-year-relationship thing. I had a boyfriend all through college." But now the tables have turned. "I'm dating, and Barbara's got a great boyfriend"—a fellow Yalie whom she declines to name. For Jenna, at least, boyfriend material comes down to one thing. "He has to be funny," she says. "If not, hasta luego." Now, as the sisters bid their own goodbyes to the mostly protected, private lives they have so far enjoyed, they are looking forward to being "independent and doing our own thing," Jenna tells me, adding, that "for now, I think it will be great to do the campaign for several months where I'll work really hard and meet tons of people. I think it will help prepare me for the next phase of my life." Neither girl's plans for that phase include politics. Barbara, who asked for a sewing machine when she was thirteen and made her own eighth-grade graduation dress, worked last summer for Proenza Schouler, the hot young design firm led by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. "I wanted to work for someone who was just getting established," she says. "With someone bigger I don't think I would actually have gotten to do anything, and I feel like I did." A math whiz who, according to her mother, has always been fascinated by "the construction of everything," she has decided to channel her design talents away from fashion toward art therapy. On the five-country tour of Africa with her parents, she visited AIDS hospitals, and the experience made an impression on her. Children, she says, especially those who are sick or impoverished, can express themselves more freely through art. "Also, with art there is no language barrier." Jenna, who developed an interest in charter schools after spending the summer of her sophomore year working at one in D.C., says her "dream" is to start one of her own. In the meantime, she has interviewed for a teaching post in Manhattan, where she and her friend Mia have already found an apartment, and she may go back to school for a graduate degree. First, though, both girls will be players in a political drama they have only watched from the sidelines. "I'm just not political," Jenna insists. "I have opinions, but there's nothing about the process that has ever interested me. I'm 22, and this is the first interview I've ever done in my life." It certainly won't be the last. "Sister Act" by Julia Reed has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the August 2004 issue of Vogue |
