Jenna Bush Hager Shares Her Dad’s Reaction After She Was Cited for Alcohol Possession at 19

From Country Living

• Jenna Bush Hager recently opened up about her famous brush with the law when she was in college.

• At 19, the Today with Hoda & Jenna star was cited for possession of alcohol as a minor and later for using a fake ID to purchase alcohol.

• Jenna was worried about embarrassing her dad, who was POTUS at the time, but George W. Bush had a surprising reaction.

Most Americans who were born before the ‘90s remember when Jenna Bush Hager was cited for possession of alcohol as a minor and using a fake ID to purchase alcohol within a five-week period. It was 2001, she was just a 19-year-old college student at the University of Texas, and since social media didn’t exist yet, it felt like the scandal that never ended.

Earlier this week, Jenna spoke with Hoda Kotb about a conversation she had with her father, former POTUS George W. Bush, shortly after the incident and about why it’s a good thing for parents to let their children fail (even if they’re in the spotlight). “I for one had parents that let us fail, let us fall and publicly,” she said. “And I always say to them now, ‘How brave of you,’ because it didn’t reflect great on them, either.”

Jenna said her dad was her first call after that initial citation. “I felt embarrassed, and I felt really badly for him because I thought this is going to make him look bad,” she said. But President Bush had a surprising reaction.

“He apologized to me because what we wanted more than anything was to just be normal college kids,” Jenna said. “So he always would say, ‘No, you can be normal.’ He also wanted to give us what we wanted, some space and to grow, and also I think he wanted to give us the chance to make mistakes, not so publicly.”

“He said, ‘I’m sorry. I promised you you could be normal, and this isn’t normal.’ I think I was probably on the Today show,” Jenna said.

In February, Jenna also opened up about a serious talk her father had with her about alcohol. At a family wedding in Maine, Jenna, who was in her 20s at the time, said her dad asked her to go for a walk.

“He said, ‘I just want to talk to you about drinking. I found in my life it got in the way of the things that mattered most, and I want to make sure that you just know that it can and be aware of it,’” Jenna recalled on Today.

Her father had given up alcohol after a “wild drunken weekend” in his 40s that pushed his wife, Laura Bush, to give him an ultimatum. “It’s either Jim Beam or me,” Laura Bush wrote in her memoir, Spoken From the Heart. Jenna didn’t recall feeling “that hungover,” but she was grateful for President Bush’s honesty.

“I do think it was such a model to me about how I want to parent, which is to be transparent about either things that have happened in our family’s past, or things that you know that can happen to your kids,” the NBC anchor explained. “He [also] said, ‘I just want you to know that there was a point in my life where I thought like this is interrupting what’s beautiful...’ I always appreciated it, and I still do.”

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