Jenna Bush Hager has revealed the childhood moment when she stumbled across a family secret she was absolutely not prepared to process.
She was only in third grade when she learned that her father, former President George W. Bush, had once been engaged to another woman.
Her reaction was immediate: “I started crying.”
The revelation—and the old wedding announcement that triggered it—are now public:
Page Six reports that the story began with something far less dramatic: a bad math grade. Jenna told her father that she suspected he had earned bad grades, too, so he pulled out a memory box that his mother had made for him.
The former president was looking for an old report card to prove his daughter wrong. Instead, Jenna saw a wedding announcement naming a woman who was not her mother, Laura Bush.
The third grader promptly burst into tears and, as she now admits with a laugh, made the entire discovery about herself.
Her father explained that he had indeed been engaged when he was young, but the wedding never happened. Looking back as an adult, Jenna recognizes the enormous consequence hidden inside that decision: if he had gone through with it, she and her twin sister Barbara would not be here.
She also gave her father credit for having the courage to walk away. Ending an engagement, she observed, requires a person to listen carefully to what he knows in his heart.
The former first daughter has long shared affectionate glimpses of the family bond behind the famous last name. One historic photo from the opening of the Bush Presidential Center captured that warmth:
People identifies Bush’s former fiancée as his college sweetheart, Cathryn Lee Wolfman. Bush was at Yale and Wolfman attended Rice University when the two dated, and he proposed in 1967 during his junior year.
Bush’s office publicly confirmed the brief engagement in 1999. His spokeswoman at the time said the young couple thought highly of one another but gradually drifted apart.
There was no scandalous overlap with Laura Bush. The earlier relationship had ended roughly a decade before George and Laura married in November 1977, only months after they met.
That marriage would become one of the most recognizable partnerships in American political life. Four years later, George and Laura welcomed Jenna and Barbara.
The family’s place in presidential history was on display again when the Bush Center brought America’s living presidents together for its 2013 dedication:
The George W. Bush Presidential Library confirms that George and Laura married in Texas in 1977.
Their official family history follows the life that unfolded after the earlier engagement ended, including the birth of twin daughters Barbara and Jenna in Dallas in 1981.
Both daughters later built families of their own. Jenna married Henry Hager at her parents’ Prairie Chapel Ranch in 2008 and now has three children, while Barbara married Craig Coyne at the Bush family estate in Maine in 2018.
The Library also preserves the public-service history surrounding the family. George served as governor of Texas before becoming the nation’s 43rd president, while Laura continued her work in education and human rights.
That larger record makes the forgotten wedding announcement more than a piece of celebrity trivia. It is a snapshot of the private decisions that came before decades of public life—and before the family Jenna knew as a child existed at all.
Jenna’s childhood panic makes for a funny story today, but the old wedding announcement also preserved a genuine fork in the road.
One choice by a young Bush closed the door on one future. Another opened the way to Laura, to their daughters and to the family the country eventually came to know.
For a third grader staring at a strange woman’s name beside her father’s, however, none of that perspective had arrived yet.
There were only tears—and one very awkward family-history lesson.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
The post Jenna Bush Hager Reveals SECRET FIANCÉE of George W. Bush — “I started crying” appeared first on 100PercentFedUp.com.
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