Here’s How The Bush Family Reacted When Jenna Bush Hager Was Offered ‘Today’
When Jenna Bush Hager was offered a job as a correspondent on the Today show in 2009, she was vacationing in Maine with her grandparents George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush and had asked the former president and first lady’s advice.
That’s when her grandparents said, “Why don’t we sit down together and watch a morning of it?” according to Sara Lavenduski, senior editor for ASI’s Advantages magazine, who was in attendance at the Advertising Specialty Institute’s trade show event where Jenna gave a keynote Q&A alongside her mom, Laura Bush.
Sara recalled to People magazine, “[Hager] said, ‘My grandparents were really encouraging. … They were mavericks, they really did a lot of different things, too,’” adding, “Mrs. Bush toward the end was talking about how we’re such a very fortunate wealthy country and because of that we have the opportunity to make sure our children are well educated and we should take advantage of that.”
In the Q&A, Jenna also described working with her mom and her twin sister, Barbara Pierce Bush, in writing several books including the most recent, Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life.
According to Sara, Jenna’s message was: “When you’re working with your family, they work differently and that’s okay, and it took a little bit of patience to work with her sister in a different working style that her sister had but in the end everything came together.”