Aurora Starchild
Jenna Bush Hager just told a hilarious story about her younger days in the White House. While it’s a favorite story of her husband’s, she also admitted that her parents never knew — until now. While on Today, Bush told co-host Hoda Kotb that the incident left her now-husband insanely flustered.
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Jenna Bush’s Husband Left White House Doing the Speed Walk of Shame
“I think there are a million people who have visited the White House and have, like, the craziest stories. You must have a couple weird ones. Do you?” asked Hoda.
“Yes, I have a couple weird ones. But Henry loves to tell this story,” Jenna Bush Hager responded. “So, Henry and I met when we were in our 20s. We were very young. And in fact, I was looking at pictures last night of us in our early courtship. Poppy was like, ‘How old were you?’ I mean, I looked twelve.
At one point, my parents were traveling, and I was staying there. And we’d gone out to the bars. And like all relationships do, they reached a certain level. And Henry said he woke up and he looked around and he was like, ‘Ahhhhh!’ Because he worked for my dad.”
Jenna is waving her arms nonchalantly at this point, mimicking her younger self. “ ‘Have fun!’ I didn’t care,” she said. “You know, ‘Bye!’ ”
At that point, Henry was speed-walking through the White House. Jenna portrayed this with fervent arm gestures as if she was running. He got into the elevator and there was someone else inside it.
Bush Says It’s Harder to Leave the White House Than Get In
“Good morning,” Henry said, flustered. He then continued to try to get out, finding it very challenging.
“And then he said, to get out of the White House was just as hard to get in. Because they’re looking that way.” Jenna then waves her hands behind the desk she and Hoda share.
“The people that guard the White House aren’t looking to see who’s running… Usually people don’t run out. So, he ran down the thing in his clothes from the night before, running. And then, pulling on the gate, ‘Sir!’
“Anyway. Poor guy,” Jenna finished. She then told another story about coming back from a movie with Henry and seeing her parents having a Christmas dance party with some other friends. “We were like, ‘okay, I guess we have to join this. This seems like too much fun.’ “
Jenna Bush (now almost 41) married Henry Chase Hager in 2008, when she was about 27. The two have three children together, Poppy, Mila, and Hal. After the Bush family left the White House, Jenna went on to become a successful journalist and media personality, starring on The Today Show as a co-host, correspondent, and contributor
Bono Just Revealed He Fell Asleep In Lincoln Bedroom While Visiting Obama
As for Hoda’s inference that the White House is full of crazy stories, it’s absolutely true.
It just came out that Bono from U2 once overdosed on alcohol while at a White House dinner and ended up disappearing for a while. In his memoir, Surrender, he wrote about visiting the Obamas with his wife, Ali. He claims to have an allergy to salicylic acid, a chemical found in wine and many alcohols and foods. It makes him fall asleep in odd places, he says.
After disappearing for about ten minutes, then-President Barack Obama became increasingly worried. Obama remembered that Bono had been asking about the Gettysburg Address and thought to look in the Lincoln Bedroom.
“They walked into the Lincoln Bedroom, and there I was, out cold, head in the bosom of Abraham Lincoln, on his very bed,” wrote Bono. “ ‘Falling asleep in the comfort of our freedoms,’ as I spun it afterward.”
In an interview with BBC, Bono said that Obama “just woke me up and laughed. President laughed his head off.”
Lyndon B. Johnson Devised Secret Buzzer System So He Could Sneak Around His Wife
But that’s not all. If you do a little bit of detective work, you’ll find all sorts of crazy stories about the White House.
Take President Lyndon B. Johnson, for example. He was quite the eclectic human. Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin says that he used to take interviews while sitting on the toilet. Goodwin told C-Span that he’d ask his interviewers to follow him.
“He just didn’t want the conversation to stop,” said Goodwin. “If you were in the bedroom holding back when he went into the bathroom, he would just call you in and say, ‘come on in, I haven’t finished what I’m saying.'”
According to Eleanor Herman’s book, Sex with Presidents: the Ins and Outs of Love and Lust, Johnson also was a bit of a player. He actually devised a secret communication system with the Secret Service just so he could sneak around behind his wife, Lady Bird. He’d ask the Secret Service to use a secret buzzer system when the First Lady was on her way back to his office.
Johnson “only wanted to hire women with ‘good behinds’ so he could ‘enjoy’ their rear ends as they left his office,” wrote Herman.
Who knows what else has happened within the White House walls. If only dogs could talk…
Lauren Pineda contributed to this article.
