JENNA BUSH IS GETTING MARRIED!

Johansen Krause / Vogue

Jenna Bush, First Daughter, author, teacher, and bride-to-be, is sitting at a table at Da Silvano in downtown Manhattan, happily tucking into a plate of vegetable lasagna and telling me all about her upcoming May 10 nuptials to Henry Hager, a former White House and Department of Commerce aide whom she met in 2004. She tells me that he asked her to marry him last August on top of Maine's Cadillac Mountain, the first place the sun hits the United States, and how she was grumpy and mystified as to why in the world he had roused her from the tent at four o'clock in the morning to start hiking in the dark, but that then, naturally, she was thrilled. She shows me her ring, a round diamond that belonged to the groom's maternal great--grandmother, reset (with advice from her twin and "best friend," Barbara) and flanked by two round sapphires.

We look at sketches of the short Lela Rose dresses, in varying shades of chiffon, to be worn by the fourteen girls who are part of what Texans call a wedding "house party." (Barbara is the only bridesmaid.) Jenna tells me about her own dress, a "very structured" organza Oscar de la Renta gown, with embroidery and a bit of matte beading, that is "simple and elegant" with a bit of a train but somehow "still casual." There are no pictures, she says, because "I'm sort of a traditionalist and Henry's a major traditionalist, and the one thing he doesn't want is to see me beforehand or to know what the dress looks like." She sounds like every other excited young (she is 26) woman on the eve of her wedding day, except, of course, she is not: She is the daughter of the president of the United States and only the twelfth to be married while her father is still in office. When Tricia Nixon, the sixth-and last-bride to be married in the White House, said "I do" in a 1971 ceremony for 400 in the Rose Garden, Life magazine put her on the cover and described the event as "akin to American royalty." More than 35 years later, the hunger to see the closest thing Americans will ever get to an actual royal wedding has not, apparently, abated. When the White House confirmed that Jenna would marry, one commentator, Doug Wead, author of All the President's Children, went so far as to make the tasteless claim that "only finding Bin Laden could do more" to boost her father's flagging standing in the polls. More than once, she was exhorted to "give the nation" a full-blown White House wedding.


See photos of Jenna Bush and her groom

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