A memo to Bush's daughters
BY Jules Witcover
Originally published Jun 4, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Planet Earth to
Jenna and Barbara Bush, age 19: In
case you haven't heard, your father is
now president of the United States.
The both of you must be somewhere out
there in space to have committed the bonehead
caper of drinking under age in public, especially
you, Jenna, using somebody else's driver's license
to beat the rap.
Just as your old man is trying to get over the loss
of Jim Jeffords (a Republican senator who quit
your dad's party with a parting shot at him), you
had to add to his grief. Thanks to you, his own
earlier confessions of excessive drinking and a
DWI arrest are being resurrected, along with his
refusal to say whether he ever used drugs.
Again thanks to you two, there will be much
chatter around the water cooler, especially in
Democratic precincts, with comments like: What
else could you expect from the kids of this
reformed drinker? And: He's a fine one to talk
about family values; he should instill them in his
own daughters. Never mind how unfair all this will
be.
To your father's credit, he had been doing a pretty
good job of protecting your privacy, and urging
the news media to do the same, until you screwed
up in a public place. He got you out of the
Washington goldfish bowl and trusted you not to
give aid and comfort to his political foes with
stupid behavior.
Almost 20
You are, after all, almost into your twenties now,
and after six years of being the twin daughters of
the governor of Texas, you had to know you were
in the public's scrutinizing eyes, especially in your
home state.
By the way, whom did you think those guys were
in the suits, with the wires plugged into their ears,
following you around to assure your safety and
security? No, they weren't the Blues Brothers.
Your conduct has my journalistic fraternity once again in the throes of
self-examination about whether your arrests are part of all the news that's fit
to print and broadcast. It's a question we've been asking ourselves at least
since Margaret Truman set out on a singing career and father Harry got into a
verbal brawl with a newspaper critic over the quality of her performance.
John Kennedy's two kids, Caroline and John-John, were just tykes when
they lived in the White House, much too young to be carded. Lyndon
Johnson's daughters were more your age, but they pretty much kept their
noses clean, so to speak, and seldom embarrassed him. One of them, Lynda,
went out with a White House Marine guard named Chuck Robb, but that
was OK because they got married and he went on to become a senator.
Assuming burdens
Richard Nixon's two daughters, Tricia and Julie, were famously
goody-two-shoes girls and never got their dad in hot water, he being plenty
capable of getting in it by himself. The same was true of Amy Carter, and
Ronald Reagan's kids were on their own, to say the least, in their distant
dad's White House years.
Your own father, for all his admitted cutting up in his irresponsible youth,
didn't cause any appreciable public grief to your grandfather. And Chelsea
Clinton, another straight arrow, could never hold a candle to either of her
parents in the bad publicity department.
No doubt it isn't a day at the beach being the offspring of the president.
Obviously you can't be just a couple of young women going out on the town
with your friends. It's said you didn't want him to run for the job in the first
place. But he's there now, and you're old enough to assume the awesome
burden of having your brewskis in private, if you care to have them at all.
If you want to stay out of the headlines, you owe it not only to your parents
but also to yourselves to be a bit more prudent in your public behavior. It's
not like you were caught lifting diamond necklaces from Tiffany's.
And if you want your privacy and want to avoid giving your old man any
more non-Jeffords-related headaches, just play it smarter from now on. After
all, it's only a four-year sentence, with the possibility of four more for good
behavior -- yours and his.
Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington Bureau. His latest book is
"No Way to Pick a President" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999).
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