The private wedding yesterday of First Daughter Jenna Bush and Henry Hager in Crawford, Texas, brought together two Republican families.
The Bush family - President Bush, his father President Bush, etc. - is extraordinarily well known, of course.
The Hager name does not constitute a national brand, but in Virginia the family is well-connected and well-known.
Henry Hager’s father, John H. Hager, 71, was an executive with the American Tobacco Company, as was his father, Virgil Hager.
John Hager is also a former lieutenant governor of Virginia and a former director of homeland security in Virginia. He’s now the chair of the Virginia Republican Party.
Beyond that, he has been an advocate and spokesman for people with disabilities since he contracted a near fatal case of polio in 1973 when he was 34.
Hager, who uses a wheelchair and competes in wheelchair races, lost a promotion with American Tobacco when he went through months of treatment for his illness.
“I had gone to the top and got knocked down to the bottom,” Hager told a Purdue University alumni publication.
But after his rehabilitation, Hager returned to the company and worked his way back up the corporate ladder
In 2004, he was appointed the assistant secretary, office of special education and rehabilitative services in the U.S. Department of Education. He served in that position until August 2007.
Jenna Bush, 26, and Henry Hager, 30, met in 2004 when both were working to get her father re-elected. Hager proposed in August 2007 on Cadillac Mountain in Maine’s Acadia National Park.
She recalled being awakened at 4 a.m. by Hager so they could catch the sunrise at the spot where the morning light first hits the United States.
“I did not want to go hiking at 4 in the morning,” she told ABC News. “It was freezing. But we got up, and we hiked in the dark for an hour and a half, and then when we got towards the top, with the sunrise, he asked me.”
A graduate of Wake Forest University, Hager will receive his MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business later this month.
He’s a former aide to presidential advisor Karl Rove. He also was an economic policy aide to Carlos Guiterrez, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
After the honeymoon - the destination hasn’t been disclosed - Hager will begin a job with Constellation Energy, a power supplier.
The couple will live in Baltimore, where Jenna Bush plans on returning to teaching.
A graduate of the University of Texas, she has taught in a charter school in Washington. She also served an internship in Latin America for the United Nations Children’s Fund.
She’s the author of Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope. It chronicles the life of a teen single mother with AIDS in Panama. Jenna Bush and her mother, Laura, are the authors of the recently published children’s book, Read All About It!
Jenna Bush selected her twin sister, Barbara Bush, to be maid of honor at her wedding.
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1 Comments
#1. Bill Giltner 05.15.2008
The reference to Constellation Energy should be to “Constellation Energy Group, Inc.”
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