Playing House in the White House – letters of first daughters

WASHINGTON: In 2009, as their father penned a letter to his successor, the twin daughters of president George W Bush, Jenna and Barbara, wrote a letter of their own.

Their dad’s would be confidential and offer advice, tucked away in the top drawer of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, where incoming President Barack Obama would find it on his first day of work as leader of the free world. Now a White House tradition, this had been done by every sitting president since Ronald Reagan.

And so as their father prepared to pass the torch, the Bush girls decided they had advice to offer, too – not for the president, but for his young daughters, Sasha and Malia.

From one pair of first daughters to another, they titled it “Playing House in the White House”.

Barbara and Jenna, then 27, told Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, to surround themselves with “loyal friends”, to cherish their pets in times when they’ll need “the quiet comfort that only animals can provide”, to slide down the banister of the solarium and play sardines on the White House lawn.

Most importantly, they said, “remember who your dad really is”.

Eight years later, with just a week until Sasha and Malia leave the White House, the Bush sisters, 35, have written a second letter – this time with advice not about living inside the White House, but out of it.

“We have watched you grow from girls to impressive young women with grace and ease. And through it all you had each other. Just like we did,” they wrote in the letter, published first online by Time magazine.

“Now you are about to join another rarified club, one of former First Children – a position you didn’t seek and one with no guidelines. But you have much to look forward to.

“You will be writing the story of your lives, beyond the shadow of your famous parents, yet you will always carry with you the experiences of the past eight years.”

Americans have an odd fascination with the idea of first daughters. It has inspired a handful of popular movie narratives – Katie Holmes’s First Daughter, My Date with the President’s Daughter and Chasing Liberty starring Mandy Moore – and was a major plotline in The West Wing, which often wove in the fictional president’s relationship with his daughters.

The scrutiny these fictional first daughters faced is not unlike the pressure the real ones encounter, and for the past quarter century, Americans have had only female first children – Chelsea Clinton, the Bush twins, Malia and Sasha Obama.

And perhaps no first children were confronted with the harsh reality of having a dad in chief as much as Jenna and Barbara, whose father was in the White House during their college years and whose antics with under-age drinking drew intense publicity.

They noted that in their letter to the Obama sisters.

“Enjoy college. As most of the world knows, we did,” they wrote. “And you won’t have the weight of the world on your young shoulders anymore.”

Jenna Bush Hager is a correspondent for NBC’s Today show and Barbara is the chief executive and co-founder of Global Health Corps, an NPO focused on the global health equity movement. – Washington Post