A Union of Families, Politics and Society

Once, when he was lieutenant governor and driving to preside over a night session of the state Senate, he was hit by a kid in a stolen Jeep. His head banged against the roof as his Cadillac spun around. The first responders wanted Hager to go to the hospital, but he borrowed a hammer from someone on the scene, banged his wheelchair back into shape, and hitched a ride to the Capitol.

He had to be there to preside. He would not be put off task.

As a campaigner, Hager was not the best speaker. But he was -- well, dogged. The joke went that wherever two or more Republicans gathered, there was the lieutenant governor in the midst of them. (He went to everything. He once attended the wedding of a woman he met while campaigning at a pork festival in Emporia.)

With him often, especially during the gubernatorial run, was Henry. He drove his dad around, pushed his wheelchair, acted as a body man. Perhaps he absorbed some of his dad's lessons: the work ethic, the love of politics. Certainly, those who were in Hager's orbit at the time recall that Henry had a seriousness about his father's campaigns and a maturity that seemed beyond his years.

At the Republican gubernatorial nominating convention in 2001, Henry, then 23, made a moving speech to delegates introducing his father, recalls Kevin Gentry, a GOP activist who supported Hager's run. "A number of people said then, 'Henry, when are you going to run?' "

And when Hager lost the nomination to Attorney General Mark L. Earley (who went on to lose the general election to Democrat Mark Warner), Henry helped his father shut down the campaign.

Hager continued in politics: In the wake of 9/11, Warner appointed him to head the state's new Office of Commonwealth Preparedness. In 2004 President Bush appointed him an assistant secretary of education, overseeing special education and rehabilitative services. This past July he was elected chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia.

Henry continued in politics, too. He was an intern and later a staffer for former presidential strategist Karl Rove, according to a family source. He worked for the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, and it was during this time that he met Jenna Bush.

They were friends at first, because he was already taken. As Jenna put it in one interview, "I said, 'Of course, the cute guy on the campaign has a girlfriend.' "

After the election, Henry worked at the Commerce Department before pursuing his MBA.

It may be good for the young couple, says Henry Hager's first cousin Nell Daniel, that Henry comes from a family with its own distinguished history, a family that can hold its own, that's not easily impressed.

"There's been money; there's been political prominence," Daniel says. "We've known influential people."

But Jenna, at least, doesn't seem inclined to continue the legacy of politics. She is now making the rounds promoting "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope," a nonfiction book for young adults about an HIV-infected teenager whom she met while interning with UNICEF in Latin America. In a television interview yesterday, Jenna was asked whether she might ever run for office.

"Never," she said three times. "I'm not political in that way -- at all." As for Henry, she said, "He's ruled it out, too."

When Henry's brother Jack was married in Manhattan earlier this year to the daughter of a former president of HBO, Henry brought Jenna. She'd been sick recently, and Henry seemed particularly attentive toward her, Daniel says.

"I actually sat with her in the church," she says. "She was just so laid back and unpretentious and seemed very sincere and sort of felt honored to be part of this special family wedding."

It will be her family soon enough. The Hagers and the Bushes -- two Good Families in one.