Here Comes the Bride!

The Houston Chronicle (5-8-08) reports:

Saturday, in an Oscar de la Renta gown with twin sister Barbara at her side, Jenna Bush, 26, will marry 29-year-old business school student Henry Hager at her parents' Central Texas ranch...

Celebrating their marriage at the president's secluded ranch is an effective way to keep it private. The property is guarded by local law enforcement and Secret Service agents, with fencing, roadblocks, surveillance cameras, an overhead no-fly zone and more...

Despite the best efforts of her parents and the Secret Service to shield her, Jenna Bush has grown up before the country's eyes, from boisterous college party girl to earnest teacher and author.

"We're both really, really excited," first lady Laura Bush said at the White House this week of herself and the president. "We're very thrilled, and, of course, Jenna is so happy, and Henry is very happy. And that makes their mother and dad really happy."

The White House is being secretive about the ceremony, secretive even by the opaque Bush administration standards.

"Be assured that there will be absolutely no readout of the wedding, whatsoever," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Thursday. "This really is a private event for the family."

...After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in English, Jenna taught at a charter school in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, she went to work as an unpaid intern for UNICEF in Panama. During her time in the region, she traveled around Argentina, Paraguay and Panama, creating photo diaries of the stories of children and adolescents she met there. Her work sparked her book idea for Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope.

More recently, she collaborated with her mother on a children's book...

Henry, a former White House staffer and the son of the Virginia Republican Party chairman, John H. Hager, will get his MBA from the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business on May 18. He is expected to take a job at Maryland's Constellation Energy, the state's biggest power company, according to several sources. It's unclear what Jenna's plans are, and the White House isn't saying much...

"It's a very interesting passage of life when you get to that time in your life when your child, first child is getting married — and we're getting, for us, our first son," Laura Bush said. "So it's a thrill, and we're very happy about it."[Full text]