Jenna Bush Hager, progeny of presidents, is now a publishing kingmaker

There is a madcap performance within the Jenna Bush Hager morning routine.

Coffee sloshes from her cup, occasionally threatening her “Today” show uniform. Lipstick tints a tooth or two until professionals intervene. Nonconformist strands of hair attach to her mouth at a staff meeting where she suggests that no true Texan would take the kind of “cowboy-cation” the show plans to feature. (“Hair in your mouth, you’re like my daughter,” her co-host, Hoda Kotb, faux-scolded off camera, straightening her up.)

Inside her dressing room, Hager sits amid well-curated trinkets tracing her long, strange public arc: an image of her father, George W. Bush, cradling her and Barbara, her fraternal twin sister, as newborns; a handwritten note from Andy Cohen, one of many celebrity pals she has accumulated, pinned to her mirror; a framed painting of a dozen books by a dozen authors, her authors, arranged neatly in a row.

And once a month, Hager rises from this nook, steps over her bunny-furnished “Hop on In” welcome mat, walks out onto Rockefeller Plaza and beckons a live audience to hold aloft the freebie literature they have just been handed.

History dictates that this book will very likely become a bestseller, no matter the prior prominence of its creator. It might well become a television series, produced by Jenna Bush Hager. It will, at a minimum, charge into the culture – on shelves, in stockings, rocketing up the Amazon rankings – for the bare fact that Hager has said its name before a viewing public that has come to trust her like an insistently persuasive aunt.

“I just have had a love affair with reading because of the women that have come before me,” Hager, the daughter of a librarian, said in an interview between recent tapings. “And my dad, too, even though people thought he couldn’t read.”

Since 2019, Hager, 41, has highlighted 49 books as part of her “Read With Jenna” book club promoted on “Today.” Many were from first-time authors with no track record of literary success, like “The School for Good Mothers” by Jessamine Chan and “The Cloisters” by Katy Hays. Most became chart-toppers almost immediately, selling over 1 million print copies in total. Since fall 2021, Hager’s picks have outpaced the overall adult fiction market by almost 60%, according to an analysis of top-selling adult fiction titles by the market research company NPD Group.

The result is a heady inversion: Once known for her last name, Hager has become as famous for her first, the five letters glowing in “Today”-show orange across the signature purple sticker that novelists plot feverishly to slap onto their book covers.

She is also a particular kind of thumb-on-the-scale success. Born into her family’s story – for better and worse over the course of her life – she has maximized the chances this fate afforded her, amassing the professional capital to place her own thumb on the scale for those found worthy of her endorsement, a sort of virtuous circle of favoritism.

Hager’s inbox and Instagram account swell daily with communications from agents, writers, friends and strangers angling to get their material in front of her.

While overall print book sales have lagged some for much of 2022, adult fiction has often fared better, buttressed by celebrity book clubs like Hager’s and Reese Witherspoon’s – a reliance that does not necessarily speak well of the industry’s health.

At times, the quest to win Hager’s imprimatur can be something of a cloak-and-dagger affair.

Publishers have changed book release dates without explanation to meet Hager’s desired announcement timeline, with industry watchers straining to decipher her wishes.

“Like figuring out who the College of Cardinals is going to pick,” said Rumaan Alam, whose “Leave the World Behind” was the October 2020 selection.

If no white smoke has been seen rising from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the high council of NBCUniversal has seen it fit to grow Hager’s flock regardless. Earlier this year, she announced the formation of a production company and a “first look” deal with Universal Studio Group, with plans to develop her favored books for the screen. Eight have been optioned so far. Among them is “The Many Daughters of Afong Moy,” by Jamie Ford, who talked about his book in Spokane during a program of the Northwest Passages Book Club in September.

The arrangement is atypical, if not unprecedented, for the network, a signal of its uncommon investment in her.

Hager’s father, a mystery fan, is among those known to consult with her informally on which projects to pursue. Her sister has also assumed an unofficial advisory role. “I get to secretly read books she’s considering,” Barbara Bush said.

Asked whether the name of the production company, Thousand Voices, was a tribute to “a thousand points of light” – a prized saying of her paternal grandfather, former President George H.W. Bush, which inspired the name of his nonprofit organization – Hager called any homage coincidental, if conspicuous in hindsight.

“Later, my husband was like, ‘Do you sort of see that?’” she said of the overlap. (Her husband, Henry Hager, who works in private equity, is a former aide to her father.)

Hager has become the most broadly popular onetime first child of the modern era – and easily the most prominent one to stray from the family business – graduating from the nation’s most scrutinized underage drinker to its media personality most likely to tell a mass audience that she went commando this year to a dinner with Prince Charles before he assumed the throne.

She is the daughter of a man who once declared himself “misunderestimated,” positioned as one of the most powerful figures in literature today.

As her father was seeking and winning the White House, she was introduced in December 2000 as “George W.’s Wild Daughter” in the National Enquirer, photographed holding a cigarette and stumbling merrily over a friend as a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.

She was cited for underage drinking, twice, the second time with Barbara in tow.

While Hager assumed a sometimes puckish surrogate role in her father’s 2004 reelection bid – punctuated by a convention speech in which she joked that her grandmother, the former first lady, “thinks ‘Sex in the City’ is something married people do but never talk about” – her relationship with the press could still be uncomfortable.

At the same time, Hager showed a postgraduate appetite for media ventures on her terms. She had worked initially as a teacher at a Washington charter school for predominantly low-income families. But after a UNICEF internship in Latin America, she began shopping a book in 2007, with assistance from the Washington superlawyer Robert Barnett, about an HIV-stricken Panamanian teenage mother she had met.

Its promotional tour, unusual for a fledgling author, changed the course of her life.

“Did I have some doors open?” Hager said. “I’m sure. I mean, I wrote a book and was on the ‘Today’ show.”

“Had I not, probably, had my last name, I don’t know that I would have been given a prime interview spot on the ‘Today’ show, which would have then eventually landed me a job.”

Though she avoids public partisanship, Hager has reached for gravitas when the moment compels. The morning after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, she sounded something like an officeholder in insisting that “these images are not our America.”

“I kissed my grandfather goodbye in that rotunda,” she said, tearing up. “I have felt the majesty of our country in those walls.”

Asked if, at minimum, her popularity and platform might have helped soften some Americans’ feelings about her father’s presidency, Hager laughed. “Time is a really great sort of diffuser,” she said. “I’m not sure I have that sort of power.”

It is a gift, Hager said, to help someone tell their story as they want it told.

Her authors know something about that.

“That’s American life, right?” Alam said of her. “You can have that second act.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.