Bush Daughters Chips Off the Old Block?
 
On May 31, 2001 President Bush's 19-year old twin daughters Jenna and Barbara were ticketed by police in Austin, TX for alcohol-related misdemeanors, while attempting to buy alcohol at a Mexican restaurant. Jenna Bush was cited for misprepresentation of age by a minor for allegedly using some else's identification to order an alcoholic beverage. Barbara Bush was ticketed for possession of alcohol by a minor. She ordered and was served a margarita.

The Houston-Chronicle reported that the ticket could represent Jenna Bush's third citation for an alcohol-related offense, confirming with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission that Jenna Bush appears in their database in connection with a violation on December 31, 1997. Ironically, this offense would have been just months after then Governor Bush signed into law legislation toughening penalties against underage drinkers.

Jenna Bush was cited on April 27 as a minor in possession of alcohol, for which she was ordered to pay court costs, take six hours of alcohol counseling, and serve eight hours of community service. According to the Chronicle a 30-day driver's license suspension is stipulated in the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code for a first offense, but was not enforced. The community court judge who issued the April 27 sentence could not be reached for comment. A third alcohol-related offense is a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a fine of $2000, and up to six months in jail. If the ticket for the 1997 offense was issued in 1997, under Texas law it would not be considered the first of three offenses because the offender was 16 at the time.

Less than 25 years earlier Dad, George W. Bush was arrested for driving while intoxicated. The revelation shortly before the November 2000 election prompted a flurry of complaints in the media that Bush had not been forthcoming about his past. On November 2, 2000 A Portland lawyer, Tom Connolly, notified the media of the Bush's 1976 DUI arrest, and provided a copy of the court docket. The next day the Dallas Morning News reported that Bush had been excused from sitting on a jury in a drunk driving case after he and his lawyers requested that the defense attorney excuse him. Al Gonzales, the governor's lawyer at the time, and later appointed by Bush to the Texas Supreme Court suggested that the reason for Bush's excusal was that as governor he might have to rule on a clemency request in the case.

During the November 2000 hub-bub over the DUI conviction the Bush campaign acknowledged an earlier arrest, likely to have been alcohol-related, and even more similar to his daughters' current predicament that the DUI conviction. In 1966 Bush was president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale. A November 1998 portrait quoted in Fortunate Son said of Bush, "He went to Yale, but he seemed to have majored in beer drinking at the Deke House." The arrest concerned theft from a local store of a Christmas wreath intended for use at Deke House. The charge was later dropped, apparently after intervention by one of Poppy Bush's friends. During Bush's senior year he was reportedly detained briefly by police after leading an attempt to remove the football goal posts at Princeton following a Yale victory.

"'George's dad had a spy network of Yale teachers, fraternity brothers, and even his roommates, calling him in Houston with detailed reports of all-nighters, weekend binges, showing up at classes drunk, and driving awa too fast while drinking way too much,' said one of Bush's close friends who attended college with him. 'When he suddenly quit his summer job as an oilfield roughneck, the old man knew he'd been out chugging beers all night long and just wanted to keep the party going with his girlfriend before they went back to school. He didn't say anything to George about his drinking, though, hoping instead that he would 'outgrow it' by the time he got out of college.'"

Bush met his wife, then Laura Welch, in 1977 when he was already running for Congress. Friends have suggested that she was responsible for sobering him up, although Bush is said to dispute the claim. Reports that "Poppy's" longtime associate Jimmy Allison called Midland, TX liquor stores from his sick bed asking that they not sell Dubya any hard liquor have been denied by sources familiar with the events from that period. "Most of the rich and powerful drank (a few drugged, too) in those days to kill the boredom of Midland, and the ones from wealthy families never got busted," sources told The Dubya Report. "If a policeman had been so 'foolish' during those days,to issue a DUI, they would have been fired immediately."

During the 1978 congressional campaign Bush's opponent, attorney Kent Hance, made an issue out of Bush's funding of a campaign keg party for students at Texas Tech. Bush lost the race, and then reportedly lost himself in a month of heavy drinking.

"Always a librarian at heart [Laura] left books dealing with alcoholism scattered throughout their Midland home. When Bush finally sobered up after a post-election month of binging on whiskey, he began reading chapters she had bookmarked for his convenience. 'Recognizing the Signs of Problem Drinking,' 'Symptoms of Alcohol Abuse,' and 'I Can't Be an Alcoholic Because ....'"

"... the Bushes have self-consciously built themselves up as a dynasty.... If you shout about the power of your blood, you can't complain if people subsequently test it for alcohol."
-- Mark Lawson, The Guardian, June 2, 2001

Bush's daughters were born in 1981. When they were five years old, the Reverend Billy Graham was vacationing with the Bush's at their summer home in Kennebunkport, ME. During a walk on the beach Bush confessed to Graham that he used drinking to anesthetize himself from pain and loss. A few months later after a group 40th birthday celebration Bush may have "bottomed out." Some time later he told his wife he planned to quit drinking.

"'[A]lchohol began to compete with my energies....I'd lose focus.' Although he once said 'he couldn't remember a day hadn't had a drink,' he added that he didn't believe he was 'clinically alcoholic.' Even his father, who had known for years that his son had a serious drinking problem, publicly proclaimed: 'He was never an alcoholic. It's just he knows he can't hold his liquor.'"

According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, "one in five adult Americans lived with an alcolholic while growing up." Compared to children whose parents were not alcoholic, these children are more likely to experience emotional problems, and are four times more likely to become alcoholics themselves. Children of an alcoholic parent may:

• See himself or herself as the cause of the parent's drinking
• Worry about the home situation, and fear fights between the parents
• May have difficulty trusting others because the child has been disappointed by the drinking parent many times.
• Feel lonely and helpless
• Feel anger at the alcoholic parent for drinking, and possibly at the non-alcoholic parent for lack of protection and support

• Truancy
• Delinquency, such as stealing or violence
• Abuse of drugs or alcohol
• Risk taking behavior

Studies have suggested that there is a genetic component to alcoholism which makes an individual potentially susceptible without causing it. Research in 1970 and 1979 established that alcoholism runs in families. Identical twins are more likely to both exhibit alcoholic tendencies than fraternal, underscoring the genetic component.

Underage drinking was this year's focus of Alcohol Awareness Month (April 2001). According to the Hazelden Foundation alcohol "remains the No. 1 drug problem for young people." Hazelden asserts that use of alcohol or other drugs at an early age is an indicator of future alcohol or drug problems. A 1995 report by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported that students who binge drink "are more likely to damage property, have trouble with authorities, miss classes, have hangovers, and experience injuries than those who do not....Binge drinkers appear to engage in more unplanned sexual activity and to abandon safe sex techniques more often than students who do not binge drink."

Heavy drinking or alcohol-related problems during college may be associated with personality characteristics, such as being impulsive; psychological problems, such as depression or anxiety; or early deviant behavior. As in the general population, a positive family history of alcohol abuse appears to be a risk factor for problem drinking in college students ....

The Guardian UK put matters in political perspective in a story it ran on June 2, which said in part:

An explicit element in the attack on the Clintons was that they were a dysfunctional family, to which the Bushes stood in contrast. And yet Chelsea Clinton remained a model of good behaviour throughout eight years, while Jenna Bush has twice been hauled in by the law before her dad's first summer in the Rose Garden was out.
 
The president might do well to reflect that the dynamics of families are more complicated than is acknowledged by the Christian Republicanism he endorses. And, while many would argue in Ms Bush's support that the post-21 rule she broke is a neurotic remnant of prohibition which is more likely to drive teenagers to drink than abstinence, her father could never be one of them. He supported the dry laws as Texas governor and has spoken in support of Victorian parenting in general.
 
Two other factors give force to the story, although both are beyond the First Daughter's control. One is that the Bushes have self-consciously built themselves up as a dynasty and it is an inevitable consequence of dynasties - cf the Windsors and the Kennedys - that the behaviour of family members becomes a source of fascination. If you shout about the power of your blood, you can't complain if people subsequently test it for alcohol. Nor does it help that the particular embarrassment she has given her family touches on her dad's rather vague status as a self-cured alcoholic. The media can safely use the defence that the incidents raise legitimate questions about the drinking of the offspring of those who themselves drank.