You’d have to be pretty brave to date the daughter of the governor of Texas and eventual president), but Jenna Bush Hager’s high school boyfriend was perhaps a bit too brave, giving her father a jokey moniker that the future POTUS didn’t love.

Growing up in Texas, TODAY With Jenna & Friends host Jenna Bush Hager and her twin sister Barbara were well-known as the granddaughters of ex-president George H.W. Bush and daughters of then-governor George W. Bush. So you’d think a potential suitor might call their father “sir” or “Governor Bush.”

Not so. “I had a boyfriend in high school who called my dad ‘Big George’ once,” Hager revealed on the February 17 broadcast of TODAY. In response, her dad “turned red.”

“He was governor of Texas and some teenager is going, ‘What’s up, Big George?’ I’m impressed he lasted,” co-host Willie Geist observed. The boyfriend, Hager said, “lasted a long time because he was handsome” though the situation was “not good” after that faux pas.

 

Speaking of nicknames, Hager got a great one during her First Daughter days, when her secret service code name was “Twinkle.”

“I take that as a compliment,” she revealed during a 2020 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. “When we went back to the White House with the TODAY show peeps, we walked in and they were like, ‘Twinkle, welcome home,’ and everybody was like, ‘Twinkle?’”

Jenna Bush Hager at her wedding with her family and new husband

President George W. Bush, Mrs. Laura Bush and Barbara Bush stand with the new Mr. and Mrs. Henry Hager following the young couple’s wedding ceremony at Prairie Chapel Ranch May 10, 2008 near Crawford, Texas. Photo: Shealah Craighead/The White House via WireImage

President Bush gets along well with Jenna Bush Hager’s husband

Fortunately, the Read With Jenna founder moved on with a much better match when her family got to the White House: Henry Chase Hager, who worked for her father’s administration. Though dating a political aide probably kept her safe from any “Big George” awkwardness, it did have certain drawbacks.

As she later spilled to Hoda Kotb, “My parents were traveling and I was staying [at the White House]. We’d gone out to the bars and, like all relationships do, it reached a certain level. Henry said he woke up [the next morning] and he looked around and he was, like, ‘Aaaaaaaah’ because he worked for my dad.”

 

The pair tied the knot in 2008 with the whole family’s well-wishes and blessings. Including from Big George.