- A new, two-part episode of the PBS docu series American Experience reveals why former President George W. Bush decided to quit drinking after his 40th birthday.
- His friends and family attributed his lifestyle change to a renewed sense of spirituality.
- He imparted similar lessons about drinking onto his daughter, Jenna Bush Hager.
If George W. Bush hadn’t made the sudden choice to stop drinking after his 40th birthday, he may have never become president of the United States. A two-part episode of the PBS docu series American Experience, which premiered on May 4 and continued on May 5, explores exactly how that decision unfolded.
After a wild night of celebrating the big 4-0, Bush woke up the following morning with quite the hangover. “He’d overdone it the night before and he didn’t feel good. I think Laura [Bush] told him he could’ve behaved better,” his childhood friend Charlie Younger says in the series. “He just said, ‘I don’t need this in my life. It’s robbing me of my energy. It’s taking too much of my time.’”
So he quit, cold turkey. “I quit because at times I thought I like to drink too much,” an older interview with the former president explains in the documentary. “Somebody said, ‘Can you think of any day you hadn’t had a beer?’ And I couldn’t.” There’s plenty of evidence of that in the documentary—he had spent his fair share of days drinking on his bachelor pad, and it was beginning to impact his life’s trajectory.
“He was kind of drifting,” Younger says in the show. “I don’t think he had focus on where he was heading.” Another childhood friend Robert McCleskey later adds, “He could really be obnoxious when he drank too much. For lack of a better word, he could be a real [expletive.]”
His friends and family attributed his abrupt lifestyle change to a renewed sense of spirituality. The documentary explains that he began attending weekly bible studies and searching for more meaning within his life. “He’s looking for something, right? He’s seeking out direction, meaning, understanding,” New York Times political reporter Peter Baker says. “Religion begins to give him that definition and that path forward.”
That was the summer of 1985, four years after his twin daughters Jenna and Barbara were born. Sixteen years later, he would become president, and would eventually find himself imparting a similar lesson onto Jenna, who received two alcohol-related citations before turning 20.
As a college freshman at the University of Texas, she was charged with the possession of alcohol and using a fake ID to purchase alcohol within a five-week period, and as the president’s daughter, the story was plastered everywhere. At first, her dad tried to let her learn her lesson alone, but he ultimately gave the advice he wished he’d taken at a family wedding a few years later.
“I’ll never forget: I was in Maine for my cousin’s wedding,” the Today with Hoda & Jenna co-host recently shared. “My dad said let’s go for a walk. We went for a walk, and he said, ‘I just want to talk to you about drinking. I found in my life it got in the way of the things that mattered most, and I want to make sure that you just know that it can and be aware of it.’”
At the time, she found the conversation random, but looking back, Jenna really appreciates it. “I do think it was such a model to me about how I want to parent, which is to be transparent about either things that have happened in our family’s past, or things that you know that can happen to your kids,” she explained. “He [also] said, ‘I just want you to know that there was a point in my life where I thought like this is interrupting what’s beautiful…’ I always appreciated it, and I still do.”
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Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.
