The Real Romney (13 page)

Something else had changed in him, too. The boy who had grown up immersed in American car culture now feared automobiles. “I was frightened of driving a car or being in a car and had a sense of vulnerability that I had not experienced before,” he said. Romney apparently had good reason for concern. On an icy day in December 1968, he was driving a Peugeot through the city of Le Mans when it was hit from behind by a garbage truck. Romney saw the truck coming in the rearview mirror and braced himself. The truck “slammed into the back of my vehicle,” he said, “which caused it to slam into the car in front of us, and they kept going—bang, bang, bang, bang!” No one was seriously injured, but Romney, who would return to the United States a few weeks later, had had it with French roads.

On his way home from France, right before Christmas 1968, Romney stopped first in England, where Ann Davies’s older brother, Rod, who had recently converted to Mormonism, had been called as a missionary. Romney gave Rod his old shirts, shoes, and suits, and they spent a day together knocking on doors before Romney flew home. But Romney wasn’t especially concerned about converting the English. All he cared about was Rod’s sister. Mitt and Ann had agreed to get married once upon a time, but that was a childhood promise, made more than two and a half years earlier. Romney hoped the deal was still on, but he couldn’t say for sure.

T
hroughout his mission, Romney never lost sight of his primary goal: holding on to Ann Davies. Just as George Romney had doggedly pursued Lenore, Mitt was determined not to let Ann slip from his grasp. He had grown over the past two and a half years—he’d come face-to-face with death, drawn closer to his faith, and seen his father wage and lose a presidential campaign. All of that, combined with the distance from Ann, had brought clarity: he wanted a life like his father’s, with Ann at his side and a family in his future. But he had ample reason to fear that his grand plan would crumble into pieces. When Romney moved into his Paris apartment with fellow Mormon missionaries, his eyes were immediately drawn to a wall covered with letters. They were “Dear John” breakup notes that other missionaries had received from their girlfriends back home. Staring at the wall, Romney worried, “Is this what’s in store for me?” Ann Davies had said yes to his informal marriage proposal, but she had been just sixteen years old. Romney’s many months away had tested their youthful romance.

Under the rigid rules for missionaries, Romney was forbidden to telephone Ann more than a couple of times a year. His two visits with her were brief and supervised. Ann, meanwhile, was living the life of a coed at Brigham Young University. The Provo, Utah, campus was crawling with men who had just returned from their own missions, with sharpened skills of persuasion and a determination to find a wife made more urgent by the Mormon ban on premarital sex. Not for nothing was the place nicknamed B-Y-Woo.

The letter Romney dreaded arrived in the fall of 1968, just months after the crash. It wasn’t a classic breakup letter, but it was close. Ann wrote to say that she hadn’t experienced feelings for any of the BYU men pursuing her—except one. His name was Kim Cameron, and he was a basketball player and a student government leader. Cameron reminded her, she wrote, of him. “That was terrifying,” Romney said. “I went, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is it!’ ” The letter threw him into despair. “He became really, really distraught that she had indicated she had gone out with this guy,” McBride said. The saga dragged on for weeks. Mitt wrestled with whether to call her. Instead he poured his heart into letters, auditioning sweet nothings with fellow missionaries before putting them to paper. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen him where he just couldn’t focus on anything else,” McBride said. “He was just kind of worthless.”

Ann’s roommate at BYU was Cindy Burton, a friend from Michigan who would go on to marry Ann’s older brother. Now Cindy Davies, she said that for a time she had thought Ann might end up marrying Cameron. “I think that’s probably right,” Cameron recalled. “Emotionally, I felt very close to her.” Romney feared the same. He implored her to wait for him. Ann had written back assuring Mitt that it was him whom she loved, easing his mind. But he couldn’t be certain. As he flew home, he worried about what awaited him. “I didn’t know how we would feel,” he said. Ann joined the Romney clan in meeting him at the airport. Enveloped in hugs from his family, Mitt kept his focus squarely on Ann. Sitting with her in the third-row seat of his sister’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, he wasted little time. “Gosh, this feels like I’ve never been gone,” he recalled telling her. “I can’t believe it.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” she said.

“You want to get married?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

When they made it home, he told his parents about their plans for an immediate wedding. His father was delighted. His mother was not. A pillar of Detroit society, Lenore Romney knew marriage was not something to be rushed. But that was only part of her hesitation. “I think Lenore had a hard time letting go of her youngest son,” Cindy Davies said. This was, after all, the baby her doctors had said she could never have. Though George had quickly forged a loving bond with Ann, it took Lenore longer. “Her relationship with Ann wasn’t as warm,” Davies said. “She held back more.” They agreed to wait three months to walk down the aisle. In the meantime, Romney ditched Stanford for BYU to be with Ann. Besides, that was where his new friends from the church would be enrolling. He would be comfortable there. Romney joined the honors program at BYU and began to dive into his studies, his time in France driving him to want to “accomplish things of significance,” he said. “I said, ‘Boy, I want to do something with my life if I can.’ So when I came home, I was a much better student.”

In the spring of 1969, he finally got his longtime wish, marrying Ann in a wedding ceremony that stretched over two days. On March 21, exactly four years after their first date, Mitt, then twenty-two, and Ann, who was nineteen, exchanged rings in a small civil ceremony before an improvised altar in her parents’ home. About sixty people attended the ceremony, which was officiated by a church elder, Edwin Jones, the man after whom teenage Mitt had patterned his hairstyle. Ann—happy, tearful, and carrying a handful of orchids—was escorted by her father. Afterward the newlyweds paused for pictures and punch and then headed to the Bloomfield Hills Country Club for a reception dotted with boldfaced names from the auto industry and government. Three hundred guests came. Mitt cut the cake, posed for countless photos, and helped his new bride fix her veil. But there was one thing he wouldn’t do. When a photographer wanted to capture a kiss for posterity, he refused. “Not for cameras,” he said.

The next morning, the wedding party and guests flew to Salt Lake City, most of them on a plane the Romneys had chartered for the occasion. In the spired Mormon temple, Mitt and Ann were “sealed” for eternity. Because they were not Mormons, Ann’s parents were not allowed inside to witness the ceremony. Afterward, the family hosted a reception at a hotel across the street from Temple Square, attended by a number of church leaders and Utah political figures. Once the ceremonies and celebrations were complete, Mitt and Ann Romney returned to BYU to begin building a life together in a modest $62-a-month basement apartment in a complex within walking distance from campus. They fit in easily among the many young Mormon couples who had started their families while at school in Provo, sharing classes and potluck meals. George and Lenore had bought them a car as a wedding gift. A year to the day after their first marriage ceremony, their first son, Taggart, named for a friend at BYU, was born. The new parents were thrilled.

Romney, despite having soured on the Vietnam War, felt at home within the conservative culture at BYU, which prohibited many rock-and-roll bands, liberal speakers and student organizations, and even long hair on male students. During Romney’s time at the school, the president of the university enlisted students to spy on professors deemed to be liberals. Students who displayed peace signs were told to take them down.

He was invited to join the Cougar Club, an all-male service club on campus—BYU’s version of a fraternity—that sought out students who had shown leadership potential. A few dozen students participated in the club, which, until Romney became president around 1970, had raised modest amounts of money for the university through bake sales, luaus, and auction sales. But Romney, put off by the protests, vandalism, and violence that had engulfed other college campuses around the country, wanted to transform the club into something greater, an entity that could provide more robust support to a school that he and the other members loved. “We felt very differently about our university . . . and we wanted it to succeed,” said McBride, who also joined the club. “We were proud of it.” So Romney set an ambitious goal: instead of just selling cookies and sponsoring parties, the Cougar Club, in collaboration with the university administration, would endeavor to raise $100,000 a year by directly soliciting alumni and their families for contributions. Romney secured names of potential donors from the school, signed up volunteers, and established phone banks. The plan worked, and they achieved their goal. The Cougar Club has since become a major booster for university athletics. It was Romney’s vision, and he made it happen.

In 1971, after two and a half years in Provo, Romney earned a degree in English literature, graduating with “highest honors” and delivering an address to students at commencement that year. In his speech, Romney invoked scripture and said that for the blessed like them, the expectations were high. “I pray that this graduating class will choose a different kind of life, that we may develop an attitude of restlessness and discomfort, not self-satisfaction,” he said. “Our education should spark us to challenge ignorance and prepare to receive new truths from God.” Though they would follow many of the same paths, Romney’s degree from BYU set him apart from his father, who had reached the heights of business without ever graduating from college. Four decades earlier, George Romney had dreamed of going to Harvard University to obtain a business degree, but he had given up the dream in order to pursue and marry Lenore. Things had worked out well for George, but now, he felt, times were different. He sat down with Mitt and laid out his view: not only should Mitt get a business degree; he should also try simultaneously to get a law degree from Harvard. It was a competitive world, and one needed the best education to thrive, he believed. Mitt wasn’t sure at first but agreed to consider the idea. He talked it over with Ann and soon set the plan into motion. They would move to Massachusetts.

H
oward C. Serkin worked his way down the long rows of terraced desks, searching the alphabetized name cards for his seat in Aldrich Hall. He was no stranger to pressure after four years as a nuclear submarine officer in the navy, but that morning his stomach was in knots. It was the first day of classes at Harvard Business School in 1972. He found his seat and introduced himself to the fellow with the glossy dark hair in the next chair. “He looks up. He smiles. I say, ‘Hi, I’m Howard Serkin.’ He says, ‘Hi, I’m Mitt Romney,’ ” Serkin recalled. “Stupid me, I say, ‘Where are you from?’ He says, ‘I’m from Michigan.’ At that point, I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’ and then I knew: He was . . . George’s son.”

Romney’s privileged pedigree was common knowledge to many of his classmates at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, where he was simultaneously enrolled through a joint degree program. But he was only one of many children of the wealthy and politically influential. His business school class included the son of Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general; and Michael Darling, whose family had given Darling Harbour in Sydney its name. The class behind his had included George W. Bush, whose father was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee. At the law school, Romney counted among his classmates Susan Roosevelt, the great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt; and Edward F. Cox, who was frequently trailed by Secret Service agents and news photographers when he appeared on campus with his wife, Tricia, the daughter of President Nixon. “When we all got there, for the first week or so, everyone—even the rich and famous—walked around saying, ‘What the hell am I doing here? Why did they pick me?’ ” said Janice Stewart, a member of Romney’s business school class. “After several weeks, I figured it out: Everyone I talked to were all internally driven human beings. They had fire in the belly.” She added, “It was expressed in any number of ways, but it was always there, always present. And Mitt’s got it big.”

Harvard’s joint MBA/JD program was relatively new at the time—it had been launched two years earlier—and intensely rigorous. Typically, business school was completed in two years and law school in three; dual-degree students earned both degrees in four years, spending their first year at one of the schools, their second at the other, and their final two shuttling between the two. Out of Romney’s 800 business school classmates and 550 law school classmates, only 15 earned degrees through the program. “We viewed ourselves as kind of an elite guerrilla band,” said Howard B. Brownstein, who graduated from the program with Romney in 1975 and then worked with him at the same firm. “We were small and a little different.”

Academically, the law school was more theoretical, the business school more practical. Harvard Law, where Romney’s professors included Stephen Breyer, now an associate justice on the Supreme Court, relied largely on textbooks and instruction. The business school revolved around the case study method, in which students dissected real-life business decisions to learn to think like managers and executives. Romney excelled at both, and together the two tracks of Romney’s graduate school experience provided excellent preparation for his future career in consulting and private equity. His legal training honed skills he had possessed since childhood: asking challenging questions, playing the role of devil’s advocate, and using an adversarial process to get answers. His new ability to analyze and reconcile conflicting points of view and data would become an important asset in his future high-stakes investing.