The Real Romney (14 page)

The Harvard campus of his day was an exciting place, crackling with talent and the collision of ideas, though it had quieted from the tumultuous days of the late 1960s. Antiwar sentiment persisted, and many veterans of the strikes and sit-ins were still on campus. But as he had at Stanford, Romney ran with a different crowd. In an age when many of his peers were challenging authority, his enthusiasm and optimism stood out. “There was nothing jaded about him, nothing skeptical, nothing ironic,” said Garret G. Rasmussen, who, by virtue of alphabetical seating, sat near Romney their first year at law school. “He was all positive, and it was a very refreshing style.” Even in the casual environment of graduate school, Romney presented a more buttoned-down image, dressing more formally than his fellow students. “Most of us dressed like borderline slobs,” recalled William L. Neff, a member of Romney’s law school study group. “He was a little neater than that.”

B
y the time Romney arrived at Harvard, his father had run a major corporation, been elected three times as Michigan’s governor, sought the presidency, and been appointed to President Nixon’s cabinet. But despite strongly resembling the elder Romney—the full head of strikingly dark hair, square jaw, dazzling smile—Mitt did little to draw attention to his parentage. Classmates said that the only hint was George’s faded gold initials on a beat-up old briefcase that Mitt carried around. Mitt’s father, meanwhile, had been drawing attention in Washington, making waves in a White House that from the beginning had viewed him more as an adversary than a collaborator.

After George Romney abandoned his bid for president, Nixon surprised many by appointing him secretary of housing and urban development. But the two former rivals never really made up. Romney had refused to release his delegates to Nixon at the 1968 GOP convention. The snub “was an incident that Nixon could never forget,” Nixon aide John Ehrlichman later wrote. Ehrlichman believed the decision to put Romney in the cabinet was purely strategic. “Nixon,” he wrote, “needed a few moderate Republicans to balance the Cabinet. What better revenge than to put Romney into a meaningless department, never to be noticed again.” But Romney did not toil quietly in obscurity. He fought hard to fulfill his vow to improve race relations, pushing for integration of suburban housing. “We’ve got to put an end to the idea of moving to suburban areas and living only among people of the same economic and social class,” said Romney, who still owned the family home in exclusive Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was a volatile issue, and his advocacy was unpopular in the Republican Party. Mitt’s mother, Lenore, tried to follow her husband into politics, mounting an unsuccessful Republican campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in 1970. Some analysts attributed her defeat to her husband’s push for integrated housing. George Romney initially believed he had Nixon’s support for his housing policies, only to learn that the president, at the urging of his aides, was keeping his distance from Romney’s plans for political reasons. Romney was torn between speaking out about his disagreements and being a team player.

Eventually, the anger within the party at George Romney led Nixon to want to push him out. Romney declined Nixon’s suggestion that he become ambassador to Mexico, his birthplace. When Nixon met with Romney in late 1970, the president, concerned about losing Michigan as well as urban voters across the country in the 1972 election, couldn’t bring himself to ax his old foe. Instead he tried to bully Romney into capitulating on a variety of issues. Romney became increasingly infuriated at his lack of authority. Then, in early August 1972, flooding following a hurricane devastated Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Nixon announced that he was sending George Romney to assess the situation—but didn’t bother to inform Romney, who learned about it from the media. As Romney angrily stewed about the slight, his wife, Lenore, decided to secretly contact the White House. Unaware that Ehrlichman had been assigned to keep Romney in line, Lenore wrote the Nixon aide on August 8, 1972, saying, “It was a stunning blow to have the president send a communication through the press that he was ‘ordering’ George to Wilkes-Barre and demanding a report. . . . It is demoralizing to know . . . that your President has such low regard for your own dignity and service.”

Arriving in Wilkes-Barre, Romney was confronted by flood victims who believed the Nixon administration had abandoned them. Romney’s blunt contrarian style welled up, and he brusquely dismissed a suggestion from the state’s Democratic governor that the federal government pay off the mortgages of hurricane victims, calling the idea “unrealistic and demagogic.” That prompted a sixty-three-year-old grandmother, Min Matheson, to challenge Romney during a press conference. “You don’t give a damn whether we live or die,” she told him, thrusting a photo of the devastated area in his face.

The confrontation received wide media coverage. Though Romney’s “brainwashing” comment about his early views on Vietnam had become his best-known sound bite, the clash in Wilkes-Barre, at the time, almost surpassed it. Nixon feared that the fallout from Romney’s trip could hurt his reelection chances in such a large, crucial state. Two days after his visit to Pennsylvania, Romney arrived for a rare personal meeting with Nixon in the Oval Office. In the course of an emotional hour, Romney let loose with his many frustrations about serving under Nixon and repeatedly tried to quit, according to a conversation captured on Nixon’s secret tape-recording system. “I have no effective voice in the policy areas or the operational areas relating to my own department!” he thundered. Nixon, however, didn’t want Romney leaving in the midst of a reelection campaign. In a soothing voice, the president told him that his leaving immediately would hurt both of them. Romney relented, agreeing to put off his resignation. He stayed silent about his disagreements with Nixon, but only until Nixon won a second term. Then, in a tart resignation letter to Nixon on November 9, 1972, he said that politicians had become too fixated on simply winning elections to lead effectively. “Their basic function is to compete for the responsibility to govern,” too afraid of alienating voters to tackle “real issues,” he wrote. He envisioned forming a “coalition of concerned citizens” with the goal of creating “an enlightened electorate.” Romney’s critique was in some ways out of step with an American political culture that was moving toward scripted, media-driven campaigns. He briefly considered running for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah in 1974 but elected not to and never again sought national office. His accumulated political wisdom, though, would prove useful yet.

M
itt Romney was already, at twenty-four, married and the father of two young sons—their second boy, Matthew, was born in October 1971—as he threw himself into graduate work at Harvard. His social circle was generally made up of other men and women who, like himself, lived off campus with their families. Mitt and Ann had, with his parents’ help, bought a house in Belmont, a leafy Boston suburb. His responsibilities at school and at home consumed most of his time. But he was still a presence on the graduate school social scene. He was an occasional visitor to the Lincoln’s Inn Society, a Harvard Law School social club where students could eat, relax, and meet other students. He sometimes attended weekend parties and group dinners at Cambridge restaurants. The restrictions of his Mormon faith—church members are instructed to avoid alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes, and drugs—never interfered. “He didn’t mind if we were drinking coffee or having a beer, but that wasn’t what he did,” Serkin said. “We respected him for being true to what he believed in, and I found him to be completely open and tolerant to everybody else.” Romney also involved himself in the Harvard Law School Forum, a student group that brought prominent speakers to campus. One guest Romney recruited was his father. When George Romney arrived to speak, orange juice—prominently labeled as such—was added to the usual mix of soda, coffee, tea, and other caffeinated refreshments.

Romney’s classmates were widely aware that he was Mormon but said he never proselytized. Mark E. Mazo, one of Romney’s law school study group partners, recalled that Romney offered to discuss his faith with any classmates interested in learning more about it. “He mentioned it once and only once, and it never came up again,” he said. On occasion, Mitt and Ann invited classmates to what’s called family home evening, a Mormon tradition in which families set aside time each week to spend together. “You got the feeling you were dealing with a guy with a very strong moral fiber who is very devoted to church and family,” Brownstein said. “You’re not going to hear from Mitt a joke at anyone’s expense, and you’re not going to hear any swearwords. You know when you meet him and when you’re with him that you’re dealing with a very serious-minded guy.”

When Romney left Harvard in 1975, he had graduated with honors from the law school and was a Baker Scholar at the business school, a distinction reserved for the top 5 percent of the class. But he had long been a hot commodity to prospective employers, even before he entered the job market. Consulting firms and investment banks were always on the hunt for future employees among Harvard’s best and brightest, and the select group enrolled in the university’s competitive dual-degree program seemed an obvious place to start. They were the elite of the elite.

Not long after he arrived on the Cambridge campus, Romney appeared on the radar of the Boston Consulting Group, then one of the hottest companies in the emerging field of business consulting. Charles Faris was assigned the task of wooing Romney to BCG. Over the course of Romney’s four years at Harvard, Faris kept in frequent contact with him, treating him to occasional lunches and dinners and inviting him to company events. As Romney neared graduation, Faris found plenty of competition when he tried to hire him. “He was an outstanding recruit with exceptional grades, and he was the very charming, smooth, attractive son of a former presidential candidate,” Faris said. “So everybody was bending over backward to get their hands on him.” Faris’s flattery and persistence paid off. Shortly after Romney left Harvard, he began working at BCG, a fitting first job for a freshly minted Ivy League graduate.

Romney was hedging his bets, though, not wholly confident that he would make it in the business world. He passed the Michigan bar exam in July 1975 and was admitted to practice law there the next year. He figured it would provide him a landing place if he didn’t cut it in business. Romney recalled thinking, “That’s where my friends are, and the industry that I know. I love cars.” But the safety valve wouldn’t be necessary. Companies nationwide were clamoring to hire BCG’s consultants, who analyzed mountains of financial data with an eye to lowering costs, improving production, and gaining market share. Romney rapidly established a reputation as a rising star.

BCG consultants marketed themselves as objective outsiders, an excellent fit for Romney’s rational turn of mind. “At BCG, analysis was king, clients were paying a lot of money, and you were expected to come in with really significant insights,” said Lonnie M. Smith, who attended Harvard Business School with Romney and later worked with him at the firm. For Romney, whose young family was expanding quickly, that meant often working nights and weekends and traveling frequently. Faris, who became Romney’s mentor at the firm, spent two summers flying regularly with him to Europe, where they worked for a U.S. client with operations overseas. “He worked his butt off,” Faris said.

Romney was part of what several of his colleagues affectionately called the “Mormon mafia,” a coterie of smart, talented, hardworking Mormon men at the firm who eventually rose to leadership positions. “For me and everybody there, including Mitt, it was a very formative time and probably more powerful than business school or law school,” Smith said. But as the 1970s wore on, one rival firm began to eclipse BCG. It was called Bain & Company, the namesake of a former BCG executive, Bill Bain. Four years after starting his own firm, Bain had positioned Bain & Company as one of the nation’s premier consulting outfits. And Mitt Romney wanted in.

[ Five ]

Family Man, Church Man

We’ve tried to civilize the boys. Unfortunately, it’s been very difficult with Mitt.

—ANN ROMNEY, JOKING ABOUT HER HUSBAND’S RAMBUNCTIOUS SIDE

I
t was shaping up to be a hard Christmas for Mark and Sheryl Nixon. They had recently moved their family to the Boston area for his job and didn’t know many people. And then, on the night of April 4, 1995, they got the kind of phone call every parent dreads. Four of their six children, including two sons in high school, Rob and Reed, had been driving back from a youth gathering at the Mormon meetinghouse in Marlborough, a city about forty-five minutes west of Boston. Shortly after leaving the parking lot, Reed lost control of the red Oldsmobile minivan. The car sideswiped a utility pole, struck two trees and a sign for a condominium complex, and flipped over. Six others in the minivan escaped with bumps and bruises, but Rob and Reed, both in the front seat, were pinned upside down, their necks shattered. In a flash, the two Nixon boys, standouts on the high school cross-country team, became quadriplegics. “I could see my legs, and they were kind of crooked, off to the side,” Reed would say later. “And I couldn’t feel them.”

After a number of major surgeries, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of treatment, and six months in rehab, Rob and Reed returned home in October 1995. Rob’s injuries had been less severe, allowing him eventually to move his arms and breathe on his own. Reed, though, was completely paralyzed and put on a ventilator. The family suddenly needed a major addition on their house. They needed a special van to transport their sons. Their financial and emotional burdens were vast. Shortly before the holidays that year, Mark Nixon, a professor of accounting at Bentley University outside Boston, got a call at his office. It was Mitt Romney. He said he wanted to help. Would they be home on Christmas Eve?

That morning, a Sunday, the Nixons opened their door to find not just Mitt but Ann Romney and their sons. They held large boxes. Inside were a massive stereo system for Rob—“beyond anything he would ever hope to have,” Mark said—and a VCR for Reed. They’d also brought Reed a check, not knowing what else to get him. The Romneys stayed a while. Their sons helped set up Rob’s new stereo. “What a Christmas surprise for the boys,” Sheryl wrote in her journal at the time.

The Nixons were floored. They shared a faith with Romney but didn’t really know him—they weren’t strangers, but neither were they friends. At that point, Romney held no formal leadership position in the Mormon church. He bore no direct ecclesiastical obligation to help. Many people within and outside the church assisted the Nixons during this difficult chapter in their lives, but the Romneys’ generosity still stands out. What impressed the Nixons more than anything was that Mitt and Ann, despite their own packed holiday calendars, made a point of delivering the gifts themselves, spending time with the family, and, by bringing their children with them, leading by example. “I knew his schedule. I knew how busy he was. And their whole family came,” Mark said. “He was actually teaching his boys, saying, ‘This is what we do. We do this as a family.’ ” Sheryl added, “We’ve never forgotten it. It stood out so much in our minds and helped us to want to be better parents, too.”

That wasn’t all. Romney had also told Mark not to worry about Rob’s or Reed’s college education; he would pay for it. The Nixons, in the end, didn’t need the help. But Romney continued to quietly lend his hand. He participated in a 5K road race and fund-raiser for Rob and Reed at Bentley the next spring. He contributed substantial financial gifts toward golf tournament fund-raisers in subsequent years. Then, in 2007, when Reed graduated from Bentley with a degree in finance after ten years in school, the Romneys sent him a Bentley desk clock engraved with a special message of congratulations. “It wasn’t,” Mark said, “a onetime thing.”

T
he Romneys’ Mormon faith, as they began building a life together, formed a deep foundation. It lay under nearly everything—not just their acts of charity but their marriage, their parenting, their social lives, even their weekly schedules. The Romneys’ family-centric lifestyle was a choice; Mitt and Ann plainly cherished time at home with the boys more than anything. But it was also a duty. Belonging to the Mormon church meant accepting a code of conduct that placed supreme value on strong families—strong heterosexual families, in which men and women often filled defined and traditional roles. The Romneys have long cited a well-known Mormon credo popularized by the late church leader David O. McKay: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” That was how Mitt had grown up in Michigan. But for Ann, who had been reared in a family in which organized religion was viewed with skepticism, raising a devout Mormon brood would be a new experience, one she would learn and master along the way.

When the Romneys arrived in the Boston area in 1971, they established a home in Belmont, a well-to-do suburb that was fast becoming a magnet for Mormon families. Over the next decade, they would have three more boys in addition to Tagg and Matt. Joshua was born in 1975, Benjamin in 1978, and then Craig in 1981, when Mitt was thirty-four years old and had begun making his mark at Bain & Company.

Like many Mormons, the Romneys established a routine for their new family. Sundays were for church, reflection, volunteer work, family dinners, and, in the fall, watching the New England Patriots on TV. Monday nights were for the Mormon ritual of family home evening, in which the Romneys would gather for Gospel lessons, stories, and activities. Ann once said that Mitt would sometimes tell stories about animals, and the children would act them out. “For us, family night was less about lessons and more about having fun together,” Mitt Romney said. Tuesday evenings brought church families together for basketball games and cookouts. Friday nights were reserved for date nights for Mitt and Ann, often consisting of dinner and a movie, and Saturdays the family performed chores at home. Before high school every day, the boys joined other children at a neighbor’s house for “seminary,” where they discussed scripture for forty-five minutes.

The parental roles were clear: Mitt would have the career, and Ann would run the house. In an era when many women had professional aspirations, homemaking became Ann’s calling. She had left Brigham Young University before graduating to go east with Mitt, later finishing her bachelor’s degree with a concentration in French. She would become active in charities such as the United Way, work with inner-city youth, compete in equestrian events, and take on various responsibilities at church. But the home was her workplace, and she was the chief executive. (Her husband’s preferred term for her was CFO, or Chief Family Officer.) “So far as the family, she has a leadership point of view, and she’s not afraid to express it,” said Douglas Anderson, a longtime friend of the Romneys.

With five boys, the domestic tasks piled up like laundry—the meals, the cleaning, the heaps of whites and colors. There were countless school, sports, and church activities, including the Eagle Scout badges that she helped their three youngest sons achieve. And with epic battles raging in kickball, basketball, and football, there were numerous cuts, breaks, and bruises to mend. Mitt once said that motherhood was its own profession. “It’s one which is challenging, it’s demanding,” he said. “It requires being a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, an engineer, a teacher.” Once Ann forgot to close the sunroof on a BMW coupe that was one of Mitt’s favorite cars. It poured, and the inside was soaked. But Mitt didn’t blow up. “I know who does the cooking here,” John Wright, a close friend, neighbor, and fellow church member, recalled him saying. “I know who prepares my meals.” Wright said the response captured Mitt’s genuine appreciation of Ann’s importance in the life of their family. In other words, it wasn’t a patronizing line; to the Romneys, as to many Mormon families, maintaining a strong, functional home was always the first priority.

Besides, Ann’s cooking, a skill she had absorbed from her mother and grandmother, was legendary. She loved to provide cooking demonstrations and once even ran a small cooking school. Within the family, everyone had favorite dishes. One of the most popular was Ann’s “monkey bread,” a treat during the Thanksgiving holiday. Mitt, meanwhile, had his own ideas about what he would—and wouldn’t—do as a father, evidently counting on Ann’s maternal generosity. “I was willing to change the urine-soaked diapers, but the messier types gave me dry heaves,” he told
GQ
magazine in 2007. “So my wife allowed me to escape that.”

I
f Ann Romney had to learn how to run a Mormon household, one thing she already knew was how to contend with boys. She had grown up with only brothers. Still, presiding over five sons as they got older and more physical was a challenge. Tagg once told an interviewer that his mother, on account of his many childhood scrapes, joked that the hospital was going to name a wing after him. “I’ve broken almost every bone in my body,” he said. “I’ve had my head stitched up five or six times. I’ve broken my shoulder, my elbow, my ankle, my femur, most of my toes, most of my fingers.”

One winter day, Wright’s son David was helping clear snow at the Romneys’ home. Tagg accidentally gashed David with a shovel above his right eye, which required four stitches. Wright’s wife, Laraine, was a nurse, and predisposed to concern. But Ann, having witnessed mishaps like that many times before, was sanguine, just as she had been a few months earlier when Tagg had broken David’s nose on the basketball court with an errant elbow. “Ann just laughed,” Wright said of the shoveling accident, “because this was something that happened all the time to her boys.” Indeed, Ann was not an overprotective mother who worried over every little thing, friends said. That would have been impossible anyway, with her sons, like their father, always out experimenting, building things, boating, and skiing. “They were not kids she could hold back if she wanted to,” Wright said.

In time, each of the boys would develop his own niche within the family. As Tagg would later describe his brothers, Matt, the second oldest, was “the jokester, always pushing people’s buttons.” Josh was “the typical middle child, wanting lots of attention and getting a lot of it.” Ben, the fourth child, remained “very reserved and quiet, a little aloof from the situation,” while Craig relished his role as “the ultimate baby, everyone’s favorite brother.” Tagg said he fit the mold as the oldest: “Type A and too tightly wound.”

Though distinct personalities, the five Romney boys, by many accounts, came to represent the wholesome Mormon ideal: they were disciplined, well mannered, clean cut, giving, and the embodiment of G-rated fun. “They were very impressive young men,” said Philip Barlow, who worked closely with Romney in Romney’s early years as a local church leader. Wright said the Romneys, unlike some other church families he knew, were not overly strict or prone to threatening grave consequences for disobedience. They set high standards and sought to demonstrate the long-term payoffs of adhering to Mormonism’s moral compact. “Mitt tried to teach his boys to be leaders and develop a sense of self-confidence,” he noted. “They’ve grown in their faith by their father’s example.” Indeed, all five sons would, in time, follow their father’s path and serve on missions, leaving as boys and returning as caring, compassionate men, their mother would later say.

Mitt Romney said he came into his own as a parent as the boys got old enough to tease, roughhouse with, and play pranks on one another. Unlike diaper duty, all that was very much in his wheelhouse. “Growing up in that household was so much fun, because of the jokes, the laughter, bathroom humor, the physical, you know, fisticuffs, wrestling, games,” Romney recalled. “It was just an enormously great experience.” Tagg said his father, when he was home, was always on the floor with everyone else. “He was right there in the mix with us,” he recalled. In a campaign ad Romney would air years later, Ann would describe her husband as just another teenager: “We’ve tried to civilize the boys. Unfortunately, it’s been very difficult with Mitt.”

His antics were not confined to their Belmont home or even to their family. For fifteen years, the Romneys owned a modest weekend house on the waterfront on Cape Cod, where Mitt would cook his kids pancakes and they would sometimes entertain friends. Grant Bennett, a friend from church, remembered being invited down with his family one weekend to go waterskiing. Bennett was up on the skis and Mitt was behind the wheel of the boat, swinging him around in a series of figure eights. The pattern intensified until Bennett grew tired of getting whipped around the water. He flashed a thumbs-down, the sign for “slow down.” “He turns around and smiles at me and speeds up and starts to make the figure eights tighter and tighter,” Bennett recalled. Eventually, Bennett dropped the rope out of sheer exhaustion. “I went up and said, ‘Mitt, you only have one speed. It’s full speed or nothing.’ ”

Mitt had learned to water-ski on the Great Lakes and had loved the water and loved his boat ever since. The family took frequent day or weekend trips to lakes, to the sea, and up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, sometimes with other families. Romney helped teach Wright’s children to water-ski on those trips. Even in the mountains, the water was a draw. On one excursion with their families up to New Hampshire’s Loon Mountain, Wright said, they became obsessed with trying to dam up a stream to create their own waterfall. That, Wright said, was the kind of hands-on project Romney loved.

On one trip to waters closer to home, Romney got himself into trouble. In June 1981, Romney and Wright went to Lake Cochituate, about a half hour west of Boston, intending to do some boating with their families. A park ranger told him he couldn’t put his boat into the lake because the license number was too difficult to read, Romney would later say. Romney then asked what the fine was, and the ranger told him: fifty bucks. To Romney, it was a no-brainer—he’d easily pay that in exchange for a day of fun. But when he began to lower his boat into the water, the ranger became incensed. “The ranger took it as a personal attack,” Wright said. The ranger pulled out a pair of handcuffs and took Romney, dripping wet in his bathing suit, into custody for disorderly conduct. The case was soon dismissed after Romney and his lawyer pushed back hard. But that day, the lake outing was over before it had begun.