The Real Romney (16 page)

For all he took on, Romney did set some limits. His growing responsibilities at Bain and at church were demanding more and more of him, keeping him away from home. There were stretches where he would miss the Monday-night family sessions for weeks at a time. But one thing Romney would not do was take work home. “Every night when I was home, I put my work at the door,” he recalled. “When I was home, I was home. For me, life is about my wife and my kids, and everything else I was doing was earning enough money to support them and was a necessary part of living.” The boys made as much as possible of the time their father was around. “To us, he was just Dad,” Tagg said. “He wasn’t a business guy. He wasn’t a politician. He was just Dad.”

F
rom the moment they first settled out east, the Romneys wove themselves into the local Mormon tapestry, which had been expanding as church members—doctors, university professors, scientists, and entrepreneurs—came to the Boston area for school and work. Romney’s religious pedigree perhaps made the family’s integration smoother, but other area church members had their own esteemed Mormon lineages. Mormon congregations, typically groups of four hundred to five hundred people, are known as wards, and their boundaries are determined by geography. That is, unlike Protestants or Catholics, Mormons do not choose the congregations to which they belong. It depends entirely on where they live. Wards, along with smaller congregations known as branches, are organized into stakes. Thus a stake, akin to a Catholic diocese, is a collection of wards and branches in a city or region. Because of the Mormon church’s rapid growth, wards and stakes in the Boston area have often changed and split in recent decades to account for all the new members.

In another departure from many other faiths, Mormons do not have paid full-time clergy. Members of stakes and wards in good standing take turns serving in leadership roles. They are expected to perform their ecclesiastical duties on top of career and family responsibilities. But despite the all-volunteer nature of the Mormon priesthood, its lay leaders are very much part of the church’s rigid hierarchy. Those called to serve as stake presidents and bishops or leaders of local wards are fully empowered as agents of the church, and they carry great authority over their domains. Their selection is carefully vetted by church headquarters in Salt Lake City. “It really is quite a tremendous amount of trust that’s placed in the leadership,” said Tony Kimball, who worked closely with Romney as a local church leader.

Mitt Romney first took on a major church role around 1977, when he was called to be a counselor to Gordon Williams, then the president of the Boston stake. Romney was essentially an adviser and deputy to Williams, helping oversee area congregations. His appointment was somewhat unusual in that counselors at that level have typically been bishops of their local wards first. But Romney, who was only about thirty years old and just at the dawn of his Bain career, was deemed to possess leadership qualities beyond his years. “He was obviously younger than most people who had had that calling,” Grant Bennett said. Romney’s responsibilities only grew from there; he would go on to serve as bishop and then as stake president, overseeing about a dozen congregations with close to four thousand members all together. Those positions in the church amounted to his biggest leadership test yet, exposing him to personal and institutional crises, human tragedies, immigrant cultures, social forces, and organizational challenges that he had never before encountered.

His leadership in the church coincided with a period of profound change and growth within Mormonism, which was contending—at times uneasily—with shifting social currents in America. Abortion had been legalized. Feminists were pushing for gender equality. The gay rights movement was gaining steam. And African Americans were still facing barriers to equality, despite the civil rights gains of prior decades. In 1978, after what it called a revelation from God, the church reversed decades of discrimination and allowed black men to hold the priesthood. Up until then, church practice reflected the text and interpretations of Mormon scripture, which deemed dark skin to be a curse upon those descended from sinners. Romney later described the reversal as “one of the most emotional and happy days of my life.” He said he had been driving near his home when he learned the news. “I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept,” Romney once recalled. But though the church had liberalized its views on race, women were another story. In a high-profile crackdown fifteen years later, in 1993, the church disciplined six Mormon activists and scholars for challenging Mormonism’s official teachings and history, including feminists who questioned the church’s treatment of women.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is far more than a form of Sunday worship. It is a code of ethics that frowns on homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births, and abortion and forbids premarital sex. It offers a robust, effective social safety net, capable of incredible feats of charity, support, and service, particularly when its own members are in trouble. And it works hard to create community, a built-in network of friends who often share values and a worldview. For many Mormons, the all-encompassing nature of their faith, as an extension of their spiritual lives, is what makes belonging to the church so wonderful, so warm, even as its insularity can set members apart from society.

But a dichotomy exists within the Mormon church, which holds that one is either in or out; there is little or no tolerance for those who, like so-called cafeteria Catholics, pick and choose what doctrines to follow. And in Mormonism, if one is in, a lot is expected, including tithing 10 percent of one’s income, participating regularly in church activities, meeting high moral expectations, and accepting Mormon doctrine—including many concepts, such as the belief that Jesus will rule from Missouri in his second coming, that run counter to those of other Christian faiths. That rigidity can be difficult to abide for those who love the faith but chafe at its strictures or question its teachings and cultural habits. For one, Mormonism is male-dominated—women can serve only in certain leadership roles and never as bishops or stake presidents. The church also makes a number of firm value judgments, typically prohibiting single or divorced men from leading wards and stakes, for example, and not looking kindly upon single parenthood.

The portrait of Romney that emerges from those he led and served with in the church is of a leader who was pulled between Mormonism’s conservative core views and practices and the demands from some quarters within the Boston stake for a more elastic, more open-minded application of church doctrine. The Boston area had been known as a comparatively liberal redoubt of Mormon thought, where church members would sometimes openly question church tenets. Romney was forced to strike a balance between those local expectations and the dictates out of Salt Lake City. Some believe that Romney artfully reconciled the two, praising him as an innovative and generous leader who was willing to make accommodations, such as giving women expanded responsibility, and who was always there for church members in times of need. To others, he was the product of a hidebound, patriarchal Mormon culture, inflexible and insensitive in delicate situations and dismissive of those who didn’t share his perspective. One thing is clear: Romney was heavily involved in all aspects of local church life.

I
n the early-morning darkness of August 1, 1984, flames shot some fifty or sixty feet into the sky. By daybreak, as word spread through the local Mormon community, members’ hearts sank. Their gleaming new Belmont chapel, nearly complete, had been gutted by fire. And the blaze, they feared, was no coincidence. For a faith that had known its share of persecution, the suspicious nature of the fire was deeply unsettling. “I don’t know when I’ve felt lower,” Kent Bowen, a local church leader, said later.

Tensions had been growing among Belmont’s Mormons and others in town. Some locals objected to the $1.6 million chapel going up on the church-owned wooded plot on Belmont Hill—opposition that church members felt had anti-Mormon overtones. Neighbors said their property values would decline. The local zoning board had initially refused to allow parking on the site, before a compromise was reached. The church urgently needed the new building. Several wards were now crammed into the Cambridge meetinghouse. Space had run out, and parking was a nightmare. The new Belmont chapel not only would host new wards in Belmont and neighboring Arlington, it would be a jewel befitting a flourishing church. Members had given additional money for the building fund, including widows on fixed incomes who insisted on helping. Some church members had worked as a group doing inventory at area department stores to raise funds. Others had started a small consulting firm and donated the proceeds to the cause.

It fell to Mitt Romney to heal his hurting congregation. A few years earlier, in 1981, Romney had been called to lead a Cambridge ward, which had led to his becoming bishop of the Belmont ward when it was created in 1984. As bishop, Romney was intimately involved in families’ lives, counseling and guiding them through marital problems, illness, unemployment, and other struggles. He orchestrated church efforts to help the needy within the congregation. He led lessons on scripture and delivered sermons on Sundays. And he interviewed members to determine their fitness to enter the sacred Mormon temple outside Washington, D.C. But the fire presented a new challenge for Romney, who cut short his vacation on Cape Cod to return to the scene. His ward was barely a few months old, and already it faced a serious crisis. Not only did the congregation lack a gathering place, members felt demoralized. Romney said later that, in addition to the parking dispute with the town, there had been other hints that the Mormons weren’t welcome. “Some people in Belmont thought of Latter-day Saints as bizarre, and we were not part of the church community,” he recalled in an interview with a Mormon magazine.

Then something unexpected happened. As the church embers cooled, so did the tensions. The day of the fire, offers of help began pouring in from other churches in Belmont and from town officials. As Grant Bennett recalled, “Many of the religious communities in town approached Mitt and said, ‘We want you to know that we welcome the Mormons to Belmont, and we think what’s happened is terrible, and you are welcome to meet in our building.’ ” Romney, knowing the fire had set the chapel project back months, wanted to accept all the offers, but some of the other church buildings simply wouldn’t work. So he and his fellow leaders accepted help from three of them—a local Catholic parish, an Armenian church, and a Congregational church. They also accepted the town’s offer to use the town hall.

It was a complex situation, both logistically and emotionally, and church members said that Romney handled it deftly. “One of the things that impressed me was how fast he thought on his feet,” recalled Connie Eddington, a church member from Belmont. Romney, mindful that they were worshipping in borrowed space, established ground rules for his congregation. He outlawed food, which church members had routinely used to keep their children quiet on Sundays. “It was hard, but we did it,” Eddington said. “I had little ones, and they did not have Cheerios.” And Romney organized a cleaning plan, assigning Mormon families to return to the churches early Monday morning to mop the floors and leave the facilities cleaner than when they’d found them. The experience of sharing buildings with other denominations resulted in the Mormons feeling more at home in Belmont, and Belmont becoming more accepting in return. “It turned out to be a huge blessing to all of us to worship in their churches that year,” Eddington said. “Everyone’s feelings softened toward one another.” It also led to new friendships and new traditions, some of which persist almost thirty years later. One of the churches whose space they used, First Armenian Church, invited members of the Mormon congregation to sing and play instruments in its annual Christmas Eve concert. “There are still members of our congregation who go to that service,” Bennett said. When the rebuilt Belmont chapel held an open house the year after the fire, nearly three thousand people came.

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ithin the family, Romney’s zany side was well known, causing both laughter and eye rolls. He loved to goof around with his sons, loved making jokes, even if they sometimes fell flat. As a missionary, he had sometimes assumed the voices of cartoon characters in letters home. Now, as he took on larger roles within the church as an adult, his fellow Mormons got glimpses of this mirthful instinct.

On one Saturday morning at Romney’s home in Belmont, Philip Barlow and another counselor were meeting with Romney, their bishop, to review the state of their congregation. For some reason that Barlow can’t remember, Romney brought up the singer Michael Jackson. “I was a little surprised at his pop-icon consciousness,” Barlow recalled. But he was even more surprised at what came next. “He just said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ and he stood up theatrically and started to ooze out a pretty credible rendition of ‘Billie Jean’ and moonwalked gracefully backwards,” Barlow said. He couldn’t believe what he had just seen.

Those who worked closely with Romney said he was serious about his faith but frequently made wisecracks or injected levity into their work. Ken Hutchins, who held leadership positions under Romney during Romney’s tenure as stake president, said that church meetings could sometimes feel like a duty. But not when Romney was leading them. “He had an engaging personality, and that didn’t stop at the door just because he was ministering over spiritual things,” Hutchins said. “You’d go away, and you’d say, ‘I gotta tell my wife about that.’ ” Romney’s church colleagues said he was warm, accessible, and a good listener, if not terribly good at remembering names. “He was reasonable, accommodating, and imaginative,” Barlow said. In fact, Barlow was so taken with Romney’s analytic mind and executive ability that he wrote to his mother at the time and told her that his bishop could be president of the United States. Douglas Anderson, the family friend, is a Democrat who doesn’t share Romney’s politics, but he said, “His leadership has been obvious to the people who know him best and who’ve known him longest.”