The Real Romney (17 page)

At times Romney was a willing delegator. “He let the people around him kind of fulfill their responsibilities and drew out of them what their strengths were,” Hutchins said. “And that made them feel better about who they were.” But there were many times when Romney just wanted to take care of things himself. This seemed to be his nature: headstrong and self-assured, at times stubbornly so. He put it to a church friend once that Romneys were built to swim upstream. In other words, leave it to him when things got sticky. When Tony Kimball became Romney’s executive secretary in the Boston stake, one of the first things Romney told him was that he need not keep Romney’s schedule. He would keep his own. Later, while Romney was still stake president, a group of nine or ten Laotian youths from the Lowell area, north of Boston, needed a ride to a church gathering in Cambridge. “Next thing I know, he’s driving them in a van,” said David Gillette, who led the church’s Boston mission program from 1991 to 1994. “He could have asked a hundred guys to do that for him, but he did it himself.”

This hands-on mentality extended far beyond the confines of his official church duties. One Saturday, Grant Bennett got up on a ladder outside his two-story Belmont Colonial intent on dislodging a hornets’ nest, which had formed between an air-conditioning unit and a second-floor window. Things didn’t go so well. The hornets went right at him, and he fell off the ladder, breaking his foot. The next day, Bennett was forced to skip a leadership meeting with Romney at the church. Romney noticed his absence, learned what had happened, and went over that afternoon to see if there was anything he could do. He and Bennett chatted for a few minutes, and then Romney left. Around nine thirty that Sunday night, Romney reappeared. Only this time, it was dark out, Romney was in jeans and a polo shirt instead of his suit, and he was carrying a bucket, a piece of hose, and a couple of screwdrivers. “He said, ‘I noticed you hadn’t gotten rid of the hornets,’ ” Bennett recalled. “I said, ‘Mitt, you don’t need to do that.’ He said, ‘I’m here, and I’m going to do it. . . . You demonstrated that doing it on a ladder is not a good idea.’ ” Romney went at it from inside the house, opening the window enough to dislodge it. Soon the hornets’ nest was gone.

Everyone who has known Romney in the church community seems to have a story like this, about him and his family pitching in to help in ways big and small. They took chicken and asparagus soup to sick parishioners. They invited unsettled Mormon transplants to their home for lasagna. Helen Claire Sievers and her husband once loaned a friend from church a six-figure sum and weren’t getting paid back, putting a serious financial strain on the family. Suddenly they couldn’t pay their daughter’s Harvard College tuition. Romney, who was stake president at the time, not only worked closely with Sievers’s family and the loan recipient to try to resolve the problem, he offered to give Sievers and her husband money and tried to help her find a job. “He spent an infinite amount of time with us, all the time we needed,” Sievers said. “It was way above and beyond what he had to do.” Romney has also upheld his obligation to tithe, which means he has personally given millions of dollars to the Mormon church over the years.

On Super Bowl Sunday 1989, Douglas Anderson was at home in Belmont with his four children when a fire broke out. The blaze spread quickly, and all Anderson could think of was racing his family to safety. “There was no thought in my mind other than ‘Get my kids out,’ ” he said. “I was not thinking about saving anything.” He doesn’t remember exactly when Romney, who lived nearby, showed up. But he got there quickly. Immediately, Romney organized the gathered neighbors, and they began dashing into the house to rescue what they could: a desk, couches, books. “Whatever they could lift off the main floor,” Anderson said. “They saved some important things for us, and Mitt was the general in charge of that.” This went on until firefighters ordered them to stop. “Literally,” Anderson said, “they were finally kicked out by the firemen as they were bringing hoses and stuff in.” After the fire was finally out, Anderson, Romney, and other church members shared a spiritual moment on the front steps of the charred house. A few weeks earlier, Romney had given a talk on what he called his father’s favorite Mormon scripture, which reads in part, “Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good.” By coincidence, Anderson and his teenage daughter had been in their study discussing that very passage when the fire began. Outside on the steps, Anderson recalled, “we talked about how even in a case like this, if we tried to be true to the faith, it could turn out to be a positive thing.” Over the many years since, Anderson said, his family has seen that come true.

Romney’s acts of charity extended beyond just the church community. After his friend and neighbor Joseph O’Donnell lost a son, Joey, to cystic fibrosis—he died in 1986 at age twelve—Romney helped lead a community effort to build Joey’s Park, a playground at the Winn Brook School in Belmont. “There he was, with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” O’Donnell said. Romney didn’t stop there. About a year later, it became apparent that the park would need regular maintenance and repairs. “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and kids and they’re working on the park,’ ” said O’Donnell, who coached some of Romney’s sons in youth sports. “He did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, ‘We’re doing this,’ without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.”

Though the Romneys established themselves as the go-to family when people required help, there were times they were the ones who needed support. On one occasion, Romney, feeling soreness in one of his legs, believed he had pulled a tendon. A couple of days went by, and his leg began changing color. “By the time he got to the hospital, he had some kind of very serious, massive infection,” Grant Bennett recalled. When the severity of it became clear, Romney asked if members of the church would come to the hospital and administer a priesthood blessing, which is given to the sick. In his own moment of vulnerability, Romney looked to the same source of strength that he so often drew on for others.

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n the spring of 1993, Helen Claire Sievers performed a bit of shuttle diplomacy to resolve a thorny problem confronting church leaders in Boston: resentment among progressive Mormon women at their subservient status within the church. Sievers was active in an organization of liberal women called Exponent II, which published a periodical. The group had been chewing over the challenges of being a woman in the male-led faith. So Sievers went to Romney, who was stake president, with a proposal. “I said, ‘Why don’t you have a meeting and have an open forum and let women talk to you?’ ” she recalled. The idea was that although there were many church rules stake presidents and bishops could not change, they did have some leeway to do things their own way.

Romney wasn’t sure about holding such a meeting, but he ultimately agreed to it. Sievers went back to the Exponent II group and said they should be realistic and not demand things Romney could never deliver, such as allowing women to hold the priesthood. On the day of the meeting, about 250 women filled the pews of the Belmont chapel. After an opening song, prayer, and some housekeeping items, the floor was open. Women began proposing changes that would include them more in the life of the church. In the end, the group came up with some seventy suggestions—from letting women speak after men in church to putting changing tables in men’s bathrooms—as Romney and one of his counselors listened and took careful notes.

Romney was essentially willing to grant any request he couldn’t see a reason to reject, Sievers said. “Pretty much, he said yes to everything that I would have said yes to, and I’m kind of a liberal Mormon,” she said. “I was pretty impressed.” Tony Kimball said that when they reviewed the list a year later, right before Romney left the stake presidency, he was amazed at how many of the women’s suggestions had been implemented. Many were small, procedural matters, but they added up to a significant concession. One shift Romney allowed was to let women who led auxiliaries within the stake speak to congregations in a monthly address on behalf of the stake presidency. The role had historically been afforded only to men who served on the twelve-member High Council. Sievers was afterward assigned to address a Boston congregation. She felt it was about time women had a chance to stand up as the men always did; say to the congregation, “I bring you greetings from the stake presidency”; and deliver the sermon. Ann Romney was not considered to be sympathetic to the agitation of liberal women within the stake. She was invited to social events sponsored by Exponent II but did not attend. She was, in the words of one member, understood to be “not that kind of woman.”

Mitt Romney showed flexibility, too, in choosing his leadership teams. While he was stake president, one of his counselors went through a divorce. The counselor asked to be released from his duties, knowing the church wanted only married men in the role. But Romney refused. His executive secretary at the time was Tony Kimball, who was single and therefore, in Kimball’s own words, also an “iffy” choice for someone serving in a position of authority. “Mitt was kind of proud of the fact that he had a counselor who was now divorced and an executive secretary who was single,” Kimball said. Romney had once said that he felt strongly about tapping single Mormons for leadership posts within the stake. “They feel needed and wanted,” he said. “And that’s part of our church experience.” That church experience under Romney’s leadership was not so rosy for everyone, though. As both bishop and stake president, he at times clashed with women he felt strayed too far from church beliefs and practice. To them, he lacked the empathy and courage that they had known in other leaders, putting the church first even at times of great personal vulnerability.

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eggie Hayes had joined the church as a teenager along with her mother and siblings. They’d had a difficult life. Mormonism offered the serenity and stability her mother craved. “It was,” Hayes said, “the answer to everything.” Her family, though poorer than many of the well-off members, felt accepted within the faith. Everyone was so nice. The church provided emotional and, at times, financial support. As a teenager, Hayes babysat for Mitt and Ann Romney and other couples in the ward. Then Hayes’s mother abruptly moved the family to Salt Lake City for Hayes’s senior year of high school. Restless and unhappy, Hayes moved to Los Angeles once she turned eighteen. She got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced shortly after. But she remained part of the church.

By 1983, Hayes was twenty-three and back in the Boston area, raising a three-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she said. “And I wanted to.” By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader. But it didn’t feel so formal at first. While she was pregnant she earned some money organizing the Romneys’ basement. The Romneys also arranged for her to do odd jobs for other church members, who knew she needed the cash. “Mitt was really good to us. He did a lot for us,” Hayes said. Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that this was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where “a successful marriage is unlikely.”

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son, or give up your God.”

Romney left her apartment. Not long after, Hayes gave birth to a son. She named him Dane. At nine months old, Dane needed serious, and risky, surgery. The bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain, and would need to be separated. Hayes was scared. She sought emotional and spiritual support from the church once again. Looking past their uncomfortable conversation before Dane’s birth, she called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to confer a blessing on her baby. Hayes was expecting him. Instead, two people she didn’t know showed up. She was crushed. “I needed him,” she said. “It was very significant that he didn’t come.” Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a twenty-seven-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. “There’s my baby,” she says.