The Real Romney (2 page)

Romney’s challenge is to narrow the gulf between these dueling perspectives, of the outsiders and the insiders. Especially in a race bursting with outsize personalities, he must show that he can connect to people and their lives; that, his expansive bank account aside, he’s just like one of them; that he can get voters excited about, or at least comfortable with, the prospect of him as president.

The stripped-down campaign apparatus has surely helped; four years ago his entourage trailed him like a wedding party, signaling an off-putting self-importance. So has the decision by Romney and his advisers not to be so tethered to a script, a tack that pays off at the town hall meeting in New Hampshire, where the first question is a doozy. “I see you’ve fallen for the fallacy that raising taxes stifles growth,” the man begins, then lectures Romney about running a business, and about how Wall Street traders and bank presidents should pay higher taxes. Through it all, Romney nods and smirks like a dinner guest awaiting his moment for a pithy retort. Then he pounces: “Have you thought about running in the Democratic primary for president?” Romney asks the man, and laughs fill the Saint Anselm auditorium. “You might consider it.” It’s the kind of challenge that might have ruffled Romney four years ago, but he swats it away effortlessly.

On the stump, Romney loves dichotomies, and he frames the 2012 race using some of his favorites: strong versus weak, stagnation versus prosperity, leadership versus drift. Political campaigns always magnify the villain, and Romney is happy to play along, even when the facts don’t quite support his critique. But his is a largely sober message, carefully calibrated to appeal to the center. So even as he attacks environmental regulators for killing jobs, he’s willing to say he believes that people contribute to global warming. As he celebrates the United States’ strong military tradition, he’s willing to say that parts of the defense budget deserve cutting, too. And as he rails against Democrats and their liberal policies, he’s willing to say that Democrats also love America. These shades of centrism are always a bit of a gamble in a primary fight, but Romney’s hope is that they will appeal to independent voters in a general election. His core message is deceptively simple. “I know how business works,” he says. “I know why jobs come and why they go.”

B
ob Sutton is sitting in the front row in a long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped shirt, a collection of pens resting in a breast pocket. Like many eager supporters, he wears a blue Romney sticker, proud to show his allegiance to the man standing before him, promising to fix his ailing nation. When the floor opens, he seizes the chance.

“I’m from Michigan,” he announces after grabbing the microphone. “I voted for your father three times. And now I’m going to vote for you.” Sutton says he doesn’t believe those who argue that Romney’s not like his father, that he lacks core convictions. “How do I fight these people?”

“Let me give you some brass knuckles—that’ll help,” Romney jokes. “Where are you from in Michigan?”

“Muskegon.”

“Muskegon, Michigan. Beautiful place,” Romney says. “My wife’s family had a cottage just north of there.”

Sutton explains afterward that he is seventy-seven years old and now the owner of a New Hampshire software company that’s taken a beating in the sluggish economy. Romney’s the only one Sutton thinks has the stuff to change that. And he knows the stock from which Romney comes. “His father was a good man—a family man, and a leader,” he says. “You could trust him.”

Romney, answering Sutton’s question before the audience, says he doesn’t whine about the attacks on him. He’s always known they were part of the deal. He’s seen it all before. “I watched my dad run, all right?” he says. “I watched my dad run three times. He ran for president as well. Most of you don’t remember George Romney, but he was governor of Michigan.” He is interrupted by applause. “You remember? A couple of folks—good! And it’s a great honor to represent a state or to represent the nation.” The important thing, he says, is to stand up for what you believe in.

Then, after a few closing flourishes, he’s done. He’s made his case. The cheers die down. He is rushed by well-wishers anxious for grip-and-grin photos, for autographed brochures, for firm handshakes, or just for a few fleeting seconds of personal connection. The media crush surrounds him, forming a bubble of cameras, microphones, tape recorders, and notebooks. Romney is right at the center, where he loves to be, with a challenge ahead, a problem to solve, eager to complete one last turnaround and close his biggest deal yet.

[ One ]

Praying for a Miracle

I grew up idolizing him. I thought everything he said was interesting.

—MITT ROMNEY ON HIS FATHER

G
eorge and Lenore Romney had always wanted a large family. This was God’s will, the devout Mormons believed, not just personal longing. They had two girls and a boy, but then, for five long years, no more. Now, in 1946, the time for another child seemed especially right. Peace had returned, the guns of World War II at last silenced. Prosperity was sweeping through Detroit’s auto industry, whose assembly lines were putting out family sedans again instead of tanks and jeeps and where George was a rising star. The Romneys lived in a spacious home and were leading citizens of Michigan and their church. Everything seemed to be going perfectly except for what felt most important—that Lenore might not survive another pregnancy and probably could not get pregnant at all.

Her doctor was adamant. Her health “would not permit . . . another child,” he told her. She needed a major operation as soon as possible. Finally accepting this devastating news but still determined to expand their family, George and Lenore assembled papers to adopt a child in Switzerland. Yet all the time, they clung to hope.

The first sign that the doctor might be wrong came as the Romneys were on vacation, boating in the Dakotas. Lenore sensed that she might be pregnant, and the concerns for her health that had first been raised at the doctor’s office came rushing back. “I remember my father’s face, the worry and concern,” one of their children, Jane, would say years later. “I had never seen that face before.”

George was, after all, an inveterate optimist, a pillar of a man, tall and ruddy, movie-star handsome, with neatly parted black hair and steely eyes. Born in Mexico in a Mormon colony, he had come to the United States at the age of five and built himself a fine life. And much of that life had been centered on the woman whose health was now at risk.

From the time George was a young teenager in Utah, he had been in pursuit of Lenore. She was smart, independent-minded, and beautiful, with porcelain skin and a winning personality, assets she put to use in pursuit of her dream of being a Hollywood actress. George, meanwhile, moved inexorably up the career ladder. He attended George Washington University and, while still an undergraduate, got a job as a typist and then a policy aide with U.S. Senator David Walsh, a Massachusetts Democrat. He then used his Senate connections to get hired as an Aluminum Company of America salesman. Lenore, after graduating from George Washington in 1929, received an offer to work for a Hollywood film studio. George was aghast. He and Lenore had “long and heated arguments before Lenore overrode all of George’s arguments and did what she wanted to do,” according to one of George’s biographers. George was so smitten that he dropped out of school, convinced the Aluminum Company of America to let him go west, and followed Lenore to California. But the couple nearly split for good once he got there. Lenore objected to George’s overbearing effort to control her life, declaring that she would “never marry him,” but the couple soon made up. Thus began a cycle of affection and argument that would define their long lives together.

Lenore’s career took off quickly. She won parts in movies that starred film legends such as Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow. She entered a social whirl that included stars such as Clark Gable, leaving the lovestruck George even more anxious about losing her. At a time when the Great Depression gripped the nation, Lenore was better educated and better off than George, a relatively independent woman at a time when that was hardly typical. A movie studio issued a promotional clip of her that showed a striking young woman wearing a short-sleeved dress and an elegant beribboned hat, sharing equal billing with a dog. The screen filled with a caption: “Miss Lenore LaFount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer actress, proves the futility of trying to force Buster, the dog star, to do tricks.” It was something of a celluloid wink to the audience, as Lenore hugged the dog and looked up with an alluring smile. It had nothing to do with dogs, of course, and everything to do with building Lenore into a star of the future. She was on her way.

George soon learned that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had offered Lenore a three-year, $50,000 contract. He then made his own take-it-or-leave-it offer: give up Hollywood and seal herself with him for eternity in a traditional Mormon marriage. George would later call it “the biggest sale I ever made in my life.” Lenore was reluctant at first to give up her career, but years later she insisted that after three or four months of playing bit parts, she was ready to get married and “never had any regrets about giving up movies.” The couple married in 1931 and moved to Washington when the Aluminum Company of America promoted George to be one of the company’s lobbyists, tasked with making the industry’s case to members of Congress and the administration. “This was the legend we grew up on,” said one of the Romney children, Jane. “Dad comes on his white horse, gets a job transfer from Washington to L.A., talks her out of [the] contract and into marrying [him]. This was storybook stuff.”

Just as Lenore had given up acting, George also gave up two of his dreams. He would not finish college or go to Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. But he was, in fact, already doing well without such golden credentials. He left his lobbyist job to become head of the Detroit office of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, and took charge of organizing the auto industry’s contribution to the massive industrial buildup during the World War II years.

By 1946, with the war ended and the auto business booming, the Romneys seemed to have it all. George and Lenore had moved into a rambling three-story home in an exclusive, leafy section of Detroit and were raising three children: Margo Lynn, Jane, and Scott, the last born in 1941. For the following five years, the Romneys prayed for another child that they were told would never come. And then, on a boat in the Dakotas, Lenore disclosed to George that she believed, contrary to all expectations, that she was pregnant.

The Romneys returned home and, excited but fearful, went again to see the doctors. Lenore was promptly hospitalized. They concluded that “the baby should be taken and a major operation performed,” George wrote later, a reference to the need for a cesarean birth and a related procedure. The prospect frightened the Romneys even more. Lenore’s sister, Elsie, had had an operation two years earlier and “nearly lost her life,” George wrote. But there was no alternative. The operation was performed, leaving Lenore “suffering.” After it was over, the doctor told George, “I don’t see how she became pregnant, or how she carried the child.” But carry the child she did, and she delivered a six-pound son in good health. He had “strong features,” George wrote, and even on this first day of life, the child’s “dark hair” was notable. The rejoicing among the family seemed nonstop.

George took out a piece of stationery and wrote a letter to his friends and colleagues.

“Dear Folks,” Romney wrote on March 13, 1947, on the letterhead of the Automobile Manufacturers Association. “Well, by now most of you have had the really big news, but for those who haven’t, Willard Mitt Romney arrived at Ten AM March 12.” As George detailed how precarious his wife’s pregnancy had been, it became clear that there was a special level of wonderment embedded in this announcement, this birth. He told the family’s friends how it had happened: Lenore “had a lot of faith.” George wrote, “We consider it a blessing for which we must thank the Creator of all.” From then on, Lenore referred to Mitt as her miracle baby.

His sisters, Margo Lynn and Jane, were nearly twelve and nine at the time, his brother, Scott, almost six, and they didn’t wait long to begin the debate over whether to call the baby “Bill” or “Mitt.” The Willard was in honor of J. Willard Marriott, a family friend, fellow Mormon, and future hotel magnate; Mitt was a nod to Milton “Mitt” Romney, a cousin of George and a former Chicago Bears quarterback.

From birth, Mitt enjoyed a starring role in the “family bulletins” George mailed out. When Mitt was not yet two years old and making his first visit to see Santa Claus, George wrote with pride, “He walked right up like a man and shook hands!” In the same letter, he noted that Mitt was “bold and inclined to be a bit reckless—loves to climb up on high chairs and say, ‘Careful, careful, careful!’ ” Throughout his childhood, Mitt logged lots of time sitting on his father’s lap, watching him read the paper. As George flipped through the pages, the passing headlines prompted him to share with his son his insights about the wider world.

In 1953, when Mitt was about six years old, the Romneys moved from their home in Detroit to the suburb of Bloomfield Hills, one of the nation’s wealthiest enclaves. The Romneys lived in a contemporary home adjacent to the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. The city of several thousand people, a domain of sprawling homes, emerald lawns, and elite private schools was a world away from nearby Detroit. George became president of the regional Mormon “stake,” overseeing a number of wards, and a meetinghouse was constructed in Bloomfield Hills. A
Time
magazine reporter who visited the home during Mitt’s childhood described a typical morning, with George taking a prebreakfast jog around the links or perhaps a fast round of golf.

Shortly after Mitt’s birth, George had been hired as an executive with the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation, which later merged with Hudson Motor Car Company to become American Motors Corporation, where George served as executive vice president. In 1954, after the head of AMC died, George became chairman and CEO. He took over when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. As Mitt would later recall it, his father took the money from the sale of their Detroit house and used it to buy company stock. “He literally risked his net worth on his ability to turn things around,” Mitt wrote years later. Mitt recalled walking the factory floor with his dad, who would say, “We’re going to make this company great.” One of the keys to George’s continued success was his ability to fight off a corporate raider who bought up shares of American Motors stock and seemed poised to try to sell off company assets and take a profit.

In perhaps the most important business decision of his life, George embraced a proposal to focus American Motors on producing a fuel-efficient car, predicting that Americans would choose it over the “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” produced by larger automakers as well as by his own company. Even Mitt questioned the strategy.

“If Ramblers are such great cars, why doesn’t everybody have one?” he asked his father one day.

“People don’t always recognize what was best,” George responded, according to a recollection by Mitt’s brother, Scott.

George was ahead of his time. In the mid-1950s, Romney’s Rambler was touted as getting thirty miles per gallon. It would be several decades before the federal government required the average passenger car fuel efficiency to be nearly that high. American consumers living in a time of 30-cents-per-gallon gas—$2.41 in 2010 dollars—were beginning to realize the economic attractiveness of a compact car. George’s embrace of the Rambler put American Motors on the road to profitability and helped make Romney wealthy and successful. It was a decision that had a lasting impact on Mitt, whose favorite pastime was discussing cars and business with his father. When Mitt announced his first presidential campaign, he arranged for an antique Rambler to be put on the stage behind him, underscoring what he called his family’s commitment to innovation.

Listening to his father, Mitt wrote later, didn’t seem like listening to a businessman. “It was more like he was on a great mission with American Motors to build innovative cars so that people could save money and fuel, and have better lives. Work was never just a way to make a buck to my dad. There was a calling and purpose to it. It was about making life better for people.”

M
ixed with the talk about cars and business was an ongoing emphasis on living the Mormon life. The Romneys were one of the Mormon faith’s leading families. George had followed family tradition and regularly delivered talks at the local Mormon church as well as at the dinner table. Unlike Utah, where George had spent most of his childhood, Michigan had relatively few Mormons, and members of the faith were widely considered to be outsiders. So, in a religion that relied upon proselytizing to grow its ranks, George urged his children to set an example of upholding the traditions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Lenore also had deep roots in the faith; she came from a well-to-do Mormon family in Utah. But as a woman she was not allowed to hold a leadership role in the church.

The Mormon faith infused Mitt’s life, and he was expected to be a leader from the start, immersing himself in theology and delivering sermons in his teens. When Mitt was fourteen years old, he and his parents were featured in a story in the
Detroit Free Press
about Mormons in Michigan. A photo showed a Mormon teacher at the Romney home, instructing an intense-looking Mitt seated next to George and Lenore. The story noted that Mormons were “one of the smallest and least understood faiths” in the Detroit area, with only four thousand Mormons living in southeast Michigan and very few elsewhere in the state. The story, which ran in the months before George sought the governorship, was the first introduction of Mitt to a wide audience through the lens of his religion.

George emphasized to his children how one Romney after another had excelled by following the tenets of their faith. To underscore his point, George instructed Mitt to follow what he called a “three point formula for joyous achievement.” It was one of his favorite pieces of advice, and it came directly from Mormon doctrine: “Search diligently, pray always and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good.” When George died, Mitt and the rest of the family would inscribe those words on his tombstone.