The Real Romney (27 page)

The Kennedy camp seized on the chance to cast Romney as a suburbanite who didn’t know his way around a city. “What do you expect from a candidate from Belmont?” Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said at a late-October event arranged by Kennedy aides. On the Southeast Expressway, one of the main highways into and out of Boston, a union local put on its electronic signboard
KENNEDY COUNTRY, AND PROUD OF IT
. Ann Romney hadn’t helped things with an interview she’d given in which she had said that she and Mitt had struggled in college because their only money had come from his selling of stock. And she seemed not to know that West Roxbury, a wealthier, more suburblike, and mostly white neighborhood of Boston, was distinct from Roxbury, which was largely black and poor. Those who already thought the Romneys lived a fairy-tale life weren’t about to change their minds.

The campaign spent $100,000 to air an unusual half-hour infomercial on Boston TV stations beginning the Friday night before election day. Romney toured the state by bus and by rail, flanked by relatives who had descended on Massachusetts. No fewer than sixty-eight Romneys joined the candidate on a whistle-stop train tour the final weekend, decked out in sweatshirts reading
ROMNEYS FOR MITT
and
TKO SQUAD
, short for
TED KENNEDY OUT
. In the days leading up to the vote, Romney’s staff saw the writing on the wall but held out hope for an unlikely victory. Romney himself knew how it would end, but it wasn’t his nature to just fold up the tent. He remained sunny and optimistic, wanting each person on the campaign team to take something positive away from the race. “Everybody felt they fought a good fight,” one former Romney aide said. Romney had given Kennedy a run, the best he’d ever have. But in the end, it would not be nearly enough.

A
t about 8:45 a.m. on election day, Romney, joined by his wife, sons, and father, strode into Belmont Town Hall and cast a ballot for himself. He knew that most of the state would be voting differently that day and was already being asked about his next run for office. George and Ann Romney seemed to be taking it harder than Mitt was. “There wasn’t a thing he said about my son that was true,” George complained of Kennedy. After he voted, Romney sat and watched his boys play touch football on the lawn, a pastime long associated with the political dynasty that was on its way to another victory at the polls. That night, Romney put on a brave face before cheering supporters at the Westin Hotel in Boston, appearing onstage shortly after 10 p.m. to concede. Kennedy won by a comfortable seventeen points, 58 to 41 percent. But Republicans took heart that they had swept into power on Capitol Hill, a wave that Romney celebrated in his speech. “Sometimes in isolated little pockets there may be some sandbags of clout and pork and seniority that are able to hold back that tide,” he said. “But let me tell you the tide keeps rising and we are going to make it keep rising.”

Ann Romney, worn out by the brutal campaign, descended from the stage and, once out of the TV lights, burst into tears. “It was heart-wrenching,” a former aide recalled. “They gave it their all.” It was Ann who’d gotten them into this, and now it was Ann who was vowing never to return to politics. “You couldn’t pay me to do this again,” she said toward the end of the race. But she also left an opening, saying on election day that if one asks any new mother right after delivering a baby whether she will have another child, “She will always say no.” As the Romney team watched Kennedy deliver his victory speech, they saw him revert back to what one former Romney adviser called “the old Teddy”—the one who often had difficulty stringing sentences together. “Why couldn’t he have done that last week?” Tagg asked in exasperation, the former adviser said. One irony was that Kennedy had spent the campaign trumpeting his outsize influence. That very night, with Republicans taking control of the U.S. Senate, Kennedy and his Democratic counterparts were instantly marginalized.

For Romney, it was the first major defeat of his life, and he didn’t swallow it easily. He had sunk $3 million of his own money into the race and was disgusted with how effective Kennedy’s attacks had been. In future years, Romney would develop a productive relationship with Kennedy and come to respect his political chops. Asked two weeks after his loss if he harbored any ill will toward the man, Romney said, “I wouldn’t say ill will, but I was surprised he went as negative on my character and I was very surprised he brought up my church. I was surprised he went after my business record with such variance with the facts.” The mistakes and missed opportunities of the campaign, he said, kept him up at night. It wasn’t just the attacks that did Romney in, though, and he knew it. He had failed to make a compelling enough case for himself, failed in crafting a narrative of his character and convictions that could move voters. “I think people were searching for something else, as much as they liked the Kennedys,” Rick Reed said. “We were never able to capitalize on it.” Or, in the words of one longtime Republican, “His main cause appeared to be himself.” Over dinner not long after the race, Romney told a fellow party member that one thing really ate at him: that one couldn’t sum up in a sentence why he had run. “After all the weeks and months of that campaign, if you ask, ‘Why did Mitt Romney run for U.S. Senate, and what did he stand for?’ most people had no clue,” the Republican recalled Romney as saying. “We didn’t do a good job getting that message across.”

Not that Romney was just sitting around Belmont marinating in self-pity. The morning after the election, he waltzed back into the Bain office as if he’d only been away on a short Caribbean cruise. He called a meeting, dished out assignments, and reviewed forthcoming deals. “I’m sure I ruffled a lot of feathers,” he wrote in
Turnaround
. “But Bain Capital was my baby, and I was back in town.” Yet Romney could not deny that even with the bitter taste of defeat still fresh in his mouth, the pull of public leadership remained strong. At that moment, he may have been comforted by returning to the familiar embrace of private equity. But the restlessness would return soon enough.

[ Eight ]

The Torch Is Lit

The best way I can describe what he faced is trying to rebuild an airplane while it’s flying.

—AN ALLY, DESCRIBING ROMNEY’S EFFORTS TO SAVE THE 2002 OLYMPICS

I
n their sixty-four years of marriage, George Romney was said to have brought his wife, Lenore, a rose every day. At the dawn of their courtship, he had gone to tremendous lengths to win her hand—trailing her when she ventured out with other suitors, buying her a piece of cake each day in the school cafeteria, and once actually yanking her off a dance floor when he thought she’d been out there too long with another boy. And after they married his devotion continued, inexhaustible.

They built quite a life together: four children, six years as Michigan’s first family, and many adventures in politics, business, and faith. They had their disagreements—as their grandchildren would later attest. But Lenore was a partner in George’s many successes. The roses were a daily ritual of love and thanksgiving. A little after 9 a.m. on July 26, 1995, Lenore awoke to find no rose. She knew right away: he was gone. She found him collapsed on a treadmill in the exercise room of their home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The man who for so many years had seemed immortal was dead of heart failure at eighty-eight.

On his birthday two weeks earlier, George had been in Los Angeles to see his younger daughter, Jane, star in the opening performance of the play
Shadowlands
at the Tracy Roberts Theatre in Beverly Hills. Her father, Jane said later, grasped her love of acting that night. “He got why I was an actor in that performance,” she said. “He had just given me that gift.” But George Romney had, over many decades, given Mitt Romney much more. From the day he was born, Mitt enjoyed the love of a father who never seemed to lose his excitement at this youngest son, the son whose very existence the doctors had said was improbable. George became more than just a role model or mentor to Mitt. He was a pathfinder, showing the way in their Mormon faith, through the thickets of politics, in family life, and in character. Through his achievements and his mistakes, George had bestowed many lessons, and Mitt soaked them up. “His whole life was following a pattern which had been laid out by his dad,” said John Wright, a close family friend.

Some twelve hundred mourners came to bid George farewell at his funeral service. All four children spoke. Mitt’s older brother, Scott, said his father liked to say that the family was descended from mules. “The Romneys tried to do the right thing, and everyone else was stubborn,” he said to laughs. Mitt, too, leavened the service with humor, saying that his father was probably aware of what was happening. “He got here good and early,” Mitt said. “His eyes are closed, but I’m sure he’s listening. And he’ll be the first to leave.” After the service, George was buried in a plot he had chosen in the city of Brighton, roughly halfway between Bloomfield Hills and Lansing, the state capital. As she said her final good-bye, Lenore returned her husband’s gesture of devotion, laying a single red rose on his casket.

Mitt, having just lost the Senate race, was already wrestling with what to do next. The campaign had transformed him. “The experience of walking into diners and onto construction sites and hearing people tell me their problems was not easily put aside,” he would later write. “I had the bug of wanting to be more involved.” This sense of duty was almost written into his genes. “I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know how far back I’d have to look to see it in my ancestry,” he said. “But there’s a sense of obligation to help my country, to help my family, to give back in some respects.” But where was he needed? What would he do? Those questions would have been hard to answer anyway. And now he was, for the first time, confronting life without his father, his North Star. The family legacy of public service now rested in Mitt Romney’s hands. The torch was his to carry, alone.

T
here are good years in private equity, and then there are really good years in private equity. After his frustrating loss to Kennedy, Romney returned to Bain Capital just in time to ride the booming economy of the late 1990s to unimaginable heights. The next five years were extremely profitable, with Bain scoring some of its biggest deals ever, deals that yielded sensational returns. Romney, the cautious, skeptical investor, had become a confident, comfortable deal maker, reaping millions for himself and his partners. “I was in the investment business during the most robust years in the history of investments,” he would later say. Indeed, the 1990s further established Bain Capital as one of the country’s elite leveraged buyout firms.

But as lucrative as those years were, Romney’s business career couldn’t hold his attention for too long. He began dabbling in politics as he searched anew for a path to public service. In 1996, he was so concerned about Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes’s proposal for a flat tax that he spent $50,000 attacking it in a series of newspaper ads during GOP primary contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Forbes’s plan, Romney said then, was dangerously tilted toward the rich. “It’s a tax cut for fat cats,” he said. A couple years later, Romney steamed over President Bill Clinton’s affair with the intern Monica Lewinsky, outraged by Clinton’s moral and political failure, one longtime Romney associate remembered. Though Romney never said it directly, the takeaway was clear: this would never happen if Mitt Romney were in the White House. Romney also inquired about playing a significant role in the inchoate presidential campaign of a Texas governor named George W. Bush. He flew down to Austin to meet with Bush and explored taking time off and campaigning for him full-time ahead of the 2000 race, said one Republican close to Romney. “He felt he had been really lucky in life,” the Republican said. “And [he] felt that the next president was important.”

Around the same time, Romney helped a longtime dream of many local Mormons come to pass. For years, area Mormons had had to travel to the temple near Washington, D.C., for sacred rites such as baptisms and marriages. It was the closest temple to Boston, and many felt that Boston, with its growing number of congregations, deserved one of its own. Years earlier, Romney, along with other local church leaders, had been active in acquiring a roughly seventeen-acre plot of land on Belmont Hill. It was where the church had, after overcoming objections from neighbors, built its Belmont chapel in the 1980s. But there was a lot of room left over, and Romney and other leaders had long hoped that they could persuade Salt Lake City to build a temple there, too. In the mid-1990s, they finally got their wish. Gordon B. Hinckley, then the president and prophet of the worldwide Mormon church, had wanted to erect a temple in the Northeast anyway. After a visit to the property, and after Romney and other local leaders advocated through various church channels, Hinckley was sold. The church’s hundredth temple would be built there on a rocky ledge in Belmont, high above a major highway and visible from miles away. Though neighborhood opposition was again fierce, the groundbreaking for the $30 million project came in 1997, and the temple, built of striking white Sardinian granite, opened in 2000. Hinckley called it “a reminder to the world.”

The new temple was a beacon beckoning the faithful and a statement asserting the church’s growing influence in New England. For Romney, it was also a fitting capstone to all the work he had done to promote the church. “It feels great to have a temple closer to home,” he said at the time. “It makes you feel proud that the membership of the church has grown large enough to merit a temple being constructed so close.” But there was one glaring omission. Unlike every other Mormon temple, this one lacked a spire with a gold-leafed statue of Moroni, the angel who Mormons believe led Joseph Smith to a set of gold plates that Smith translated into the Book of Mormon. That aspect of the sacred building—the plans called for a 139-foot steeple—was still being challenged in court.

An unlikely booster came to the Mormons’ defense: Ted Kennedy, Romney’s bitter rival only a few years earlier, who had once suggested that his opponent’s religion was a legitimate political target. One afternoon in September 2000, Romney led Kennedy on a personal tour of the new temple, an important step in their gradual rapprochement. The two former rivals downplayed their past battles. “As individuals, we certainly respect each other,” Romney said. “I wish he was a Democrat,” Kennedy said. “I’m glad he’s not running against me this time.” On the tour, Kennedy praised what he called the “magnificent” temple architecture, and he said the Mormons should be allowed to build their steeple. “If other churches are going to have their expressions in terms of spires, this one should as well,” Kennedy said. “What’s fair is fair.” The following spring, the state’s highest court agreed, to the delight of the local Mormon community, and Moroni got his rightful home atop the towering spire.

T
he more tests the doctor did, the further their hearts sank. She couldn’t feel pinpricks in her foot. She couldn’t keep her balance. She couldn’t touch her nose with her eyes closed. Something was seriously wrong with Ann Romney, and she and Mitt were scared.

Ann, fit and not yet fifty years old, had first noticed the symptoms in 1997, and they had gotten progressively worse. Numbness in her right leg, which spread up her right side. A hard time climbing stairs. Difficulty swallowing. Initially they’d thought that maybe she had a virus or a pinched nerve. But their family physician recommended that she see a neurologist, so they made an appointment with Dr. John Stakes at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Mitt and Ann didn’t know what to expect when they arrived at Stakes’s office that day in 1998. In the waiting room, seeing pamphlets on Lou Gehrig’s disease and multiple sclerosis, they quickly realized that the news wasn’t going to be good. “There weren’t many other brochures there; that was basically what he was dealing with,” Romney said. “And of course, it was very frightening.” Stakes brought them in and performed a series of tests. That’s when it became clear: this was no virus. “She’s failing test after test after test,” Romney recalled. They were crushed. When the doctor left the office, Ann and Mitt broke down. “We hugged each other, and I reminded her that as long as this was not fatal, we could deal with it,” Romney said. It was, he would later say, the worst day of his life.

After an MRI, Stakes made his diagnosis: Ann Romney had multiple sclerosis, a life-changing, chronic disease of the central nervous system whose course is difficult to predict. It was a devastating moment for a family that, by almost any measure, had lived a charmed life. “When I heard that she had MS, I didn’t believe it,” Tagg Romney said. “Like my dad was Superman, she was Superwoman to me. I just couldn’t accept it.” Mitt had known a few hard moments: the fatal accident in France as a missionary, the bruising defeat by Kennedy, and, more recently, the loss of his father. But for the most part he’d had it pretty good, his golden childhood largely unimpeded. “It continued for Mitt,” said his sister Jane. That had not been the case for his siblings, who had suffered divorces and other setbacks.

Ann’s diagnosis changed everything. Now the love of Mitt’s life was facing a potentially crippling disease. Their future was in doubt, his political aspirations in serious question. “It subdued him,” Jane said. The diagnosis also came as Mitt was mourning the loss of his mother, Lenore, who had died at the age of eighty-nine after suffering a stroke at home in July 1998. Ann and Mitt’s youngest son, Craig, who was seventeen, cried after a friend told him the disease would kill his mother. “Craig, I’m not going to die from this,” Ann said she told him. But early on, she felt as though she wanted to. The uncertainty was too much to bear. “I frankly would have rather died than be the way I was,” she once said. “At the time, I wished I had cancer instead of this, something more tangible. We didn’t know what was in store for me. This would take bits and pieces of you.” The months after her diagnosis were trying. Ann would improve, raising everyone’s hopes, only to dash them by suffering relapses. Even limited physical activity could exhaust her. She was so weak she could barely take care of herself. She received intravenous steroid treatments at first, but she stopped because the drugs made her sick, according to Tagg.

The Romneys, having given help to so many over the years, now required it themselves. Close friends from church offered prayers, emotional support, meals—whatever was needed. “A lot of people were pulling for them,” John Wright said. But Ann was relatively private about her affliction early on, and she also had five able sons at her side. For a time, Mitt and Ann wondered how her illness would affect his career. Grant Bennett asked him that question once, and Mitt’s immediate response was clear: family came first. “I remember to this day, it wasn’t ‘Maybe this will slow us down,’ ” Bennett said. “It was ‘Of course Ann’s my first priority.’ ”

Eventually, Ann hit upon an effective assortment of treatments, including yoga, Pilates, reflexology, acupuncture, and a controlled diet. Perhaps most important, she rekindled her childhood love of horses, improving both her mobility and spirit. “Riding exhilarated me; it gave me a joy and a purpose. It jump-started my healing,” she said later. “When I was so fatigued that I couldn’t move, the excitement of going to the barn and getting my foot in the stirrup would make me crawl out of bed.” Tagg said that his dad tried to relieve some pressure on Ann by urging her to focus on herself instead of everyone else, as she had for years. Mitt told her, “You don’t have to be perfect—having meals cooked for everyone, getting presents for the grandkids,” Tagg said. That, he said, gave Ann license to say, “It’s okay if I deal with me and get myself better.” She gradually began to see that living with multiple sclerosis didn’t have to mean a future in a wheelchair. “I am very strong right now, but I have been in a deep, dark hole,” she would say several years after her diagnosis. “And I have crawled out inch by inch.”