The Real Romney (33 page)

Amorello and others around them were taken aback. “I’m standing there in shock,” the witness said. “It was really something to see.” As Romney and Amorello started walking awkwardly together down into the tunnel, the witness said, Romney’s rant continued, before Amorello tried to calm him down by reminding him that a woman had just been killed. Asked later about their heated exchange, which had been caught from afar by TV cameras, Romney said he had expressed “disappointment” with Amorello at his snub. “And so, if you will, the mountain went to Mohammed,” Romney said.

For years, the public had been troubled by cost overruns and design problems on the megaproject. Now the abstractions turned into a real threat: commuters were, for a time, afraid to venture into the warren of tunnels underneath the city. Romney had public opinion on his side. Three days after the accident, the legislature handed him emergency powers over the tunnel project. Amorello soon resigned. Immediately, Romney became a commanding and reassuring presence. The legendary quick study was on the case, demonstrating a stunning mastery of complicated engineering details. He unveiled plans for inspections and repairs. He vowed to restore public confidence. This, even many critics had to admit, was the take-charge CEO Massachusetts voters had elected in 2002. “At a moment of crisis, he exercised significant leadership,” said David Luberoff, the coauthor of a book about the Big Dig and other megaprojects. Romney seemed to relish his role. When the accident happened, he was at his vacation home in New Hampshire and had to return to Boston. Tony Kimball, Romney’s former colleague in local Mormon leadership, remembered running into Romney’s middle son, Josh, at some point afterward. “Josh said, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen my dad not really mad to have to go back,’ ” Kimball recalled.

H
e was, in almost every way, Mitt Romney’s perfect foil. William M. Bulger, a former president of the state Senate, was a cunning and erudite Democratic pol from South Boston. A powerful figure during forty-two years in state government, Bulger enjoyed support among Democrats in the legislature, but his reputation for arrogance and Boston parochialism did not wear well with the general public. He was also weakened by embarrassing disclosures about his contact with his brother, the mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who had been accused of nineteen murders and, at the time, was still a fugitive.

In his first year as governor, Romney zeroed in on Bulger, trying to break up the five-campus University of Massachusetts system and eliminating the office of president, which Bulger held. Major industries in the state objected, however, and the legislature thwarted the move. But Romney had a Plan B. Before Romney took office, Bulger had invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege before a congressional committee investigating the FBI’s use of informants, his brother “Whitey” being among the most notorious. In June 2003, William Bulger faced a climactic second congressional appearance, testifying under a grant of immunity. Days before the hearing, State Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly broke ranks with Democrats and called for Bulger to resign from his state post. The next day, Romney, who resented Bulger’s lack of cooperation with authorities, said he might call on the University of Massachusetts trustees to remove him.

After trustees rebuffed Romney, praising Bulger’s job performance, Romney began to frame the conflict in moral terms, saying that Bulger, as a public university leader, should be held to “a much higher standard” even if he had committed no crime. The chairwoman of the trustees, Grace K. Fey, Bulger, and other backers on the board worried that the higher education system would suffer retaliation by Romney if Bulger survived. Lawyers negotiated an expensive buyout of the remaining four years on his contract, and he resigned. It was a triumph of the Beacon Hill newcomer over the ultimate insider. To Romney, that was what accountability looked like.

Romney had no personal relationship with Bulger as he pushed him out the door. William P. Monahan was a different story, one that illustrates Romney’s allergy to controversy and willingness to cut loose even loyal associates if they threaten to sully his reputation. Three weeks after Bulger’s exit, Monahan’s long personal and political relationship with Romney ended abruptly with a thirteen-minute phone call. Romney forced Monahan out as chairman of the state Civil Service Commission just a month after he appointed him. His hasty ouster was engineered by aides who feared that the governor would be embarrassed by a
Boston Globe
story about Monahan’s purchase of property from Boston organized crime figures twenty-three years earlier. From his lake house in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Romney called Monahan, who recalled Romney saying, “Bill, my stomach is turning. . . . My senior staff is unanimous that I have to ask for your resignation. I don’t want to do this, but I am outvoted.” Embittered, the lawyer and former Belmont town leader filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Romney and others, seeking reinstatement. “He threw me under the bus,” recalled Monahan, who had been a backer of Romney’s political campaigns and a leading supporter of efforts by the Mormon church to build the Belmont temple. “When he needed me, I was always there.”

Citing the litigation, Romney in 2007 declined to discuss the case in detail. He said that, had he known the full scope of Monahan’s business dealings, he would never have appointed him in the first place. A federal court judge found in favor of Romney and his aides in September 2009.

R
omney’s relative coldness toward state lawmakers while in the State House did not extend to James Vallee. At least not initially. Vallee, a Democrat who chaired a key House committee, was one of the few legislators with whom Romney cultivated a relationship. Vallee had fought for high-profile bills that the governor backed. “The first couple of years, he’d call me on my cell phone and we met maybe a dozen times,” Vallee said. “He supported me when I was going against the grain of my own colleagues.”

But then Vallee lost his chairmanship, he said, and Romney stopped calling. Still, a few days before he left office, Romney thanked Vallee and asked whether there was anything he could do for him. The legislature had passed a measure awarding Vallee’s hometown an additional liquor license, and all it needed was Romney’s signature. So Vallee asked for it. “I’ll take care of it before I leave,” he quoted Romney as saying, though Romney would later contend that he did not recall the conversation. When Romney departed, the petition lay in a stack of last-minute bills left unsigned on his desk. “It was not a two-way street,” Vallee said of the relationship.

This is consistent with how others who have worked with or watched Romney closely describe him: as a utilitarian who sometimes views others purely in terms of their value to him and his goals. “Mitt is always the star,” said one fellow Republican. “And everybody else is a bit player.” Indeed, Romney was, in many ways, a solo act, and his obsession with staying above the fray irked many State House regulars. They were accustomed to the transactional culture that has long permeated Massachusetts politics. Votes were traded. Political supporters were awarded state jobs. Family members of politicians were appointed to lucrative positions. And pension deals rewarded the well connected. That, quite literally, wasn’t a language Romney spoke. When he used words like “poophead” and “gosh” in place of coarser constructions, hard-bitten political veterans rolled their eyes, as if to say, Who is this guy?

Over the course of Romney’s term, Democratic lawmakers came to understand that it wasn’t even worth approaching him for a favor. “I never asked the governor for anything political, never,” said Robert Travaglini, the Senate president during Romney’s tenure. “I’ve observed him, and never once did he demonstrate to me that that was part of his tool set.” But although Romney’s relative detachment was, at times, a hindrance, it also presented a healthy challenge to a stagnant, insular political culture. “He forced all of us to bring our A game to the table,” Travaglini said as Romney ended his term. “Say what you will about the man, to some degree he initiated the action and direction on reform. . . . He brought out the best of us here in the Senate.”

One change Romney made was sanitizing the judicial selection process, requiring a nominating panel to conduct an initial blind review of candidates without knowing their names, gender, or references. “The review process was completely apolitical,” said Ralph C. Martin II, who chaired the state Judicial Nominating Commission for half of Romney’s term. A July 2005 review of Romney’s judicial picks by
The Boston Globe
detected no philosophical or partisan pattern. Indeed, Romney, who had all the information about judicial candidates when making his final selections, had filled three-quarters of thirty judicial vacancies with registered Democrats or independents, including two gay lawyers who had supported expanded same-sex rights. He similarly showed no evident preference for candidates who had contributed to his campaign.

Romney’s distaste for crony politics was perfectly in character, another manifestation of his determined personal rectitude. But it was something very different in the State House, producing an administration that was virtually scandal-free and comparatively restrained in the exercise of patronage. “He never sent me anyone he wanted hired and never said, ‘This is a major donor, see what you can do for him,’ ” Foy recalled. Romney gave a similar message to Daniel B. Winslow, who became his legal counsel. “He said, ‘You will have lots of people calling you up to get their Uncle Oscar a job on the legal team,’ ” recalled Winslow, who served about two years under Romney. “ ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I need the best and brightest lawyers without regard to politics.’ ” It was not, as with many public figures, an image-buffing quote aimed at posterity. It was what Romney actually expected.

As governor, Romney did give jobs to many of his own campaign workers, but he was aggressive in ousting longtime operatives of his own Republican Party, including David Balfour, the head of the Metropolitan District Commission, a patronage haven that Romney would fold into another state agency. Much later, Romney rebuffed requests that he appoint Brian P. Lees, the Republican leader in the Senate, to the open job of clerk-magistrate of a district court in western Massachusetts. “I wanted to change the environment in Massachusetts from one of patronage to one of people getting jobs on the merit,” Romney explained. “I don’t think that government is about doing favors for people. I think it’s doing the right thing for the folks we represent.”

Romey’s hiring policies were, however, flexible enough to tolerate some people with political ties. He found a job for Angelo R. Buonopane, a veteran of prior GOP administrations and a key liaison with labor and Italian-American voters. In April 2005, Buonopane resigned his $108,000-a-year job as state labor director after
The Boston
Globe
reported that his post had no obvious duties and reporters observed him working an average of less than three hours on eight different days. And in his final months as governor, Romney filled more than two hundred slots on boards and commissions with party loyalists, state employees, and others. Eric Fehrnstrom, his communications director, was named to the part-time board of a town housing authority. But after the
Globe
reported that the appointment would help Fehrnstrom qualify for a large state pension, he resigned, protesting “unwarranted political attacks” on Romney.

B
y the start of his second year in office, Romney understood—better than he wanted to—the make-or-break power the Democratic legislature held over his agenda. If at the outset he had been fuzzy on that point, it had now become painfully clear. Frustrated by lawmakers’ resistance to his ideas, he decided to go over their heads and right to the people.

The outlines of what would become a frontal assault on the Democrats in the 2004 elections emerged in his State of the State address that January. Using the word “reform” at least ten times, Romney laid out his challenge. “Quite simply, reform is about putting people first,” Romney said. “We have to put people we don’t know ahead of political friends we do know, schoolchildren ahead of teacher unions, and taxpayers ahead of special interests.” The message may have been sound, but it was risky politics. In the past, Republican governors had tried to pick off a few legislative seats to build their numbers. Not Romney. He began an aggressive recruiting drive and in May unveiled a slate of 131 Republicans—the most in a decade—for the legislature’s two hundred seats. All this in a year in which a favorite son, U.S. Senator John F. Kerry, was poised to win the Democratic nomination for president and be at the top of the November ballot.

Romney personally campaigned for more than forty Republican candidates, making almost seventy trips around the state. With his help, the state GOP raised $3 million and sent a blizzard of direct mail attacking Democrats for supporting in-state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants and being soft on sex offender laws. It was tough stuff, in many cases misleading, and Democrats were outraged. Raising the stakes further, Romney backed candidates who were challenging powerful Democratic committee chairs. But with so much advance warning, Democrats were ready for the fight. Many Republicans, meanwhile, weren’t; the party had a famously short political bench in Massachusetts, and a number of its legislative hopefuls weren’t ready for prime time. On election day, Kerry coasted to a nearly twenty-six-point win over George W. Bush in the state, providing long coattails for his party. “We could have had the twelve disciples running,” said one Massachusetts Republican close to Romney.

For Romney, it was a train wreck. The party not only failed to pick up seats, it suffered a net loss of two in the House and one in the Senate. With only 21 of 160 seats in the House and 6 of 40 in the Senate, the party was down to its most diluted legislative presence since 1867. Romney’s push may have protected a handful of GOP legislators, including an up-and-comer named Scott P. Brown, who would win election to the U.S. Senate several years later. But overall, Romney had invested immense political capital and now had nothing to show for it. “He put his personal reputation on the line,” the state Democratic chairman crowed. “And he lost.”