The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  Throughout Mitt’s life, the striking parallels between him and his father would be widely noted, from their meticulously groomed hair to their business and political careers. But Mitt was devoted to his mother as well, and he inherited her tact and even temperament—qualities that were often absent in her blunt, intense husband. The Romney children relished the story of how their mother had been ahead of her time as an independent woman and a college graduate, briefly worked as a Hollywood actress, and then devoted herself to her family and religious duties, all while retaining her own outspoken identity. When George was elected governor, Lenore gave the public a sense of her liberated style, telling Time magazine she planned to use her role as first lady of Michigan to make “a real breakthrough in human relations by bringing people together as people—just like George has enunciated. Women have a very interesting role in this, and I don’t expect to be a society leader holding a series of meaningless teas.”

  Mitt’s sister Jane would speak years later of the indelible impression Lenore left with her children for being a “gutsy” woman, “invincible and courageous as heck, setting the tone of our home, her joy, her love of life.”

  The tone at home was both loving and jarring. George tried to bring Lenore a single rose every day, a true sign of their affection. But they also argued so much that their grandchildren would call them “the Bickersons.” Luckily for George, Lenore was well matched to a man like him—unintimidated, indeed drawn, by his powerful persona. She once said she had rejected other suitors because she was so attracted to George’s “forceful personality.” George was the sort of person who tried to set people straight by starting his argument saying, “Look,” and didn’t hesitate to bluntly challenge those who disagreed with him. Life magazine memorably called him “a loner who is really close to one person, Lenore.” That closeness enabled the couple to settle their arguments amicably, with Lenore calming her fiery husband. Still, such spats were something Mitt would resolve to banish from his own life, adopting his mother’s diplomatic style. He tried to avoid arguments at all costs in his family life, if not always in business and government. His wife, Ann, would later say that they had argued only once, without raising voices, and that they had never argued after they were married. Mitt wanted no repeat showing of the Bickersons.

  Lenore’s impact on Mitt was clear, according to his sister Jane. “Mitt’s more like my mother,” she said. “Mitt’s the diplomat. Mitt knows how to smooth things.” Still, when it came to his career aspirations, Mitt modeled himself on his force-of-nature father, and their relationship would be a central axis in his life. Indeed, Life magazine may have been off in its assessment; George the loner expanded his circle of confidants to include Mitt, and the impact of that decision would last a lifetime. The young Mitt aspired to run a car company, just like Dad, and later would try to follow his father’s political path. The bond between the two could be seen on summer weekends, when George would join the rest of the family at their cottage on Lake Huron in Ontario. Mitt and his best friend, Tom McCaffrey, would sneak into his father’s briefcase for a first look at photos of the cars planned for the new model year.

  On the paddle tennis court in front of the cottage, George would compete with his children in matches played to the death. Mitt’s older brother, Scott, was the fiercest challenger, sharing their father’s competitive streak and exceeding him in athletic ability. Like his father, Mitt was never much of an athlete, but even that seemed to work in his favor. Although Scott went through the common adolescent phase of occasionally competing with his father, Mitt always maintained an easy rapport. Scott would marvel at his little brother’s confidence in talking with their father almost as a peer. When George held “family councils” to discuss big decisions he was contemplating, Scott and his sisters would say, “Gee, that sounds fabulous,” while Mitt would pipe up with “Well, have you thought about this?”

  In the seventh grade, Mitt enrolled at the elite Cranbrook School, a boarding school in his hometown of Bloomfield Hills. The 315-acre campus has been described as “one of the most enchanted architectural settings in America.” Boys attended classes in elegant buildings modeled after an English boarding school. Girls went to separate facilities designed in the Arts and Crafts style. Amid this prim and preppy landscape was a world-class art school, surrounded by wondrous sculptures by Carl Milles, including a replica of his masterwork, the Orpheus fountain, which features nine bronze figures thrusting skyward from a pool of water.

  Surrounded by other sons of privilege, Mitt wasn’t a standout. “He was in many ways the antithesis of what he’s portrayed as today,” classmate Jim Bailey said. “He was tall, skinny, gawky, had a bad complexion.” A quarterly report card told the story of a bright boy who had yet to feel the urge to apply himself fully. “He can do a lot better,” his English teacher wrote. “He tended to let up on time spent studying and had a low mark on his last test. He wastes much time in class,” his algebra teacher wrote. “He had some trouble with Genetics,” his biology teacher wrote. His worst grade was in French; he got a C. Following the pattern of other classes, Mitt had started off well, but he had then fallen into a “lull.” The French teacher predicted Mitt could improve, and Mitt indeed later became fluent while living in France. A teacher added a handwritten notation at the bottom of a 1961 report card: “Mitt is doing well. He is a more responsible citizen this year.” In six years at Cranbrook, he never showed himself to be a leader; Bailey, not Mitt, went on to be president of their class.

  Mitt was a day student the first three years, going home after classes. But when his father became governor and his parents spent much of their time at the capital of Lansing, Mitt boarded at the school. As a result, his last three years were a time of increasing independence, and Mitt thrust himself more deeply into the prep school world. He became known as an inveterate prankster. On one occasion, he staged an elaborate formal dinner in the median strip of a busy thoroughfare. For another prank, Mitt came close to stepping over the line, if not crossing it. He dressed up in a uniform similar to that worn by a police officer, put a flashing red “cherry top” on his car, and raced after a vehicle carrying two of his male friends and their dates. By prearrangement, the friends had stashed beer bottles in the trunk and knew that Romney would pretend to be an officer chasing them. The dates had no idea of the plot.

  As planned, Romney pulled up to the car belonging to his friends. “He came up to the car and pretended to be a cop. . . . He asked me to get out of the car and open the trunk, at which point we found the beer,” recalled Graham McDonald, one of the friends in the car. Romney told McDonald and the other friend to come with him, “and we drove off,” McDonald recalled. “It was a terrible thing to do. We came back shortly. We didn’t leave damsels in distress.” In retrospect, the idea of the governor’s son impersonating a police officer is startling. But McDonald’s point in telling the story is that “I am surprised when I read about him being stiff and humorless. That is the opposite image I have of him. He was almost slapstick to a fault.”

  Despite the school’s rarefied air, it was still a high school, so the jocks tended to be the most popular. Mitt took on the role of cheerleader, putting on his school sweater, working the sidelines at football games, and shouting traditional cheers. The Cranbrook teams were called the Cranes, but no one could find a crane to be a mascot. Instead, the cheerleading squad acquired a duck. Mitt volunteered to take care of it because his parents’ house had a pond. But when Mitt went to retrieve the bird a few days later, all he found was a pile of feathers. A local fox had apparently dined well. Mitt “was genuinely distressed because he was the guardian of the duck,” said Gregg Dearth, a fellow cheerleader. “You can imagine, Mitt had a responsibility for the duck and the duck no longer existed. He felt he had let us all down.”

  When Mitt tried to transition into being an athlete, it proved even more embarrassing. He joined the cross-country team for a 2.5-mile race traditionally held during a football game, setti
ng off with the rest of the runners at the start of halftime. But in his eagerness to compete, he failed to pace himself. Everyone except Mitt returned before the second half began. Finally, the several hundred spectators noticed Mitt making an agonizingly slow approach to the cinder track. “Mitt kept falling and getting up, falling and getting up, and eventually he just crawled across the line,” McDonald recalled. It could have been one of the most humiliating moments of his young life. But then the crowd began to rise to its feet, giving Mitt a standing ovation for his effort. “It was definitely looked upon as a show of character. Other people would have quit,” another classmate, Sidney Barthwell, Jr., said. Mitt’s fellow runners realized what had happened: he had run too fast at the start and, unprepared for the distance, had cramped up.

  Dearth, who also ran the race, is convinced that this moment provided a lesson for Mitt, which he would use in his later political life. Mitt had started an endurance race as if it were a dash. “It is something that has stayed with him the rest of his life—to pace yourself and to run the whole race, and to temper your enthusiasm with judgment,” Dearth said.

  Given the family history, it likely prompted a round of discussion at home. George relished telling the story of how his own high school coach had never seen someone with so little athletic ability “try so hard.” In later years, George jogged most mornings and, even when he was elderly, walked at such a fast pace that many companions practically had to run to keep up. Mitt, too, would work to improve his athletic performance and, when he ran for president in 2008, would run an advertisement that showed him running through the New Hampshire woods.

  While Mitt’s world revolved around the relatively pristine preserve of Cranbrook and Bloomfield Hills, the urban and racial problems of Detroit were just a half-hour drive away. George often brought troubling details about that other world home with him. Detroit’s leaders had urged George to help lead an effort to improve the city schools. George agreed to work with what became known as the Citizens Advisory Committee on School Needs, helping to pass a $60 million education bond, and he then helped lead an effort to resuscitate the economy of Michigan, which was suffering with the rest of the country through a pair of recessions that had hit in the late 1950s and 1960. George soon concluded that the best way to help the state was to run for governor in 1962—if his family supported the idea. One day, he came down the stairs, entered the dining room, and asked Mitt and the rest of the family a question: “You know, I think I’m going to run for governor. Should I run as a Republican or a Democrat?” George decided that he would run as a Republican, and Mitt was among the most enthusiastic about the race.

  Fifteen-year-old Mitt was increasingly interested in politics and became involved in his father’s campaign from the start. He appeared at George’s side at the announcement speech, spoke at county fairs, and traveled throughout the state in a campaign van. He worked the campaign switchboard and set up “Romney for Governor” booths. “I would introduce myself and shout out to people walking past, ‘You should vote for my father for governor. He’s a truly great person. You’ve got to support him. He’s going to make things better,’ ” he wrote years later. And, he said, “I really believed it. We all did. It was true.”

  George ran as a liberal-to-moderate politician, playing down his Republican Party affiliation, and worked hard to win the votes of groups that didn’t always support the GOP, including the black and labor votes. A month before election day, President John F. Kennedy arrived to campaign with the Democratic candidate, the incumbent governor, John Swainson. Kennedy and Swainson went on a twelve-mile tour of Detroit and the surrounding area, with the presidential motorcade greeted by crowds that may have reached a hundred thousand people. Without mentioning Romney’s name, Kennedy mocked GOP candidates, who he said were attempting to win without declaring that they were Republicans. “You can’t find the word ‘Republican’ on their literature,” he said. The presidential appearance almost certainly made an impact on Mitt, who would have been aware of the possibility that Kennedy’s intervention might doom his father’s chances. But even President Kennedy could not stop George’s momentum, and he won narrowly.

  Watching his father, Mitt learned that George had a disarming way of rebutting arguments against him. Sometimes George did so by distancing himself from his party and speaking sympathetically about an opponent’s viewpoint. For example, George had been attacked by labor groups, one of which published a pamphlet titled “Who Is the Real George Romney?” The booklet accused Romney of doublespeak, such as when he said that Michigan needed a hundred thousand new jobs but then declared that he had never promised he could deliver them. But George, who had mixed relations with the unions at American Motors, sometimes sounded sympathetic to his labor antagonists, as when he lamented that the Republican Party was identified “too much as a business party.” The blunt way was the George Romney way. It worked, at least at the time. He was easily reelected and eventually gained enough clout to win passage of the state’s first income tax. For Mitt, these were early lessons in how a Republican could win in a Democratic state.

  On the Cranbrook campus, Mitt downplayed his family’s fame, though others showed less restraint. The Detroit News’s report on a small fire at Cranbrook carried this headline: “Romney Son Helps Fight School Fire.” Deep in the article, it turned out that Mitt’s heroism had consisted of opening the building’s front door and directing the firefighters toward the small blaze.

  More important to Mitt was sharing his father’s front-row seat on government as an intern in the governor’s office. When Mitt was sixteen years old, in 1963, he joined his father late one night at the capitol in Lansing. As Governor Romney sought passage of a bill before a midnight deadline, an Associated Press reporter observed the “tall, slim boy” delivering advice to his father about how to deal with recalcitrant legislators.

  “Dad, go in there and talk to them,” Mitt told his father.

  “I don’t think that will get it done,” George told his son.

  But it did, and a resolution was finally reached at 1:30 a.m. At that point, the AP reporter checked on Mitt and his father. “It was lots more fun before they let the reporters in,” Mitt said, perhaps foreshadowing his dour view of the press when he was a candidate himself. It was laid out in a front-page story headlined “Mitt Romney Keeps Vigil as Clock Is Running Out; Hears Dad Argue, Win Point with Solons.”

  It was a formative moment, that December evening in Lansing. Three weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with the country in turmoil and searching for leadership, his father was fast emerging as a shining light of the Republican Party. The bond between father and son, as well as between Mitt and the political world, was only growing stronger.

  Dick Milliman, who served as Romney’s press secretary, was struck by how much the governor delighted in having his teenage son around. “They would hug upon meeting, and not just any hug,” he recalled. “He would give Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss.” To Milliman, it was clearly not just a father-son bond but almost a “partner relationship.” Around the office, just as around the family home, Mitt seldom held back. “He would chime in, ‘Have you thought about this?’ ” Milliman said, admitting, “Sometimes you’d think, ‘That kid oughta shut up!’ But he was always nice to be around.”

  Mitt’s sister Jane likened their upbringing amid the swirl of politics to “living in a drama.” It was, she said, a fascinating time, with interesting people always parading through, reporters often at the doorstep, the issues of the day deliberated at the dinner table. George Romney’s success in Michigan prompted talk of him as a presidential candidate in 1964. That didn’t happen, but he arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco that summer as a star, inviting Mitt to come orbit around him. The elder Romney would make headlines by walking out on nominee Barry Goldwater because of Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. In a subsequent letter to Goldwater, Romney wrote, “The rights of some must
not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others.” Romney refused to endorse Goldwater’s candidacy, embittering conservatives within the party and solidifying Romney’s reputation as a more liberal iconoclast.

  When Goldwater complained about Romney’s failure to endorse him, Romney responded in a blistering letter—soon leaked to The New York Times—in which he took sharp aim at Goldwater’s right-wing philosophy. In what amounted to a Romney Manifesto, the governor wrote, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.” Years later, Mitt would run as a moderate and win the governorship of Massachusetts and as a conservative in seeking the presidency. Throughout his career, Mitt would be accused of changing his positions according to the politics of the moment. He would reject charges of opportunism, but his father’s blunt forthrightness, his adamancy on the divisive civil rights issue and others, was a trait he would not so fully emulate. George more easily, even proudly, embraced what some saw as philosophical conflicts. When Brigham Young University named an institute at its School of Management after George, it erected a plaque that boasted of the wide embrace of his spirit: “A liberal in his treatment of his fellow humans, a conservative with other people’s money.” George often said he hated political labels, knowing how they could typecast a politician and put off potential supporters. He was presumed to be conservative in his actions as a business and religious leader, but he would perhaps be best remembered as a liberal for his views of racial equality and social justice.

  George’s progressive stance on race earned him critics not only in the right wing of his party but at the highest levels of his church. The church policy at the time was that blacks could join as members but not become members of the priesthood. In 1964, a top Mormon official wrote to Romney, calling a civil rights bill “vicious legislation” and warning Romney that it was not man’s job to remove what he termed the Lord’s “curse upon the Negro.” Romney refused to back down. Mitt would be particularly proud of his father’s willingness to take on their own church when it came to the Mormons’ treatment of blacks. When Mitt was asked later in his life about the church’s refusal until 1978 to let blacks fully participate in Mormon rituals, he cited his father’s work on civil rights as evidence of how far the family had distanced itself from the church on the issue.