The next morning, the wedding party and guests flew to Salt Lake City, most of them on a plane the Romneys had chartered for the occasion. In the spired Mormon temple, Mitt and Ann were “sealed” for eternity. Because they were not Mormons, Ann’s parents were not allowed inside to witness the ceremony. Afterward, the family hosted a reception at a hotel across the street from Temple Square, attended by a number of church leaders and Utah political figures. Once the ceremonies and celebrations were complete, Mitt and Ann Romney returned to BYU to begin building a life together in a modest $62-a-month basement apartment in a complex within walking distance from campus. They fit in easily among the many young Mormon couples who had started their families while at school in Provo, sharing classes and potluck meals. George and Lenore had bought them a car as a wedding gift. A year to the day after their first marriage ceremony, their first son, Taggart, named for a friend at BYU, was born. The new parents were thrilled.
Romney, despite having soured on the Vietnam War, felt at home within the conservative culture at BYU, which prohibited many rock-and-roll bands, liberal speakers and student organizations, and even long hair on male students. During Romney’s time at the school, the president of the university enlisted students to spy on professors deemed to be liberals. Students who displayed peace signs were told to take them down.
He was invited to join the Cougar Club, an all-male service club on campus—BYU’s version of a fraternity—that sought out students who had shown leadership potential. A few dozen students participated in the club, which, until Romney became president around 1970, had raised modest amounts of money for the university through bake sales, luaus, and auction sales. But Romney, put off by the protests, vandalism, and violence that had engulfed other college campuses around the country, wanted to transform the club into something greater, an entity that could provide more robust support to a school that he and the other members loved. “We felt very differently about our university . . . and we wanted it to succeed,” said McBride, who also joined the club. “We were proud of it.” So Romney set an ambitious goal: instead of just selling cookies and sponsoring parties, the Cougar Club, in collaboration with the university administration, would endeavor to raise $100,000 a year by directly soliciting alumni and their families for contributions. Romney secured names of potential donors from the school, signed up volunteers, and established phone banks. The plan worked, and they achieved their goal. The Cougar Club has since become a major booster for university athletics. It was Romney’s vision, and he made it happen.
In 1971, after two and a half years in Provo, Romney earned a degree in English literature, graduating with “highest honors” and delivering an address to students at commencement that year. In his speech, Romney invoked scripture and said that for the blessed like them, the expectations were high. “I pray that this graduating class will choose a different kind of life, that we may develop an attitude of restlessness and discomfort, not self-satisfaction,” he said. “Our education should spark us to challenge ignorance and prepare to receive new truths from God.” Though they would follow many of the same paths, Romney’s degree from BYU set him apart from his father, who had reached the heights of business without ever graduating from college. Four decades earlier, George Romney had dreamed of going to Harvard University to obtain a business degree, but he had given up the dream in order to pursue and marry Lenore. Things had worked out well for George, but now, he felt, times were different. He sat down with Mitt and laid out his view: not only should Mitt get a business degree; he should also try simultaneously to get a law degree from Harvard. It was a competitive world, and one needed the best education to thrive, he believed. Mitt wasn’t sure at first but agreed to consider the idea. He talked it over with Ann and soon set the plan into motion. They would move to Massachusetts.
Howard C. Serkin worked his way down the long rows of terraced desks, searching the alphabetized name cards for his seat in Aldrich Hall. He was no stranger to pressure after four years as a nuclear submarine officer in the navy, but that morning his stomach was in knots. It was the first day of classes at Harvard Business School in 1972. He found his seat and introduced himself to the fellow with the glossy dark hair in the next chair. “He looks up. He smiles. I say, ‘Hi, I’m Howard Serkin.’ He says, ‘Hi, I’m Mitt Romney,’ ” Serkin recalled. “Stupid me, I say, ‘Where are you from?’ He says, ‘I’m from Michigan.’ At that point, I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’ and then I knew: He was . . . George’s son.”
Romney’s privileged pedigree was common knowledge to many of his classmates at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, where he was simultaneously enrolled through a joint degree program. But he was only one of many children of the wealthy and politically influential. His business school class included the son of Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general; and Michael Darling, whose family had given Darling Harbour in Sydney its name. The class behind his had included George W. Bush, whose father was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee. At the law school, Romney counted among his classmates Susan Roosevelt, the great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt; and Edward F. Cox, who was frequently trailed by Secret Service agents and news photographers when he appeared on campus with his wife, Tricia, the daughter of President Nixon. “When we all got there, for the first week or so, everyone—even the rich and famous—walked around saying, ‘What the hell am I doing here? Why did they pick me?’ ” said Janice Stewart, a member of Romney’s business school class. “After several weeks, I figured it out: Everyone I talked to were all internally driven human beings. They had fire in the belly.” She added, “It was expressed in any number of ways, but it was always there, always present. And Mitt’s got it big.”
Harvard’s joint MBA/JD program was relatively new at the time—it had been launched two years earlier—and intensely rigorous. Typically, business school was completed in two years and law school in three; dual-degree students earned both degrees in four years, spending their first year at one of the schools, their second at the other, and their final two shuttling between the two. Out of Romney’s 800 business school classmates and 550 law school classmates, only 15 earned degrees through the program. “We viewed ourselves as kind of an elite guerrilla band,” said Howard B. Brownstein, who graduated from the program with Romney in 1975 and then worked with him at the same firm. “We were small and a little different.”
Academically, the law school was more theoretical, the business school more practical. Harvard Law, where Romney’s professors included Stephen Breyer, now an associate justice on the Supreme Court, relied largely on textbooks and instruction. The business school revolved around the case study method, in which students dissected real-life business decisions to learn to think like managers and executives. Romney excelled at both, and together the two tracks of Romney’s graduate school experience provided excellent preparation for his future career in consulting and private equity. His legal training honed skills he had possessed since childhood: asking challenging questions, playing the role of devil’s advocate, and using an adversarial process to get answers. His new ability to analyze and reconcile conflicting points of view and data would become an important asset in his future high-stakes investing.
The Harvard campus of his day was an exciting place, crackling with talent and the collision of ideas, though it had quieted from the tumultuous days of the late 1960s. Antiwar sentiment persisted, and many veterans of the strikes and sit-ins were still on campus. But as he had at Stanford, Romney ran with a different crowd. In an age when many of his peers were challenging authority, his enthusiasm and optimism stood out. “There was nothing jaded about him, nothing skeptical, nothing ironic,” said Garret G. Rasmussen, who, by virtue of alphabetical seating, sat near Romney their first year at law school. “He was all positive, and it was a very refreshing style.” Even in the casual environment of graduate school, Romney presented a more buttoned-down image, dressing more formally than his fellow students. “Most of us d
ressed like borderline slobs,” recalled William L. Neff, a member of Romney’s law school study group. “He was a little neater than that.”
By the time Romney arrived at Harvard, his father had run a major corporation, been elected three times as Michigan’s governor, sought the presidency, and been appointed to President Nixon’s cabinet. But despite strongly resembling the elder Romney—the full head of strikingly dark hair, square jaw, dazzling smile—Mitt did little to draw attention to his parentage. Classmates said that the only hint was George’s faded gold initials on a beat-up old briefcase that Mitt carried around. Mitt’s father, meanwhile, had been drawing attention in Washington, making waves in a White House that from the beginning had viewed him more as an adversary than a collaborator.
After George Romney abandoned his bid for president, Nixon surprised many by appointing him secretary of housing and urban development. But the two former rivals never really made up. Romney had refused to release his delegates to Nixon at the 1968 GOP convention. The snub “was an incident that Nixon could never forget,” Nixon aide John Ehrlichman later wrote. Ehrlichman believed the decision to put Romney in the cabinet was purely strategic. “Nixon,” he wrote, “needed a few moderate Republicans to balance the Cabinet. What better revenge than to put Romney into a meaningless department, never to be noticed again.” But Romney did not toil quietly in obscurity. He fought hard to fulfill his vow to improve race relations, pushing for integration of suburban housing. “We’ve got to put an end to the idea of moving to suburban areas and living only among people of the same economic and social class,” said Romney, who still owned the family home in exclusive Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was a volatile issue, and his advocacy was unpopular in the Republican Party. Mitt’s mother, Lenore, tried to follow her husband into politics, mounting an unsuccessful Republican campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in 1970. Some analysts attributed her defeat to her husband’s push for integrated housing. George Romney initially believed he had Nixon’s support for his housing policies, only to learn that the president, at the urging of his aides, was keeping his distance from Romney’s plans for political reasons. Romney was torn between speaking out about his disagreements and being a team player.
Eventually, the anger within the party at George Romney led Nixon to want to push him out. Romney declined Nixon’s suggestion that he become ambassador to Mexico, his birthplace. When Nixon met with Romney in late 1970, the president, concerned about losing Michigan as well as urban voters across the country in the 1972 election, couldn’t bring himself to ax his old foe. Instead he tried to bully Romney into capitulating on a variety of issues. Romney became increasingly infuriated at his lack of authority. Then, in early August 1972, flooding following a hurricane devastated Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Nixon announced that he was sending George Romney to assess the situation—but didn’t bother to inform Romney, who learned about it from the media. As Romney angrily stewed about the slight, his wife, Lenore, decided to secretly contact the White House. Unaware that Ehrlichman had been assigned to keep Romney in line, Lenore wrote the Nixon aide on August 8, 1972, saying, “It was a stunning blow to have the president send a communication through the press that he was ‘ordering’ George to Wilkes-Barre and demanding a report. . . . It is demoralizing to know . . . that your President has such low regard for your own dignity and service.”
Arriving in Wilkes-Barre, Romney was confronted by flood victims who believed the Nixon administration had abandoned them. Romney’s blunt contrarian style welled up, and he brusquely dismissed a suggestion from the state’s Democratic governor that the federal government pay off the mortgages of hurricane victims, calling the idea “unrealistic and demagogic.” That prompted a sixty-three-year-old grandmother, Min Matheson, to challenge Romney during a press conference. “You don’t give a damn whether we live or die,” she told him, thrusting a photo of the devastated area in his face.
The confrontation received wide media coverage. Though Romney’s “brainwashing” comment about his early views on Vietnam had become his best-known sound bite, the clash in Wilkes-Barre, at the time, almost surpassed it. Nixon feared that the fallout from Romney’s trip could hurt his reelection chances in such a large, crucial state. Two days after his visit to Pennsylvania, Romney arrived for a rare personal meeting with Nixon in the Oval Office. In the course of an emotional hour, Romney let loose with his many frustrations about serving under Nixon and repeatedly tried to quit, according to a conversation captured on Nixon’s secret tape-recording system. “I have no effective voice in the policy areas or the operational areas relating to my own department!” he thundered. Nixon, however, didn’t want Romney leaving in the midst of a reelection campaign. In a soothing voice, the president told him that his leaving immediately would hurt both of them. Romney relented, agreeing to put off his resignation. He stayed silent about his disagreements with Nixon, but only until Nixon won a second term. Then, in a tart resignation letter to Nixon on November 9, 1972, he said that politicians had become too fixated on simply winning elections to lead effectively. “Their basic function is to compete for the responsibility to govern,” too afraid of alienating voters to tackle “real issues,” he wrote. He envisioned forming a “coalition of concerned citizens” with the goal of creating “an enlightened electorate.” Romney’s critique was in some ways out of step with an American political culture that was moving toward scripted, media-driven campaigns. He briefly considered running for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah in 1974 but elected not to and never again sought national office. His accumulated political wisdom, though, would prove useful yet.
Mitt Romney was already, at twenty-four, married and the father of two young sons—their second boy, Matthew, was born in October 1971—as he threw himself into graduate work at Harvard. His social circle was generally made up of other men and women who, like himself, lived off campus with their families. Mitt and Ann had, with his parents’ help, bought a house in Belmont, a leafy Boston suburb. His responsibilities at school and at home consumed most of his time. But he was still a presence on the graduate school social scene. He was an occasional visitor to the Lincoln’s Inn Society, a Harvard Law School social club where students could eat, relax, and meet other students. He sometimes attended weekend parties and group dinners at Cambridge restaurants. The restrictions of his Mormon faith—church members are instructed to avoid alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes, and drugs—never interfered. “He didn’t mind if we were drinking coffee or having a beer, but that wasn’t what he did,” Serkin said. “We respected him for being true to what he believed in, and I found him to be completely open and tolerant to everybody else.” Romney also involved himself in the Harvard Law School Forum, a student group that brought prominent speakers to campus. One guest Romney recruited was his father. When George Romney arrived to speak, orange juice—prominently labeled as such—was added to the usual mix of soda, coffee, tea, and other caffeinated refreshments.
Romney’s classmates were widely aware that he was Mormon but said he never proselytized. Mark E. Mazo, one of Romney’s law school study group partners, recalled that Romney offered to discuss his faith with any classmates interested in learning more about it. “He mentioned it once and only once, and it never came up again,” he said. On occasion, Mitt and Ann invited classmates to what’s called family home evening, a Mormon tradition in which families set aside time each week to spend together. “You got the feeling you were dealing with a guy with a very strong moral fiber who is very devoted to church and family,” Brownstein said. “You’re not going to hear from Mitt a joke at anyone’s expense, and you’re not going to hear any swearwords. You know when you meet him and when you’re with him that you’re dealing with a very serious-minded guy.”
When Romney left Harvard in 1975, he had graduated with honors from the law school and was a Baker Scholar at the business school, a distinction reserved for the top 5 percent of the class. But he had long been a hot commodity to prospective employers, even
before he entered the job market. Consulting firms and investment banks were always on the hunt for future employees among Harvard’s best and brightest, and the select group enrolled in the university’s competitive dual-degree program seemed an obvious place to start. They were the elite of the elite.
Not long after he arrived on the Cambridge campus, Romney appeared on the radar of the Boston Consulting Group, then one of the hottest companies in the emerging field of business consulting. Charles Faris was assigned the task of wooing Romney to BCG. Over the course of Romney’s four years at Harvard, Faris kept in frequent contact with him, treating him to occasional lunches and dinners and inviting him to company events. As Romney neared graduation, Faris found plenty of competition when he tried to hire him. “He was an outstanding recruit with exceptional grades, and he was the very charming, smooth, attractive son of a former presidential candidate,” Faris said. “So everybody was bending over backward to get their hands on him.” Faris’s flattery and persistence paid off. Shortly after Romney left Harvard, he began working at BCG, a fitting first job for a freshly minted Ivy League graduate.
Romney was hedging his bets, though, not wholly confident that he would make it in the business world. He passed the Michigan bar exam in July 1975 and was admitted to practice law there the next year. He figured it would provide him a landing place if he didn’t cut it in business. Romney recalled thinking, “That’s where my friends are, and the industry that I know. I love cars.” But the safety valve wouldn’t be necessary. Companies nationwide were clamoring to hire BCG’s consultants, who analyzed mountains of financial data with an eye to lowering costs, improving production, and gaining market share. Romney rapidly established a reputation as a rising star.
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