Utah’s political elite launched an urgent search for a leader who could revive their flickering Olympic flame. Robert Garff, the chairman of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, quickly submitted Romney’s name to Governor Michael Leavitt. Garff had known Romney since childhood, their fathers having been close friends since they had attended Latter-day Saints High School in Salt Lake City in the 1920s. In the fifty years since Romney and Garff had first met at a family gathering, Garff had established himself among Utah’s most influential leaders by helping to expand his father’s automotive empire, becoming speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, and rising to the upper echelons of the Mormon church.
Romney’s own ties to Utah ran deeper than his ancestral roots. After visiting the state regularly as a child, he and Ann had married at the Salt Lake City temple, and he had graduated from BYU, where two of his sons were enrolled as Utah prepared for the Olympics. The Romneys had also just built a magnificent mountainside retreat near Park City, on the aptly named Rising Star Lane, thirty miles from the organizing committee’s office in downtown Salt Lake City. To Garff, Romney was the perfect candidate, the “white knight” they so desperately needed. “Mitt had his father’s charisma, his mother’s good looks, his own intellect, and his wife’s supporting hand,” he said. Romney also had a keen sense of the Mormon hierarchy’s role in Utah’s social and political culture. “It would have been a disaster if we just picked a stranger and they didn’t understand the mores of this community,” Garff said.
The only other serious candidates—Jon Huntsman, Jr., one of Utah’s most prominent and politically connected figures as the son of the billionaire industrialist Jon Huntsman; and Dave Checketts, the chief executive of Madison Square Garden—were also Mormons with Utah roots. But Garff wanted Romney. So did Leavitt. “I was looking for a businessman who had a good political instinct,” Leavitt said. The younger Huntsman, then a top executive of his father’s chemical conglomerate and a former U.S. ambassador to Singapore, grew disillusioned with the search process in its final days. With Romney emerging as the likely winner, Huntsman responded by withdrawing his name from consideration, then rebuffing an invitation to serve on Romney’s management committee. “A search was never fully carried out,” Huntsman complained. “If I was not able to support the process which they were employing in bringing in new leadership, I shouldn’t be serving in a position like that.” Huntsman would later assist Romney’s bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, only to then defect to his main rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona. Four years later, Huntsman would himself compete against Romney, joining a field of candidates for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
Leavitt, in trying to sell the job to Romney, appealed to his desire to serve. “Based on the fact that he had run for office, I figured his public service gene might be lighted,” he said. Gardner’s strategy of starting with Ann, meanwhile, had paid off. She helped her husband flick the switch. “Just think about it,” she told him. “If there’s any one person ideally suited for this job, it’s you.” Mitt said he had resisted, but “the more I protested, the less crazy the idea seemed.” As was his nature, he also found the challenge difficult to turn down.
To Romney, a major civic achievement would be good for his soul—and his political résumé. He understood that if he could turn the Games around, it would be the perfect bridge to elective office. One of his campaign consultants from 1994, Rick Reed, told him as much in a letter urging him to take the Olympics post. In a return letter, Reed said, Romney told him that the advice had been integral to his decision to go for it. “It was serendipitous,” Garff said. “Mitt wanted to leapfrog from the world of business to public service, and this was a perfect opportunity for him to propel himself into the national spotlight, which I believe was all part of his overarching plan of his life.”
His departure from Bain Capital, though, was not so neat. The partners squabbled over how the firm would operate without him. A power struggle ensued. Several partners made plans to leave. Suddenly, a company that relied on loyalty, long-term relationships, and Romney’s personal courtship of investors seemed to be at risk. And such a breakup could be messy. A Bain meltdown might mean lawsuits with tens of millions of dollars at stake. The potential existed for embarrassing disclosures of how much money Romney had made on certain deals. “It would have been a circus, and circuses over money are not good for politicians,” one Romney associate said. Romney grew worried that the company he had worked so hard to build would be destroyed. The anxiety escalated until finally, one Sunday afternoon, Romney and one of his fellow Mormons at Bain Capital, Bob Gay, knelt on the floor together and prayed for its survival. “We were facing a crucial event that threatened the very existence [of] our firm’s partnership,” Gay said later. In the end, the crisis abated. Romney left the firm, retaining a financial interest in it, and Bain Capital continued to thrive.
David D’Alessandro’s office on the fifty-ninth floor of Boston’s Hancock Tower was decked with pricey artifacts: original images of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, Marilyn Monroe’s silver compact, Muhammad Ali’s boxing trunks. Romney, who had come seeking the counsel of D’Alessandro, an insurance executive and one of the Olympic movement’s most influential corporate voices, was especially drawn to one item: a memoir authored and signed by Winston Churchill, the British statesman who had epitomized resolve in the face of grave danger. Romney viewed Churchill’s memoir as a source of inspiration. He understood that taking over the Olympics would likely be his personal crucible.
Romney knew the perils of squandering the Salt Lake opportunity. Failure would scar the United States’ pride, further embarrass Utah and the Mormon church, and derail Romney’s effort to position himself as a leader for the new millennium. “If this doesn’t work,” Romney told D’Alessandro that day, “I can come back to private life, but I won’t be anything anymore in public life.” D’Alessandro thought to himself that the damage could extend to Romney’s business career, rooted as it was in his reputation for high competence and probity. “I knew that more than his public reputation was at stake,” D’Alessandro said. “If he failed to put on a quality Olympic Games, his reputation as a private-equity guy would have been significantly damaged.” D’Alessandro later said he was surprised that Romney had taken the job. “I think he took it because he felt that the Mormons were in trouble. He never said that, but I think he saw the scandal as a stain on his religion. But I don’t believe he understood what he was getting into.” He might not have anticipated all the challenges he would encounter, but he knew a calamity when he saw one. And that was the appeal. “He loves emergencies and catastrophes,” Ann Romney said the day her husband took the reins. “He would never have considered doing it if it wasn’t a big mess.”
And it was. In Romney’s first weeks in charge of the Winter Games—he was formally introduced on February 11, 1999, as chief executive officer of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee—he grasped the enormity of his challenge. “We were in a psychological zombie-land; the whole community was walking around dazed,” he said of the early days. “Here they were, jubilant that the Games had been won, and then their reputation was now tagged with scandal—that this was the center of Olympic scandal. It made people sick.” Romney left no doubt when he started the job that he would take full command. A century and a half after his pioneer ancestors had trudged through Emigration Canyon to help make the Great Salt Lake Valley a land of the righteous, Romney arrived that February morning in a cheerless ballroom in a Salt Lake City hotel to open a new chapter in his family’s history. He began by issuing a stern warning to the remaining trustees of the scandal-tainted organizing committee about restoring dignity to the mission. “There is no justification for compromising integrity,” he informed the fifty-three-member board. “I will expect that if, as the investigations continue, any of you casts a shadow on the Games, even where no wrong may have been done, you will stand immediately aside.”
Much of the dama
ge seemed to stem from decisions made by two previous executives on the Salt Lake Organizing Committee: president Thomas K. Welch and vice president David R. Johnson. Welch and Johnson had allegedly embraced some of the seamy practices that had long greased the international selection process for Olympic sites. After Salt Lake City had lost its bid for the 1998 Games to Nagano, Japan, Welch and Johnson had concluded that they had failed to lavish enough largesse on members of the International Olympic Committee, which chooses host cities. Whereas Nagano had plied IOC members with about $540,000 worth of souvenirs, including laptop computers and video cameras, Salt Lake City had handed out little more than cowboy hats and saltwater taffy. Vowing not to be defeated again, Welch and Johnson funneled, through the committee, more than $1 million in gifts to numerous IOC delegates for the 2002 Games—a stunning trove of booty that included cash, college tuition, medical care payments, jobs, lodging, beds and bedding, bathroom fixtures, Indian rugs, draperies, doorknobs, dogs, leather boots and belts, perfume, Nintendo games, Lego toys, shotguns, a violin, and trips to ski resorts, Las Vegas, and a Super Bowl in Miami.
Then came the comeuppance. After Salt Lake City won the Games, a local ABC affiliate, KTVX, received a news tip about college tuition payments the organizing committee had made for the daughter of an IOC delegate from Cameroon. Soon investigations were launched by the Justice Department, Congress, Utah’s attorney general, the United States Olympic Committee, the IOC, and the Salt Lake committee. There was scandal in the land of the righteous, and some critics began wearing T-shirts that depicted the five Olympic rings fashioned as handcuffs. The challenge Romney faced was clear to D’Alessandro. “The best way I can describe what he faced,” he said, “is trying to rebuild an airplane while it’s flying.”
Within months of Romney taking the job, his Mormonism and the church itself became sources of contention. Romney had been chosen in part because of his Mormon credentials, but some people in Utah—most notably a prominent Mormon, Jon Huntsman, Sr.—complained that the church was too actively involved in the secular event. After all, the church had made no secret of its desire for Salt Lake City to host the Games. In a state where nearly every political leader and a majority of the population was Mormon, church president Gordon B. Hinckley had delivered the message that he viewed the Games as a vehicle to fulfill pioneer Brigham Young’s prophesy that Salt Lake City would “become the great highway of the nations.” “Kings and emperors and the noble and wise of the earth will visit us here,” Hinckley said, quoting Young. Church leaders had traveled the world with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Documents in Garff’s archives at the University of Utah show that church officials recommended employees to the organizers, commented on committee policies, and sought direct public relations benefits from the Games. A Mormon leader, Elder Robert Hales, met privately with an NBC executive in New York to offer the church’s cooperation in the television presentation of the Games.
Romney’s initial decisions exacerbated concerns about the level of church participation. He had requested an additional $8 million—on top of the $5 million it had already committed—in lent property and cash from the church, among other contributions, as he tried to strengthen the Games’ financial position. And he hired Fraser Bullock, another prominent Mormon who had been a partner at Bain, as his chief operating officer. The moves prompted the elder Huntsman to assail Garff and Romney for exploiting their ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “We’ve got a chairman who is active LDS, now we’ve got a present CEO who is active LDS,” Huntsman said. “They claim they’re going out [to] really scour the world to find the best person, so Mitt brings in one of his cronies to be the COO. Another broken promise. Because we’ve got three LDS folks who are all cronies. Cronyism at its peak. . . . These are not the Mormon Games.”
Garff, Leavitt, and Romney quickly paid a series of visits to Huntsman, who cooled his opposition to their management and made peace with all three. The elder Huntsman later helped fund Romney’s political campaigns and served on his national finance committee for the 2008 presidential race. But church leaders, wary of appearing to exert too much influence on the Games, asked Romney to scale back his requests for aid, which he did. They also curbed their ambitions to use the Olympics to promote Mormonism—with a few exceptions, among them a book that one of the church’s publishing companies released for the Games, Why I Believe, in which the Romneys joined about fifty other prominent Mormons in expressing their faith. “It all worked out beautifully after the church backed off and the prophet [Hinckley] said we won’t have any missionaries on the streets proselytizing,” Garff said.
Yet Romney’s funding problem persisted. Three years shy of the opening ceremonies at the University of Utah’s hillside stadium, Romney had inherited a $1.45 billion budget. After he and Fraser Bullock completed an analysis, they concluded that the organizing committee needed to raise at least $400 million more to meet expenses. Romney later joked that at the rate they’d been going, the Olympic cauldron “was going to be a couple of Weber grills welded together and hauled up a flagpole.” He cast the challenge as a monumental crisis, one that would require extraordinary efforts from everyone involved. “We could be liquidated by our creditors, and shamed,” Romney told Leavitt.
Romney rapidly trimmed the budget to $1.32 billion, launched marketing campaigns, and established an austerity program, which included an end to free lunches for the trustees. No more grand, multicourse buffets such as committee members had enjoyed until Romney’s first meal with them. After that he ordered pizza and required board members to pay $1 a slice, plus $1 per soda. No one resisted the change, although one financially strapped trustee considered the new meal plan part of her sacrifice to public service. Joan Guetschow, a former winter Olympic biathlete who served on the board as an athlete representative, said, “Mitt was very adamant about being squeaky clean on every single rule. I was a volunteer. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had to take vacation time from work to go to meetings. I thought, ‘Can I at least get a free piece of pizza?’ ” Romney’s culinary austerity extended through the Games. Olympic sponsors and other VIPs had grown accustomed through the years to organizing committees’ providing lavish buffets. Yet their main staple at the Salt Lake Games was not exactly haute cuisine. “I ate more chili in those two weeks than I’ve eaten in my entire life,” D’Alessandro said. When a local paper ran a cartoon depicting Romney saying, “We’re cheap!” in front of “MittFrugal’s,” his discount Winter Games, Romney was so proud he had it framed.
Though most of Romney’s belt-tightening moves—both symbolic and substantive—energized the organizing committee, some people familiar with the budget insisted that his dire forecasts were overstated. A review of archived records shows that the organizing committee had already secured commitments of nearly $1 billion in revenues, including $445 million as its share of NBC’s broadcasting contract, and nearly $450 million in sponsorship deals before Romney arrived. In addition, the Utah State Legislature had already loaned $59 million in sales tax revenue to the Games and Congress was prepared to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in direct support, despite protests from Arizona Senator John McCain. Direct federal aid for the Games ultimately totaled $382 million. “Most of the federal money was already in place before Mitt came on,” said Robert Bennett, a Republican senator from Utah who served as point man for the federal funding for the Salt Lake Games. “The Clinton administration was completely supportive in saying these are America’s Games, we will do whatever we can to make sure they are successful. The one concern I had was whether we would get the same degree of support from the Bush administration, which we did.”
Even some key members of the organizing committee, including the friend who had recommended him for the job, didn’t believe the budget was in peril. “Yes, we were out of balance, but we had [three] years to organize that,” Robert Garff said. “In my mind, there was no sense of panic.” But Fraser Bullock said the hole was real. “I w
as the chief financial officer, so all these other people who say it wasn’t that dire, they needed to be in my shoes,” he said. Romney has since touted his economic rescue of the Games as a hallmark of leadership, saying, “The tsunami of financial, banking, legal, government, morale, and sponsor problems following the revelation of the bid scandal swamped the organization. It was the most troubled turnaround I had ever seen.”
Romney did have to work quickly to revive corporate support, the lifeblood of the Olympics. Fund-raising had stalled as companies feared becoming stained by the scandal. Sponsors had been scared off in part by D’Alessandro, who was highly critical of Olympic leaders for bringing on the assorted investigations. D’Alessandro had standing. After all, his company, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, had committed $50 million to sponsor the Games. “The I.O.C.’s sponsorships have become radioactive,” D’Alessandro said before Romney took over. “They’ve got to find a way to make sponsorships safe again.” Romney cast himself as the clean businessman who would restore integrity to the Games. He began by personally winning over D’Alessandro. That cleared the way for Romney to assume the role of chief salesman, crisscrossing the country to help reap more than $300 million in additional sponsorships. His entrepreneurial abilities were on full display. He was prohibited from soliciting companies in marketing categories that already had been claimed—Pepsi could not sponsor the Games, for instance, because Coca-Cola had already committed. So he created more than twenty new categories, including an official furniture supplier (Herman Miller) and an official online job recruiter (Monster.com). He also struck a deal for an official meat (certified Angus beef), which explained why the free buffet for VIPs was heavy on chili and hot dogs.
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