The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  His salesmanship, which involved raising an additional $100 million from companies and individuals in Utah, extended to NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Plaza in New York. The company had paid $555 million to broadcast the Games, and network executives would not abide having their investment damaged by subpar management. Had Romney botched the assignment, he would have earned the wrath of Dick Ebersol, who was chairman of NBC Sports and Olympics and had been identified by Sporting News in 1996 as “the most powerful person in sports.” But Romney impressed Ebersol. “I have no doubt whatsoever, as the representative of the chief investor in the Salt Lake City Olympics, that Mitt Romney was single-handedly responsible for those Games being the immense success they were,” Ebersol later said. “The list of people who could have pulled it off began and ended with Mitt Romney.”

  Part of Romney’s appeal was his insistence on high ethical standards. Yet Romney himself risked the appearance of conflicts by soliciting sponsorships from companies such as Staples and Marriott International on whose boards of directors he served. As a director, he was responsible for protecting the companies’ interests; as CEO of the organizing committee, he had promised to get the best deal for the Olympics. Romney dismissed the notion of any conflict. “That’s not a conflict of interest,” he said. “That’s trying to encourage people who I knew to get with the Games.” In Garff’s view, Romney mitigated any risk of a possible conflict by citing his business affiliations on an ethics statement. To be sure, Romney’s entanglements were nothing like those of the trustees who resigned when he took over, including Alan Layton, whose construction company had received a $29 million contract from the organizing committee, and Earl Holding, whose ski area had signed a $13.8 million deal with the committee. Romney did allow some trustees whose companies engaged in relatively small business with the committee to remain on the board. “They removed the people who were the poster children for conflicts of interest,” said Glenn Bailey, a leader of Salt Lake Impact 2002 and Beyond, a coalition of community groups. “But they still had conflicts.”

  Even if the finances were fixable, there were real doubts about how to repair the reputation of the Games, Salt Lake City, and Utah. Romney acted quickly to remove the taint of the scandal, partly by laying the blame on Welch and Johnson. Romney joined Leavitt in casting the two men as rogue members of the organizing committee who had betrayed their Olympic cause. Until the case went to trial, Romney supported federal prosecutors, who alleged that Welch and Johnson had participated in defrauding the committee of more than $1 million by doling out gifts to IOC delegates. Facing bribery charges punishable by up to seventy-five years in prison, Welch asserted that everyone involved in the process, including Governor Leavitt, had known that favors were being given to members of the international selection committee. “We amassed significant, undeniable information that everybody involved in the process was knowledgeable about what was going on, all the way to the governor’s office,” said Max Wheeler, one of the defense attorneys. Leavitt denied knowing anything.

  Welch’s view was widely shared in the Salt Lake community. “If you’re going to fault Tom Welch for anything, you can fault him for having tunnel vision,” said Zianibeth Shattuck-Owen, who served on the organizing committee. “He was given the directive to get the Olympic Games. He’s not a dumb man. He saw what he was up against and played to win. Is he a devil or a bad man? No, not to me.” Garff, too, took exception to criticism of Welch, Johnson, and the committee for some of their actions before Romney arrived. “All we did was do what other people did,” Garff said. “The IOC expected and wanted to be pampered.” But Romney barred Welch’s and Johnson’s names from appearing on a list of more than 20,000 other committee staffers and volunteers on a Wall of Honor at the city’s Olympic Legacy Plaza. And he went so far as to encourage Welch to accept a plea bargain for the good of the Games. One of Welch’s friends, Sydney Fonnesbeck, said that Romney had urged her to persuade Welch to plead guilty to a lesser charge. “Mitt called and said he thought it would be best for the Olympics and for everyone’s benefit,” said Fonnesbeck, a former Salt Lake city councillor who helped organize the Games as a member of the state’s Sports Advisory Council. “He said they would slap Tom’s hands and it would be over.”

  She recalled Romney saying, “You never know what could happen if he goes to trial. He could end up going to jail.” “Well, I’ll send him some books,” Fonnesbeck replied. She said that Romney was civil throughout their conversation, but she resented his urging her to intervene. “I don’t know if it was legally inappropriate, but I felt it would have been incredibly inappropriate to do what he asked me to do,” she said. Welch’s defense team agreed. “Tom was represented by counsel, and it was inappropriate for [Romney] to be talking to a defendant in a criminal case about pleading,” Wheeler said.

  Romney’s request looked even worse when a federal judge threw out all fifteen felony charges against Welch and Johnson for insufficient evidence and praised their contributions to the Games. “I can only imagine the heartache, the disappointment, the sorrow that you and your loved ones suffered through this terrible ordeal,” U.S. District Judge David Sam told Welch and Johnson. Yet even after the charges were dismissed, Romney continued to express doubt about Welch’s and Johnson’s innocence, blaming the acquittal in part on ineffective prosecutors. “Of course, not being convicted of a crime isn’t vindication of wrongdoing, and not all unethical behavior is criminal,” he contended. “Even when criminal conduct occurs, it may be difficult to prove—and that’s with effective prosecutors. I believe those who pursued Welch and Johnson were inept.”

  “Mitt’s objective was to look as good as he could, to wear the white hat,” Welch said. “The more critical he could be of what was there before him, he was. He didn’t have to do it, but he chose to. He viewed everything in terms of how he could promote himself and his legacy, even at the expense of others. He showed a mean side, as well as a competent side.” The government’s chief prosecutor, Richard Wiedis, believed he had lost the case primarily because several members of the organizing committee who had agreed to testify against Welch and Johnson “essentially went south during the trial” by supporting the defendants. “Mitt Romney, as far as I know, was never in the courtroom, didn’t review any of the evidence, and never asked the prosecutors for a summary of their case,” Wiedis said. “I don’t see how he was in a position to make a judgment as to the competence of the prosecution team.”

  To that point in his life, the tests of Mitt Romney’s capacity for leadership had been conducted largely in private, his skills and shortcomings visible only to business associates and fellow Mormons. The Senate campaign had brought him to the fore, but it had ended in failure. It wasn’t until he took over the Olympics that his ability to lead was put on intensely public display. The overall picture that emerges from those who worked with and observed him in Salt Lake City is of a man focused on the task at hand with laserlike intensity. To some, that was an inspiring thing. His many admirers viewed him as ethically pristine, amiable, and self-effacing. But he developed another image among a group of dissenters: as petty, vindictive, and self-aggrandizing. Romney was also dismissive of the few trustees who aggressively questioned his practices.

  Romney’s chief foe was Ken Bullock, who was no relation to Fraser Bullock. Ken Bullock, who served on the organizing committee as executive director of the Utah League of Cities and Towns, believed his professional position made him an official watchdog for the state’s $59 million investment in the Games. “He tried very hard to build an image of himself as a savior, the great white hope,” Bullock said of Romney. “He was very good at characterizing and castigating people and putting himself on a pedestal.” Bullock was among those bemused by Romney’s efforts to promote himself, which seemed to run against the grain of his buttoned-down business persona. Romney became the first Olympics executive to approve a series of commemorative pins bearing his likeness. One pin depicted his face under a heart with th
e words: HEY MITT . . . WE LOVE YOU!

  Romney and Bullock clashed often, never more publicly than when they went nose to nose at the Utah state capitol after Bullock failed to support Romney’s request to defer repaying the state its $59 million.

  “You don’t want me as an enemy,” Romney said in the corridor outside a conference room, according to Bullock. “Ted Kennedy and I get along. Why can’t you and I?”

  “I’m doing my job,” Bullock replied.

  To which Romney repeated, “You don’t want me as an enemy.”

  Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, a Democrat who also served on the organizing committee and has remained a Romney friend, said that Bullock had long played a “very destructive” role in the Olympic movement. “We were all running out of patience and were pretty proud of Mitt that he finally put Ken in his place,” he said. Yet Garff, the organizing committee chairman whose association with Romney went back to childhood, believed that Romney had inappropriately tried to silence Bullock. “Mitt saw him as an agitator,” Garff said, “and I saw him as a watchdog who needed to be heard.” Romney showed little sympathy for another trustee who criticized his stewardship. Lillian Taylor, a small-business consultant, questioned why the organizing committee continued to retain a pricey, well-connected law firm that claimed to have lost documents related to the scandal. “I wanted to know why we were spending millions of dollars for a law firm that was expected to keep the records and then told us, ‘Somebody ate the homework,’” she said. “I thought I was asking a legitimate question.” Romney, she said, offered no support, sitting silently while the board’s attorney aggressively dismissed her complaint. “Shame on Mitt for that one,” Taylor said. “He didn’t stand up and protect me, and they just dropped it like a hot potato.”

  On other occasions, Romney artfully defused tension by reaching out to leading critics of the Games. The most vocal was Stephen Pace, the head of a group called Utahns for Responsible Public Spending. A business consultant, Pace had made great sport of ridiculing Romney’s predecessors in an effort to cast the Olympics as an exercise in wasted tax dollars. Pace’s group produced a line of T-shirts mocking the Games, and Pace had taken to standing in front of television cameras wearing a shirt that said “Slalom & Gomorrah.” Romney wasted no time trying to disarm him. “His first day in Utah, he called me and started blowing in my ear,” Pace said. “It was very clear what he was doing, but it was a very smart gesture after the people before him had treated us very contemptuously.”

  Romney also impressed Guetschow, the former Olympian on the organizing committee, by demonstrating a measure of respect for her as a lesbian. Geutschow recalled the first meeting of the new committee members after Romney’s arrival. It was at the governor’s mansion. Garff, after presiding over an opening prayer, began by asking the members to stand and introduce their spouses. Guetschow, who had brought her partner, went last. She recalled saying to herself, “What am I going to do?” Many of the trustees were members of the Mormon church, which considers homosexuality sinful. When Guetschow’s turn came, she said, “This is my friend; I guess that’s a safe way to put it.’” Everyone, she said, “was a little horrified.” Soon, Guetschow herself was horrified when the organizing committee proposed an antidiscrimination employment policy that did not include a provision for sexual orientation. “They skipped over my minority, and I was too shy to speak up,” Guetschow said. Instead, she spoke to Lillian Taylor, who served on the board’s human resources committee. Taylor conveyed the omission to Romney, who approved an amended policy that covered homosexuality. Romney later reached out to Salt Lake’s gay community as part of the committee’s effort to enhance diversity in the Olympic workforce. “He treated me well, and I think he genuinely believes that all people should be treated well,” Guetschow said.

  The most publicized moment of controversy during Romney’s Olympics stint came later, during the Games, when he clashed with Utah police after they alleged that he had twice used the F-word in berating a teenage student who was directing snarled traffic at an Olympic venue, the Snowbasin resort. Police were angry that Romney had denied shouting the expletive. “Both the Job Corps student and a sergeant who witnessed the scene related the same story,” said Weber County Sheriff’s Captain Terry Shaw, who was in charge of security at Snowbasin. “There was no reason to indicate they weren’t telling the truth.” Romney denied using the obscenity and said that two other witnesses—a Secret Service agent and an Olympic aide, Spencer Zwick—corroborated his denial. “I have not used that word since college, all right? Or since high school,” he said. Law enforcement authorities were further miffed that Romney offered a partial apology to the police but not to the student. “There were a lot of people in public safety who were extremely angry,” said Peter Dawson, who was serving as an intern in the Olympics communications center at the time. “The general consensus was ‘I hope he doesn’t need any help from us because we aren’t going to respond very quickly.’ ”

  The warm morning air was thick with black smoke as Mitt Romney and an aide raced away from Capitol Hill. They’d been preparing for a day of lobbying the federal government for Olympic aid. Then came reports of planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The acrid smoke billowed down on their BMW convertible as they fled. It smelled, Romney would say later, “like war.” Of all Romney’s challenges as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics, this was the most grave: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had changed everything. The blueprint had to be rewritten with the Games just five months away, a joyous celebration now set in a wounded land. Security became paramount. Romney expected calls for the Games to be canceled. Delegations, teams, or certain athletes might refuse to come. “I think Mitt wondered inwardly whether we could even hold the Games. He couldn’t say it publicly, but that was his nagging fear,” Ann Romney said at the time. “For a few days, like the rest of the country, he was floating in this sense of gloom and doom. But when he realized that the Olympics might help things, he became extra-determined. It was: We’re holding these Games no matter what, even if it’s just the athletes.”

  When he returned to Utah, Romney gathered hundreds of staffers and volunteers in an outdoor plaza and delivered a speech that several described as the most presidential moment of his Olympic tenure. While he addressed the fears many harbored of terrorists striking again during the Games, Romney invoked the glory of patriotism, public service, and facing down danger. “By the end, he had everybody singing ‘God Bless America,’ but not in a ‘Kumbaya’ kind of way,” said Zianibeth Shattuck-Owen, who had served as a trustee and later as a luge manager. “It was leadership.” Romney delivered a similar message in an e-mail to the staff. “In the annals of Olympism and the history of Utah, this may stand as one of the defining hours,” he wrote. “I am confident we will perform with honor.”

  The attacks required tightened security for the Games—and a new infusion of federal funding to pay for it. The Salt Lake Games were designated as a national special security event, with the FBI, Secret Service, and Federal Emergency Management Agency overseeing an effort that also involved the Central Intelligence Agency and numerous other international, national, state, and local military and law enforcement agencies. Congress had already earmarked about $200 million to try to make the Games safe. After the attacks, it fell largely to Senator Robert Bennett, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to secure an additional $34.4 million, and Bennett enlisted Romney to help lobby key legislators. “It was very easy to make the case with Mitt because he had the credibility,” Bennett said. “Whenever he was questioned, Mitt had his homework done. It made my job a lot easier to have him as the salesman for all of this.”

  Romney’s team displayed less tact in handling another sensitive matter related to the terror attacks. Trouble began when his executive assistant, Donna Tillery, twice rejected requests to provide free or discounted tickets to widows and orphans of firefighters who had died at the World Trade Center. Tillery s
ent e-mails to a former Salt Lake City firefighter, A. J. Barto, in which she explained the denial by citing a policy barring ticket giveaways. That made Romney, who professed not to know about the requests to Tillery, appear callous six weeks later when he offered a hundred surplus tickets, valued at $885 each, free to Utah legislators. “I was outraged at the hypocrisy,” Barto said. “In less than two months, he went from saying, ‘We’re going to run a tight ship’ to throwing out free tickets to a group of people who could help him politically.”

  As the Games neared, Romney and his Olympic colleagues wrestled with what tone to strike at the ceremonies. “It’s been much more somber since September 11, so I don’t know that we will have the same kind of exuberant, celebratory feeling for the Olympics that other cities have enjoyed,” he said at the time. “But we are what we are, and the nation is experiencing the mood it’s experiencing. In some respects, the Olympics take on a more profound meaning now than they might have in a more giddy time.”

  It was, in the end, a solemn display of resiliency that became the most unforgettable moment of the Games. Romney and Sandy Baldwin of the United States Olympic Committee persuaded the IOC to allow the U.S. team to carry into the opening ceremonies a tattered American flag found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. IOC officials had argued that the gesture would be viewed as too political, but they ultimately relented, clearing the way for eight American athletes, accompanied by New York firefighters and police officers, to carefully walk the flag into the Olympic stadium, to silence.

  With September 11 still on his mind and Winston Churchill as his inspiration, Romney was prone, as the Games approached, to grand historical analogy. “Dwight Eisenhower was quoted as saying that as D-day got closer, he realized there wasn’t much more he could do than salute the soldiers as they went off,” he said. “But I’ll still be in the main operations center during the Games. I’ll still be on the radio and the phones constantly. I doubt I’ll sit down and just watch events.” In taking on the job, Romney had “gone through all the usual Mitt stages,” said Charles Manning, his former political strategist. “First it’s Mr. Worrywart: ‘This will never happen; it’s going to be a disaster.’ Then it’s: ‘Let’s take it all apart, then put it back together.’ Now it’s: ‘Let’s make this the greatest success we can.’ ” Indeed, Romney, true to his nature, fretted and fussed and fidgeted over his Olympics until the flame in Salt Lake City was finally extinguished.