The Real Romney

The Real Romney

Michael Kranish
and
Scott Helman

www.harpercollins.com

Dedication

Michael Kranish:

To the journalists of
The Boston Globe
.

Scott Helman:

To Jonas and Eli, and the rich lives that await them.

Contents

About This Book

The Real Romney
was written by Scott Helman and Michael Kranish of
The Boston Globe
staff, and edited by Mark S. Morrow, the deputy managing editor who oversees the Sunday
Globe
and major news projects. It builds on the work of the many
Globe
staffers who have tracked Mitt Romney’s life and career over the decades, including those who contributed to a landmark seven-part biographical series published as he launched his first presidential run. Among those critical contributors: Brian C. Mooney, a veteran investigative reporter, whose deep reporting on Romney’s years as governor and his push for state health care reform was a critical resource; Beth Healy, a business reporter who brought expert reporting and vital sources to our analysis of Romney’s years as a leveraged buyout specialist; Bob Hohler, a sports reporter who trained a sharp eye on Romney’s turnaround of the Utah Olympics; Michael Paulson, the
Globe
’s former religion reporter and now an editor at
The New York Times
, who was the first to trace Romney’s missionary years in detail; Neil Swidey, a Sunday magazine staff writer who played a crucial writing and editing role in the 2007 series; and Peter S. Canellos, who edited the series as the paper’s Washington bureau chief and now leads its editorial page. Other key contributions to that series came from
Globe
staffers Stephanie Ebbert, Robert Gavin, and Sacha Pfeiffer (now an on-air host for WBUR radio). The authors are deeply indebted, and grateful, to them all.

Prologue

W
hen he finally enters the auditorium, they jump to their feet, the murmur crescendoing to a spirited ovation. Through a gauntlet of whoops, whistles, fist pumps, and camera flashes, he emerges, microphone in hand, his charcoal hair speckled with gray, wearing an easy smile as the warm reception washes over him. “Let’s go, Mitt!” someone screams. He mildly protests the adulation, imploring everyone to sit down, to please sit down. On this balmy autumn day in New Hampshire, in a campaign being fought very much on his turf, Willard Mitt Romney is confident, serenely so. He’s an old hand at this now. He’s ditched the stiff suits for cuffed khakis, scrapped the elaborate stagecraft for a minimalist presentation—just a guy holding court at a modest town hall meeting, ready for anything from voters who feel entitled to this ritual of political intimacy. He opens with a patriotic riff, promising “a campaign of American greatness.” He wants everyone to know: Mitt Romney loves America, and he believes in its people.

It is a simple, Reaganesque anthem, served up to a Republican audience hungry for a credible, electable leader who will deny President Barack Obama a second term. Romney’s whole demeanor, here at the center of this theater-in-the-round at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, is meant to convey, beyond any doubt, that he is ready. If he could take over now, he would. Just give him the keys to the White House. Why wait? After all, he’s been preparing for this moment—his moment—all his life. Many politicians say that. Or have it said about them. In Mitt Romney’s case, to a remarkable degree, it happens to be true.

He is, as he likes to say in debates, in speeches, and on the stump, a turnaround specialist running to lead a nation that desperately needs one. In his narrative, President Barack Obama has steered the country into a ditch, and Mitt Romney is the only one capable of yanking it out. Mr. Fix-it, reporting for duty. He’s already fixed his approach as a candidate, self-assured and savvy where he was often slipshod and self-defeating in 2008. He is, as one local politician tells him point-blank at Saint Anselm, a far stronger contender than he was four years ago, much more at home in a campaign centered on the economy. Last time, Romney looked like an actor playing a presidential candidate. This time, he seems like the real thing.

All around him on this day, mounted high on the walls of the college’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics, are imposing photos of men who have achieved what he has long dreamed about. There’s George H. W. Bush in a red jacket, standing with supporters near the ocean in Maine. There’s Bill Clinton on the tarmac beside Air Force One. There’s Jimmy Carter with Bill and Jeanne Shaheen, one of New Hampshire’s most famous political couples. But on these walls also hang reminders of the brutal selectivity of presidential politics, of the men whose reach came up short. There’s Bill Bradley shooting a basketball in a tweed coat and red tie. There’s the young Al Gore, in blue jeans and a barn jacket, on the doorstep of a man who is evidently not thrilled at the visit. And then, down a hallway in a quiet corner, is an even more poignant reminder that politics is a fickle business.

There, at eye level, in a simple black frame against a wood panel, hangs a campaign poster from the 1968 presidential bid of his father, George Romney, a Republican moderate who bowed out of the race Richard Nixon would go on to win. The poster, in keeping with the era, has a psychedelic feel, with the words
I WANT ROMNEY IN ’68
printed in a fun-house font that wouldn’t be out of place on a Jimi Hendrix concert flyer. George is smiling broadly in the gray-and-white rendering of his handsome face, his teeth impossibly white and his hair helmetlike in its perfection. It is an image strangely in tune with the moment, an artifact of both inspiration and warning.

T
his book is the first complete, independent biography of Mitt Romney, a man whose journey to national political fame is at once remarkable and thoroughly unsurprising. It would have been unthinkable to his ancestors just a few generations ago, yet countless people whose lives intersected with Romney’s over the past seven decades have drawn the same conclusion: this man might just be president someday.
The Real Romney
, which draws on our many years tracking the man and his career for
The Boston Globe
, is an attempt to capture him in whole, to plumb the many chapters of his life for insight into his character, his worldview, his drive, and his contradictions.

It is the story of a man guided by his faith and firmly grounded in family. It is the story of a once marginal and feared religion, Mormonism, a brand of Christianity homemade in America that he and his forebears helped move to the mainstream. It is the story of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and the proudly square young man who found it all appalling. It is the story of the wildly lucrative world of private equity and leveraged buyouts, a world largely opaque to outsiders, in which wealth is built and concentrated in novel ways, sometimes at others’ expense. It is the story of an uneasy relationship between conviction and vaulting ambition and how political dreams can die when tactics outrun beliefs. And it is the story, of course, of a father and a son, George and Mitt Romney, and the ways in which their lives aligned and diverged.

George Romney remains, more than four decades after his own adventure in presidential politics and sixteen years after his death, a constant spiritual presence at his son’s side. When a young girl asks Mitt Romney during the New Hampshire gathering what he would tell her class to make them want to be politicians, he deadpans at first, saying “The answer is: nothing. Don’t do it. Run as far as you can.” But when he turns serious, he invokes the advice he says his father offered years ago: “He said, ‘Don’t get into politics as your profession. . . . Get into the world of the real economy. And if someday you’re able to make a contribution, do it.’ ” This is the essence of Romney’s pitch, and it has been ever since his days as a deal maker in the 1980s and 1990s. He’s made his money—a mountain of it, in fact—and believes, as his father did, that he now owes a debt to the country that made a place for him.

Once upon a time, Mitt Romney was just a kid with a famous last name. He was born into a family of pioneers—early adopters of Mormonism who set out on brave journeys to spread their faith and preserve their traditions; a father who rose from dusty exile in Mexico to the gleaming boardrooms of business and politics. Through those strong men and women, the genes of leadership accumulated, adapted, and reassembled in a boy whose birth, the doctors said, should have been impossible, the youngest of four in a Detroit family whose fortunes, like so many in postwar America, were hitched to the automobile. Thanks to his father’s drive and hard work, Mitt Romney grew up differently from the Romneys before him. He enjoyed a largely privileged childhood of private schools and wide suburban streets, the product of a close-knit Mormon community that had gradually gained acceptance in a diversifying society. He was, more or less, an all-American baby-boom kid—a success story written in a land once so hostile to his ancestors.

If early Romneys got by on grit and frontier pluck, Mitt Romney would develop a different skill set. From early childhood, he formed his views through observation and analysis, by hanging back as the world unfolded before him. He watched his siblings grow up before him. He watched his parents build a life of family and faith that he would endeavor to follow. In college, he watched the social unrest of the 1960s convulse the country and chose to go another way, his obedient nature inclined to side with authority. He watched his father win three elections for governor of Michigan and then lose a bid for president, taking away critical insights from the highs and lows alike.

In his own career, armed with exceptional intelligence and analytical skills honed in one of the nation’s elite graduate programs, Romney studied and dissected companies around the world, eventually trading on his data mining to score incredibly sweet investment returns. When he did make pioneering breakthroughs, whether expanding the boundaries of private equity or enacting a novel universal health care plan as governor of Massachusetts, he followed a trusty formula: pursue data aggressively, analyze rigorously, test constantly, and observe always. Having grown up around engines, Romney adopted a kind of car hobbyist’s mind-set. Almost anything, he believed, could be taken apart, studied, and reengineered. Strategy informed nearly everything he did. This is a man who saw the millions of dollars one could make in selling paper clips. The man who once explained to a reporter in an airport that he preferred eating only the tops of muffins, so as to avoid the butter that melted and sank during baking.

Yet as successful as his strategic impulse made him in the private sector, Romney would find it unreliable in politics, where intangibles often reign. Not everything, he learned, would be so easy to quantify. Strategy can take a candidate only so far and sometimes to the wrong place entirely. Romney has, to date, lost more political races than he’s won, and his failure to see past the limits of his strategic outlook is one reason why.

The proximate cautionary tale, of course, is his campaign of 2008, which thrust him to the fore of national politics but exposed a tendency to assume whatever political profile he thought would best help him win. At the outset of that race, two household names, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, occupied the political center of the Republican field. The vacuum was on the right, and Romney set out to fill it, launching a prolonged and aggressive courtship of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives—any conservatives he could find. The trouble was that it looked too much like opportunism—or, worse, insincerity, given his long record of syncing his political views with the party’s moderate wing. “Everything could always be tweaked, reshaped, fixed, addressed,” said one former aide, describing Romney’s outlook. “It was foreign to him on policy issues that core principles mattered—that somebody would go back and say, ‘Well, three years ago you said this.’ ” The perception of expedience, along with lingering bigotry against Mormonism, helped bury his hopes.

Those challenges have not exactly subsided with time, despite Romney’s best efforts to overcome them. To this day, he remains an enigmatic presence to people outside his closest circle, a puzzle whose pieces don’t neatly fit. Many see in him what they want to see: a centrist or a conservative, an economic wizard or a rapacious capitalist, an adaptable leader or a calculating politician who will do anything to get elected. He acknowledges that he has changed on some key issues, casting his shifts as evidence of his nimble and flexible mind. He tells voters in New Hampshire to read his latest book if they want to know where he stands. “I’m very happy with where I am and the things I believe,” he says. Even the phrasing, though, implies that conviction is a destination. However tortuous the path, he’s saying, he is comfortable where he ended up.

It’s a journey his father might have had difficulty understanding. Alike in so many ways, George and Mitt Romney had distinct views of politics. George was famously headstrong and outspoken, willing to follow his gut where it took him. He was, in that way, more idealistic than pragmatic. He charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party’s foot-dragging on civil rights. He ensured the end of his presidential hopes in 1968 with an honest outburst about Vietnam. And he infuriated Richard Nixon while serving in Nixon’s cabinet, by pushing hard on behalf of racially integrated housing, a cause dear to his heart. George did what he felt was right, and if the torpedoes came, the torpedoes came. “There is no leader who can provide sound leadership on the basis of unsound principles,” he once said. “Principles are more important than men.”

If George Romney shot from the hip, his son, before he shoots at all, carefully studies the target, lines up the barrel just right, and might even fire a few practice rounds. Mitt Romney, who saw the shortcomings of his father’s approach, has often been more inclined to identify the consequences he wants, then figure out how to get there. In politics, those methods have varied depending on the race. In the current campaign, Romney is hoping that his undeniable economic expertise and record of accomplishment in business and government will trump questions about the striking changes, over time, in his political persona. And it may well be that the virtue of constancy will count for less when the unemployment rate is so stubbornly high and economic uncertainty so pervasive.

Romney is also, by now, a pro at this, knowing he will take his knocks and much better at parrying them. It’s a trade-off he would gladly make in exchange for avenging his father’s loss and becoming the country’s forty-fifth president. “Politics is like washing diapers,” Romney’s mother, Lenore, once said. “You want the baby so much, you don’t mind washing his diapers.”

And Mitt Romney wants the baby.

A
wall. A shell. A mask. There are many names for it, but many who have known or worked with Romney say the same thing: he carries himself as a man apart, a man who sometimes seems to be looking not into your eyes but past them. This detachment, in political settings, can make him seem too programmed, self-aware, bottled up. Even some of Romney’s closest friends don’t always recognize the man they see from afar.

This is a vexing rap to those in his inner circle—his wife, his family, and his closest confidants. They see a very different Mitt Romney and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want him to lead their country. The man they know is warm. He’s human. He’s silly. He’s funny, though sometimes his attempts at humor drift into corniness or just pure oddness. He’s deeply generous with both his time and his money when people need a lift. It seems that everyone who has known him has a tale of his altruism, whether it’s quietly funding a charitable cause or helping build a playground to honor the late son of a friend and neighbor. And he is an authentically devoted husband and father, commitments often honored by politicians more in the breach than in fact.