The Real Romney (26 page)

The most delicate issue in the race, though, had nothing to do with social policy, economics, or the direction of the country. It was much more personal. Romney was forced into the uncomfortable position of having to defend something he felt had no place in the campaign: his faith.

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veryone was there—print reporters, photographers, TV cameras. This was a press conference one didn’t want to miss. It was September 27. Romney’s campaign had summoned the media to its headquarters on Moulton Street in Cambridge. Questions about his faith had reached the point where Romney felt he had to address them head-on. Several days earlier, Kennedy’s nephew Joseph P. Kennedy II, the self-styled “pit bull” of his uncle’s campaign, had criticized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over its exclusion of blacks and women from leadership positions. He later apologized, saying he didn’t know that the church had let blacks join the priesthood in 1978. But then, on September 26, Senator Kennedy—despite previously insisting that religion had no place in the campaign—said Romney should be asked where he stood on the Mormons’ racially exclusive policies in the past. “Where is Mr. Romney on those issues in terms of equality of race prior to 1978 and other kinds of issues in question?” the senator said.

So Romney took to the podium and invoked the words of Kennedy’s own brother, John F. Kennedy, who confronted skepticism about his Catholic faith in 1960 by saying, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.” Romney said that John F. Kennedy’s presidential victory that year “was not for just forty million Americans who were born Catholic, it was for all Americans of all faiths. And I am sad to say that Ted Kennedy is trying to take away his brother’s victory.” As Romney was talking, George Romney, who had been circling the press gaggle, shaking his head and deeply agitated, suddenly couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “George Romney literally dove into the scrum,” a former Romney aide recalled. “He shoved his arms in between reporters like the parting of the Red Sea.” Everyone turned to him. “I think it is absolutely wrong to keep hammering on the religious issues,” said George, who had experienced anti-Mormon bias in his own life. “And what Ted is trying to do is bring it into the picture.” Romney, who had come to expect his father to do things like that, made light of the outburst and then retook control of the news conference.

Romney’s faith posed an unusual quandary—not only for him but for Kennedy and his aides, for the press, and for voters. Was it fair game in a political context? Was it off-limits completely? Or did it fall somewhere in the middle, especially as it informed his social views? They weren’t always easy questions to answer. And they surely weren’t helpful to Romney. Christopher Crowley, who took over as Romney’s research director, said at the time, “Every time it’s brought up, it makes women think, ‘Is he really prochoice?’ ” Romney’s media team even produced a TV ad in which Romney, addressing the camera in short sleeves from his driveway, said that John F. Kennedy’s election should have ended “religious bigotry” in politics. “All my life I’ve been guided by a set of strongly held beliefs. One is my religion. Another is tolerance of others,” he said. “Unfortunately, some in this campaign have chosen to use religion against me.” But his campaign never aired the spot. Kennedy backed off on Romney’s religion, and Romney and his aides decided that running the ad was unnecessary. His bitterness at the whole episode, though, would not fade easily.

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ife on the Romney campaign, as the press conference had shown, was never dull with George around. And one never quite knew when George would be around. One former aide recalled, “I would ask Ann, ‘So what is George Romney’s schedule for the next week?’ She goes, ‘Oh, we never know.’ ” George’s schedule was his own, but he was deeply invested in his son’s success. He was also in his late eighties at that point but irrepressibly defying his age. He would fly in to Boston’s Logan Airport from Detroit, take the bus to the subway, catch the Blue Line into the city, pick up the Red Line outbound to Cambridge, take it to the end of the line, and then walk, wheeling his bag, the mile or so to campaign headquarters. Then he’d walk upstairs and say simply, “Is Mitt here?” Sometimes he’d arrive with his thoughts about the campaign sketched out. “He would get all kinds of ideas going, because he was on the plane,” one aide remembered. “George Romney had a sense that Mitt had to be his own man, his own candidate, but wanted to share his own strategies.” Eventually, he and Lenore moved into the guest suite above Mitt and Ann’s garage. Campaigning for his son one day at a nursing home in Salem, north of Boston, George was asked if Mitt wasn’t very much like himself back in the day. “He’s better than a chip off the old block,” George replied. “No. 1, he’s got a better education. No. 2, he’s turned around dozens of companies while I turned around only one. And No. 3, he’s made a lot more money than I have.”

On the campaign trail, Kennedy and Romney had distinct styles and strengths. Romney was a far more polished speaker—authoritative, confident, and cogent in his arguments. But Kennedy, having honed his street skills over more than three decades, was a more natural campaigner, always finding a way to connect with the person on the other end of a handshake. Making such fleeting personal connections stick was hard for Romney; sometimes, indeed, he seemed painfully awkward. A series of campaign appearances filmed by C-SPAN captured the difference between the men: Kennedy, leaving a Rotary Club event in Salem, comes across a man with a cigar dangling from his mouth. “I used to smoke those myself,” Kennedy tells him, eliciting a knowing laugh. Romney, shaking hands in Waltham, just west of Boston, approaches a woman outside a convenience store, who turns from him. “Don’t run,” he says. “I’ll shake your hand anyway.” The woman stops and puts her hand to her face. “I know, you haven’t got your makeup on yet,” Romney says good-naturedly. “I do! I do!” the woman protests, mildly offended. “You do! You do!” Romney responds with a nervous laugh. “Good to see you!”

One side of Romney that voters rarely saw on the campaign trail was his tremendous charitable impulse when people needed help. They were often, but not always, people he encountered in his church. After Kennedy’s assault on his business career set him off, Romney did complain publicly that no one saw all his compassionate work as a private citizen, a theme he would revisit in a televised debate. But he largely kept it out of the spotlight. There was the time he took an entire day off from campaigning so he and his sons could help a single mother move, because she couldn’t afford movers. Or the time he called Rick Reed’s mother in the hospital when she was dying of cancer. Romney made a point of telling her how proud he was of her son. “It was something I’ll never forget,” Reed said. But the story that perhaps best illustrates Romney’s charitable streak in those days came late in the campaign. It began with a gaffe.

About a week before election day, Romney spent a half hour courting voters at the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans, a regular stop on the political trail near Boston’s City Hall. After giving his pitch, Romney was talking to the center’s director, Ken Smith. Romney asked him what his biggest problem was. Smith said that just that morning, he’d met with the guy in charge of food services for the shelter and learned that the high price of milk was killing their budget. And they went through a lot of milk, some one thousand pints a day. Romney attempted a joke: why don’t you just teach the veterans how to milk cows? Then he was out the door. Smith was stunned. “One of the press guys said, ‘Did he just tell you to have veterans milk cows?’ I said, ‘That’s what I heard,’ ” Smith recalled. “It did rub everyone the wrong way.”

But then, several days later, Smith got a phone call. It was Romney. “He personally called and said something to the effect of ‘I want you to know that I truly do support American veterans, regardless of what has been said or how this was portrayed.’ ” Romney told Smith he wanted to cover part of the shelter’s milk costs, and he didn’t want any publicity for it. “He said something like ‘I’m looking to do it because it’s the right thing,’ ” Smith said. He didn’t know exactly how Romney had done it—he figured Romney had arranged something with one of the shelter’s milk suppliers. But now, instead of paying for a thousand pints a day, the shelter was paying for just five hundred. And it wasn’t just some political stratagem. “It wasn’t a short-term ‘Let me stroke you a check,” he said. “It happened not once, not twice, but for a long period of time.” In fact, Smith said he understood that Romney was still supporting the shelter when Smith left in 1996.

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ith Kennedy pulling ahead in the closing weeks of the race, Romney had but one hope left to arrest his own slide. The two candidates, after furious negotiations, agreed to meet for two debates. The first, scheduled for October 25 at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, promised to be an especially high-stakes clash. With a commanding performance, Romney could show everyone on live television why he, and not Kennedy, belonged in the United States Senate. The day of the Boston debate, a poll published in the
Boston Herald
underscored the pressure on Romney for a game-changing night: Kennedy was up by eighteen points. That evening, Kennedy supporters, including many union members, were out in force around Faneuil Hall. Many had been drinking. They were rowdy, even menacing. Tussles broke out. “I saw little old ladies getting kicked over by guys in hard hats,” recalled one former Romney aide. There was, the aide said, “palpable hostility toward Romney.” Even though he had many supporters on the streets, too, Romney didn’t linger long, slipping into the building soon after he pulled up. Kennedy basked in the show of support, however unruly, clasping hands and pumping his fist, and he and Vicki entered the hall.

Kennedy had the benefit of low expectations—peerless with a script, he could be halting and incoherent as an extemporaneous speaker. Aides worried that a major stumble could be damaging. But his campaign did score one important aesthetic victory by persuading Romney’s advisers to agree to larger podiums. The giant wooden boxes made both candidates look smaller, which was bad for Romney but good for Kennedy, because, as his aides intended, it concealed his ample girth. “You could stay overnight in this podium,” Kennedy cracked at one point beforehand.

Faneuil Hall was electric that night, packed with supporters of the candidates, opinion leaders and journalists from around the country, and a lively audience speckled with boldfaced names. For Romney, it was one of the biggest moments of his life. He started strong. He did not shrink from Kennedy’s stature. He tagged the senator as a relic of the 1960s. He offered a full-throated defense of his beliefs and values, criticizing the Kennedys for drawing attention to his Mormon faith. He accused Kennedy of misleading attacks on his business record. But as the debate unfolded, Romney made crucial missteps while Kennedy gained steam, particularly after a memorable, rehearsed retort to Romney’s charge that he had benefited from a no-bid real estate deal. “Mr. Romney,” Kennedy thundered, “the Kennedys are not in public service to make money.”

When Kennedy asked Romney what health care plan he favored, Romney answered with a solid summation of his beliefs. But after Kennedy followed up by saying, “What is the cost of your program?” Romney said, “Uh, I don’t have a cost to my program, Senator Kennedy.” “You don’t have a cost?” Kennedy replied with exaggerated incredulity. Romney complained that, unlike Kennedy, he didn’t have Congressional Budget Office number crunchers at his disposal. But it sounded like an excuse, and Kennedy, in his best patronizing tone, succeeded in painting Romney as an amateur who didn’t understand lawmaking. Romney had rehearsed an answer to that very question in debate prep—something along the lines of “Senator, since when did you care about the cost of programs?” But he didn’t use it.

Not long after, in defending himself against Kennedy’s charge that he was a political clone of Ronald Reagan, Romney said, “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” It was at that moment that some of Romney’s fellow Republicans felt the race slip from his grasp. John Lakian, who was doing commentary for one of the local TV stations, looked over at his Democratic counterpart and said, “I think the election is over.” Reagan had won Massachusetts twice, and Romney needed those voters. His answer also revived the same pesky question that had dogged him for months: what did Mitt Romney believe? “When you deny Ronald Reagan when you’re a Republican, then nobody knows where you are,” Lakian said. “You just become another person running against Kennedy.”

And then, toward the end of the night, Romney fumbled an appeal to working women. “Women are concerned about the glass ceiling,” he declared, attempting solidarity. He asked Kennedy what the senator would do to break it. Kennedy had been around long enough to recognize the softball question that it was. Almost smiling as he recited his legislative record, Kennedy said, “You’re not going to find a member of the United States Senate that’s a stronger supporter.” Robert Shrum, Kennedy’s senior adviser, said at the time, “That question was like asking Babe Ruth how to hit a ball.” Romney overall didn’t perform badly, especially for a novice. But Kennedy fared better, and with some three million people watching. With less than two weeks to election day, a fresh
Boston Globe
poll put Kennedy up by twenty points.

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few weeks earlier, a Kennedy sign holder in a run-down part of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood had warned Romney to steer clear of “Kennedy country.” Romney figured he could turn that phrase on its head, using it as shorthand for the appalling urban blight that had persisted through years of Democratic control of the state. It would neatly capture, he thought, the failure of Kennedy’s liberal policies. Romney and his wife discussed making it a campaign slogan, but advisers dissuaded them. Then, in his final debate with Kennedy, Romney used the phrase anyway, going on to make it the centerpiece of his closing message to voters. He launched a tour of economically depressed neighborhoods and aired a late TV ad bemoaning the “legacy of Kennedy country—a legacy of failed programs, welfare dependency, and rising crime.”