The Real Romney (28 page)

The lesson that she did not have to be captive to her disease came not in Belmont, where she had made her home for nearly thirty years, but in Utah, where she found equestrian companions and a retired guru of reflexology by the name of Fritz Blietschau, who, although he was nearly eighty, agreed to take her on as a patient. By early 1999, Ann and Mitt were based there as well. That’s because when the call came offering Mitt Romney the opportunity of a lifetime, it came with a Utah address.

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round the time the Romneys were reeling from Ann’s diagnosis, they got a phone call from Kem Gardner, an old family friend and fellow Mormon. Gardner, who was now a prominent developer and civic leader in Utah, had a wild proposal that he knew Mitt would reject out of hand. So he went first to Ann.

The 2002 Winter Olympics, which Salt Lake City would host in a few years, were in deep trouble, severely damaged by an influence-peddling scandal. The Salt Lake Organizing Committee, swept up in a culture of corruption that permeated the high-stakes international competition to get the Games, had embarrassed itself and the state of Utah by lavishing gifts on international Olympics executives. The shame of the scandal—in which ten members of the International Olympic Committee had resigned or been expelled for accepting gifts from the Salt Lake committee—had sent corporate sponsors fleeing, leaving the budget for the Games woefully underfunded. Relations between the international and U.S. Olympic committees deteriorated badly. Morale among Salt Lake staffers nose-dived. The competition would go on; there was little doubt about that, with three years to go before the Games were set to begin. But there was a palpable sense of peril, particularly among vital supporters and sponsors. The Games needed a turnaround artist, and fast.

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.

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avid 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 damage 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.”

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ithin 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.”