The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  “It sounds silly now,” said Mike Roake, a classmate who accompanied Romney part of the way to Berkeley that night, “but it was the great crusade in that time of sweet innocence.”

  Marquess was impressed with Romney’s dedication. “I don’t think that sucker slept for four days,” Marquess recalled, using the word “sucker” in a nice way. The bonfire and axe were protected, and an impression had been made. “You wanted Mitt on whatever committee or group you were doing. He would take charge or lead it.”

  Romney and Marquess did what Stanford freshmen do: they studied and they talked a lot about girls, although Mitt made it clear he would not date anyone besides Ann. They went to parties, where Mitt refrained from smoking or drinking. But Marquess, who would tire of the parties quickly, learned that Mitt would stay for hours, engaging students on whatever was the topic of the day. Oftentimes, Marquess would be worn out from practice or a game, and Mitt would leave the room to go to the dorm lobby and talk for hours more. “He was conservative and willing to express himself,” said one classmate, James Baxter. Mitt also left for long stretches to attend church functions. Over the course of the year, the roommates grew to understand each other and grew close. “He didn’t put on any airs about anything,” Marquess said. “That’s what I liked about him.” On several occasions, Marquess drove with Romney to his home in Stockton, ninety miles from campus, where the two boys would have a home-cooked meal courtesy of Marquess’s mother. They went to a local gym and played basketball, and slept in the modest three-bedroom home. It was a world away from Mitt’s upbringing in Bloomfield Hills but a slice of normalcy that Romney seemed to embrace.

  Back at the dorm, Romney became close to a number of boys whose fathers also happened to be Republican leaders. Alan Abbott had come from El Paso, Texas, where months earlier he had picked up Ronald Reagan at the train station, thanks to his father’s role as county chairman of the Republican Party. On the first day of the semester, Abbott had wandered into Romney’s room and found it overflowing with students. Noticing the picture of George Romney on Mitt’s desk, Abbott announced that he was a fan of the Michigan governor. Everyone broke out laughing because Abbott didn’t know he had entered the room of George’s son. Mitt embraced Abbott as a soul mate from the start.

  Also on Mitt’s floor was Robert Mardian, Jr., the son of the man who had managed Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign in four western states. George Romney had walked out on Goldwater’s nomination. The two sons nonetheless became close, attending football games together and spending much of the year playing practical jokes on each other. Mardian loved to tease Romney about how he had gotten into Stanford. A standing joke was that Romney, who’d had some mediocre grades on his prep school transcript, had been admitted in exchange for cars from American Motors, where George had been chairman. On other occasions, Mardian said, “I would say publicly, ‘He’s just not qualified. I’m getting tired of writing his papers.’ ” It was untrue, of course, but Romney always played along. “He took it always in a joking manner,” Mardian said. “That is the part that I remember. He was a fun guy.” When the two did talk seriously, it was about Republican politics and their shared dislike of radicals.

  As freshman year progressed, the political demarcation lines on campus sharpened dramatically. Romney and his Republican buddies were representative of the traditional, conservative side of Stanford’s ecosystem. But David Harris made surprising headway with his antiestablishment advocacy, attracting an increasing number of followers as he educated his peers about racial unrest in the South and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. More air was leaking from the Stanford bubble.

  It was one thing for the nearby campus of the University of California–Berkeley to have been radicalized by the antiauthority Free Speech Movement and for San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to emerge as a mecca for free-loving hippies in peasant skirts and dashikis. But at buttoned-down Stanford this creeping radicalism was something new and unsettling. Now, as Romney returned from his mandatory freshman classes in English and Western civilization, the scent of marijuana wafted across the pathways and strains of psychedelic rock blared from the windows. Some students set up a site to take blood donations for the North Vietnamese Communist fighters. Drug-infused “acid tests” were held in courtyards, taking their name from parties popularized by a local resident, Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who had honed his literary skills in Stanford’s creative writing program. “There was this cultural current coming from the whole Bay area,” Harris said. “I would assume that, coming from [Romney’s] background, there were certainly things on campus that made him uncomfortable.”

  By the time football season got under way, Stanford was a split-personality campus of tradition and revolution, and Mitt increasingly found himself caught in a world of which he knew little, about as far from his cloistered Cranbrook School and strict Mormon upbringing as he could get. Months earlier, he had been on a date with Ann watching The Sound of Music back home in Michigan. Now he was at large in the land of the Grateful Dead. One fall day, a stream of protesters—most of them dressed in coat and tie or skirt and blouse—headed down a wide palm-lined pathway carrying a banner that said, VIETNAM—MATTER OF CONSCIENCE. An older, short woman carried a huge sign that nearly dwarfed her. PEACE, it said, with a giant hand-drawn peace symbol. A young man held a placard that said, FRENCH KILLED ONE MILLION. HOW MANY SHALL WE? The protests grew exponentially. More than a hundred Stanford students joined a group of at least six thousand protesters who marched between Berkeley and Oakland. At night, Harris and other protesters would meet in a dorm room, where they smoked marijuana and listened to songs by Joan Baez, the antiwar singer whom Harris would later marry.

  The protests were having an impact across the nation and on the Romney family. Three weeks after the antiwar march at Stanford, Mitt’s father, George, headed to Vietnam to see for himself what was happening. The Michigan governor was comforted by what he heard, filled with assurances from U.S. generals that the conflict would turn out in the United States’ favor. The issues in Vietnam were “the same that brought our country into existence,” George said after meeting with the generals, adding that “the American presence in Vietnam is necessary, if the world is to maintain liberty and freedom.” Nothing could have been more at odds with what the protesters at Stanford were saying—and George would soon learn about that as well. Returning from Vietnam, George stayed overnight at a San Francisco Hilton on November 12, 1965. It was during that stopover, according to two of Mitt’s classmates, that George went to Stanford to visit Mitt. The campus buzzed about the visit, and a dinner was arranged for some of Mitt’s dormitory friends. Peter Davenport, Mitt’s classmate, recalled that the elder Romney dined with Mitt and a group of students at the dorm. “He spoke about his trip to Vietnam,” Davenport said. “It was rather subdued.”

  George also had a more narrow parental concern. He was worried about his son’s personal life. Mitt had secretly been flying back home on many weekends to visit his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Ann. On another occasion, he drove nonstop from California to Michigan, showed up at Ann’s home a sweaty mess, and dived fully clothed into her pool. Mitt planned the visits to Bloomfield Hills like a covert operation, aiming for times when his parents were staying in the state capital of Lansing due to George’s gubernatorial duties. “He didn’t want his parents to know,” Ann recalled years later. “They had no idea he was coming home weekends.” One time, Mitt and Ann were at a party and were shocked to see that Mitt’s parents were there. “As soon as we saw them, we made a U-turn and left,” Ann said.

  At some point, however, George learned about the liaisons, and he worried that the frequent trips would affect Mitt’s grades. Mitt’s older brother, Scott, had attended Stanford for a year but had had trouble keeping up and had transferred to Michigan State. George did not want Mitt to encounter the same kind of troubles. So during his visit to Stanford, George sought out Mitt’s friend Al
an Abbott. Would you watch out for my son? he asked Abbott. Abbott, somewhat awed that one of his Republican heroes was asking for such a favor, said he would. Then George confided his anxiety about Mitt. “He said he was concerned about the time Mitt was spending traveling back to Michigan on the weekends,” Abbott recalled. George planned to “cut back” on Mitt’s allowance in the hope that Mitt would spend more time on campus and his studies. But Mitt was so smitten, and so determined to outwit his father, that he came up with a brazen idea. He announced to his friends that he was holding an auction. Nearly all of his clothing was for sale. Abbott arrived at Mitt’s dorm room and was astonished that Mitt was selling off even his treasured camel-hair overcoat. “He auctioned off his clothing and bought a ticket to see Ann,” Abbott recalled. At a time when most Stanford guys were dating an array of girls, the depth of Romney’s devotion to his girl back home would make a lasting impression.

  Something else stood out to Mitt’s peers: his bond with his father, who remained his hero and confidant notwithstanding the friction over Mitt’s home visits. Classmates could see the closeness between them. “It was especially interesting,” Romney’s classmate Mike Roake said, “because we were freshmen and therefore in the process of divorcing ourselves from our parents.”

  But even if Mitt was frequently away from campus, he could not escape the escalating turmoil fueled by Harris and other antiwar activists. A campus rally was headlined by Stokely Carmichael, the new national chairman of the influential Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, who said that U.S. actions in Vietnam were comparable to the lynching of southern blacks. During the course of Romney’s freshman year, the antiwar movement at Stanford had grown from furtive dorm room conversations to massive rallies. Harris became so popular that he was urged to run for student body president, and he launched a long-shot campaign. His growing profile was increasingly disconcerting to the university’s leaders and to students such as Romney. Harris figured there was no chance he would be elected on the conservative campus; he just wanted to get his message out. “You don’t stand a chance of winning,” a friend told him. “This is Stanford.” Wearing a wrinkled shirt, tan moccasins, and blue jeans and sporting a mustache, Harris competed against six opponents who wore suits and ties and worked their connections to the establishment and fraternities. For one rally, Harris traded an ounce of marijuana to members of an emerging band from San Francisco called the Jefferson Airplane for the use of the band’s sound equipment. At another event, he was asked about his attitude toward fraternities. “I think fraternities are a crock of shit,” Harris responded.

  Harris’s platform called for ending the university’s cooperation with the war effort, abolishing its board of trustees, and legalizing marijuana. He was against the draft, but also argued that if there was a draft it should apply to everyone, including university students. Why should the war be delegated to the poor, who couldn’t get student deferments? he asked. To the shock of the establishment and even more to Harris himself, he won the election with 56 percent of the vote in a runoff against a fraternity man. “The President Elect—Voice of Radicalism,” reported the Stanford Daily. The election made national news; if supposedly conservative Stanford students elected a radical as president, what did that mean for the country? Alumni contributions plummeted. It was a repudiation not only of the establishment but also of politicians such as George Romney and, by extension, of resolute straight arrows like his son. Romney had become a leading member of the university’s Republican Club. But many of his classmates were headed in the opposite direction.

  The disconnect between Mitt and many of his fellow students grew increasingly pronounced. A group calling itself the Stanford Committee for a Free University sponsored a series of events called “The New Student—Pot and/or Politics,” with sessions on sex, psychedelic drugs, radicals, and “Politics Without Ideology?” And then there was growing anger over the war and anxiety about the draft. Shortly after Harris’s election, Selective Service officials were quoted in the Stanford Daily as saying that draft boards would closely examine student deferments. If a student was at the bottom of his class, the officials suggested, he risked losing the deferment. Across the campus, fear spread that the coveted deferment might be undermined. The issue came to a head when it was announced that 850 students would have to take a Selective Service test that could affect their status. The mere presence of the Selective Service on campus prompted a new uproar. Harris and several hundred other students held a protest on White Plaza and then walked to the office of the university president, Wallace Sterling. Two dozen students (Harris not among them) occupied the office overnight, in what became the first sit-in at Stanford.

  Mitt was incensed. Skipping his study discussion group for Western civilization class, which was focusing that spring on the works of Lenin and Marx, Romney put on a blazer and attached a large sign to a pole: SPEAK OUT, DON’T SIT IN. Gene Tupper, a photographer who then worked for the Palo Alto Times, snapped an indelible image that showed Romney in his white shirt and dark jacket, thick hair sweeping over his forehead, appearing to lecture a protester as he brandished the sign. The picture ran the next day in the newspaper with a caption that read, “Governor’s son pickets the pickets. Mitt Romney, son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, was one of the pickets who supported the Stanford University administration today in opposition to sit-in demonstrators.” Mitt was at the forefront of a group of about 350 antiprotesters, who shouted at the antiwar group, “Down with mob rule!” “Out! Out!” and “Reason, not coercion!” When a university official announced that students participating in the sit-in would be disciplined, Mitt shouted, “Come out of the office and let school continue!”

  Romney, asked about the confrontation years later, recalled Harris being on the opposite side and said, “We had animated discussions about political issues.” To Harris, however, Romney was “a zero” who hadn’t made a ripple on campus. But to those who knew him and admired his father, Mitt had earned a reputation as an organizer and was becoming a political figure in his own right; the image of him holding the sign at the antiprotest protest would linger in classmates’ memories. After a childhood watching his father speak out and lead, Mitt plainly had a similar inclination. If he had left home with any intention of distancing himself from his parents and their politics, that time had passed. The sign he carried to the sit-in that day became a marker of sorts, pointing to the public path he would one day follow.

  One of the rallying cries for antiwar protesters did hit home for Romney. Mitt, like other Stanford students, had a deferment that meant he had little reason to worry about being drafted. But he intended to leave college after one year to serve the traditional thirty months as a missionary and then return to complete his studies. The missionary interlude created a potential problem. Most Mormons serving missions were declared “ministers of religion” by the church and, under an agreement with the Selective Service, granted an exemption from the draft. But the agreement was not absolute.

  Such deferments for Mormon missionaries became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, especially in Utah, leading the Mormon church and the government to limit the number of church missionaries who could put off their military service. That agreement called for each church ward, or district, to designate one male every six months to be exempted from potential duty for the duration of his missionary work. Thus, getting a deferment could be more difficult in a state such as Utah, where the huge Mormon population meant that there were sometimes more missionaries than available exemptions. Romney, however, benefitted from having lived in Michigan, where there were relatively few Mormons. Thus, the odds were high that he would receive a 4-D exemption as a missionary. Barry Mayo, who was counselor to the bishop of the Michigan ward where Romney attended church, said Mitt’s deferment was never in much doubt. “There were some wards, mostly in the West, where the congregation was large and the number of youth was large,” Mayo said. “The circumstances were very different here. Our
congregation was small, and the number of youth were small. To the best of my knowledge we never had a situation where we had more than two young men wanting to go in any one year.” Mayo said that no records are available from the period that would show how Romney’s deferment was handled. But by serving as a missionary and being given the deferment, Romney ensured that he would not be drafted from July 1966 until February 1969. Romney’s draft record from the time describes him as “minister of religion or divinity student.”

  As the war escalated and the demand for draftees grew, the Mormon exemption drew increasing fire. Some non-Mormons in Utah filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 1968, saying it was unfair for Mormons on a thirty-month mission to receive the same kind of deferment as those in other faiths who made a lifetime commitment to serve a religion. Richard Leedy, the lawyer who brought the suit, said he did so because “the substantial number of deferments to missionaries made the likelihood of us non-Mormons going to Vietnam a lot more likely.”

  Romney has denied that he sought to avoid the draft. Asked years later about his lack of military service, he said, “I was supportive of my country. I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.” But on another occasion he seemed to contradict himself, saying, “I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft.”