When Romney’s student and religious deferments ended, his name was put into the lottery based on an individual’s birthday. He drew the number 300 at a time when no one drawing higher than 195 was drafted. He would never serve, voluntarily or otherwise, in the military.
Years later, some of Romney’s Stanford classmates would wonder what had happened to him. He had lost touch with most of them after freshman year ended, and some did not realize that he had intended to leave campus on a Mormon mission. But Mitt’s path was preordained. Like nearly all nineteen-year-old men of his faith, Mitt would be called to serve somewhere around the world for two years. (Many women went on shorter missions at age twenty-one.) During his absence from Stanford, the campus would explode with protests that sometimes turned violent. He would never return there as a student.
His freshman year done, Mitt left campus and headed home to Michigan to spend time with his family—and Ann. While there, he did briefly consider breaking with family and religious tradition and not go on a mission. For one thing, he said, his Mormon beliefs at the time were “based on thin tissue.” What he apparently meant, according to his friend Dane McBride, was that there were relatively few Mormons in Michigan and thus he didn’t have the same kind of connection to the faith as someone growing up in a place like Mormon-heavy Utah. Though Romney’s parents were deeply committed and conveyed their faith to their children, it was normal for a nineteen-year-old about to embark on a mission to have questions about his commitment, said McBride, who would later witness the growth of Romney’s belief.
But Romney’s biggest reason for not wanting to go may have been a fear that he would lose Ann. Countless missionaries before him had left behind girlfriends, only to learn in a letter that the relationship was over. He told her he might not go. But she was insistent. If he didn’t, she told him, he would always regret it. Mitt, having sneaked home on many weekends from Stanford to see Ann, now faced the prospect of having to spend two and a half years apart from her. He would live in a location to be determined by the Mormon Church and try to convince strangers to convert to his faith. While his classmates rushed fraternities and prepared for sophomore year, and as a growing number of people his age were being shipped to Vietnam, Romney’s life was heading in a very different direction.
The letter came as Romney completed his year at Stanford. “Your presiding officers have recommended you as one worthy to represent the Church of our Lord as a Minister of the Gospel,” wrote Mormon Church president David O. McKay, whom members revered as a living prophet. From the very start, in the 1830s, the Latter-day Saints had sent out young envoys to preach the Gospel and try to win converts. It was a missionary who had convinced Mitt’s great-great grandparents in England to convert and immigrate to America, and many Romneys had followed the tradition. George had done a mission in England. Now Mitt learned that he would be going to France. It sounded like one of the easier assignments. Some missionaries went to jungles and deserts and islands, while Mitt was off to one of the most cultured societies on the planet. But heavily Catholic France was a society mostly hostile to Mormons. Most French citizens, if they knew anything about Mormonism, were familiar with its history of polygamy and, in a country that takes its wine seriously, for its prohibition against alcohol.
The first Mormon missionary had arrived in France in 1849, but the missionaries had been evicted during the reign of Napoléon III and been evacuated during World War II. In the 1950s, a growing number of missionaries in France had questioned the tenets of Mormonism and embraced other faiths, a scandal that had resulted in nine members being excommunicated. The church had rebounded with a campaign to build chapels in France, and the first two, in Bordeaux and Paris, opened just before Romney arrived. Still, despite more than a century of missionary activity, Mormonism had barely taken root. There were 6,500 Mormons out of 49 million people in France by the time Romney prepared for his mission.
Less than two months after Romney left Stanford, he was on his way to the gritty seaport of Le Havre, best known to Americans for being occupied by the Germans during World War II. Horrific bombing had led to the deaths of thousands of residents and the destruction of much of the city. With the end of the war, the French government had undertaken one of the greatest rebuilding efforts in Europe. Over a twenty-year period, Le Havre had been remade into a modernist ideal. It was a long way from the sunny setting of Stanford and its Mission Revival–style architecture. In Le Havre, blocks of boxy concrete buildings surrounded the 351-foot-high spire of the Church of Saint Joseph. The spire served as a memorial to the war dead and a symbol of the traditional Catholic faith of the region. Feelings about Americans had veered from warmth to wariness as World War II receded into memory and the Vietnam conflict wore on. The mayor and other top city officials were Communists, adding to the anti-American sentiment but also fueling hope among the missionaries that some irreligious citizens might be curious about the Mormon message. Into this world of concrete, communism, and Catholicism came the gangly nineteen-year-old, selling something that very few people in Le Havre were interested in buying: a new religion.
Romney shared a one-bedroom apartment with three other missionaries. They put together makeshift beds by getting used mattresses from a ship in port and stacking plywood atop cinder blocks. There was no telephone, no television, and no radio. There were also no other Mormons in Le Havre, so the four American missionaries would hold worship in their apartment, taking turns preaching and singing and offering one another the sacrament of bread and water. Romney and his three fellow missionaries woke at 6 a.m., ate breakfast, and studied the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and French. They knocked on doors, with breaks for meals, and went to bed as required at 10 p.m. They traveled on Solex motorized bicycles, wearing their suits and carrying satchels containing pamphlets about Mormonism.
Romney’s routine rarely varied. Joining with a fellow missionary, he went to a carefully mapped zone. The missionaries kept track of every door they knocked on to be sure they weren’t duplicating efforts. It could be a mind-numbing and demoralizing day after day of rejection. Romney knocked on the door of an unsuspecting French family. “Bonjour, Madame. Nous sommes deux jeunes Américains,” Romney would say, a fellow missionary by his side. “Hello, ma’am. We are two young Americans.” He continued: ”We’re talking to people in your neighborhood about our faith and wonder if you’d like to—”
Decades later, Romney would recall what had often happened next: “Bang! The door shuts. And most people assumed we were salesmen and said, ‘No, I don’t want any,’ and would shut the door. A lot of people would say, ‘Americans? Get out of Vietnam!’ Bang!”
Romney worked hard to memorize key French words and phrases that would help in his missionary work. A fellow missionary, Donald K. Miller, recalled that Romney would take a long, hot bath and emerge having memorized his lesson. Romney also stood out for his rarefied background. One of his fellow missionaries, Gerald Anderson, recalled how Romney, on a trip to Paris, stunned everyone with his familiarity with the fine French perfumes in a shop on the Champs-Élysées. Yet he could show a tougher side when the occasion warranted. Six months into his mission, Romney was in his apartment when a woman burst in to say some Frenchmen were beating up one of his fellow Mormons down the street. The barefoot Romney joined his roommates in rushing into the snowy night. They found a team of rugby players, drowning their sorrows after a lost match, hassling two female missionaries. The women had cried out “Allez-y!” which means “Go on,” rather than “Allez-vous-en,” meaning “Go away.” The male missionary who had leaped to their defense had been punched out. Romney ended up with a badly bruised jaw. “There were about 20 guys, very large and very muscular, and we were a group of very young and very small American guys,” Romney would recall forty years later. “If you get into a fight with Muhammad Ali, you don’t return the punch, you just put your arms up.”
For two and a half years, Romney lived under the strict missionary regime. He was to cal
l home only on Christmas and Mother’s Day, although one of his fellow missionaries remembered him calling more often. There would be no drinking, no smoking, no sex, and no dating. He would be alone only in the bathroom—Mormon missionaries are always paired with a companion to reduce opportunities for mischief. All of his time, all of his energy, would be devoted to trying to persuade the people of France to join the Mormon Church.
Mitt’s fellow missionaries came from across the United States and Canada, including some from small towns where Mormons were as much a minority as they were in France. Some had viewed George Romney as their hero and were delighted to be paired with Mitt. He thus commanded a certain amount of respect from the start. And he looked the part: a tall, strikingly handsome young man, hair neatly trimmed, oozing confidence and speaking French better than most of his comrades. Marie-Blanche Caussé, a French Mormon who encountered Romney during his mission, thought the young man would go far. Romney “had a personality that was above average for the other missionaries. Usually the missionaries that are eighteen, nineteen years old stay in their corners, they don’t speak good French, and you have to approach them, they’re a little timid, but Mitt Romney . . . was very comfortable communicating with others.”
At the urging of a church official from Utah, Romney encouraged his fellow missionaries to read Think and Grow Rich, a 1937 self-help book by Napoleon Hill that had been reissued in 1960. Hill, who interviewed hundreds of wealthy and famous Americans to learn the secret of success, concluded that wealth grew out of the rigorous application of personal beliefs and an ability to work with people of like-minded determination. Some of the chapter titles serve as guides to how Romney achieved success in his future careers in business and politics. Chapter 2 is titled “Desire: The Turning Point of All Achievement.” It seems no coincidence that at a missionary conference Romney gave a talk with a similar theme, about “desire” and “how we can obtain anything we want in life—if we want it badly enough,” as summarized in a missionary’s journal.
One of the more unlikely lessons in the book was called “The Mystery of Sex: Transmutation.” In this chapter, Hill advises that a successful person converts some of his sexual energy, “the most powerful of human desires,” into other kinds of action. “Love, Romance, and Sex are all emotions capable of driving men to heights of super achievement,” Hill wrote. “Love is the emotion which serves as a safety valve, and insures balance, poise, and constructive effort. When combined, these three emotions may lift one to an altitude of a genius.” The message was welcomed by the missionaries, struggling as many were with their faith’s prohibition of premarital sex. “We were red-blooded American boys. We were not eunuchs,” said Dane McBride, one of Romney’s fellow missionaries. “We joked about the fact that we didn’t have much choice but to put sex drive into succeeding at something else. It fit our situation very well.”
No one doubted Romney’s determination. His fellow missionaries remember him as charming, charismatic, and passionate. In the “Conversion Diary,” then a newsletter of the French mission, he is mentioned repeatedly for his standout numbers of hours spent knocking on doors, numbers of copies of the Book of Mormon distributed, and numbers of invitations for return visits. On the occasions when he was allowed to deliver his full pitch, it went something like this, according to McBride. Romney and his partner would explain that they were students from the United States who interrupted their studies to tell the French that they had a “great message” about Jesus Christ’s ministry. They said that Christ’s ministry “extended far beyond the small area in which he walked. . . . After his resurrection he visited a civilization living in the Americas at that time.” As a result, the missionaries continued, “what we have in our Book of Mormon is another witness for Jesus Christ.” The missionaries said that at a time when people questioned whether Jesus was the son of God, “we have very strong evidence he was who he said he was.”
A number of those who heard them out, particularly those committed to their own faith, were offended. Some of those who had lost their faith were intrigued. The missionaries urged those people to return to a faith and to consider Mormonism and asked the others to think about converting. Relatively few accepted the message, however, and Romney grew frustrated. Convinced that door-to-door work was mostly unproductive, Romney came up with innovative ways to engage the French. In a letter to his parents, he talked about reaching out to people through “singing, basketball exhibitions, archelogy [sic] lectures, street meetings. . . . Why even last Sat. night my comp [companion] and I went into bars, explaining that we had a message of great happiness and joy, and that we would like to talk to anyone who had a few minutes! Amazing how that builds one’s courage!” Noticing some French people’s interest in America, he staged “USA nights,” complete with a slideshow. But the work took a toll on him. “I must admit that one gets really tired—I had never imagined that it’s so hard to drive and drive.”
Romney later said he converted ten to twenty people during his time as a missionary, but even that small-sounding number stood out among missionaries. Years later, Romney bluntly assessed the experience. “As you can imagine, it’s quite an experience to go to Bordeaux and say, ‘Give up your wine! I’ve got a great religion for you!’ ” he said. “It was good training for how life works. I mean, rejection of one kind or another is going to be an important part of everyone’s life. Here I’d grown up as the son of a governor, from a wealthy home. No one had asked me about my religion, or cared, and now I was on the street, lower than a Fuller Brush salesman, in a place where Americans were not particularly liked, where I couldn’t speak the language very well, and where selling religion, particularly Mormonism, was going to be very painful.” The most successful conversion may have been of Romney himself. Having begun his mission with what he called thin ties to the faith, he became a stalwart believer. “On a mission your faith in Jesus Christ either evaporates or it becomes much deeper,” Romney noted. “And for me it became much deeper.” It sometimes seemed like “more of a teaching experience for me than it is for the people whose doors I knocked on.”
While Mitt was changing and growing in France, many of his Stanford classmates were being transformed by the tumult of the late 1960s. His friend Mike Roake, a good Irish Catholic boy and navy ROTC student, would go on to question organized religion and seriously consider registering as a conscientious objector. Roake wondered what would have happened to Mitt had he never left. “Almost everybody I knew there changed,” he said. “I know that as a thoughtful person Mitt would have been altered in some way.” Paul Richardson, who lived across the dormitory hallway from Romney at Stanford, said that Mitt left for his mission just as the tumult of the mid-1960s was hitting campus. “History was changing,” Richardson said. “It hadn’t come full flood, and Mitt was taken on a different journey and different opportunity. . . . He didn’t see the full unleashing of it because he was on assignment.”
David Harris, the antiwar leader who had become president of the student body, went even further in the opposite direction from Mitt. He married his girlfriend, the singer Joan Baez, and continued to protest. Instead of seeking more deferments or fleeing to Canada, he resisted the draft. Given his prominence, he became a symbolic target and was arrested, convicted, and eventually jailed for twenty months, becoming one of the best-known symbols of resistance. Baez would later rally the rain-soaked masses at Woodstock with an account of her husband’s imprisonment.
Years later, Harris wondered whether being so distant from the United States and the Stanford campus during those crucial years had affected Romney’s political leanings in some way. Back on campus, Harris said, “There were plenty of people who started to the right of Mitt Romney who ended up as full-scale hippies.” Instead, Romney—looking on from a safe remove—grew increasingly appalled at the growth of radicalism in the United States.
While Mitt struggled to win converts in France, his father was having better luck at home. In between his jaunts acro
ss the country to test the waters for a presidential bid, George was guiding Ann Davies through her conversion into the Mormon faith. Ann was seventeen years old when Mitt left for France. She had matured into a beautiful young woman, athletic and confident, with shoulder-length hair. As she prepared to go to college the following year, she focused anew on what her relationship with Mitt meant for her religion. She told George she was interested in attending Mormon services. The governor headed straight for the Davies home. He asked Ann’s parents for permission to send some U.S.-based missionaries to meet with her. Her mother was an easy sell. But getting clearance from Ann’s father, whose rejection of organized religion ran deep, would be a much tougher challenge. Ultimately, Edward Davies and George Romney shook hands on an agreement: George could send the missionaries, provided Ann’s mother sat in on the discussions. Ann’s younger brother, Jim Davies, said their father had relented based on the trust he had in his daughter and the admiration he had for George Romney. Besides, the governor outranked him. In addition to being president of Jered Industries, which made maritime machinery, Edward Davies was the part-time mayor of Bloomfield Hills.
The missionaries came for six sessions, sitting with Ann in the family room on the lower level of the Davieses’ split-level home, taking her through the Mormon conversion process. After learning the faith’s story and embracing it, a convert is baptized and is said to be reborn and eligible to “inherit the kingdom of God.” Besides her mother, Ann’s friend Cindy Burton sat in on the lessons. Cindy was also the girlfriend of Ann’s older brother, Rod, who was doing a study-abroad year in England. Little brother Jim wanted to sit in as well, but his parents decided he was too young. So Jim stood outside the family room window, listening in.
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