The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  BCG consultants marketed themselves as objective outsiders, an excellent fit for Romney’s rational turn of mind. “At BCG, analysis was king, clients were paying a lot of money, and you were expected to come in with really significant insights,” said Lonnie M. Smith, who attended Harvard Business School with Romney and later worked with him at the firm. For Romney, whose young family was expanding quickly, that meant often working nights and weekends and traveling frequently. Faris, who became Romney’s mentor at the firm, spent two summers flying regularly with him to Europe, where they worked for a U.S. client with operations overseas. “He worked his butt off,” Faris said.

  Romney was part of what several of his colleagues affectionately called the “Mormon mafia,” a coterie of smart, talented, hardworking Mormon men at the firm who eventually rose to leadership positions. “For me and everybody there, including Mitt, it was a very formative time and probably more powerful than business school or law school,” Smith said. But as the 1970s wore on, one rival firm began to eclipse BCG. It was called Bain & Company, the namesake of a former BCG executive, Bill Bain. Four years after starting his own firm, Bain had positioned Bain & Company as one of the nation’s premier consulting outfits. And Mitt Romney wanted in.

  [ Five ]

  Family Man, Church Man

  We’ve tried to civilize the boys. Unfortunately, it’s been very difficult with Mitt.

  —ANN ROMNEY, JOKING ABOUT HER HUSBAND’S RAMBUNCTIOUS SIDE

  It was shaping up to be a hard Christmas for Mark and Sheryl Nixon. They had recently moved their family to the Boston area for his job and didn’t know many people. And then, on the night of April 4, 1995, they got the kind of phone call every parent dreads. Four of their six children, including two sons in high school, Rob and Reed, had been driving back from a youth gathering at the Mormon meetinghouse in Marlborough, a city about forty-five minutes west of Boston. Shortly after leaving the parking lot, Reed lost control of the red Oldsmobile minivan. The car sideswiped a utility pole, struck two trees and a sign for a condominium complex, and flipped over. Six others in the minivan escaped with bumps and bruises, but Rob and Reed, both in the front seat, were pinned upside down, their necks shattered. In a flash, the two Nixon boys, standouts on the high school cross-country team, became quadriplegics. “I could see my legs, and they were kind of crooked, off to the side,” Reed would say later. “And I couldn’t feel them.”

  After a number of major surgeries, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of treatment, and six months in rehab, Rob and Reed returned home in October 1995. Rob’s injuries had been less severe, allowing him eventually to move his arms and breathe on his own. Reed, though, was completely paralyzed and put on a ventilator. The family suddenly needed a major addition on their house. They needed a special van to transport their sons. Their financial and emotional burdens were vast. Shortly before the holidays that year, Mark Nixon, a professor of accounting at Bentley University outside Boston, got a call at his office. It was Mitt Romney. He said he wanted to help. Would they be home on Christmas Eve?

  That morning, a Sunday, the Nixons opened their door to find not just Mitt but Ann Romney and their sons. They held large boxes. Inside were a massive stereo system for Rob—“beyond anything he would ever hope to have,” Mark said—and a VCR for Reed. They’d also brought Reed a check, not knowing what else to get him. The Romneys stayed a while. Their sons helped set up Rob’s new stereo. “What a Christmas surprise for the boys,” Sheryl wrote in her journal at the time.

  The Nixons were floored. They shared a faith with Romney but didn’t really know him—they weren’t strangers, but neither were they friends. At that point, Romney held no formal leadership position in the Mormon church. He bore no direct ecclesiastical obligation to help. Many people within and outside the church assisted the Nixons during this difficult chapter in their lives, but the Romneys’ generosity still stands out. What impressed the Nixons more than anything was that Mitt and Ann, despite their own packed holiday calendars, made a point of delivering the gifts themselves, spending time with the family, and, by bringing their children with them, leading by example. “I knew his schedule. I knew how busy he was. And their whole family came,” Mark said. “He was actually teaching his boys, saying, ‘This is what we do. We do this as a family.’ ” Sheryl added, “We’ve never forgotten it. It stood out so much in our minds and helped us to want to be better parents, too.”

  That wasn’t all. Romney had also told Mark not to worry about Rob’s or Reed’s college education; he would pay for it. The Nixons, in the end, didn’t need the help. But Romney continued to quietly lend his hand. He participated in a 5K road race and fund-raiser for Rob and Reed at Bentley the next spring. He contributed substantial financial gifts toward golf tournament fund-raisers in subsequent years. Then, in 2007, when Reed graduated from Bentley with a degree in finance after ten years in school, the Romneys sent him a Bentley desk clock engraved with a special message of congratulations. “It wasn’t,” Mark said, “a onetime thing.”

  The Romneys’ Mormon faith, as they began building a life together, formed a deep foundation. It lay under nearly everything—not just their acts of charity but their marriage, their parenting, their social lives, even their weekly schedules. The Romneys’ family-centric lifestyle was a choice; Mitt and Ann plainly cherished time at home with the boys more than anything. But it was also a duty. Belonging to the Mormon church meant accepting a code of conduct that placed supreme value on strong families—strong heterosexual families, in which men and women often filled defined and traditional roles. The Romneys have long cited a well-known Mormon credo popularized by the late church leader David O. McKay: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” That was how Mitt had grown up in Michigan. But for Ann, who had been reared in a family in which organized religion was viewed with skepticism, raising a devout Mormon brood would be a new experience, one she would learn and master along the way.

  When the Romneys arrived in the Boston area in 1971, they established a home in Belmont, a well-to-do suburb that was fast becoming a magnet for Mormon families. Over the next decade, they would have three more boys in addition to Tagg and Matt. Joshua was born in 1975, Benjamin in 1978, and then Craig in 1981, when Mitt was thirty-four years old and had begun making his mark at Bain & Company.

  Like many Mormons, the Romneys established a routine for their new family. Sundays were for church, reflection, volunteer work, family dinners, and, in the fall, watching the New England Patriots on TV. Monday nights were for the Mormon ritual of family home evening, in which the Romneys would gather for Gospel lessons, stories, and activities. Ann once said that Mitt would sometimes tell stories about animals, and the children would act them out. “For us, family night was less about lessons and more about having fun together,” Mitt Romney said. Tuesday evenings brought church families together for basketball games and cookouts. Friday nights were reserved for date nights for Mitt and Ann, often consisting of dinner and a movie, and Saturdays the family performed chores at home. Before high school every day, the boys joined other children at a neighbor’s house for “seminary,” where they discussed scripture for forty-five minutes.

  The parental roles were clear: Mitt would have the career, and Ann would run the house. In an era when many women had professional aspirations, homemaking became Ann’s calling. She had left Brigham Young University before graduating to go east with Mitt, later finishing her bachelor’s degree with a concentration in French. She would become active in charities such as the United Way, work with inner-city youth, compete in equestrian events, and take on various responsibilities at church. But the home was her workplace, and she was the chief executive. (Her husband’s preferred term for her was CFO, or Chief Family Officer.) “So far as the family, she has a leadership point of view, and she’s not afraid to express it,” said Douglas Anderson, a longtime friend of the Romneys.

  With five boys, the domestic tasks piled up like laundry—t
he meals, the cleaning, the heaps of whites and colors. There were countless school, sports, and church activities, including the Eagle Scout badges that she helped their three youngest sons achieve. And with epic battles raging in kickball, basketball, and football, there were numerous cuts, breaks, and bruises to mend. Mitt once said that motherhood was its own profession. “It’s one which is challenging, it’s demanding,” he said. “It requires being a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, an engineer, a teacher.” Once Ann forgot to close the sunroof on a BMW coupe that was one of Mitt’s favorite cars. It poured, and the inside was soaked. But Mitt didn’t blow up. “I know who does the cooking here,” John Wright, a close friend, neighbor, and fellow church member, recalled him saying. “I know who prepares my meals.” Wright said the response captured Mitt’s genuine appreciation of Ann’s importance in the life of their family. In other words, it wasn’t a patronizing line; to the Romneys, as to many Mormon families, maintaining a strong, functional home was always the first priority.

  Besides, Ann’s cooking, a skill she had absorbed from her mother and grandmother, was legendary. She loved to provide cooking demonstrations and once even ran a small cooking school. Within the family, everyone had favorite dishes. One of the most popular was Ann’s “monkey bread,” a treat during the Thanksgiving holiday. Mitt, meanwhile, had his own ideas about what he would—and wouldn’t—do as a father, evidently counting on Ann’s maternal generosity. “I was willing to change the urine-soaked diapers, but the messier types gave me dry heaves,” he told GQ magazine in 2007. “So my wife allowed me to escape that.”

  If Ann Romney had to learn how to run a Mormon household, one thing she already knew was how to contend with boys. She had grown up with only brothers. Still, presiding over five sons as they got older and more physical was a challenge. Tagg once told an interviewer that his mother, on account of his many childhood scrapes, joked that the hospital was going to name a wing after him. “I’ve broken almost every bone in my body,” he said. “I’ve had my head stitched up five or six times. I’ve broken my shoulder, my elbow, my ankle, my femur, most of my toes, most of my fingers.”

  One winter day, Wright’s son David was helping clear snow at the Romneys’ home. Tagg accidentally gashed David with a shovel above his right eye, which required four stitches. Wright’s wife, Laraine, was a nurse, and predisposed to concern. But Ann, having witnessed mishaps like that many times before, was sanguine, just as she had been a few months earlier when Tagg had broken David’s nose on the basketball court with an errant elbow. “Ann just laughed,” Wright said of the shoveling accident, “because this was something that happened all the time to her boys.” Indeed, Ann was not an overprotective mother who worried over every little thing, friends said. That would have been impossible anyway, with her sons, like their father, always out experimenting, building things, boating, and skiing. “They were not kids she could hold back if she wanted to,” Wright said.

  In time, each of the boys would develop his own niche within the family. As Tagg would later describe his brothers, Matt, the second oldest, was “the jokester, always pushing people’s buttons.” Josh was “the typical middle child, wanting lots of attention and getting a lot of it.” Ben, the fourth child, remained “very reserved and quiet, a little aloof from the situation,” while Craig relished his role as “the ultimate baby, everyone’s favorite brother.” Tagg said he fit the mold as the oldest: “Type A and too tightly wound.”

  Though distinct personalities, the five Romney boys, by many accounts, came to represent the wholesome Mormon ideal: they were disciplined, well mannered, clean cut, giving, and the embodiment of G-rated fun. “They were very impressive young men,” said Philip Barlow, who worked closely with Romney in Romney’s early years as a local church leader. Wright said the Romneys, unlike some other church families he knew, were not overly strict or prone to threatening grave consequences for disobedience. They set high standards and sought to demonstrate the long-term payoffs of adhering to Mormonism’s moral compact. “Mitt tried to teach his boys to be leaders and develop a sense of self-confidence,” he noted. “They’ve grown in their faith by their father’s example.” Indeed, all five sons would, in time, follow their father’s path and serve on missions, leaving as boys and returning as caring, compassionate men, their mother would later say.

  Mitt Romney said he came into his own as a parent as the boys got old enough to tease, roughhouse with, and play pranks on one another. Unlike diaper duty, all that was very much in his wheelhouse. “Growing up in that household was so much fun, because of the jokes, the laughter, bathroom humor, the physical, you know, fisticuffs, wrestling, games,” Romney recalled. “It was just an enormously great experience.” Tagg said his father, when he was home, was always on the floor with everyone else. “He was right there in the mix with us,” he recalled. In a campaign ad Romney would air years later, Ann would describe her husband as just another teenager: “We’ve tried to civilize the boys. Unfortunately, it’s been very difficult with Mitt.”

  His antics were not confined to their Belmont home or even to their family. For fifteen years, the Romneys owned a modest weekend house on the waterfront on Cape Cod, where Mitt would cook his kids pancakes and they would sometimes entertain friends. Grant Bennett, a friend from church, remembered being invited down with his family one weekend to go waterskiing. Bennett was up on the skis and Mitt was behind the wheel of the boat, swinging him around in a series of figure eights. The pattern intensified until Bennett grew tired of getting whipped around the water. He flashed a thumbs-down, the sign for “slow down.” “He turns around and smiles at me and speeds up and starts to make the figure eights tighter and tighter,” Bennett recalled. Eventually, Bennett dropped the rope out of sheer exhaustion. “I went up and said, ‘Mitt, you only have one speed. It’s full speed or nothing.’ ”

  Mitt had learned to water-ski on the Great Lakes and had loved the water and loved his boat ever since. The family took frequent day or weekend trips to lakes, to the sea, and up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, sometimes with other families. Romney helped teach Wright’s children to water-ski on those trips. Even in the mountains, the water was a draw. On one excursion with their families up to New Hampshire’s Loon Mountain, Wright said, they became obsessed with trying to dam up a stream to create their own waterfall. That, Wright said, was the kind of hands-on project Romney loved.

  On one trip to waters closer to home, Romney got himself into trouble. In June 1981, Romney and Wright went to Lake Cochituate, about a half hour west of Boston, intending to do some boating with their families. A park ranger told him he couldn’t put his boat into the lake because the license number was too difficult to read, Romney would later say. Romney then asked what the fine was, and the ranger told him: fifty bucks. To Romney, it was a no-brainer—he’d easily pay that in exchange for a day of fun. But when he began to lower his boat into the water, the ranger became incensed. “The ranger took it as a personal attack,” Wright said. The ranger pulled out a pair of handcuffs and took Romney, dripping wet in his bathing suit, into custody for disorderly conduct. The case was soon dismissed after Romney and his lawyer pushed back hard. But that day, the lake outing was over before it had begun.

  For all the hijinks in the Romney household, there were serious moments, too, and at times moments of friction. Mormonism may have muted the boys’ teenage rebellion, but it wasn’t an antidote entirely. Still, friends and family describe their home life as remarkably harmonious.

  Tagg said some of his best childhood memories are of the nights the boys would gather with their parents in the dark and just talk, often on a couch at the foot of Mitt and Ann’s bed. The tradition grew out of the boys’ habit of wandering into their parents’ room in the middle of the night. Over time, the discussion drifted to the evening hours before bedtime, with the darkened room giving everyone license to talk freely. “It was just a time to totally be yourself and completely open up,” Tagg said. Ann and Mitt would
offer their advice on whatever someone brought up, and so would the brothers. The tradition would continue as the boys aged, with the points of debate shifting from school to where they would go to college and then, later, to raising children of their own and their careers. Matt, Josh, and Craig would later go into real estate development or management, Tagg would work in private equity, and Ben would become a radiologist.

  As Mitt had, Tagg spent his early years idolizing his father. But then he spent part of his adolescence wanting nothing to do with him. His rebellion began when he was young, around age eleven, Tagg said, as his father, in his eyes, went from being “superman” to “supernerd.” “Overnight,” Tagg said, “everything about him bugged me.” The way he wore his jeans so short. The way his hair was never mussed. The way he insisted the boys wake up early on Saturdays for chores. Even the way he said good morning. “It bothered me that he would be so nice about it,” Tagg said.

  Family members say Mitt had a tough time dealing with rejection by his oldest son, the only Romney boy to experience this degree of teenage angst. After all, Mitt’s relationship with his own father had not suffered such strain. The tensions lifted after a few years, as Mitt learned to give Tagg more space and Tagg began to regret how he’d been behaving. By the time he was fifteen, the arguments subsided, and Tagg came around to a new appreciation of his father. One night not long after, Tagg was struggling with tremendous peer pressure from friends at school, who were starting to do things he didn’t want to do. Mitt came to his room to ask what was wrong, but Tagg didn’t feel like talking. So Mitt sat there for about two hours, chatting about the Boston Red Sox and waiting for his son to open up. “Finally,” Tagg said, “he asked enough questions and stayed long enough that I felt comfortable in saying what I was feeling.” As for his rebellion, Tagg said, “I matured and understood that he had faults, like anybody. But I did recognize that he was special.”