To Mitt, the special one in the house was Ann, with her wide smile, piercing eyes, and steadying domestic presence. And woe to the boy who forgot it. Tagg said there was one rule that was simply not breakable: “We were not allowed to say anything negative about my mother, talk back to her, do anything that would not be respectful of her.” On Mother’s Day, their home would be fragrant with lilacs, Ann’s favorite flowers. Tagg didn’t get it back then, but he came to understand. From the beginning, Mitt had put Ann on a pedestal and kept her there. “When they were dating,” Tagg said, “he felt like she was way better than him and he was really lucky to have this catch. He really genuinely still feels that way.” What makes his parents’ relationship work, he said, is their distinct characters: Mitt is driven first by reason, while Ann operates more on emotion. “She helps him see there’s stuff beyond the logic, he helps her see that there’s more than just instinct and feeling,” Tagg said. “We’re all a little bit in between the two.”
Mitt and Ann’s relationship would grow and change as their family entered the public eye. But she has remained his chief counselor and confidante, the one person who can lead Mitt to a final decision. Though she did not necessarily offer input on every business deal, friends said, she weighed in on just about everything else. “Mitt’s not going to do something that they don’t feel good about together,” said Mitt’s sister Jane. Tagg said they called their mom “the great Mitt stabilizer.” Ann would later be mocked for her claim that she and Mitt had never had an argument during their marriage, which sounded preposterous to the ears of many married mortals. Tagg said it’s not that his parents never disagree. “I know there are things that she says that he doesn’t agree with sometimes, and I see him kind of bite his tongue. But I know that they go and discuss it in private. He doesn’t ever contradict my mother in public.” Friends of the Romneys back up that account, saying they cannot recall Mitt ever raising his voice toward Ann. In that way, the relationship between Mitt and Ann differed from that of Mitt’s parents. Despite their lifetime of devotion, George and Lenore had no problem airing their disagreements, especially in later years, according to Tagg. “Listen, they fought like cats and dogs,” he said.
Nowhere was Ann’s special status more evident than on long family car trips. Mitt imposed strict rules: they would stop only for gas, and that was the only chance to get food or use the restroom. With one exception, Tagg explained. “As soon as my mom says, ‘I think I need to go to the bathroom,’ he pulls over instantly, and doesn’t complain. ‘Anything for you, Ann.’ ” On one infamous road trip, though, it wasn’t Ann who forced Mitt off the highway.
The destination of this journey, in the summer of 1983, was his parents’ cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Mitt would be returning to the place of his most cherished childhood memories. The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt climbed behind the wheel to begin the twelve-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario. As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. Before beginning the drive, Mitt put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He had improvised a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.
Then Romney put his sons on notice: there would be predetermined stops for gas, and that was it. The ride was largely what one would expect with five brothers, ages thirteen and under, packed into a wagon they called the “white whale.” Tagg was commandeering the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, when he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. “Dad!” he yelled. “Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours. As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Mitt coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway with the dog still on the roof. It was a preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management. But the story would trail him years later on the national political stage, where the name Seamus would become shorthand for Romney’s coldly clinical approach to problem solving.
If Romney is exceedingly comfortable around family and close friends, he’s much less so around those he doesn’t know well, drawing a boundary that’s difficult to traverse. It’s a strict social order—us and them—that has put coworkers, political aides, casual acquaintances, and others in his professional circles, even people who have worked with or known him for years, outside the bubble. As a result, he has numerous admirers but, by several accounts, not a long list of close pals. “He’s very engaging and charming in a small group of friends he’s comfortable with,” said one former aide. “When he’s with people he doesn’t know, he gets more formal. And if it’s a political thing where he doesn’t know anybody, he has a mask.” For those outside the inner circle, Romney comes across as all business. Colleagues at work or political staffers are there to do a job, not to bond. He has little patience for idle chatter or small talk, little interest in mingling at cocktail parties, at social functions, or even in a crowded hallway. He is not fed by, and does not crave, casual social interaction, often displaying little desire to know who people are and what makes them tick. “He wasn’t overly interested in people’s personal details or their kids or spouses or team building or their career path,” said another former aide. “It was all very friendly but not very deep.” Or, as one fellow Republican put it, “He has that invisible wall between ‘me’ and ‘you.’ ”
This sense of detachment is a function partly of his faith, which has its own tight social community that most outsiders don’t see. Indeed, the stories of Romney’s humanity and warmth come mostly from people who know him as a fellow Mormon. His abstention from drinking also makes parties and other alcohol-fueled functions distinctly less appealing. He is the antithesis of the gregarious pol with a highball in one hand and cigar in his mouth, offering a colorful dose of political lore under a dim bar light. When he does have to show his face after dark at nonchurch social events, his visits can last a half hour or less. For the Romneys, who became known as generous dinner hosts, especially for newcomers to the area, their home has long been a preferred social setting.
Romney’s discomfort around strangers would later become more than just a curiosity; it would be an impediment on the campaign trail. Lacking an easy rapport with voters, he would come across as aloof, even off-putting. “A lot of it is, he is patrician. He just is. He has lived a charmed life,” said one former aide. “It is a big challenge that he has, connecting to folks who haven’t swum in the same rarefied waters that he has.” His growing wealth, the deeper he got into his career, only widened the disconnect. At the time of the now-legendary road trip with Seamus, Romney was already on his way to a new, and spectacularly lucrative, phase in his career. He was about to take over a new enterprise in private equity called Bain Capital. The idea was to buy or take a controlling stake in companies, retool them with Bain’s analytical expertise, and then sell them at a profit. The venture would, in the latter part of the 1980s and into the 1990s, bring in millions of dollars for Romney and his partners. As a result, his family, already financially comfortable, was entering an entirely new social class: they were rich.
After seven years on the East Coast, they had moved from a modest three-bedroom home in Belmont to a handsome natural-shingle house with white trim on a big corner lot near the private Belmont Hill School, which all five boys would attend. Then, in 1989, Mitt and Ann allowed their first bout of conspicuous spending, plunking down $1.25 million for a stately Colonial on nearly two and a half acres up the road, enlarging and renovating it, and installing a pool and tennis court. At the time, Tagg was in France on his Mormon mission. After his parents sent him a photo, he asked his father, “How can you afford that house?” The family’s modest
getaway on Cape Cod gave way, in 1997, to a stunning waterfront retreat on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. They would also purchase a sprawling ski retreat in the mountains of Park City, Utah, and an oceanfront home on the Pacific coast north of downtown San Diego, California. Mitt was wealthy to a degree well beyond what his parents had ever been.
Romney acknowledged in 1994 that his good fortune afforded them a lifestyle few could reach, one that allowed Ann to stay home without a second thought. “I tell my kids, ‘We won the lottery. Don’t think this is normal. Don’t think that your life will have the kind of plenty that ours has had,’ ” he said. Still, the Romney boys had no idea how much their dad was truly worth. Perhaps that’s because Mitt eschewed many of the trappings of wealth. The family had no cook or full-time maid. His sons urged him to buy a luxury car, but he refused, continuing to drive a dented Chevy Caprice Classic nicknamed the Gray Grunt. And he was frugal to the core, wearing winter gloves patched with duct tape and cracking down on anyone in the house who left the water running or the lights on.
They did join the Belmont Hill Club, a small private tennis and swimming club near their home. Ann got to be a good tennis player; Mitt less so. “I sometimes thought God put him on Earth so I could beat him six-love,” said Joseph J. O’Donnell, a longtime friend and neighbor from Belmont. Mitt compensated on the tennis court with skills he did possess: strategic thinking and gamesmanship. “His strategy is simply to hit the ball back one more time than you do,” Wright said. “He would encourage me—‘John, hit it harder, hit it harder’—trying to get me to hit it out.”
Even as he began shouldering more responsibility at Bain, Romney would assume several leadership positions in the Mormon church. But he could handle it. “Mitt,” said Kem Gardner, a fellow church official from this period, “just had the capacity to keep all the balls up in the air.” Or, as Tagg put it, “Compared to my dad, everyone’s lazy.” Helen Claire Sievers, who served in a church leadership position under Romney, got a glimpse of his work habits during weekend bus trips to the Mormon temple near Washington, D.C. Church groups would leave late on a Friday, drive all night, and arrive early on Saturday morning. Then they’d spend all day Saturday in temple sessions before turning around and driving home, to be back by Sunday morning. It was a grueling itinerary, Sievers said, so everyone used the time on the bus to sleep or read quietly. Everyone but Romney. “Mitt was always working. His light was on,” she said. “He was taking advantage of every moment.” Similarly telling was the time the Romneys were renovating their Belmont house before moving in. Romney had asked Grant Bennett to meet him at the new home to review church business. Bennett thought it was strange, knowing the family wasn’t in the house yet. When Bennett showed up, Romney pried open a large storage container on the property. Inside, in front of a heap of their belongings, Romney had created a makeshift office with his desk, a chair, and his papers. “He opened it and sat down and worked,” Bennett recalled. If Romney’s drive was legendary, so was his conspicuous caution. Years before he launched his first political campaign, Romney sensed that he would, like his father, enter public life. John Wright remembered an instance early on in Mitt’s professional career when he and Mitt had been approached by a businessman who wanted them to invest in some real estate deals. There was nothing illegal about them, Wright said, but they seemed unsavory enough that Mitt balked. “He said, ‘If I ever ran for office, that’s not something that I would want people to know about.’ ”
For all he took on, Romney did set some limits. His growing responsibilities at Bain and at church were demanding more and more of him, keeping him away from home. There were stretches where he would miss the Monday-night family sessions for weeks at a time. But one thing Romney would not do was take work home. “Every night when I was home, I put my work at the door,” he recalled. “When I was home, I was home. For me, life is about my wife and my kids, and everything else I was doing was earning enough money to support them and was a necessary part of living.” The boys made as much as possible of the time their father was around. “To us, he was just Dad,” Tagg said. “He wasn’t a business guy. He wasn’t a politician. He was just Dad.”
From the moment they first settled out east, the Romneys wove themselves into the local Mormon tapestry, which had been expanding as church members—doctors, university professors, scientists, and entrepreneurs—came to the Boston area for school and work. Romney’s religious pedigree perhaps made the family’s integration smoother, but other area church members had their own esteemed Mormon lineages. Mormon congregations, typically groups of four hundred to five hundred people, are known as wards, and their boundaries are determined by geography. That is, unlike Protestants or Catholics, Mormons do not choose the congregations to which they belong. It depends entirely on where they live. Wards, along with smaller congregations known as branches, are organized into stakes. Thus a stake, akin to a Catholic diocese, is a collection of wards and branches in a city or region. Because of the Mormon church’s rapid growth, wards and stakes in the Boston area have often changed and split in recent decades to account for all the new members.
In another departure from many other faiths, Mormons do not have paid full-time clergy. Members of stakes and wards in good standing take turns serving in leadership roles. They are expected to perform their ecclesiastical duties on top of career and family responsibilities. But despite the all-volunteer nature of the Mormon priesthood, its lay leaders are very much part of the church’s rigid hierarchy. Those called to serve as stake presidents and bishops or leaders of local wards are fully empowered as agents of the church, and they carry great authority over their domains. Their selection is carefully vetted by church headquarters in Salt Lake City. “It really is quite a tremendous amount of trust that’s placed in the leadership,” said Tony Kimball, who worked closely with Romney as a local church leader.
Mitt Romney first took on a major church role around 1977, when he was called to be a counselor to Gordon Williams, then the president of the Boston stake. Romney was essentially an adviser and deputy to Williams, helping oversee area congregations. His appointment was somewhat unusual in that counselors at that level have typically been bishops of their local wards first. But Romney, who was only about thirty years old and just at the dawn of his Bain career, was deemed to possess leadership qualities beyond his years. “He was obviously younger than most people who had had that calling,” Grant Bennett said. Romney’s responsibilities only grew from there; he would go on to serve as bishop and then as stake president, overseeing about a dozen congregations with close to four thousand members all together. Those positions in the church amounted to his biggest leadership test yet, exposing him to personal and institutional crises, human tragedies, immigrant cultures, social forces, and organizational challenges that he had never before encountered.
His leadership in the church coincided with a period of profound change and growth within Mormonism, which was contending—at times uneasily—with shifting social currents in America. Abortion had been legalized. Feminists were pushing for gender equality. The gay rights movement was gaining steam. And African Americans were still facing barriers to equality, despite the civil rights gains of prior decades. In 1978, after what it called a revelation from God, the church reversed decades of discrimination and allowed black men to hold the priesthood. Up until then, church practice reflected the text and interpretations of Mormon scripture, which deemed dark skin to be a curse upon those descended from sinners. Romney later described the reversal as “one of the most emotional and happy days of my life.” He said he had been driving near his home when he learned the news. “I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept,” Romney once recalled. But though the church had liberalized its views on race, women were another story. In a high-profile crackdown fifteen years later, in 1993, the church disciplined six Mormon activists and scholars for challenging Mormonism’s official teachings and history, including feminists who q
uestioned the church’s treatment of women.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is far more than a form of Sunday worship. It is a code of ethics that frowns on homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births, and abortion and forbids premarital sex. It offers a robust, effective social safety net, capable of incredible feats of charity, support, and service, particularly when its own members are in trouble. And it works hard to create community, a built-in network of friends who often share values and a worldview. For many Mormons, the all-encompassing nature of their faith, as an extension of their spiritual lives, is what makes belonging to the church so wonderful, so warm, even as its insularity can set members apart from society.
But a dichotomy exists within the Mormon church, which holds that one is either in or out; there is little or no tolerance for those who, like so-called cafeteria Catholics, pick and choose what doctrines to follow. And in Mormonism, if one is in, a lot is expected, including tithing 10 percent of one’s income, participating regularly in church activities, meeting high moral expectations, and accepting Mormon doctrine—including many concepts, such as the belief that Jesus will rule from Missouri in his second coming, that run counter to those of other Christian faiths. That rigidity can be difficult to abide for those who love the faith but chafe at its strictures or question its teachings and cultural habits. For one, Mormonism is male-dominated—women can serve only in certain leadership roles and never as bishops or stake presidents. The church also makes a number of firm value judgments, typically prohibiting single or divorced men from leading wards and stakes, for example, and not looking kindly upon single parenthood.
The portrait of Romney that emerges from those he led and served with in the church is of a leader who was pulled between Mormonism’s conservative core views and practices and the demands from some quarters within the Boston stake for a more elastic, more open-minded application of church doctrine. The Boston area had been known as a comparatively liberal redoubt of Mormon thought, where church members would sometimes openly question church tenets. Romney was forced to strike a balance between those local expectations and the dictates out of Salt Lake City. Some believe that Romney artfully reconciled the two, praising him as an innovative and generous leader who was willing to make accommodations, such as giving women expanded responsibility, and who was always there for church members in times of need. To others, he was the product of a hidebound, patriarchal Mormon culture, inflexible and insensitive in delicate situations and dismissive of those who didn’t share his perspective. One thing is clear: Romney was heavily involved in all aspects of local church life.
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