by Ann Romney
When Mitt and I were campaigning, we called Natalie regularly. Mitt made sure she stayed on the campaign payroll, as much to remind her how valuable she was to all of us as to help with managing her expenses. There was no pretense. This was just a temporary setback, and eventually she would be able to rejoin the campaign. We all acknowledged exactly what this was: a fight for life.
Three months after Natalie was diagnosed—while we were still absorbing the news—Senator Ted Kennedy was also diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Then, incredibly, within a brief period of time, another wonderful young woman, Renee Fry, who had worked in Mitt’s administration as director of business and technology and later as deputy chief of staff, had a seizure. Doctors found a brain tumor, as Renee described it, “the size of a racquetball.” It just seemed like too much to absorb. At times it made me want to climb back up onto that roof and lie there with my dad looking up at all the stars in the universe and ask him what was going on. Renee’s tumor was pushing on her brain, and doctors didn’t know if it would affect her sight, her hearing, or her ability to speak. Fortunately, in her case, they were able to operate and remove it—although, eventually, the tumor returned and she had to have a second operation. Her life was saved. What made that situation even more gratifying is that when she received her initial diagnosis, Mitt’s term had ended and because she hadn’t yet taken another job, she had no health insurance. But under Massachusetts’s new state health care plan, she was completely covered. As she happily told Mitt, “Romneycare saved my life.” To see what Mitt had worked so hard for make such a difference to someone so close to us was incredibly satisfying.
Natalie … Natalie wasn’t so fortunate. She fought ferociously, and after a while we fooled ourselves into believing that she had beaten the monster. As she wrote:
As the months passed, my hair grew back, my strength returned even more slowly, and my gratitude ebbed and flowed … I had been given more days to hug my baby and kiss my husband, to wake up and look at the towering pines in our backyard while listening to the thunderous roar of the ocean in the distance. I had been granted more summer evenings with my dear family (and beloved dogs) listening to a steamship go by or playing board games, swims in the lake and barbeques with old girlfriends. So how could I possibly forget that I have been granted precious time to live and do what I love? To put it all too simply, life got in the way, cluttering the path with nonsense and clouding my vision with busyness …
Starting today, January 2nd [2011] I will be grateful for every day that I open my eyes and breathe deeply. That does not necessarily mean that every single moment will be blissful, exciting or pain-free (as my daughter reminded me frequently over this past weekend). But I will be grateful for the fullness of experience. After all, I’m alive and healthy and once upon a time that was all I ever wanted.
I had learned years earlier from my mother about the will to live. Five days after my mother, Lois, was baptized, her condition deteriorated quickly. I rushed back from Boston to say good-bye. I sat by her bed and cried, but as was typical of her, she tried to make me feel better. “Ann, don’t waste another tear,” she said. “Everything’s wonderful.”
She was in terrible pain, but she refused to let go. My brother Rod asked gently, “Mom, what’s holding you back?”
“I need to talk to Dave,” she whispered. Dave was Mom’s younger brother, thirteen years her junior, and she hadn’t spoken with him for years, after he’d had a particularly bitter argument with my father. The two men were very different: my father was the regimented engineer; Dave was laid-back and creative. They had tried to work together and clashed, and Dave had been estranged from the family ever since. We didn’t know what to expect when Rod got Dave on the phone.
“Dave?” Mom asked.
“Oh, Lois.”
“I just wanted to visit with you,” she said.
“I know. I’ve been so bad. Forgive me, forgive me, please.”
Mom’s eyes were closed. She said, “I had to hear that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Will you let me go? I can’t go until we resolve this.”
There was softness in Dave’s voice as he realized how connected he was to his sister, even after years of their being separated. “Oh, my gosh, my resentment and our separation is what’s holding you back? Oh, Lois, I think you are the best sister in the world.”
Those words seemed to liberate her. She winced, she sighed, and finally at peace, she closed her eyes forever.
So, believe me, I knew the importance of the will to live. Natalie had fought to live long enough to watch her daughter become a beautiful young girl. And she did. In early 2014, Natalie’s tumor came back, and it was more ferocious than ever. This time there was no medicine, no treatment, that could knock it down. We got a call from her husband, Brad, in June 2014 telling us that she didn’t have too much longer to live and we needed to come as soon as possible.
It was one of the saddest visits of my life. Brad was protecting her; he hadn’t told her that this was the last stage, but obviously she knew. She was forty-one years old, much too young to suffer like that. Her fight had taken every last bit of her energy. Two years, they’d told her, and she’d lived for seven. She lay in a chair, tired and weak, and barely able to speak. We told stories about the governor’s office, and she giggled and laughed and added just a few words. Natalie lived long enough to see her daughter become a young lady. She played tennis with her daughter and traveled with her, went to ballet recitals and loved listening to her daughter singing as she practiced the piano. Most important, she lived long enough for her daughter to have memories of her.
Seven
ANY NOTION WE’D had that a presidential campaign was simply a magnified version of what we’d experienced during the gubernatorial campaign was quickly corrected. The media and the cameras were everywhere, and they were focused on trying to get the million-dollar quote or photo. Every word, every expression, was put under a microscope.
After years of dealing with my condition, I had learned a few guiding principles for keeping myself healthy. Get lots of rest, avoid stress, eat well, and get exercise. A campaign is not restful; it is stressful. Sometimes dinner is from a vending machine, and there is very little time or place to exercise. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, when I felt the first warning signs of fatigue, I had to slow down and recharge. As much as I wanted to contribute, I wouldn’t have done myself, or the campaign, any good by relapsing. Other than that, I was good to go—so I went to New Hampshire.
Iowa and New Hampshire hold the first contests, so their importance in establishing one’s position can’t be overstated. And those are the two states in which I really had an opportunity to meet people one on one. For me, that’s the best part of a campaign, and it is what I do best. In the other states, you’re campaigning on a much larger scale; while you’re still meeting people, the races there are much more media driven, and it’s harder to get to know folks on a personal level. But Iowa and New Hampshire represent politics in person. The first time you meet someone, it’s often in their living room. There may be as many as fifty people in that living room, so there isn’t much time to chat, but then you’ll meet the same people at another small event and say hello, and the next time you see them, they’ve got a campaign T-shirt on and some items to be signed for their kids. At the next event, they’re helping hand out literature, and over time you chat with them and get to know them on a little more than a handshake basis. Throughout a campaign, this gets multiplied by hundreds of people, who become friends.
Often, I’ve found, people related to me because of my experience with MS. It simply made them feel more comfortable discussing the real problems their families had to deal with. Their stories unfolded as I got to know them.
We Americans are a strong people, and generally we care about a community that’s bigger than just ourselves and our families. But it’s impossible to campaign without being reminded that many people struggle an
d work hard to overcome very essential challenges. Every day, we would meet people who themselves or whose family member had encountered a challenge that seemed overwhelming. Often it was a health issue, but particularly during that campaign, when the economy was so down, people wanted to talk about job issues and financial difficulties. Generally people don’t show up for campaign events because everything is going well for them. These were people who had worked hard their whole lives. They’d played by the rules, and still they were facing huge obstacles. And they wanted to know which candidate was going to make their lives better.
These people weren’t especially interested in abstract numbers. They didn’t care about the unemployment rate. They cared about the fact that they or their friends were unemployed. On this level, people tend not to ask questions about policy. Instead, they explain that their unemployment payments were about to run out and they didn’t know how they were going to be able to make their next mortgage payment. I was reminded every day that we all are carrying that big heavy bag of rocks on our backs.
This is really the grassroots part of a national campaign. Long before you get to large rallies and begin travelling from place to place by airplane, it’s just a few people in a car, often watching the sun rise on the highway to the next town. In 2008, for example, I was in a car with three other women on a freezing cold day in the middle of an Iowa blizzard. We were just about the only car on the road. We were laughing, wondering how we had managed to end up in a snowstorm in Iowa. Suddenly our car skidded on ice and spun several times before sliding into a snowbank.
Thankfully no one was hurt, and we just sat there for a few moments fully appreciating the absurdity of the moment. We dug ourselves out and started up again, and then, to add to it, out of the snowstorm an Amish man driving a horse-drawn buggy trotted by. It was an amazing sight at that time, in that place, in the middle of a snowstorm. That man was completely exposed to the storm, but he didn’t seem to mind. Mind? He didn’t even seem to notice. “Follow that buggy!” I said. The girls looked at me strangely, and I repeated, “I’m serious. Follow that buggy!” We tracked him to a convenience store/gas station. His horse was parked outside, near the pumps. I went into the store and introduced myself, and then said, “We’re in a car and we’re freezing. You’re in a horse and buggy. How cold are you?” He laughed and sort of shrugged it off: “When the wife and kids need milk, you go get milk.”
At the beginning of the 2008 campaign we didn’t know how much I could do or for how long. Mitt and I are both better when we’re together, so we tried to spend as much time with each other as possible. I found out pretty quickly that campaigning with him probably wasn’t the best thing for me. In those early days, Mitt needed to spend a lot of time in small, brightly lit, often noisy rooms meeting and greeting. That was exactly the wrong environment for me, so the campaign eased up a bit on my schedule.
By nature, I’m quite shy. Growing up, I was always the shyest girl in my class. In elementary school, for example, I was the girl they sat between the two noisy boys because the teacher knew there would be no communication through me. I’m most comfortable being in the back of the room talking to one person. But during the campaign, with each day, with each group I met and each hand I shook, my confidence grew. Fortunately, I care about people. Maybe it’s possible to fake that. The great comedian George Burns once said that the most important thing in life is sincerity—and if you can fake that you’ll do fine. But it has been my experience that people know when you mean what you say. I believed with all my heart what I was telling people: that my husband, Mitt Romney, was the best man to become the President of the United States. I found I was able to relate to people both on a one-on-one basis and in front of a group.
My biggest contribution in 2008 was to be the Mitt Stabilizer. A presidential primary campaign is difficult, and it was new terrain for us. In the end, Mitt finished second in both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, which was disappointing. He is very competitive, and a big loss can get him down. Behind closed doors, he shows it. (Me, too, by the way.) But my job, as campaign manager Beth Myers told me, “was to pull him out of a bad place.” So as often as possible, the campaign would get us together for at least a few hours. It always seemed to work.
Although Mitt won a smaller primary in Wyoming, the next big primary was in Michigan. That was a win-or-forget-it primary for us, because in some ways Mitt was perceived to be a Michigan favorite son. But Mike Huckabee and John McCain were contesting the state, knowing that getting Mitt out of the race would make their own prospects that much easier.
We went on to win the Michigan primary, reigniting Mitt’s prospects. But Michigan meant more than just politics to us: It was the place where we had both been born and raised, and it was the state where Mitt’s mom and dad had given so much of themselves. Winning in Michigan felt very, very good.
Every campaign day was a learning experience for the family. Our five boys were touring Michigan in an RV when I responded to a reporter’s question that my son Josh would be visiting all ninety-nine Iowa counties in that RV. I can close my eyes and see the look on Josh’s face when he heard me say that. It was news to him, too. But Josh did it with his family of five. He had a map on the back end of that RV and as he reached a new county, he’d check it off with a huge marker.
I was continually learning about the media. Through the governor’s race, I had sort of figured out how the media worked, and I tried hard not to give them an opportunity to whack me. Overall I think throughout both presidential runs, the media generally was fair to me. I knew they had a job to do and editors to please, and I tried to be friendly and gracious and smiled even when I didn’t quite feel like it. As a result, I escaped almost unscathed—almost. Our family’s wealth was always an issue in the media and, in many cases, for our opponents. The image that often was conveyed was that we were so wealthy we were out of touch with the average American. Mitt’s fifteen years as pastor of church congregations and his service as governor in providing health care for all Bay Staters was simply ignored. I thought it was a terribly unfair portrayal, but once it got ingrained in the narrative, the media ran with it. During a debate in Des Moines, for example, Mitt was asked about his tax policy, and he said, as he believed, “I don’t lose sleep thinking about the upper-class tax burden.”
According to GQ magazine, one of the reporters covering the debate tapped the author of the article on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, he has people on his payroll to do that for him.”
I just had to accept criticism without responding. Politics is tough, and it can get ugly. And at times it can get absurd: Even Mitt’s teeth got criticized. One unnamed former White House staffer told a reporter that our problem was Mitt was too good looking: “Perfect family, perfect teeth and hair,” he said. “The reaction is ‘He doesn’t understand people like me.’”
I certainly learned a lot during that first presidential campaign. In retrospect, I think I took too much of the criticism personally, which is both counterproductive and destructive. I understood that every candidate’s wife was fair game, but admittedly, at times, I did let it get to me. I also allowed myself to get more fatigued than I should have, and by the time the campaign was over, I truly was exhausted, and concerned that I’d left an opening for my MS to sneak back through.
Super Tuesday, the day on which numerous primaries are held and the outcome of the race can pretty much be determined, took place three weeks after our win in Michigan. Twenty-four states and American Samoa held either primary elections or caucuses for Republicans to choose delegates to send to the national conventions. While Mitt won seven states and 201 delegates, John McCain was the big victor, winning nine states and 602 delegates.
Losing that contest was much more difficult than losing to Ted Kennedy more than a decade earlier. That had been an uphill battle, and few people believed that Mitt had a real chance, but we thought we had a very good prospect to win the presidential nomination. After Super Tuesday, Mitt c
ould have stayed in the race, and statistically there was a chance he could have won. Yet, realistically, it was a very long shot, and it would have been destructive to Senator McCain’s general election prospects. In order to give the Republican nominee the best chance to win the national election, Mitt decided to drop out. Josh tried to lighten our mood a little, suggesting that there were downsides to winning. But at that moment, in all honesty, I couldn’t figure out what they might be.
A part of me was happy it was over—not the way it ended, but that it was over. During a press conference, we were asked if we would consider making another attempt in four years. I looked at Mitt, and it was clear we were on the same page: “Never again.” And as I had when I said pretty much the same thing after we lost the election to Ted Kennedy, I meant it. I just couldn’t see going through that effort again. None of us could.
It was hard for us to tell how big an issue our Mormon faith would be in the race. It seemed like the press raised the topic in almost every interview. More than four decades earlier, John Kennedy had confronted head-on the invisible barrier to becoming the first Catholic president, and won the election, shattering that barrier forever. But there remained some question about how Americans would feel about a Mormon president. There were polls that indicated that a number of people would not vote for Mitt because of his religion. As we were well aware, the only thing many Americans knew about Mormonism was that at one time polygamy was permitted, although the Church has long prohibited it. During the campaign I actually made a little joke about it, pointing out the irony that at that point in the campaign, Mitt was the only candidate who’d had only one wife.
While it shouldn’t have a role in any election, in December 2007 Mitt decided to face it just as Kennedy had done. He made his “Faith in America” speech at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, explaining, “I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith … If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A president must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.”