Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of George W. and Lenore Romney, the great-great-grandson of Miles Romney, an English carpenter who’d been converted to Mormonism by a traveling missionary and, in 1841, emigrated to the United States. With his wife and young children, Miles settled in Utah in 1850, but in the 1880s his son, Miles Park Romney, was forced to flee to Mexico: The federal government was aggressively prosecuting polygamy, and Miles Park had three wives. His son Gaskell was not a polygamist, however, and in 1912 Gaskell, a carpenter, returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Salt Lake City to raise his family, including son George W. Romney.

George Romney’s story fascinates both for its own drama and for the effect it had—and continues to have—upon Mitt. Following a two-year mission in England and Scotland, George enrolled at the University of Utah, but dropped out to court Lenore LaFount, his future wife, who was attending college in Washington, D.C. He got the girl but paid a price: George had hoped to attend the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, as the Harvard Business School was then called. Now he was a college dropout, and broke to boot. So after a brief stint on Capitol Hill, Romney took a job as a lobbyist for Alcoa. Energetic and social, he eventually became head of the Automobile Manufacturers Association. In 1954 Romney was named CEO of the fledgling car company American Motors.

In a market dominated by General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, American Motors spent its first years hemorrhaging cash. But Romney saw an opportunity. In January 1955, he delivered a fiery speech, “The Dinosaur in our Driveway,” attacking the behemoths Detroit was churning out. “Cars 19-feet long and weighing two tons are used to run a 118-pound housewife three blocks to the drugstore for a two-ounce package of bobby pins and lipstick,” Romney charged. His Rambler, a zippier, more fuel-efficient car, would save the company.

Parlaying that success into politics, Romney was thrice elected Michigan governor in the 1960s. Positioned between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, he was a moderate Republican with progressive views on civil rights, public education, and urban policy. (His Mormonism was never an issue.) In 1967, Romney made it clear that he was running for president and was considered by many a likely nominee. But in September 1967, his campaign imploded after he tried to explain to a television interviewer why, having once supported the Vietnam War, he now opposed it. “When I came back from Vietnam [in November 1965], I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get…Not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they did a very thorough job.”

Five years after the release of The Manchurian Candidate, that comment—and Romney’s refusal to disavow it—exposed him to vicious political attacks. Democratic National chairman John Bailey noted “that anybody who tries to brainwash the governor has very little to work with.” A Democratic senator joked, “Governor Romney must have an awfully clean brain, because he changes it so often.” Perhaps most damaging, though, were behind-the-scenes assaults from conservative Republicans; some still resented Romney’s civil rights–related criticisms of Barry Goldwater in 1964, while others sought to boost the candidacy of Richard Nixon. If Romney could be so easily “brainwashed,” could he really be trusted?

Romney tried to turn the fiasco to his advantage, saying, “The real question is whether the American people have been told the truth about the war,” but the damage was done. His candidacy was dead, and the right wing ascended. And although the victorious Nixon would appoint Romney secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the governor’s electoral career had been abruptly and permanently terminated. George Romney’s may have been the first presidential campaign ever scuttled by a single gaffe.

Willard Mitt Romney was 20 when his father ran for president. Asked recently by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if what happened to his father was “a tough blow” for his family, Romney replied, “It must have been, but I wasn’t around. I was lucky. I was in France [on a Mormon mission]. I was serving my church at the time.”

“The man was unique,” Romney continued. “My dad…I am a small shadow of the real deal. My dad was extraordinary.”

Filial devotion has permeated Mitt Romney’s life, and the conviction that his father was wronged is a powerful part of that. “What happened to his father made a lasting impression,” says George Christodoulo, a Boston lawyer and a law-school classmate of Romney’s. “Mitt feels his father got a raw deal and he’s out there to do something about it.”

“His father’s a complete lodestar for him,” says former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. In early 1995, Romney brought his father to visit then-Governor Weld; George Romney wanted to talk about volunteerism, a longtime cause. “I was sitting behind the desk that later became Mitt’s desk, and George talked for a solid hour,” Weld says. “Mitt was just sitting there looking at his father, just beaming the whole time. He didn’t say a word, he was so proud.”

Romney always had a close family life. Raised in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy Detroit suburb, he attended the posh Cranbrook School. When he was 18, he began dating 15-year-old Ann Davies, a pretty blonde. Ann was Episcopalian, but she and Mitt fell in love, and when he went off to college at Stanford, she began to attend Mormon services with George Romney. Mitt took a campus job so that he could fly home on weekends to see her.

Romney didn’t really fit in at Stanford. When he and his friends went out at night he’d order a soda, in keeping with the Mormon proscription against alcohol, while they boozed it up. After a year in Palo Alto, he left for his two-year mission, trying to convert Catholics in the suburbs of Paris, earning $100 a week. As he later told Newsweek, “I’d say, ‘Bonjour, Madame, je m’appelle Elder Romney.’ They’d say, ‘Are you American?…Get out of Vietnam.’” (Romney, who has mostly limited his recent interviews to conservative media, declined to speak for this story.)

When he returned after 30 months in France, Romney transferred to Brigham Young University, where Ann had enrolled during his absence. Ann had converted to Mormonism, and the couple was married on March 21, 1969. The happy newlywed excelled at Brigham Young; Romney’s 3.97 GPA was top of his graduating class.

George Romney had wanted to attend Harvard, and now he encouraged Mitt to do what he could not. In 1971 Romney enrolled in a joint program at the law and business schools, a four-year marathon that required three applications just to get in. In the first year, students took courses at one school; in the next, they studied at the other; and in the third and fourth years, they studied at both simultaneously. “It was considered a very ambitious thing to do,” says David Maister, then a doctoral student at the business school and later a professor there. Only about five to seven students were accepted into the joint program each year. “We were smart enough to get into the law school, and regular enough to get into the business school,” says Christodoulo, now a partner at the Boston firm Lawson & Weitzen.

It was a politically charged time in which to enroll at Harvard Business School. “The college disturbances of 1968 to 1972 were just beginning to get to the business school,” says 1976 graduate Charlie Green, now a business consultant. “The percentage of women had roughly doubled, and you began to get people who were cutting-edge, liberal-arts people, whom you would never have seen go into business school two years earlier.” Still, HBS was hardly a bastion of radicalism. “At the law school, they thought you were some kind of fascist for being at the business school, and at the business school, they thought you were in some kind of communist league for being at the law school,” says Charles Szalkowski, a student in Romney’s program and now a partner at the Texas law firm Baker, Botts.

As was the case at Stanford and in Paris, the 24-year-old Romney didn’t quite fit in at Harvard. He was Mormon, married, already a father, and soon to be expecting another son. All these things separated him from most of his peers. And though the students had little time for politics, Christodoulo remembers that Romney wasn’t a fan of certain Massachusetts icons. “Even then, he did not like the Kennedys,” Christodoulo recalls, “and he said so.” After a pause, Christodoulo qualified his remarks. “Maybe it wasn’t the Kennedys but what they stood for—the carousing, the booze. The Kennedys stood for a lot of things besides liberal politics that serious Mormons do not embrace.”

Socially, Romney was isolated from his classmates; in part because he lived off-campus and returned home to Ann and the boys after class was over. He did, however, integrate into the local Mormon community. “On Sundays, he spent most of his time on church-related stuff,” recalls Christodoulo. “Through his church, Mitt had a ready-made social network,” says Szalkowski.

Romney stood out in other ways. “He was more mature than many people because he’d done his missionary tour,” recalls Tom Phillips, a classmate who became chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. “He got some ribbing for having drawn Paris, but it was more than the rest of us had done.”

“He had…‘presence,’ I guess, is the right phrase,” says Szalkowski. “Not arrogance by any means, just the sort of self-assuredness that comes from experience.”

By way of comparison, another scion of a political family was preparing to graduate from the business school in 1975: George W. Bush. While Bush had a reputation as a class clown, Romney was poised and serious. “If you asked me in 1975 which of the two was more likely to be president, I would have said Mitt,” says Christodoulo. “In 1975, Mitt’s father was a lot more prominent than George H. W. Bush. Mitt was articulate and charismatic, and his father’s foray into national politics was clearly very fresh in his mind.”

Several classmates remember a proud Mitt bringing his father to class at the law school one day. George Romney, says Christodoulo, was “bigger than life,” and the pride Mitt took in his father was easily seen.

“He only had one thing that was even possibly an affectation,” says Phillips. “He carried his dad’s briefcase with him everywhere he went. It was brown leather, totally scratched and scuffed, the initials ‘GWR’ in gold in the middle. It looked like it had been through World War I and World War II and the Cold War. It was the only sign he gave of a link to being from a politically or economically privileged family. He didn’t go around saying, ‘My dad’s in the cabinet,’ or ‘He was president of a major automobile corporation and ran for president.’ But if you looked at that briefcase…”

Like most of the students in the joint program, Romney gravitated toward the business school, which was more pragmatic and less intellectual than the law school. Harvard Law School professor emeritus Detlev Vagts, who ran the program during Romney’s time, remembers Romney as “not shooting for the very top, but taking his studies seriously.”

As we spoke, Vagts walked over to a file cabinet and pulled out a 30-year-old folder—papers from the seminar Vagts taught, “Law and Business Problems.” Romney’s was still there. Titled “Dual-Distribution in the Automobile Industry,” the paper considered the practice by which manufacturers sell products through both company channels and independent distributors.

Scanning the paper, Vagts said, “I see a grade, a very okay grade, better than most—I’m not allowed to tell you what. But I was positively impressed.” In 1975, Romney graduated cum laude from HLS and in the top five percent of his HBS class. He would stay in touch with some of his classmates, who are now helping him with fundraising. His brother Scott attended HLS, and three of Romney’s sons would attend HBS. Harvard graduates would play vital roles in his business and political careers; his closest advisor, Bob White, was an HBS grad, and his lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, went to Harvard College, to name just two.

But on the campaign trail these days, Romney almost never mentions his Harvard pedigree, and in that one area, he’s been nothing but consistent. Romney has never shown much affection for the university that gave him his professional start and whose alumni surround him—evidence, perhaps, that Romney’s cultural conservatism has deeper roots than a campaign-season switch.

I asked Bill Weld, a Romney supporter who is also a Harvard alum, what influence Harvard had on Romney. Weld said he couldn’t answer the question. In the 20 years they’ve known each other, he explained, “I have never heard him mention Harvard once.”

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