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The Mitt Romney You Don't Know

by Richard Bradley
Spring 2007

There are surely more pleasant things to do than hang out in a Marriott in Baltimore on a frigid winter day, but this February 2, a band of gay-marriage-trashing, illegal-immigrant-bashing, abortion-banning, activist-judge-canning Republicans have convened to talk shop. And so Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and current presidential candidate, is also in attendance. He’s the guest of honor, in fact. Romney has pilgrimaged to Baltimore to woo this group of red-staters, blandly known as the Republican Study Committee, hoping to convince them that he is a liberal-slayer they can count on.

In a banquet hall about the size of a high-school gym, with similar acoustics and charm, Florida representative Tom Feeney introduces Romney to around 80 paying guests and half as many reporters. Romney, he declares, was “a modern-day Henry V, doing battle with a Massachusetts legislature that is 85 percent Democrat.” The policies Romney crusaded for “will sell much easier in the rest of the country than in Massachusetts.”

A smiling Romney takes the stage wearing an elegant two-button blue suit with a blindingly white shirt and tasteful blue-striped tie. His square-toed black shoes are polished enough to double as mirrors. Much has been written about Romney’s looks—fans say he’s “straight from central casting,” doubters call him “a Ken doll”—and it’s true that, in the easy-on-the-eyes department, he has a substantial edge over his two leading GOP opponents, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Romney is tall and fit, with a Dudley Do-Right jaw and thick black hair. Dabs of white around his temples seem so calculated to suggest gravitas, if they’re not fake, they might as well be. When he speaks, he moves his hands in practiced, careful gestures—a Vanna White hand-roll here, a mild punch for emphasis there—as if he’s afraid of breaking something. rspeech He was, he confesses, “a conservative Republican governor in a liberal blue state,” an experience which “confirmed some principles and educated me on some principles.” That’s an allusion to the fact that his position on social issues has grown sharply more conservative in recent years—conveniently coinciding, critics say, with his decision to run for president in a party whose conservative base holds enormous influence.

But Romney insists that he’s not really the one who changed—society did. During his governorship, “Massachusetts became a center stage for the most divisive issues facing our nation today,” primarily gay marriage and stem cell research. “We picked a lot of fights that we didn’t stand a chance of winning,” he concedes, blasting judges who act as if “3,000 years of recorded history didn’t matter”—particularly the four judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who, in 2003, ruled to legalize gay marriage.

Then he talks about Harvard. But Romney doesn’t mention that he went to Harvard, or that he graduated in 1975 with an MBA and a J.D. from one of the university’s most rigorous programs. Instead, he alludes to how an encounter with a Harvard scientist prompted him to fundamentally change his politics on abortion, just as he dramatically altered his stance on gay rights, just as he softened his pro-gun-control position and joined the National Rifle Association last summer.

“Just a few T-stops from the Statehouse, over at Harvard, scientists were preparing to clone human embryos—experimenting with human life itself,” Romney says. “We need to be wary of those who experiment with life…who toy with the building blocks of the family and society.”

In this room, Romney’s charisma is working; people are paying attention. They like to hear about Romney sticking it to Harvard—“the Kremlin on the Charles” Republicans used to call it—and Massachusetts, home of the reviled Ted Kennedy. And with his outsider language, his anti-big-government posture, and his sunny disposition—“I’m overwhelmingly optimistic,” he announces proudly—Romney doesn’t hesitate to invoke the spirit of Ronald Reagan. What with George W. dragging himself, lonely and bedraggled, to the finish line, the GOP could use a touch of the Gipper.

No, there’s no question that Romney is a viable candidate. He has a compelling résumé, bags of campaign cash, and page after page of endorsements. He is passionately committed to the race and fantastically hard-working; Romney just turned 60—you’d never know it to look at him—but his energy level would trump most men half his age. And he happens to be running in an election without an incumbent, in a primary in which his most serious opponents, McCain and Giuliani, have serious liabilities.

And yet, beyond these walls, Romney has been struggling. Well, more than struggling. He’s been beaten like a drum, really. Before most Americans even know who he is, he has been dogged by accusations that he is a man without principles, an empty vessel willing to say whatever it takes to get elected. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for example, recently called Romney a “counterfeit man”, saying, “If he were a coin, a vending machine would spit him out.” Ouch. And when the media isn’t scripting that story line, it’s teeing up the question of whether Americans will vote against Romney because he is Mormon.

It’s early yet; the New Hampshire primary is almost a year away. Romney will either ride out these controversies, dispensing with them at a time when most Americans aren’t following presidential politics. Or he’ll be labeled, defined, by them, which would probably doom his candidacy. Romney has spent years, maybe decades, preparing for this campaign. The moment when it will rise or fall is finally upon him.

American presidential politics, especially in this time of bitter partisanship and non-stop media, turns candidates into stick figures, masters of the sound-bite, allergic to spontaneity, ever-vigilant against the unscripted gaffe or the 30-second attack ad. Romney has both suffered from that cartooning phenomenon and played along with it. Yet underneath all the politics, Mitt Romney is an interesting and complex man—more substantial than the mainstream media will allow, more complicated than he himself wants you to know. Romney may be a flip-flopper. He is obviously a Mormon. In weighing his fitness for the presidency, these may be the least important issues to consider.

The Mitt Romney You Don't Know

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.

romyear 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.”

romwed “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.”

The Mitt Romney You Don't Know

After his graduation, Romney took a job at the Boston Consulting Group. Three years later, he jumped ship to join fast-growing rival Bain & Company, a five-year-old firm known for snapping up the sharpest, most well-rounded HBS grads. “Bain did not accept the person who was only smart,” says consultant David Maister. “To get into Bain, you had to be very smart and know how to get along with other people.”

At the time, management consulting was the hot field for business-school grads, the equivalent of investment banking in the ’80s and hedge funds in the ’90s. Bain had a distinctive philosophy. “The company would work with only one company in any given industry,” says Bob White, whom Romney recruited to work at the firm. “You’d not only work with the senior people to set strategy, you’d stay and work alongside the management teams to implement the solutions.” Bain consultants wouldn’t just scrutinize isolated problem areas; they would infiltrate a company from the shop floor to the boardroom. Such bottom-to-top access meant that Bain consultants could constantly diagnose new ailments, thus decreasing the amount of time spent trolling for new business while maximizing billable hours.

Working at Bain offered “all the attractions that consulting provides,” Maister says. “Incredibly high income immediately, access to CEO-level issues, a self-important status. You’re a young punk in your twenties and suddenly you’re giving advice to the heads of organizations. Your self-image is transformed. You now see yourself as quite capable of giving advice to the world.”

But after six years rising through the ranks, Romney left to help found Bain Capital, a venture-capital firm. “It was a logical outgrowth for them because of their emphasis on implementation,” says Charlie Green. “It was, ‘Let’s stop billing by the hour, let’s get a piece of the action.’”

If Romney’s political road has been marred with potholes, not so his business career: He was successful at Bain & Company and extraordinarily successful at Bain Capital. Perhaps his most lucrative decision was investing in the idea for an office-supply store called “Staples”; the chain now has some 1,800 stores, and Bain Capital’s initial investment of about $600,000 has been returned untold times over. “His reputation was superb,” says Bill Weld. “Everyone wanted to get into that fund.”

“He is extremely smart, extremely analytical, and he bathes himself in data,” explains one hedge-fund dealmaker who has worked with Romney. “Wealth is an important part of his story, but there’s an intellectual and analytical dimension to finance and equity that he absolutely thrives on. He likes to have 10 or 15 people around the table sharing their different views and just duking it out.”

Romney often talks about the success he has had turning businesses around; in 1990 he even rescued Bain & Company from collapse after a period of mismanagement. He’s less loquacious, though, about just how much money he’s made in the process. But the hedge fund source puts Romney’s fortune at between $500 million and one billion dollars, “and I don’t know which one it’s closer to.”

Another finance source who has worked closely with Romney thinks he does know; this chief executive puts Romney’s wealth at between $900 and $950 million. The amount could be significantly larger, but in keeping with Mormon custom, Romney tithes 10 percent of his pre-tax income, meaning that, over the years, Romney has given the Church of Latter-day Saints tens of millions of dollars.

romfam1 Friends say that there was little outward sign of Romney’s wealth but ample evidence of his generosity. Joe O’Donnell, founder of the Boston Culinary Group and a graduate both of Harvard College and HBS, came to know Romney as a neighbor in the Boston suburb of Belmont. “I coached his kids in Little League,” O’Donnell says. When O’Donnell’s son Joey, who suffered from cystic fibrosis, died at age 12, Romney and a team of boy scouts—he’d been a scout himself—helped build “Joey’s Park,” a Belmont playground. “And this was when his father was the only person who knew who Mitt Romney was,” O’Donnell says. Every year Romney writes the Joey Fund, a foundation O’Donnell started to fund cystic fibrosis research and care, “a substantial check.” And every year Romney, along with boy scouts and fellow Mormons, would spend a weekend cleaning the park.

There is a humor, even a goofiness, to Romney that the public doesn’t see, O’Donnell says. They once went to the movies and a technical glitch delayed the start of the film. So, O’Donnell recalls, “I bet him $100—not ‘bet’, Mitt doesn’t bet—I said I’d give him $100 if he stood up in the crowded theater and made a 30-second speech. He didn’t even wait for me to finish. He got up and announced, ‘Excuse me, but I’ve got this dope with me who’s willing to give me $100 to do this…’” About 28 seconds later, the crowd gave Romney a round of applause, and O’Donnell gave him the hundred bucks.

When Romney, a registered independent until 1993, decided to run against Ted Kennedy in 1994, Romney’s friends were skeptical. “I said, ‘Mitt, this is like running against God in his hometown,’” says Christodoulo. “But at that point he had a bunch of money”, that longstanding antipathy to the Kennedys, and a passion to continue his father’s public work. “He felt somebody needed to take on Ted Kennedy,” says Bob White.

Romney campaigned as a fiscal conservative and social liberal. He declined, for example, to endorse Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. “I’m not a partisan politician,” he explained. “My hope is that, after this election, it will be the moderates of both parties who control the Senate, not the Jesse Helmses.” He insisted that he was pro-choice and supported Roe v. Wade—“You will not see me wavering on that”—and he argued that he’d be more progressive on gay issues than Ted Kennedy. In a letter to the Massachusetts Log Cabin Republicans, Romney wrote, “I am not unaware of my opponent’s considerable record in the area of civil rights…For some voters it might be enough for me to simply match my opponent’s record in this area. But I believe we can and must do better…We must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.”

For a while, it was close—Kennedy’s closest race. Into late September, Romney was within a few percentage points of the senator. For Romney, it was personal. Joe O’Donnell remembers watching the first debate of the campaign at Romney’s house. Though in declining health, George W. Romney was present to cheer on his son. “He was sick, but he was there,” O’Donnell says. “He was instrumental for Mitt.” (In July 1995, the 88-year-old George Romney would collapse and die while exercising on a treadmill.) Romney performed credibly in that debate, but as the election neared, Kennedy poured money into the race and Massachusetts voters decided that they weren’t really ready to dispense with the Democratic warhorse. Kennedy won, 58-41.

In the aftermath, a demoralized Romney doubted that he would run for office again. The campaign “was hard-fought and not particularly pleasant,” Bob White says. Publicly, Kennedy had slammed Romney because of layoffs at a factory in which Bain Capital had invested—even though Romney was on leave campaigning at the time of the firings. The Kennedy camp also suggested that Mormonism was weird and out of the mainstream; Congressman Joe Kennedy, Ted’s nephew, called Mormonism racist. Once again, Mitt Romney, the handsome, wealthy, happily married Harvard grad, was reminded that when it came to the Kennedys, Harvard, and Massachusetts, he would always be an outsider.

Not long after the election, Romney got drawn into an ugly fight over a proposed Mormon temple to be built in Belmont. The plans called for a 94,000-square-foot building with a 156-foot-high spire, and some incensed neighbors, including Alan Altshuler, a Harvard professor of urban planning, led a years-long fight to block construction. The dispute put Romney, a lay official in the church, in an awkward situation. George Christodoulo, also a Belmont resident, was asked to represent some neighbors in the dispute against the church. “I called Mitt and said, ‘Mitt, it’s not my first choice to be involved in the controversial things in the town I live in.’ And he said, ‘You’d be great—at least I could talk to you.’” After years of litigation and hard words, including accusations of anti-Mormon bias, a slightly smaller version of the temple was completed in 2001.

So in 1998, when Romney was asked to come to Salt Lake City to save a faltering Winter Olympics, he hesitated, unsure about another public role. And he had another concern: After losing sensation on the right side of her body, Ann was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “I was not an example of strength and courage when I was going through it,” she has said. “I was pretty scared.” She had reason to be. “Ann was very, very sick,” remembers Joe O’Donnell, so weak that “she couldn’t get out of bed for a while.” By changing her diet and through exercise such as yoga, Pilates, and horseback riding, Ann gradually improved, but for years she felt weak and vulnerable to relapse. One reason Romney decided to accept the Olympics job was because the Utah climate was reportedly good for Ann’s health.

When Romney took the position as CEO of the Olympic organizing committee, the Games faced multiple crises: allegations that Olympic officials had accepted bribes to locate the games in Salt Lake City, massive disorganization, low morale, and high spending—the budget was bloated with items such as $10,000 to provide motivational speakers for Olympic volunteers. Romney slashed costs and got the Games back on track. And because the Olympian culture did not always blend comfortably with Mormon conservatism, he negotiated compromises on issues such as whether the snowboarders could play hip-hop music (not if it was profanity-laced), or whether alcohol could be served at the medal ceremonies (yes, but off to one side). At the end, the Games would turn a profit approaching $100 million.

The Mitt Romney You Don't Know

And then it was back to Massachusetts. In 2002, the state was led by Republican Jane Swift, probably best known as the first governor to give birth while in office. Swift’s poll numbers were abysmal—only around 35 percent of voters planned to vote to reelect her—and state Republicans desperately hoped to draft Romney. While Democrats protested, not without cause, that Romney did not fulfill state residency requirements, Swift was pressured to drop out by “powerful men,” as she put it. At a teary press conference on March 19, she did. (Swift is now supporting John McCain for president.) That same day Romney announced that he was running for governor.

Again presenting himself as a moderate, pro-choice Republican, Romney stressed his independence from special interests. “I don’t worry about being liked,” he explained. “People respected my dad, but didn’t necessarily like him. The most important thing in life is not being liked. The most important thing is being true to who you really are.” Boosted by such rhetoric, Romney beat a weak Democratic candidate, state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, 50 to 45 percent.

When Romney took office, Massachusetts faced deficits of one to three billion dollars, depending on whose estimates you believe. (Romney claims the latter.) He had said he would do everything possible not to raise taxes, and, technically, he didn’t. Instead, he merged state agencies to effect a small reduction in the size of the Massachusetts government, raised “fees” on driver’s licenses and other state services, and cut state aid to cities and towns, which, in turn, promptly raised their taxes. During Romney’s tenure, the total state and local tax load on Massachusetts residents actually increased.

Romney did have his moments, however. He forced the resignation of powerful political hack Billy Bulger from the presidency of the University of Massachusetts system. He aggressively intervened in the management of the Big Dig tunnel after cement panels fell and killed a woman in a car. And he initiated a plan for universal health insurance in the state, by tapping a fund used to cover emergency-room care for the non-insured. While the final shape of that plan is in flux, few would question that Romney drove the issue and crafted legislation with national import.

But in the last two years of his term, Romney seemed to lose interest in governing. In 2006, he spent all or part of 212 days—four days a week—traveling out of Massachusetts. “His main priority was to position himself to run for president, and he did it by looking for signature opportunities to get national publicity,” argues Marty Linsky, a former Weld adviser who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. One such opportunity came in September 2006, when the Kennedy School invited former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to speak. Though by Iranian standards Khatami is considered a reformer, Romney blasted the move as “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists” and tried to deny Khatami police protection.

The governor was even more outspoken on social issues. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized gay marriage, Romney fought to keep out-of-state gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts, and pushed for a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage without making provision for civil unions. Romney says now that he has always been opposed to both gay marriage and civil unions, and no one has been able to show otherwise. But the moves certainly ran counter to his earlier insistence that “we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.”

His hard line on stem cell research and abortion was unquestionably new. In July 2005, Romney vetoed legislation expanding access to the morning-after pill; he wrote a Boston Globe editorial to explain why. “In considering the issue of embryo cloning and embryo farming, I saw where the harsh logic of abortion can lead—to the view of innocent new life as nothing more than research material or a commodity to be exploited.”

As Romney would tell the story, his change of heart followed a meeting with two Harvard scientists from the university’s Stem Cell Institute. Romney claims that one scientist—apparently Douglas Melton, an institute co-director—told him that their research “is not a moral issue, because we kill the embryos at 14 days.” When the scientists left, Romney says, he turned to his chief of staff and declared, “We have cheapened the sanctity of life by virtue of the Roe v. Wade mentality.” Now he opposes the cloning of embryonic stem cells—even though his wife Ann could one day benefit from research involving such cells—and opposes abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is at risk.

Melton, however, disputes that story. “I told Governor Romney about ethical stem cell research, work based on a deeply held respect for life and a commitment to do all I can to help those suffering from debilitating diseases,” Melton wrote to me in an e-mail. “The words Governor Romney has attributed to me are simply not part of my professional vocabulary.” Whatever actually transpired, after more than a decade of being challenged on the issue of abortion, would Romney really change his mind because of one alleged callous remark?

Romney’s social shifts have been so dramatic, he can hardly pretend they haven’t happened. Instead, he concedes them. As he explained on one conservative talk-radio show, thanks to the passage of time, “I’m grayer, I’m a little heavier, and I hope I’ve grown a bit wiser as well. Of course I was wrong on some issues back then. I’m not embarrassed to admit that.”

Some social conservatives may actually embrace Romney because of his late-life shifts. “People have conversions,” says James Bopp Jr., a Republican anti-abortion lawyer who supports Romney. “Our two most successful pro-life presidents were both converts. [California] Governor Ronald Reagan signed what was at the time the most permissive abortion law in the country, and George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a pro-choice candidate in 1980. We have to welcome converts as long as they’re sincere.” And how is sincerity measured? “It’s an event that triggers a reconsideration.”

The new, socially hawkish Romney has drawn howls of criticism from detractors who think his right-turn merely a conversion of convenience. But there’s also the possibility that Romney has been conservative all along. “I think, in his heart, he wasn’t pro-choice in 2002,” says one of Romney’s political advisers. In a June 2005 National Review article, former Romney political consultant Mike Murphy called him “a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly.” (Murphy later claimed he was misquoted.) Adds a friend of Romney’s, “I think this is the real Mitt. There’s no question in my mind.” So why wasn’t he conservative in his 1994 and 2002 campaigns? “He just perceived that he couldn’t win that way.”

Whether Romney’s ramped-up conservatism was authentic or fake, Massachusetts voters didn’t like it. By the time he left the governorship in January 2007, Romney’s popularity had plummeted. His poll numbers were actually worse than Swift’s when she quit in 2002. “The guy couldn’t have been reelected on a bet,” says former governor Michael Dukakis.

“I was a huge admirer of his dad’s, not only for his corporate leadership but for his governorship,” Dukakis explains. “He was a very good governor of Michigan, fine secretary of HUD, good instincts, lots of leadership. He was the first guy who said we need a small, efficient automobile. I drove a Rambler with pride.”

George’s son, Dukakis argues, “should have been a very good, very effective moderate Republican.” Instead, “he was a huge disappointment to me and a lot of other people. A huge disappointment.”

The Mitt Romney You Don't Know

Such sentiments help explain why, on February 13, Romney officially announced his presidential campaign at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In a navy suit, Romney stood in front of a Ford SUV hybrid and an AMC Rambler. His family—wife Ann, five sons, five daughters-in-law, 10 grandchildren—waited in the wings.

“I always imagined that I would come back to Michigan someday,” he said. Dad and I loved cars…The Rambler automobile that he championed was the first American car designed and marketed for economy and mileage…It transformed the auto industry.”

It was a telling overstatement: As anyone who reads the business pages knows, the Rambler clearly did not transform the industry. And the museum was a bizarre place in which to launch a campaign: as Jewish activists pointed out to the candidate, Ford was a notorious anti-Semite. Given Romney’s own sensitivity to religious prejudice, the museum seemed a loaded choice.

romfam2 Some six million Americans are Mormons. By and large, they are family-oriented, hardworking and prosperous. But some Mormon beliefs strike many people as odd: that God Himself was once a human being; that humans exist as “spirit children” before their birth; that people can be baptized and converted to Mormonism after their death (to save them from hellfire); that after death people can become godlike. Up to 40 percent of Americans in polls say that they will not vote for a Mormon for president. Many of them are evangelical Protestants, the kind whose support Romney is now seeking. Ann Romney has suggested to her husband that he deliver a “JFK-style speech” on the separation of church and state, but Mitt doesn’t seem to think it necessary. “People have interest early on in your religion and any similar element of your background,’’ he told the New York Times. ‘’But as soon as they begin to watch you on TV and see the debates and hear you talking about issues, they are overwhelmingly concerned with your vision of the future and the leadership skills that you can bring to bear.’’

What matters, Romney says, is not the specifics of your religious faith, but the simple fact of belief in God. “We need to have a person of faith lead the country,” he said recently. That’s why he injects religious language into his speeches, saying, as he did in Baltimore, that Americans are “a God-fearing people” and that everyone is “a child of God.”

It’s paradoxical: You should vote for a presidential candidate because he is religious, but you shouldn’t vote against a candidate for the same reason. And at the same time that Romney says Mormonism isn’t an issue in his campaign, he is reaching out to Mormons, sometimes in unprecedented ways. He has targeted the Mormon community for fundraising, though that is little different than Dukakis raising money from Greeks or Joe Lieberman from Jews. But in late 2005, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, Romney “sought the advice” of LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley—whom Mormons consider the earthly voice of God—on whether he should run for president. And last October, the Boston Globe reported that a Romney aide was coordinating planning with church officials on how to build Mormon support for Romney’s campaign. (Romney disavowed the effort.)

Perhaps some of these religious tensions are inevitable. Romney is breaking new ground here; no Mormon has ever mounted a serious presidential campaign (Utah senator Orrin Hatch tried, briefly, in 2000). Romney must convince Republican voters that on the one hand, he’s religious, but on the other hand, his religion isn’t a cult, despite the fact that some Christians consider its teachings blasphemy. This is not an easy gauntlet to run. But Republican candidates don’t have much choice in this regard, and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are likely to have their own problems making themselves palatable to GOP primary voters. Whoever wins the nomination will then have to tack back toward the center, where the mood of the country seems to be.

In some ways things were simpler back in the ’60s, back when George W. Romney wanted to be president, back when you didn’t have to demonstrate your religious bonafides before you could be considered a credible Republican candidate. But Mitt Romney remembers what happened to his father, how the conservatives destroyed his path to the presidency, and he won’t let that happen to him. Unless, of course, it already has.