Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
On the Cranbrook campus, Mitt downplayed his family’s fame, though others showed less restraint.
The
Detroit News
’s report on a small fire at Cranbrook carried this headline: “Romney Son Helps Fight School Fire.” Deep in the article, it turned out that Mitt’s heroism had consisted of opening the building’s front door and directing the firefighters toward the small blaze.
More important to Mitt was sharing his father’s front-row seat on government as an intern in the governor’s office. When Mitt was sixteen years old, in 1963, he joined his father late one night at the capitol in Lansing. As Governor Romney sought passage of a bill before a midnight deadline, an Associated Press reporter observed the “tall, slim boy” delivering advice to his father about how to deal with recalcitrant legislators.
“Dad, go in there and talk to them,” Mitt told his father.
“I don’t think that will get it done,” George told his son.
But it did, and a resolution was finally reached at 1:30 a.m. At that point, the AP reporter checked on Mitt and his father. “It was lots more fun before they let the reporters in,” Mitt said, perhaps foreshadowing his dour view of the press when he was a candidate himself. It was laid out in a front-page story headlined “Mitt Romney Keeps Vigil as Clock Is Running Out; Hears Dad Argue, Win Point with Solons.”
It was a formative moment, that December evening in Lansing. Three weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with the country in turmoil and searching for leadership, his father was fast emerging as a shining light of the Republican Party. The bond between father and son, as well as between Mitt and the political world, was only growing stronger.
Dick Milliman, who served as Romney’s press secretary, was struck by how much the governor delighted in having his teenage son around. “They would hug upon meeting, and not just any hug,” he recalled. “He would give Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss.” To Milliman, it was clearly not just a father-son bond but almost a “partner relationship.” Around the office, just as around the family home, Mitt seldom held back. “He would chime in, ‘Have you thought about this?’ ” Milliman said, admitting, “Sometimes you’d think, ‘That kid oughta shut up!’ But he was always nice to be around.”
Mitt’s sister Jane likened their upbringing amid the swirl of politics to “living in a drama.” It was, she said, a fascinating time, with interesting people always parading through, reporters often at the doorstep, the issues of the day deliberated at the dinner table. George Romney’s success in Michigan prompted talk of him as a presidential candidate in 1964. That didn’t happen, but he arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco that summer as a star, inviting Mitt to come orbit around him. The elder Romney would make headlines by walking out on nominee Barry Goldwater because of Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. In a subsequent letter to Goldwater, Romney wrote, “The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others.” Romney refused to endorse Goldwater’s candidacy, embittering conservatives within the party and solidifying Romney’s reputation as a more liberal iconoclast.
When Goldwater complained about Romney’s failure to endorse him, Romney responded in a blistering letter—soon leaked to
The New York Times
—in which he took sharp aim at Goldwater’s right-wing philosophy. In what amounted to a Romney Manifesto, the governor wrote, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.” Years later, Mitt would run as a moderate and win the governorship of Massachusetts and as a conservative in seeking the presidency. Throughout his career, Mitt would be accused of changing his positions according to the politics of the moment. He would reject charges of opportunism, but his father’s blunt forthrightness, his adamancy on the divisive civil rights issue and others, was a trait he would not so fully emulate. George more easily, even proudly, embraced what some saw as philosophical conflicts. When Brigham Young University named an institute at its School of Management after George, it erected a plaque that boasted of the wide embrace of his spirit: “A liberal in his treatment of his fellow humans, a conservative with other people’s money.” George often said he hated political labels, knowing how they could typecast a politician and put off potential supporters. He was presumed to be conservative in his actions as a business and religious leader, but he would perhaps be best remembered as a liberal for his views of racial equality and social justice.
George’s progressive stance on race earned him critics not only in the right wing of his party but at the highest levels of his church. The church policy at the time was that blacks could join as members but not become members of the priesthood. In 1964, a top Mormon official wrote to Romney, calling a civil rights bill “vicious legislation” and warning Romney that it was not man’s job to remove what he termed the Lord’s “curse upon the Negro.” Romney refused to back down. Mitt would be particularly proud of his father’s willingness to take on their own church when it came to the Mormons’ treatment of blacks. When Mitt was asked later in his life about the church’s refusal until 1978 to let blacks fully participate in Mormon rituals, he cited his father’s work on civil rights as evidence of how far the family had distanced itself from the church on the issue.
Still, there weren’t many blacks in Mitt’s exclusive neighborhood of Bloomfield Hills. Mitt’s primary exposure to black people was his family’s beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and a fellow student, Sidney Barthwell, Jr., whose father had worked with George Romney in revising the state’s constitution. Coming from Detroit to attend Cranbrook, Barthwell had entered a different world. “It was primarily white WASP. I was the only African-American student in our graduating class,” Barthwell said. Though Mitt and Sidney were not close, they were friendly and went through all six years at the school together. It made an impression on Barthwell that the Romney family opposed the Mormon prohibition against blacks holding the priesthood. His recollection of Mitt is that he seemed like a “very nice guy” although “not a standout student.” During one of his father’s gubernatorial campaigns, Mitt and his brother, Scott, were sent to talk to African Americans in a Detroit neighborhood, and they came away pleased that their father was respected by blacks, even if they didn’t receive assurances of votes.
In his final years at Cranbrook, Mitt emerged a more serious student and a good-looking teen. Adding to the package was his great head of hair. Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father’s sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father’s top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon church. “He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,” Mitt would recall years later. “I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in distinct comb lines from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it’s just like his was some forty years ago.”
W
hen graduation arrived, the speaker was none other than George Romney. He hit upon a surprising theme. Girlfriends, the governor told the seventy-six graduating boys, “will have more to do with shaping your life than probably anybody else. . . . If the girl you’re interested in doesn’t inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her, then you’d better look around and get another.”
Mitt had looked around and, just like his father, had found at a relatively early age the girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Ann Davies, and she was beautiful, smart, and independent-minded. The parallels to Mitt’s mother were unmistakable. But there was one difference—and a major problem: Ann was not a Mormon; she came from a mainline Protestant family.
Mitt had first met Ann when they were both in elementary school in Bloomfield Hills. He was dressed in his Cub Scout uniform and saw Ann riding her horse over the railroad tracks. He picked up some stones and threw them at her, he recalled years later. They lost track of each other over the years. Then they were at neighboring prep schools. Ann attended Cranbrook’s sister school, Kingswood, on the other side of campus. Mitt had just turned eighteen and Ann was fifteen, almost exactly the same ages his parents had been when they met. One day, Mitt went to a friend’s birthday party. Across the room, he spied Ann. “Wow, has she changed,” Mitt said he thought to himself. He went over to Ann’s date and offered to drive Ann home.
Cranbrook in the 1960s still adhered to a strict separation of the sexes. The girls were allowed to see the boys for athletic events, dance lessons, and a weekly movie night in the gym. Beyond that, their interaction largely was confined to letters, which the Kingswood girls lined up to receive daily. Shortly after they ran into each other at the party, Mitt asked Ann out for a date. It was March 21, 1965, and they saw the movie
The Sound of Music
. “I caught his eye and he never let me go,” Ann recalled years later. “I mean, he hotly pursued me.” They fell “deeply in love,” she said, but “we didn’t tell anyone, because no one would have believed it.” Mitt later said, “I fell in love with her the second I saw her.”
When Ann arrived at the Kingswood School, she wasn’t much interested in academics; that would come later. She was more into riding horses and playing field hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and tennis. Mitt learned to keep up. They strode across the sprawling Cranbrook campus, past the lake, amid the emerald landscape with its bubbling pools and surfeit of sculptures. Mitt taught Ann how to water-ski, and they went almost every day when the weather allowed. She taught him to snow-ski. She found Mitt funny and fun to be with, and “no matter where he was, there was a lot of action.” Other boys pursued her, and she would date them in Mitt’s absence, but she said Mitt “stole my heart from the very first.”
Ann, like Mitt, had grown up in Bloomfield Hills. Her father, Edward R. Davies, was the city’s former mayor and had become the wealthy president of Jered Industries, which made maritime machinery. He was also something of an inventor. One time, her father got mad at her and her two brothers for not closing a sliding door. So he built a pulley system that automatically closed the door. Ann considered him a “creative genius.” What Mitt didn’t know about Ann was that she had been brought up in a home with a father who had no use for religion, and that she had been on a spiritual search since a young age. Her father had grown up in a coal-mining family in Wales, and Ann’s brothers say he associated the religion of his childhood—a Welsh Congregational church he found as dreary as the climate of Wales—with drudgery and hogwash. Before their dad married their mom, Lois Davies, he insisted that she give up organized religion. “Dad,” said Ann’s older brother, Roderick Davies, “considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees.”
But like Mitt, Ann had a special relationship with her father. So he occasionally indulged his only daughter’s requests that the family attend services at one Protestant church or another. He remained unswayed by the pulpit and believed his daughter would eventually come to her senses. As for her romance, Ann’s father knew that Mitt was heading to California for college while Ann still had two years of high school left. So how serious could they be?
They were serious. One night, Mitt went to pick up Ann for the prom, driving his “goofy-looking” AMC Marlin, a two-door fastback with a sloping roof. After they had been at the festivities for a while, he nervously took his sixteen-year-old girlfriend aside and asked—informally—if she would one day marry him. Yes, Ann said. It was a tentative yes, with the couple knowing they would soon part ways as Mitt headed to college. Years later they would remember the moment not just for the romance but for also the hilarity. Mitt, the car guy, had forgotten to gas up. He blamed it on nerves. The Marlin puttered to a halt as he drove Ann home. Somehow, Mitt and the exquisitely outfitted woman he had just asked to be his wife made it home.
From Mitt’s perspective, their path was set. But there had been a lingering, critical question. On one of their earliest dates, Mitt had leaned in for a kiss, but Ann had other ideas.
“What,” she asked, “do Mormons believe?”
Mitt was suddenly uneasy. He knew his religion made him something of an outsider. He didn’t want Ann to consider changing religions just because of him. It had to be from her heart. Now here he was on a date with one of the prettiest girls on campus, someone he knew came from mainline Protestant stock, and she was asking for a tutorial on the Mormon Church?
“I was not in the mood to talk about religion,” he would say later. “I was much more interested in physical expressions of love.”
Mitt looked Ann in the eyes and tried to answer her question. He turned to the church’s “Articles of Faith,” propounded by church founder Joseph Smith and typically memorized by followers. Mitt began by quoting the first article. “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” When he finished, he noticed that Ann had started to cry.
There was, of course, much more to explain, much more to the story of this little-known faith. It was a story in which the Romney family itself was deeply intertwined, from the early days of the religion’s founding to the modern era, when the Romneys held leadership positions within the church. It was a story of scripture and revelation but also of polygamy, an early Mormon practice in which Romneys had played a pivotal role, and of a harrowing westward journey that tested the hardiest settlers. The story of the faith, it turned out, was in many ways the story of the Romneys. It had begun in an English village more than a century earlier, when Mitt’s great-great-grandfather heard an astonishing tale from an American visitor who insisted he was a saint.