Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
T
he fourth and fifth portraits that were mounted on the wall in Belmont were, of course, of George and his treasured son Mitt. Mitt Romney rarely discusses the details of his family ancestry, but when he has discussed his faith at length, he has left no doubt of the importance of his family legacy, even as he has stressed that he would never let church leaders influence him if he became president. He has rejected suggestions by some that he distance himself from his religion.
It is a faith that has deepened year by year. By the time Mitt left the insular world of Bloomfield Hills, leaving Ann behind and heading to college, he was still discovering how being a Mormon put him outside the mainstream of American life. Unlike many Mormons, he did not instinctively head to Brigham Young University in Utah or another institution affiliated with the faith. He felt he had much to explore and discover, so he enrolled at Stanford University in California, near the counterculture haven of San Francisco. As Mitt left for this new journey, much of what his faith and upbringing had taught him would be tested anew.
Outside the Fray
I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam.
—MITT ROMNEY ON HIS COLLEGE YEARS
I
n the fall of 1965, Mitt Romney moved into the third floor of a Mission Revival–style freshmen dormitory on the sprawling campus of Stanford University. All seemed serene on the grounds known fondly as The Farm. Soaring palm trees lined the pathways, and an orderly group of sandstone buildings topped with red-tile roofs clustered around the 285-foot-tall Hoover Tower, named for the former president—a Stanford alumnus—and topped with a forty-eight-bell carillon. The university had begun heavily recruiting the children of the eastern establishment to join the California-heavy student body, and Mitt, in his sporty blazer and narrow tie, seemed to fit right in. He had grown taller, his face was more angular and handsome, and he walked with the stride of a student who expected great things for himself.
The initial calm would prove deceptive. The freshmen had begun their year as if closed in a bubble, but that wouldn’t last long. “The campus was quite isolated from the real world,” said Wayne Brazil, who lived in Romney’s dormitory. Day by day, Brazil said, “the air started leaking out of that bubble.” On the dorm’s first floor, one of the resident advisers, David Harris, started talking angrily about the United States’ escalation of the war in Vietnam and began organizing protests. Students went to Harris’s room or attended his speeches and got an earful about what was wrong with U.S. policy. The discontent began to smolder.
Mitt’s third-floor room in the Rinconada dormitory seemed a haven from all that, at least at first. He placed a picture of his father on his desk, hung up his camel-hair overcoat, and shelved his books. His roommate completed the all-American picture. Mark Marquess had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in nearby Stockton and was the first in his family to go to college. He had made his way to Stanford as one of the greatest athletes of his day, the quarterback of the football team (until future Heisman Trophy winner Jim Plunkett showed up), and first baseman and outfielder on the baseball team. Marquess, a straitlaced Catholic, soon learned that Romney followed a religion called Mormonism, of which Marquess knew nothing, and that Mitt had a girl named Ann. Mitt and Mark, the son of a governor and the quarterback, each in his own way fit the big man on campus script.
Mitt was no athlete, but he made it his mission to be part of Marquess’s world. As Marquess recalled it, Mitt was always running one organization or another. His most serious commitment appears to have been his role on the “Axe-Com,” or the Axe Committee, charged with protecting a cherished campus tradition. In the week before the football game between Stanford and University of California–Berkeley, the material for a bonfire was gathered in a dry lake bed on campus. It was a massive setup, with telephone poles stacked like logs, ready to be lit just before the big game. But Cal students also had a tradition: they would try to sneak in and set the bonfire ablaze days before kickoff. They would also try to steal the ceremonial axe—a broad red blade mounted on a plaque that went to the winner of the game; hence the name of Romney’s committee. While Marquess sent the team through its paces, Mitt took on the job of protecting the bonfire site and the axe, patrolling the grounds day and night.
When Mitt heard about a rally planned at Berkeley, he figured the axe heist might be discussed and decided to go undercover. Ditching his coat and tie, he dressed up like an antiwar protester in the hope of going unnoticed in the Berkeley crowd. In faded Levi’s jeans, a heavy wool work jacket, and well-worn moccasins, Mitt infiltrated the rival campus. One classmate recalled that Romney had borrowed David Harris’s clothing, although Harris has no recollection of lending an outfit. The two seemed worlds apart. Harris was protesting a war and saw himself on a mission to prevent the United States from disaster, and Romney was protecting an axe in a campus tradition. But to Romney at the time, it was a serious job.
“It sounds silly now,” said Mike Roake, a classmate who accompanied Romney part of the way to Berkeley that night, “but it was the great crusade in that time of sweet innocence.”
Marquess was impressed with Romney’s dedication. “I don’t think that sucker slept for four days,” Marquess recalled, using the word “sucker” in a nice way. The bonfire and axe were protected, and an impression had been made. “You wanted Mitt on whatever committee or group you were doing. He would take charge or lead it.”
Romney and Marquess did what Stanford freshmen do: they studied and they talked a lot about girls, although Mitt made it clear he would not date anyone besides Ann. They went to parties, where Mitt refrained from smoking or drinking. But Marquess, who would tire of the parties quickly, learned that Mitt would stay for hours, engaging students on whatever was the topic of the day. Oftentimes, Marquess would be worn out from practice or a game, and Mitt would leave the room to go to the dorm lobby and talk for hours more. “He was conservative and willing to express himself,” said one classmate, James Baxter. Mitt also left for long stretches to attend church functions. Over the course of the year, the roommates grew to understand each other and grew close. “He didn’t put on any airs about anything,” Marquess said. “That’s what I liked about him.” On several occasions, Marquess drove with Romney to his home in Stockton, ninety miles from campus, where the two boys would have a home-cooked meal courtesy of Marquess’s mother. They went to a local gym and played basketball, and slept in the modest three-bedroom home. It was a world away from Mitt’s upbringing in Bloomfield Hills but a slice of normalcy that Romney seemed to embrace.
Back at the dorm, Romney became close to a number of boys whose fathers also happened to be Republican leaders. Alan Abbott had come from El Paso, Texas, where months earlier he had picked up Ronald Reagan at the train station, thanks to his father’s role as county chairman of the Republican Party. On the first day of the semester, Abbott had wandered into Romney’s room and found it overflowing with students. Noticing the picture of George Romney on Mitt’s desk, Abbott announced that he was a fan of the Michigan governor. Everyone broke out laughing because Abbott didn’t know he had entered the room of George’s son. Mitt embraced Abbott as a soul mate from the start.
Also on Mitt’s floor was Robert Mardian, Jr., the son of the man who had managed Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign in four western states. George Romney had walked out on Goldwater’s nomination. The two sons nonetheless became close, attending football games together and spending much of the year playing practical jokes on each other. Mardian loved to tease Romney about how he had gotten into Stanford. A standing joke was that Romney, who’d had some mediocre grades on his prep school transcript, had been admitted in exchange for cars from American Motors, where George had been chairman. On other occasions, Mardian said, “I would say publicly, ‘He’s just not qualified. I’m getting tired of writing his papers.’ ” It was untrue, of course, but Romney always played along. “He took it always in a joking manner,” Mardian said. “That is the part that I remember. He was a fun guy.” When the two did talk seriously, it was about Republican politics and their shared dislike of radicals.
As freshman year progressed, the political demarcation lines on campus sharpened dramatically. Romney and his Republican buddies were representative of the traditional, conservative side of Stanford’s ecosystem. But David Harris made surprising headway with his antiestablishment advocacy, attracting an increasing number of followers as he educated his peers about racial unrest in the South and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. More air was leaking from the Stanford bubble.
It was one thing for the nearby campus of the University of California–Berkeley to have been radicalized by the antiauthority Free Speech Movement and for San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to emerge as a mecca for free-loving hippies in peasant skirts and dashikis. But at buttoned-down Stanford this creeping radicalism was something new and unsettling. Now, as Romney returned from his mandatory freshman classes in English and Western civilization, the scent of marijuana wafted across the pathways and strains of psychedelic rock blared from the windows. Some students set up a site to take blood donations for the North Vietnamese Communist fighters. Drug-infused “acid tests” were held in courtyards, taking their name from parties popularized by a local resident, Ken Kesey, the author of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, who had honed his literary skills in Stanford’s creative writing program. “There was this cultural current coming from the whole Bay area,” Harris said. “I would assume that, coming from [Romney’s] background, there were certainly things on campus that made him uncomfortable.”
By the time football season got under way, Stanford was a split-personality campus of tradition and revolution, and Mitt increasingly found himself caught in a world of which he knew little, about as far from his cloistered Cranbrook School and strict Mormon upbringing as he could get. Months earlier, he had been on a date with Ann watching
The Sound of Music
back home in Michigan. Now he was at large in the land of the Grateful Dead. One fall day, a stream of protesters—most of them dressed in coat and tie or skirt and blouse—headed down a wide palm-lined pathway carrying a banner that said,
VIETNAM—MATTER OF CONSCIENCE
. An older, short woman carried a huge sign that nearly dwarfed her.
PEACE
, it said, with a giant hand-drawn peace symbol. A young man held a placard that said,
FRENCH KILLED ONE MILLION. HOW MANY SHALL WE?
The protests grew exponentially. More than a hundred Stanford students joined a group of at least six thousand protesters who marched between Berkeley and Oakland. At night, Harris and other protesters would meet in a dorm room, where they smoked marijuana and listened to songs by Joan Baez, the antiwar singer whom Harris would later marry.
The protests were having an impact across the nation and on the Romney family. Three weeks after the antiwar march at Stanford, Mitt’s father, George, headed to Vietnam to see for himself what was happening. The Michigan governor was comforted by what he heard, filled with assurances from U.S. generals that the conflict would turn out in the United States’ favor. The issues in Vietnam were “the same that brought our country into existence,” George said after meeting with the generals, adding that “the American presence in Vietnam is necessary, if the world is to maintain liberty and freedom.” Nothing could have been more at odds with what the protesters at Stanford were saying—and George would soon learn about that as well. Returning from Vietnam, George stayed overnight at a San Francisco Hilton on November 12, 1965. It was during that stopover, according to two of Mitt’s classmates, that George went to Stanford to visit Mitt. The campus buzzed about the visit, and a dinner was arranged for some of Mitt’s dormitory friends. Peter Davenport, Mitt’s classmate, recalled that the elder Romney dined with Mitt and a group of students at the dorm. “He spoke about his trip to Vietnam,” Davenport said. “It was rather subdued.”
George also had a more narrow parental concern. He was worried about his son’s personal life. Mitt had secretly been flying back home on many weekends to visit his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Ann. On another occasion, he drove nonstop from California to Michigan, showed up at Ann’s home a sweaty mess, and dived fully clothed into her pool. Mitt planned the visits to Bloomfield Hills like a covert operation, aiming for times when his parents were staying in the state capital of Lansing due to George’s gubernatorial duties. “He didn’t want his parents to know,” Ann recalled years later. “They had no idea he was coming home weekends.” One time, Mitt and Ann were at a party and were shocked to see that Mitt’s parents were there. “As soon as we saw them, we made a U-turn and left,” Ann said.
At some point, however, George learned about the liaisons, and he worried that the frequent trips would affect Mitt’s grades. Mitt’s older brother, Scott, had attended Stanford for a year but had had trouble keeping up and had transferred to Michigan State. George did not want Mitt to encounter the same kind of troubles. So during his visit to Stanford, George sought out Mitt’s friend Alan Abbott. Would you watch out for my son? he asked Abbott. Abbott, somewhat awed that one of his Republican heroes was asking for such a favor, said he would. Then George confided his anxiety about Mitt. “He said he was concerned about the time Mitt was spending traveling back to Michigan on the weekends,” Abbott recalled. George planned to “cut back” on Mitt’s allowance in the hope that Mitt would spend more time on campus and his studies. But Mitt was so smitten, and so determined to outwit his father, that he came up with a brazen idea. He announced to his friends that he was holding an auction. Nearly all of his clothing was for sale. Abbott arrived at Mitt’s dorm room and was astonished that Mitt was selling off even his treasured camel-hair overcoat. “He auctioned off his clothing and bought a ticket to see Ann,” Abbott recalled. At a time when most Stanford guys were dating an array of girls, the depth of Romney’s devotion to his girl back home would make a lasting impression.
Something else stood out to Mitt’s peers: his bond with his father, who remained his hero and confidant notwithstanding the friction over Mitt’s home visits. Classmates could see the closeness between them. “It was especially interesting,” Romney’s classmate Mike Roake said, “because we were freshmen and therefore in the process of divorcing ourselves from our parents.”