does any of this ring true?
MITT ROMNEY, A LIFE
By Donna Sammons Carpenter, Maurice Coyle, and The Editors of New Word City
Purchase the iBooks edition of Mitt Romney, A Life
"Think of yourselves as corporations"
In 1978, in a classroom on the campus of the Harvard Business School, Mitt Romney stood before a gathering of Mormon students. Thirty-one years old, tall, handsome, confident, already a successful management consultant, his assignment was to discuss the challenges of balancing work and family life. Romney — who had graduated from the business school three years earlier — began with an analogy. "Think of yourselves as corporations," he instructed his audience. "You have the same question as General Electric. Your resources are your time and talent.
How are you going to deploy them?"
Using a chart to help illustrate his points, Romney went on to label various components of life as "businesses" — profession, family, church, community, self. Each business demanded a different allocation of resources, which included time, energy, knowledge, skills, talents, money, and faith. Work required the greatest share of resources and delivered the most tangible result: wealth. On the other hand, Romney said, "Your children don't pay any evidence of achievement for twenty years." But children and spouses should not be ignored: Failing to invest sufficient resources might cause them to become drags on "the corporation," lowering morale and draining time and energy from the enterprise.
Romney's presentation was well received. He had made a strong case for the importance of family time. Emotion was taken out of the equation and replaced with reason.
This anecdote reveals much about Mitt Romney. He is driven, smart, optimistic, analytical, methodical, not afraid to lead, a strategic thinker who stays focused on his goals. But he can also be dispassionate, entitled, and lacking in spontaneity. Sometimes, he has difficulty connecting with people on an emotional level.
Thirty-four years later, as he seeks the presidency of the United States, these same traits are on display. Setbacks hardly seem to faze him. He is prepared, focused, disciplined, and runs a well-organized campaign. He also has trouble expressing empathy and forging a visceral bond with voters. And his drive to get to the White House has led him to switch positions on a number of issues, raising questions about his core beliefs.
Does Mitt Romney have the makings of a great president? Let's take a look at his journey so far and what we can conclude from it.
Lesson 1: "Speak out, don't sit in."
Willard Mitt Romney was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947. His father, George, spent much of his life as a businessman. Tall, handsome, square-jawed, and ramrod straight, George Romney would go on to lead automaker American Motors to a remarkable turnaround before entering politics and becoming Michigan's governor. At George Washington University, he met his future wife, Lenore. Intelligent and independent, she wanted to become an actress, and, in 1929, after graduating from GWU, she moved to California to accept an offer from a film studio. George followed her there. For four months, she played bit parts alongside the likes of Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered her a three-year, $50,000 contract. Lenore was thrilled, George was not. In what he later described as "the biggest sale of my life," he convinced her to forgo a film career and marry him.
Six-pound Mitt was the Romneys' fourth child and second son. He was the youngest by six years, born after his mother's doctors had told her that she would put her life at risk if she had another baby. Mitt was named after two men: hotel mogul J. Willard Marriott, George's best friend and a fellow Mormon; and Milton "Mitt" Romney, George's cousin and quarterback of the Chicago Bears from 1925 to 1929. In 1953, when Mitt was six, the family moved from Detroit to a modern house abutting a golf course in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills.
To understand Mitt Romney is to understand his parents. They were opposites in many ways. George was the kind of man who burst into a room — gregarious, blunt, a force of nature. Lenore, on the other hand, was calm, controlled, discreet, and private — traits that his friends say Romney possesses, too. A high-school classmate of Mitt's told The New York Times, "George was very unlike Mitt — he was kind of a bull in the china shop, and he would speak his mind regardless. Lenore was much more measured. Everyone is focusing on the father, but he is really much more like his mother."
But Lenore Romney was not without ambition or conviction. She had a steely will and was a passionate advocate for both women's rights and civil rights. In 1963, when she was Michigan's first lady, she told Time magazine that she did not "expect to be a society leader holding a series of meaningless teas." In 1966, she asked, "Why should women have any less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?" She even ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1970.
During Mitt Romney's childhood, though, it was his father who he worshipped. As he later said: "I grew up idolizing him. I thought everything he said was interesting."
George Romney was a deeply religious man, who presided over the Detroit stake (diocese) of the Mormon church. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of Mormonism to the Romney family.
The senior Romney was a fifth-generation Mormon, born in 1907 in a church colony in Chihuahua, Mexico. His great-grandfather Miles Romney was a British-born carpenter, who joined Joseph Smith's young Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1841, when the Mormons were headquartered in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. The temple Miles helped build was burned by mobs, who drove the Mormons out of Illinois. When Smith's successor, Brigham Young, settled the church in Salt Lake City, Utah, Miles helped construct the new temple. The Mormon practice of polygamy was banned by the church in 1896, after the federal government demanded it as a condition for granting Utah statehood. Soon thereafter, Miles' son fled to Mexico to create a sanctuary for the practice. The colony prospered, and Miles' grandson Gaskell became a wealthy rancher and factory owner before he, his only wife, and their five-year-old son George had to flee north across the Rio Grande to escape the Mexican Revolution.
The family settled in Salt Lake City, and George set out to make his own fortune in the teeth of the Great Depression. After a stint as a Washington lobbyist, he became head of the Detroit office of the Automobile Manufacturers Association and helped coordinate the industry's conversion to military production during World War II.
In 1954, two floundering auto brands, Nash and Hudson, merged to become the American Motors Corporation, and George became its executive vice president. The company faltered and was facing bankruptcy. When its CEO died, George assumed the top spot. Selling the family home, he took the proceeds and bought AMC stock. "He literally risks his net worth on his ability to turn things around," Mitt later wrote. George bet AMC's fate on producing a fuel-efficient, thirty-mile-a-gallon car, the Rambler, in an age of gas guzzlers. Not even Mitt was convinced. "If Ramblers are such great cars," he asked his father, "why doesn't everyone have one?" In the end, the gamble paid off, and, in the early 1960s, the Rambler became America's third most popular car.
In 1962, Romney resigned from American Motors to run for governor of Michigan as a liberal Republican. His fifteen-year-old son Mitt was an enthusiastic supporter and campaigner. "You should vote for my father for governor. He's a truly great person. You've got to support him. He's going to make things better," he would say, and he meant every word of it.
Despite a visit by President John F. Kennedy to boost his opponent's chances, George Romney won a narrow victory and was reelected twice, with increasing margins each time. Romney, like his wife, was a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement and earned 30 percent of the black vote in his third campaign, unprecedented for a Republican. During the 1964 presidential campaign, he refused to appear onstage with GOP nominee Barry Goldwater, who he considered too conservative and whose stand on civil rights legislation he abhorred. "The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others," he wrote Goldwater. In another letter, which landed in The New York Times, Romney 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."
This was an exciting time for the Romney family — not only was there financial success, there was moral courage, a sense of being in the thick of history. These heady years defined Mitt's childhood and adolescence and made a profound impression on him.
In seventh grade, Mitt enrolled at Cranbrook, an exclusive private school that boasted a 315-acre campus with Eero Saarinen buildings and Carl Milles statuary. He wasn't a standout scholar or athlete, although he did serve on the cheerleading squad. "He was in many ways the antithesis of what he's portrayed as today," one former classmate remembered, describing Romney as tall, skinny gawky, and with "a bad complexion." Romney is best remembered for one cross-country race in which he failed to pace himself and ran out of steam. The race was run during halftime at a football game, and the finish line was on the field. Through sheer force of will, Romney, stumbling and gasping for breath, crawled across the line. His tenacity earned him a standing ovation from the crowd, and he took it as a lifetime lesson to pace himself.
During his first three years at Cranbrook, Romney commuted between home and school each day. During his last three years, after his father was elected governor, he boarded. The two remained close. The governor's press secretary, Dick Milliman, remembered that "they would hug upon meeting, and not just any hug. [George Romney] . . . would give Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss."
At Mitt's graduation, George Romney spoke. One of his topics: women. "If the girl you're interested in doesn't inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her," he told the seventy-six young men, "then you'd better look around and get another."
Romney went on to Stanford, in sunny Palo Alto, California, a world away from the hard winters and heavy industry of the Midwest. But the climate and the economic base were the least of the differences between the two places. This was the mid-sixties, a time of protests against the Vietnam War and rebellion against authority. Romney was a young man on the straight and narrow, imbued by his parents and church with discipline, propriety, and respect for authority. He followed what his father described a "three point formula for joyous achievement," taken directly from Mormon doctrine: "Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good." At Stanford, when a group of protesting students occupied the university president's office, Romney put on a white shirt and blazer and counter-demonstrated, carrying a sign reading "Speak Out, Don't Sit In."
During his freshman year at Stanford, Romney had something else on his mind in addition to academics and advocating civility. He was becoming about his high-school girlfriend, Ann Davies, and he flew home to see her as often as he could. Ann had been two years behind him at Kingswood, Cranbrook's sister school for girls. Romney tried to keep these visits secret, but his father caught on. Worried that they would affect Mitt's grades, George cut his allowance. Mitt met the challenge — he sold off most of his expensive clothes to pay his airfare.
Originally Posted by Wavebourn
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