The Real Romney (9 page)

B
ut even if Mitt was frequently away from campus, he could not escape the escalating turmoil fueled by Harris and other antiwar activists. A campus rally was headlined by Stokely Carmichael, the new national chairman of the influential Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, who said that U.S. actions in Vietnam were comparable to the lynching of southern blacks. During the course of Romney’s freshman year, the antiwar movement at Stanford had grown from furtive dorm room conversations to massive rallies. Harris became so popular that he was urged to run for student body president, and he launched a long-shot campaign. His growing profile was increasingly disconcerting to the university’s leaders and to students such as Romney. Harris figured there was no chance he would be elected on the conservative campus; he just wanted to get his message out. “You don’t stand a chance of winning,” a friend told him. “This is Stanford.” Wearing a wrinkled shirt, tan moccasins, and blue jeans and sporting a mustache, Harris competed against six opponents who wore suits and ties and worked their connections to the establishment and fraternities. For one rally, Harris traded an ounce of marijuana to members of an emerging band from San Francisco called the Jefferson Airplane for the use of the band’s sound equipment. At another event, he was asked about his attitude toward fraternities. “I think fraternities are a crock of shit,” Harris responded.

Harris’s platform called for ending the university’s cooperation with the war effort, abolishing its board of trustees, and legalizing marijuana. He was against the draft, but also argued that if there was a draft it should apply to everyone, including university students. Why should the war be delegated to the poor, who couldn’t get student deferments? he asked. To the shock of the establishment and even more to Harris himself, he won the election with 56 percent of the vote in a runoff against a fraternity man. “The President Elect—Voice of Radicalism,” reported the
Stanford Daily.
The election made national news; if supposedly conservative Stanford students elected a radical as president, what did that mean for the country? Alumni contributions plummeted. It was a repudiation not only of the establishment but also of politicians such as George Romney and, by extension, of resolute straight arrows like his son. Romney had become a leading member of the university’s Republican Club. But many of his classmates were headed in the opposite direction.

The disconnect between Mitt and many of his fellow students grew increasingly pronounced. A group calling itself the Stanford Committee for a Free University sponsored a series of events called “The New Student—Pot and/or Politics,” with sessions on sex, psychedelic drugs, radicals, and “Politics Without Ideology?” And then there was growing anger over the war and anxiety about the draft. Shortly after Harris’s election, Selective Service officials were quoted in the
Stanford Daily
as saying that draft boards would closely examine student deferments. If a student was at the bottom of his class, the officials suggested, he risked losing the deferment. Across the campus, fear spread that the coveted deferment might be undermined. The issue came to a head when it was announced that 850 students would have to take a Selective Service test that could affect their status. The mere presence of the Selective Service on campus prompted a new uproar. Harris and several hundred other students held a protest on White Plaza and then walked to the office of the university president, Wallace Sterling. Two dozen students (Harris not among them) occupied the office overnight, in what became the first sit-in at Stanford.

Mitt was incensed. Skipping his study discussion group for Western civilization class, which was focusing that spring on the works of Lenin and Marx, Romney put on a blazer and attached a large sign to a pole:
SPEAK OUT, DON’T SIT IN
. Gene Tupper, a photographer who then worked for the
Palo Alto Times
, snapped an indelible image that showed Romney in his white shirt and dark jacket, thick hair sweeping over his forehead, appearing to lecture a protester as he brandished the sign. The picture ran the next day in the newspaper with a caption that read, “Governor’s son pickets the pickets. Mitt Romney, son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, was one of the pickets who supported the Stanford University administration today in opposition to sit-in demonstrators.” Mitt was at the forefront of a group of about 350 antiprotesters, who shouted at the antiwar group, “Down with mob rule!” “Out! Out!” and “Reason, not coercion!” When a university official announced that students participating in the sit-in would be disciplined, Mitt shouted, “Come out of the office and let school continue!”

Romney, asked about the confrontation years later, recalled Harris being on the opposite side and said, “We had animated discussions about political issues.” To Harris, however, Romney was “a zero” who hadn’t made a ripple on campus. But to those who knew him and admired his father, Mitt had earned a reputation as an organizer and was becoming a political figure in his own right; the image of him holding the sign at the antiprotest protest would linger in classmates’ memories. After a childhood watching his father speak out and lead, Mitt plainly had a similar inclination. If he had left home with any intention of distancing himself from his parents and their politics, that time had passed. The sign he carried to the sit-in that day became a marker of sorts, pointing to the public path he would one day follow.

O
ne of the rallying cries for antiwar protesters did hit home for Romney. Mitt, like other Stanford students, had a deferment that meant he had little reason to worry about being drafted. But he intended to leave college after one year to serve the traditional thirty months as a missionary and then return to complete his studies. The missionary interlude created a potential problem. Most Mormons serving missions were declared “ministers of religion” by the church and, under an agreement with the Selective Service, granted an exemption from the draft. But the agreement was not absolute.

Such deferments for Mormon missionaries became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, especially in Utah, leading the Mormon church and the government to limit the number of church missionaries who could put off their military service. That agreement called for each church ward, or district, to designate one male every six months to be exempted from potential duty for the duration of his missionary work. Thus, getting a deferment could be more difficult in a state such as Utah, where the huge Mormon population meant that there were sometimes more missionaries than available exemptions. Romney, however, benefitted from having lived in Michigan, where there were relatively few Mormons. Thus, the odds were high that he would receive a 4-D exemption as a missionary. Barry Mayo, who was counselor to the bishop of the Michigan ward where Romney attended church, said Mitt’s deferment was never in much doubt. “There were some wards, mostly in the West, where the congregation was large and the number of youth was large,” Mayo said. “The circumstances were very different here. Our congregation was small, and the number of youth were small. To the best of my knowledge we never had a situation where we had more than two young men wanting to go in any one year.” Mayo said that no records are available from the period that would show how Romney’s deferment was handled. But by serving as a missionary and being given the deferment, Romney ensured that he would not be drafted from July 1966 until February 1969. Romney’s draft record from the time describes him as “minister of religion or divinity student.”

As the war escalated and the demand for draftees grew, the Mormon exemption drew increasing fire. Some non-Mormons in Utah filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 1968, saying it was unfair for Mormons on a thirty-month mission to receive the same kind of deferment as those in other faiths who made a lifetime commitment to serve a religion. Richard Leedy, the lawyer who brought the suit, said he did so because “the substantial number of deferments to missionaries made the likelihood of us non-Mormons going to Vietnam a lot more likely.”

Romney has denied that he sought to avoid the draft. Asked years later about his lack of military service, he said, “I was supportive of my country. I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.” But on another occasion he seemed to contradict himself, saying, “I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft.”

When Romney’s student and religious deferments ended, his name was put into the lottery based on an individual’s birthday. He drew the number 300 at a time when no one drawing higher than 195 was drafted. He would never serve, voluntarily or otherwise, in the military.

Y
ears later, some of Romney’s Stanford classmates would wonder what had happened to him. He had lost touch with most of them after freshman year ended, and some did not realize that he had intended to leave campus on a Mormon mission. But Mitt’s path was preordained. Like nearly all nineteen-year-old men of his faith, Mitt would be called to serve somewhere around the world for two years. (Many women went on shorter missions at age twenty-one.) During his absence from Stanford, the campus would explode with protests that sometimes turned violent. He would never return there as a student.

His freshman year done, Mitt left campus and headed home to Michigan to spend time with his family—and Ann. While there, he did briefly consider breaking with family and religious tradition and not go on a mission. For one thing, he said, his Mormon beliefs at the time were “based on thin tissue.” What he apparently meant, according to his friend Dane McBride, was that there were relatively few Mormons in Michigan and thus he didn’t have the same kind of connection to the faith as someone growing up in a place like Mormon-heavy Utah. Though Romney’s parents were deeply committed and conveyed their faith to their children, it was normal for a nineteen-year-old about to embark on a mission to have questions about his commitment, said McBride, who would later witness the growth of Romney’s belief.

But Romney’s biggest reason for not wanting to go may have been a fear that he would lose Ann. Countless missionaries before him had left behind girlfriends, only to learn in a letter that the relationship was over. He told her he might not go. But she was insistent. If he didn’t, she told him, he would always regret it. Mitt, having sneaked home on many weekends from Stanford to see Ann, now faced the prospect of having to spend two and a half years apart from her. He would live in a location to be determined by the Mormon Church and try to convince strangers to convert to his faith. While his classmates rushed fraternities and prepared for sophomore year, and as a growing number of people his age were being shipped to Vietnam, Romney’s life was heading in a very different direction.

T
he letter came as Romney completed his year at Stanford. “Your presiding officers have recommended you as one worthy to represent the Church of our Lord as a Minister of the Gospel,” wrote Mormon Church president David O. McKay, whom members revered as a living prophet. From the very start, in the 1830s, the Latter-day Saints had sent out young envoys to preach the Gospel and try to win converts. It was a missionary who had convinced Mitt’s great-great grandparents in England to convert and immigrate to America, and many Romneys had followed the tradition. George had done a mission in England. Now Mitt learned that he would be going to France. It sounded like one of the easier assignments. Some missionaries went to jungles and deserts and islands, while Mitt was off to one of the most cultured societies on the planet. But heavily Catholic France was a society mostly hostile to Mormons. Most French citizens, if they knew anything about Mormonism, were familiar with its history of polygamy and, in a country that takes its wine seriously, for its prohibition against alcohol.

The first Mormon missionary had arrived in France in 1849, but the missionaries had been evicted during the reign of Napoléon III and been evacuated during World War II. In the 1950s, a growing number of missionaries in France had questioned the tenets of Mormonism and embraced other faiths, a scandal that had resulted in nine members being excommunicated. The church had rebounded with a campaign to build chapels in France, and the first two, in Bordeaux and Paris, opened just before Romney arrived. Still, despite more than a century of missionary activity, Mormonism had barely taken root. There were 6,500 Mormons out of 49 million people in France by the time Romney prepared for his mission.

L
ess than two months after Romney left Stanford, he was on his way to the gritty seaport of Le Havre, best known to Americans for being occupied by the Germans during World War II. Horrific bombing had led to the deaths of thousands of residents and the destruction of much of the city. With the end of the war, the French government had undertaken one of the greatest rebuilding efforts in Europe. Over a twenty-year period, Le Havre had been remade into a modernist ideal. It was a long way from the sunny setting of Stanford and its Mission Revival–style architecture. In Le Havre, blocks of boxy concrete buildings surrounded the 351-foot-high spire of the Church of Saint Joseph. The spire served as a memorial to the war dead and a symbol of the traditional Catholic faith of the region. Feelings about Americans had veered from warmth to wariness as World War II receded into memory and the Vietnam conflict wore on. The mayor and other top city officials were Communists, adding to the anti-American sentiment but also fueling hope among the missionaries that some irreligious citizens might be curious about the Mormon message. Into this world of concrete, communism, and Catholicism came the gangly nineteen-year-old, selling something that very few people in Le Havre were interested in buying: a new religion.