The position of Republican presidential aspirant, like that of New York Giants quarterback, is rich in patrilineal psychodrama. There is the slowly unfurling, three-generation saga of the Bushes; the meticulous dutifulness of John McCain, who followed his father and grandfather into the Navy; and now the fascinating case of Rand Paul, who is trying the tricky feat of at once upholding and modernizing his father Ron’s orthodox libertarianism.
The complexity of these relationships isn’t surprising — it is difficult living with a potent legacy. But if each of these famous sons has subtly recoiled from the model of his father, there is no such truculence in Mitt Romney, whose life, in its schedule and in its imagery, has mirrored his father’s almost exactly, with George Romney’s success acting as an advance advertisement for his eldest son. “When I saw Mitt, I instantly saw George Romney,” says Bill Bain, the man who picked Mitt to start the investment firm Bain Capital.
(Harper) - “The Real Romney” by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.
The younger Romney has done what he can to deepen the impression: He announced his first run for president in Michigan, a state where he had never been a public figure but his father had, as a lauded auto executive and then as governor. Next to Mitt onstage was a vintage Nash Rambler, the car that represented the triumph of George Romney’s business career. “His whole life,” said John Wright, a close family friend, “was following a pattern which had been laid out by his dad.”
Political observers have long noted the ways in which the shadow of the father, an iconic establishment figure — as a businessman, the savior of Detroit, as a politician, a moderate, pro-civil-rights Republican — has served Romney well and helped spur his career. But a curious hole at the center of Romney’s public persona has become more obvious during this presidential campaign. No one seems to know what his principles are or what motivates his involvement in politics, and the candidate has not seemed eager to let people know. This, too, may owe something to having inherited a calling.
We know from Mitt’s wife, Ann, that one morning in the summer of 1993 she woke up and, invoking the Romney family legacy, argued forcefully that Mitt had a responsibility to go into politics, and fast. (We also know that her husband’s first response was to dive under the covers.) A few months later, Romney was challenging Ted Kennedy in the Massachusetts Senate race. What we don’t know — what Ann Romney has not reported — is the precise dynamic of her husband’s decision: Did he volunteer, or was he pushed?
For any biographer, Romney presents — to put it gently — a high degree of difficulty. Not only is the former Massachusetts governor deeply cautious, but the two institutions that have been perhaps the most important to life and his career — the Mormon Church and the private-equity firm Bain Capital — are heavily fortified and stonily non-transparent. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, veteran Boston Globe reporters, have assembled in “The Real Romney” a genuinely compelling story and a more thorough record of Romney’s life than has yet appeared. But their account nevertheless fails to penetrate Fort Romney’s formidable defenses. Theirs is a portrait of Romney as a public figure, its narrative exposing not so much the man as the career.
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