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A toweringly successful automobile executive who didn’t spend a year in college and was born in Mexico to Mormon parents whose family had taken refuge there, fearing religious persecution from U.S. authorities, George Romney had an early life that was everything his youngest son’s wasn’t: desperate, tough, sometimes dangerous. Early in his boyhood, the family fled Mexico in the midst of a revolution, leaving behind nearly everything they owned.
As a young adult, George Romney dreamed big. After stints as a business owner, a congressional aide and a lobbyist, he ascended into corporate boardrooms before finally winning renown as the magnate who spectacularly turned around American Motors.
By Mitt’s early teen years, his father had plunged into a newcareer in public service. Fiscally conservative but socially moderate, dedicated to forging a Republicanism that invested itself in problems of race and American inner cities, he irked conservative elements of his party. A national figure after his election as Michigan’s governor in 1962, he fought vainly for a civil rights plank in the 1964 Republican Convention platform and, afterward, refused to support the party’s nominee, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, an opponent of far-reaching civil rights legislation. “My dad was a champion of civil rights when some in the Republican Party questioned the civil rights movement,” Romney proudly remembers.
As George began hobnobbing with prominent politicians and high-profile visitors such as Henry Kissinger, who saw in him a possible presidential candidate, he revealed a capacity for social adaptation that in time his two sons would emulate. Although Mormon tenets included abstaining from the use of tobacco and alcohol, “he realized that some of these guys were going out before — or after their meetings — to get a drink,” remembers G. Scott Romney, Mitt’s older brother. “He thought it just wasn’t hospitable not to give them something if they wanted it.”
Young Mitt absorbed his father’s lessons by familial osmosis. As a teenager in the Cranbrook School, the exclusive prep academy attended by many of the scions of auto executives and Michigan business leaders, his faith posed no drawback: His high school life was a charmed one and included landing a girlfriend of another faith, Ann Davies. “There’s nothing unusual [to being] around religions we’re unfamiliar with,” he recalls. “So what? So we’re not all the same.”
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