/ stevenwarran's Library/ Notes/ June 24, 2007, Boston Globe, The Making of Mitt Romney, (Pt. 1 of 7)
June 24, 2007, Boston Globe, The Making of Mitt Romney, (Pt. 1 of 7)
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WEB EXCLUSIVE
The Making of Mitt Romney, (Pt. 1 of 7)
June 24, 2007, Boston Globe, Privilege, tragedy, and a young leader, by Neil Swidey and Michael Paulson,
BERNOS-BEAULAC, France—By the time he saw the black Mercedes barreling into his lane, there was nothing Mitt Romney could do.
He was 21, buoyed by a recent promotion, a young man finally on his way. Two years of getting doors slammed in his face as a Mormon missionary in France had tested him like nothing before in his privileged life, revealing a drive and seriousness that had been absent during his breezy childhood. Now he was the assistant to the president, a top job in the French mission, and behind the wheel of a luxury silver Citroen packed with church officials visiting congregations in southern France.
He knew these roads were dangerous. That very afternoon in June of 1968, on the way from Pau to Bordeaux, he had pulled over to remove a roof rack lying in the middle of the road, a remnant of an earlier accident.
His own crash was swift and brutal. The Mercedes, driven southbound by a Catholic priest, passed a truck, missed a curve, and shot into the northbound lane at a high rate of speed.
''It happened so quickly that, as I recall, there was no braking and no honking, it was like immediate,'' Romney said in a recent interview. ''I remember sort of being hood-to-hood. And then pretty much the next thing I recall was waking up in the hospital.''
Romney responded differently. Since birth, his parents had invested great ambition in their youngest child. Yet his sheltered life had given him few opportunities to show himself worthy of such expectations. Now, with tragedy in the French mission, and chaos in the late 1960s air, Romney emerged as a leader. In President Anderson's absence, the 21-year-old helped direct the mission.
He launched an effort to accelerate the conversions of French people, complete with more ambitious numerical goals. And he kept his anguish to himself.
''There's nothing like hard work and time to heal the pain and sorrow of a tragic loss,'' Romney said. ''What we do with our time is not for frivolity, but for meaning.''
A 'miracle' birth
For Mitt Romney, life began with high drama.
On March 13, 1947, George Romney, a rising star in the auto industry who was often described as a man in a hurry, took time out to write to the relatives and colleagues he'd missed during the previous day's blizzard of telegrams and phone calls. ''Dear Folks,'' Romney wrote on the letterhead of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, where he served as general manager, ''Well, by now most of you have had the really big news, but for those who haven't, Willard Mitt Romney arrived at Ten AM March 12.'' The new baby was not the first, but rather the fourth, born to Romney and his wife, Lenore. Yet as the paragraphs flowed, and Romney detailed how precarious his wife's pregnancy had been, it became clear there was a special level of wonderment embedded in this announcement, in this birth.
''A couple of years ago, the Doctor told Lenore that her condition would not permit her to have another child and that she would have to undergo a major operation,'' Romney wrote. ''However, she had a lot of faith.''
After delivery, he wrote, the doctor examined Lenore and announced in amazement, ''I don't see how she became pregnant, or how she carried the child.'' Romney summed it up this way: ''We consider it a blessing for which we must thank the Creator of all.'' From then on, Lenore referred to Mitt as ''my miracle baby.''
His sisters were nearly 12 and 9 at the time, his brother almost 6, and they didn't wait long to begin the debate over whether to call the baby ''Bill'' or ''Mitt.'' The Willard was in honor of J. Willard Marriott, a family friend and future hotel magnate, and the Mitt was a nod to Milton ''Mitt'' Romney, a cousin of George's and former Chicago Bears quarterback. By the time Mitt settled on his preferred name in kindergarten, the family had moved from Detroit to the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills.
Mitt lived the all-American suburban family experience of the 1950s, with an important exception. The Romneys were one of the Mormon faith's leading families. In fact, the clan's journey from the fringes to the mainstream symbolized the transformation of the church itself. For nearly a century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the most vilified religion in America, its dusty, bearded adherents derided as polygamous outlaws. Born in a Mexican colony that his grandfather had co-founded to preserve polygamy, George Romney was a product of that outsider status. But by the turn of the century, George's father, like the Mormon Church itself, had broken with that past in exchange for acceptance.
George's father struggled to find his foothold in middle-class America, going broke several times, and George carried some of that baggage, laboring as a plasterer rather than earning a college degree. Still, George was determined to go far. He ''married up,'' pairing off with his classy high school sweetheart, Lenore LaFount, who came from a Mormon family several rungs higher on the ladder of assimilation. President Calvin Coolidge had appointed her father to serve on the Federal Radio Commission.
By the middle of the 20th century, the LDS Church had buried its pioneer past of beards and Mormon-centric businesses, pushing instead a clean-shaven embrace of the Chamber of Commerce and the American Dream. And George Romney, refined by his cultured wife, had finally arrived.
He briskly advanced in the business world, moving from salesman to lobbyist to executive, while taking on leadership roles with the church. In 1954, he became president and chairman of American Motors. It was a promotion loaded with peril, since the company was on the brink of bankruptcy.
At a time when Detroit was bent on turning out ever-bigger cars, George bet the future of American Motors on the compact, unflashy Rambler. He called it the antidote to the ''gas-guzzling dinosaurs'' coming from the Big Three automakers.
The gamble paid off handsomely, delivering record profits for American Motors and turning George Romney into a rich man and a national figure.
On his father's lap
By the time Mitt was 12 years old, he had seen his father's square-jawed face grace the cover of Time Magazine. Despite his celebrity, George managed to make more time for Mitt than he had for his older children. ''Dad was more settled by then,'' says Mitt's sister Jane.
From birth, Mitt had enjoyed a starring role in the ''family bulletins'' George mailed out. When Mitt was not yet 2and making his first visit to see Santa Claus, George wrote with pride, ''he walked right up like a man and shook hands!'' In the same letter, he noted that Mitt was ''bold and inclined to be a bit reckless - loves to climb up on high chairs and say, 'Careful, careful, careful!'.'' Throughout his childhood, Mitt logged lots of time sitting on his father's lap, watching him read the paper. As George flipped through the pages, the passing headlines prompted him to share with his son his insights about the wider world.
Cars were George's focus, so naturally they were Mitt's as well. Mitt was quite close with his mother, and he inherited her tact and even temper - qualities that were often absent in her blunt, intense husband. Still, Mittidolized his force-of-nature father, and their relationship would form the central axis in his life.
Other kids wanted to grow up to be a professional athlete or even president, but Mitt aspired to run a car company. On weekends in the summer, when George would join the rest of the family at their cottage on Lake Huron in Ontario, Mitt and his best friend, Tom McCaffrey, would sneak into his father's briefcase for a first look at photos of the cars planned for the new model year.
On the paddle tennis court in front of the cottage, George would compete with his children in matches played to the death. Mitt's older brother, Scott, was the fiercest challenger, sharing their father's competitive streak and athletic ability.
Mitt was never much of an athlete, but even that seemed to work in his favor. Although Scott went through the common adolescent phase of occasionally competing with his father, Mitt always maintained an easy rapport. Scott would marvel at his little brother's confidence in talking with their father almost as a peer. When George would hold ''family councils'' to discuss big decisions he was contemplating, Scott and his sisters would say, ''Gee that sounds fabulous,'' while Mitt would pipe up with, ''Well, have you thought about this?'.''
A face in the crowd
In the seventh grade, Mitt enrolled at Cranbrook School, an elite boys school with world-class sculptures sprinkled across its Bloomfield Hills campus. Surrounded by other sons of privilege, many of whom came from greater wealth and more established families, Mitt wasn't a standout.
''He was in many ways the antithesis of what he's portrayed as today,'' says classmate Jim Bailey. ''He was tall, skinny, gawky, had a bad complexion.'' His report cards tell the story of a bright boy who had yet to feel the urge to apply himself fully. (''He can do a lot better ..... He wastes much time in class.'') In six years at Cranbrook, he never showed himself to be a leader - Bailey went on to be president of their class, not Mitt. Instead, Mitt was known as a kinetic kid who loved to laugh and pull off pranks, once staging an elaborate formal dinner in the median strip of a busy thoroughfare.
Despite the school's rarefied air, it was still a high school, so the jocks tended to be the most popular. Mitt's singular distinction as an athlete was an embarrassing one, classmates recall. He competed in a 2.5-mile race held during a football game, setting off with the rest of the runners at the start of halftime.
Everyone returned before the second half of the football game began, except Mitt. He didn't resurface until about 10 minutes after the last runner. He staggered around the oval for the final lap, collapsing twice in the last 15 yards but drawing cheers from the crowd when he finally crossed the finish line. ''It had to be one of those moments that made you feel good, but inadequate,'' Bailey says. ''But those kinds of things didn't bother him.''
During Mitt's sophomore year, his father leveraged his popularity as a business-turnaround artist to get elected governor of Michigan. George Romney would revive and moderate a moribund Republican Party, impose the state's first income tax, and emerge more popular than ever.
On campus, Mitt downplayed his father's fame, though others showed less restraint. The Detroit News report on a small fire at Cranbrook carried this headline: ''Romney Son Helps Fight School Fire.'' Deep in the article, one learned that Mitt's heroism consisted of opening the building's front door and directing the firefighters toward the small blaze.
More important to Mitt was sharing his father's front-row seat on government, first as a campaign aide and then as an intern in the governor's office.
Dick Milliman, who served as Romney's press secretary, was struck by how much the governor delighted in having his teenage son around. ''They would hug upon meeting, and not just any hug,'' he recalls. ''He would give Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss.''
To Milliman, it was clearly not just afather-son bond but almost a ''partner relationship.'' Around the office, just like around the family home, Mitt seldom held back. ''He would chime in, 'Have you thought about this?'.'' Milliman says, admitting, ''Sometimes you'd think, 'That kid oughta shut up!' But he was always nice to be around.''
All of Romney's success in Michigan prompted talk of him as a presidential candidate in 1964. That didn't happen, but he arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco that summer as a star, inviting Mitt to come orbit around him.
George Romney made headlines by walking out on nominee Barry Goldwater because of his opposition to civil rights. In a subsequent letter to Goldwater, Romney wrote, ''The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others.''
Romney's progressive views on race earned him critics not only in the right wing of his party but at the highest levels of his church. In 1964, a top Mormon official wrote to Romney, calling a civil rights bill ''vicious legislation'' and warning Romney that it was not man's job to remove what he termed the Lord's ''curse upon the Negro.'' Romney refused to back down.
Mitt's primary exposure to black people had been his family's beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and an acquaintance named Sid Barthwell who was the lone black in his Cranbrook senior class. Still, he returned from San Francisco extolling his father's courage in standing up to the Republican right wing.
In his final years at Cranbrook, Mitt emerged a more serious student and a good-looking teen. Adding to the package was his great head of hair. Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father's sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father's top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon Church.
''He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,'' Mitt would recall years later. ''I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in distinct comb lines from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it's just like his was some 40 years ago.''
When graduation arrived, the speaker was none other than George Romney. He hit upon a surprising theme. Girlfriends, the governor told the 76 graduating boys, ''will have more to do with shaping your life than probably anybody else ..... If the girl you're interested in doesn't inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her, then you'd better look around and get another.''
George knew from experience the importance of choosing a mate wisely. He often told family members thatconvincing his high school sweetheart to marry him was ''the best sales job of my life.'' As he looked into the crowd, he knew his youngest son had a sophomore sweetheart he'd fallen for. What he didn't know was that a few days earlier, during a break from the prom, Mitt had taken aside his 16-year-old girlfriend of only a few months and asked her to marry him.
And Ann Davies had said yes.
A question before a kiss
On one of their earliest dates, Mitt leaned in for a kiss, but Ann had other ideas.
''What do Mormons believe?'' she asked him.
Mitt was floored, and frightened. He'd grown up knowing his mysterious faith made him something of an outsider. Now here he was on a date with one of the prettiest girls on campus, someone he knew came from mainline Protestant stock, and she was asking for a tutorial on the Mormon Church?
''I was not in the mood to talk about religion,'' he would say later. ''I was much more interested in physical expressions of love.''
They had first gotten to know each other at a mutual friend's birthday party in the late winter of 1965, when he spotted the wholesome beauty with light brown hair from across the room. Mitt had just turned 18, Ann was 15 - almost exactly the same ages his parents had been when they met. Ann attended Cranbrook's sister school, called Kingswood, on the other side of campus.
Cranbrook in the 1960s still adhered to a strict separation of the sexes. The girls were allowed to see the boys for athletic events, dance lessons, and a weekly movie night in the gym. Beyond that, their interaction was largely confined to letters, which the Kingswood girls lined up to receive daily. Mitt gave Ann a ride home from the birthday party, and that led to a first date going to see ''The Sound of Music.''
Now, she wanted to know about Mormonism. So he turned to the ''Articles of Faith,'' the 13 tenets church founder Joseph Smith had once used to explain his religion to a Chicago reporter.
Mitt looked Ann in the eyes and began with the first article. ''We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.'' When he finished, he noticed that Ann had started to cry.
What Mitt didn't know was that Ann had been brought up in a home with a father who had absolutely no use for religion and she had been on a spiritual search since a young age. Her father had grown up in a coal-mining family in Wales, and Ann's brothers say he associated the religion of his childhood - a Welsh Congregational church he found as dreary as the climate of Wales - with drudgery and hogwash. Before their dad married their mom, he insisted she give up organized religion. ''Dad,'' says Ann's older brother, Roderick Davies, ''considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees.''
But like Mitt, Ann had a special relationship with her father. So he occasionally indulged his only daughter's requests that the family attend services at one Protestant church or another. He remained unswayed by the pulpit and believed his daughter would eventually come to her senses. As for her romance, Ann's father knew Mitt was heading to California for college while Ann still had two years left of high school. So how serious could they be?
Sheltered from a storm
In the fall of 1965, Mitt Romney left behind Cranbrook, with its varsity sweaters and hand-delivered courtship letters, and moved across the country to San Francisco's Bay Area, which was fast becoming the capital of the counter-culture movement. By the time he settled into his freshman dorm at Stanford University, the nearby campus of the University of California-Berkeley had been fully radicalized by the anti-authority Free Speech Movement. In San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury was emerging as an LSD-fueled mecca for free-loving hippies in peasant skirts and dashikis.
Into this world, Mitt showed up with his dark blazers and narrow ties, his idiom peppered with ''oh gosh'' and ''oh boy.'' Classmates remember him as the embodiment of the Young Republican the radicals would mock as a ''square,'' the earnest product of the Chamber of Commerce culture that his family, and his faith, had embraced.
He was mindful of the strict Mormon prohibitions against smoking, drinking, and premarital sex. At Stanford, there were still plenty of clean-cut, traditional kids, and Mitt bonded with a few dorm-mates who shared his world view. That view was immediately challenged by one of their resident assistants, or ''sponsors,'' a charismatic junior by the name of David Harris. A leader in the campus's small antiwar movement, Harris was determined to shake such freshmen as Mitt out of their blazer-and-tie orthodoxy.
Mitt embraced the preppy traditions that Harris saw as inane 1950s residue. Stanford usually played its Big Game against Cal-Berkeley on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and the week leading up to the game was always filled with hijinks.
The winner from the previous year took possession of an ax, which students from the losing side would try to steal. When an upperclassman cheerleader enlisted Mitt in the effort to protect the ax from Berkeley marauders, he pounced. He mapped out a schedule of patrols, cruising the campus perimeter overnight in his Rambler and then loaning his car to other freshmen for their shifts.
When Mitt heard about a rally planned at Berkeley, he figured the ax might be discussed, so he decided to go undercover. He thought his normal attire might make him a target. So he turned to the one radical he knew - Harris - and asked to borrow his clothes. Dressed in Harris's faded Levis jeans, heavy wool work jacket, and well-worn moccasins, Mitt headed over to Berkeley.
His friend Mike Roake accompanied him but opted to hang back as Mitt marched into the rally. ''It sounds silly now,'' says Roake, ''but it was the great crusade in that time of sweet innocence.''
Throughout the year, Mitt talked endlessly about Ann. He once drove nonstop from California to Michigan, showing up at Ann's home a sweaty mess, diving into her pool fully clothed. During his second semester, Ann accompanied Mitt's parents on a visit to see him.
By then, George Romney was increasingly being talked about as a top Republican prospect for reclaiming the White House in 1968. Watching Mitt interact with his parents, Roake was struck by the warmth of the relationship. ''It was especially interesting,'' he says, ''because we were freshmen and therefore in the process of divorcing ourselves from our parents.''
As the year wore on, the Stanford campus became more radicalized, but Mitt stood firm. When demonstrators staged a sit-in of the administration building to protest Stanford's decision to hold draft-status tests, Mitt protested the protesters. The local newspaper carried a front-page photo of Mitt wearing a blazer and holding a sign that read ''SPEAK OUT, DON'T SIT IN.'' The caption read: ''Governor's son pickets the pickets.''
Mitt's own draft status was secure for the next few years. Although his friends would continue to benefit from the deferment for college students, Mitt had decided to leave Stanford after his freshman year and go on a 30-month mission to spread the Mormon faith overseas. It was the same path his father, and generations of Mormon men before him, had taken upon turning 19. As a missionary, Mitt was declared ''a minister of religion'' by the church and, under an agreement with the Selective Service, granted an exemption from the draft.
As Mitt was winding down his freshman year, David Harris ran for student body president on a platform of ending the university's cooperation with the war effort, abolishing its board of trustees, and legalizing marijuana. For one rally, Harris recalls, ''We traded a lid (an ounce) of weed to the Jefferson Airplane so we could use their sound equipment.'' He won the election handily.
Over the next few years, when Mitt was in France, many of his Stanford classmates who'd come from traditional backgrounds were transformed. Even Roake, a good Irish-Catholic boy and Navy ROTC student, would go on to question organized religion and seriously consider registering as a conscientious objector.
Roake often wonders what would have happened to Mitt had he never left. ''Almost everybody I knew there changed,'' he says. ''I know that as a thoughtful person Mitt would have been altered in some way.''
Harris, who would go on to cement his counter-culture credentials by marrying Joan Baez, sums it up this way, ''There were plenty of people who started to the right of Mitt Romney who ended up as full-scale hippies.''
Campaigns, conversions
In 1966, as Mitt struggled to adapt to his grueling first year as a missionary in France, two events that would change his life were happening back in Michigan, out of his view.
First, his father made the decision to run for president in earnest. Second, when he wasn't crisscrossing the country, George Romney was guiding Ann Davies through her conversion into the Mormon faith.
With Mitt away, Ann told George she was interested in attending Mormon services. The governor headed straight for the Davies home. He asked Ann's parents for permission to send some US-based missionaries to meet with Ann. Her mother was an easy sell. But getting clearance from Ann's father, whose rejection of organized religion ran deep, would be a much tougher challenge.
Ultimately, Edward Davies and George Romney shook hands on an agreement: George could send the missionaries, provided Ann's mother sat in on the discussions. Ann's younger brother, Jim Davies, says their father relented based on the trust he had in his daughter and the admiration he had for George Romney. Besides, the governor outranked him. In addition to being a self-made businessman, Edward Davies was the part-time mayor of Bloomfield Hills.
The missionaries came for six straight sessions, sitting with Ann in the family room on the lower level of the Davies' split-level home, taking her through the Mormon conversion process. Besides her mother, Ann's friend Cindy Burton sat in on the lessons. Cindy also was the girlfriend of Ann's older brother, Rod, who was doing a study-abroad year in England. Little brother Jim wanted to sit in as well, but his parents decided he was too young. So Jim stood outside the family room window, listening in.
Before long, George Romney was picking Ann up and driving her to services at the Mormon chapel, and Ann began bringing Jim along. When she decided to be baptized, she asked Mitt's father to do the honors. Dressed in white, she followed George into the baptismal font, where she was immersed while he said the prayers. By February of 1967, Jim had also persuaded his parents to let him join the church, and again George performed the baptism.
Even Rod's girlfriend Cindy decided to become a Mormon, though her father forbade it, warning her that she would become ''a social outcast.'' When Cindy wrote to Rod to tell him of her plans, he agreed with her father, vehemently objecting.
When Mitt lamented in letters home from France that he was failing to gain converts to Mormonism in one of the world's most secular, wine-loving nations, his father tried to cheer him up.
''I was thrilled to stand in for you in connection with Jim's baptism,''George wrote back. ''This makes two converts here that are certainly yours so don't worry about your difficulty in converting those Frenchmen! I am sure you can appreciate that Ann and Jim each are worth a dozen of them, at least to us.''
A few months later, even Rod, the family rebel who had been enjoying the pub-crawling life during his year abroad, returned home a baptized Mormon. Mitt had arranged for missionaries to contact him in England. Thanks largely to Mitt Romney, in less than one year the entire progeny of anti-religious Edward Davies had joined the Mormon faith.
Within the same period, George Romney's presidential campaign went from high-flying to free fall. Under the glare of the national political press, all the qualities that had made the moderate Republican so popular as a businessman and governor began to work against him. Instead of unguarded, he came across as gaffe-prone.
But it was his cloudy and ever-shifting position on Vietnam that caused him the most grief. After visiting Vietnam in 1965 he had given his strong support to military involvement, but he later declared it to be a tragic mistake.
In an interview before Labor Day in 1967, a Detroit broadcaster asked Romney to reconcile his opposing positions on Vietnam. Romney cited the ''brainwashing'' he'd had by US generals and diplomats during his visit there. Before long, the former Time magazine cover boy became the punch line of a national political joke.
On the eve of the New Hampshire primary in February 1968, Romney dropped out of the race. One fellow Republican governor was quoted as saying, ''Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.''
Romney refused to wallow in defeat. Then, just a few months after dropping out of the presidential race, he received devastating news. Mitt, the prince of the family, had been in a horrible car wreck. There was at least one confirmed fatality in the crash along a winding road of Bordeaux, and Mitt was believed to be in critical condition. Initially, the French policeman who found his battered body had marked his passport Il est mort: He is dead.
George reached out to Ann, inviting her to the Romney home as the family waited and prayed for good news. ''I remember the call coming in,'' says Ann's brother Jim. ''I remember the shock of it.''
During Mitt's years away, a kind of father-daughter bond had developed between George and Ann, the father who was the most important figure in his youngest son's life personally preparing his girlfriend to be able one day to assume that role.
In an instant, all of their hopes for the future were tested.
Hours later, they learned that Mitt would survive his serious injuries. It would take them a lot longer to realize the degree to which he would never be the same.
Neil Swidey can be reached atswidey@globe.com. Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com. Ann Silvio contributed to this report.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
June 24, 2007, Boston Globe, The Making of Mitt Romney, (Seven Part Series) Part 1 continued, Survivors recall tragic car crash in France with Romney at the wheel, by Michael Paulson, Globe Staff,
Survivors recall tragic car crash in France with Romney at the wheel,
BERNOS-BEAULAC, France—The mission car was packed that day.
The president of the Mormon mission to France, H. Duane Anderson, was eager to get out to visit congregations after a difficult May in which travel in France had been severely limited because a general strike had caused a gasoline shortage.
A dispute had developed in the small Mormon congregation in Pau, in southern France, and Anderson thought he should pay a call. So he took his wife and two missionaries along, and on the way they picked up a French Mormon couple in Bordeaux.
There were six people in a car that would comfortably seat five, but otherwise it was an ordinary drive that happened to turn tragic.
On the way back from Pau, the car was hit head-on and Anderson's wife, Leola, was killed.
Anderson's driver, a 21-year-old missionary named Mitt Romney, is now a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, with the June 16, 1968, accident one of his rare dark moments.
Romney, who was seriously injured in the crash and was momentarily feared dead, has long said there was nothing he could have done to avoid the tragedy. Interviews with survivors and people who were directly involved in the accident's aftermath largely confirm his description.
"Mitt was not in any way at fault,'' said Richard B. "Andy" Anderson, a son of Leola Anderson, who at the time of the accident was 27, attending graduate school at Harvard and living in Belmont. Anderson, who now lives in Kaysville, Utah, said he has gotten to know Romney in a variety of church roles over the years, and considers him to be a friend. "If I had any reason to think he was in the slightest degree at fault ..."
The accident took place on a curving, two-lane highway insouthern France in an area that, at the time, was rife with car crashes. In fact, Romney had passed another car accident on the same road, just before the collision. And France at the time was a notoriously dangerous place to drive.
The driver of the car that hit Romney, according to an account in a local newspaper at the time, was a 46-year-old man, Albert Marie, from Sireuil. Marie, according to French Mormons who responded to the accident, was a Catholic priest; in an interview this spring, a priest at the parish in Sireuil confirmed that the church's former pastor, now deceased, was Albert Marie. Many of the Mormons familiar with the accident say they believe that the priest was inebriated at the time of the crash but that assertion could not be confirmed. The priest was traveling with his mother, Marie-Antoinette Marie, and a 48-year-old woman, Marguerite Longué, neither of whom could be located.Continued...
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as Mormonism is formally known, had had a variety of run-ins with the French government over the previous century, and did not pursue any civil action after the accident, fearful of a confrontation with either the Catholic Church or the French government.
"Duane Anderson refused to press charges because he didn't want there to be difficulties between the two churches,'' said Andre Salarnier, a French Mormon who now lives in the village of St. Pierre de Plesguen, Brittany, but who in 1968 was living in Bordeaux and rushed to the hospital after the accident to help. The Romney party had dined at the Salarnier home the evening before the accident.
In one of three recent interviews about the accident, Romney said he believes there was a criminal proceeding against Marie, and that he recalls filling out an affidavit about the accident. His spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said in an e-mail, "the governor does not have any records from the court case against the driver who caused the accident in France." At the local police station in Bazas, officials said they do not have any records because they routinely destroy all documents after 10 years.
The trip to Pau began in Paris, where the Andersons, known to Mormons by the titles "president" and "sister,'' got into the Citroen DS, the best of several cars owned by the French mission. Some of the missionaries, including Romney, had thought Anderson should drive a Mercedes, which was considered a better car, but Anderson had wanted to use a car made in the country of the mission, and the DS was the best French car on the market at the time.
The couple had Romney, who had just moved into the grand manse in Paris that served as the mission headquarters and was Duane Anderson's junior assistant, serve as their driver. They also brought a second staffer, David L. Wood, a 21-year-old from Salt Lake City who was serving as mission coordinator.
The Paris foursome stopped in Bordeaux on the way south to pick up a French Mormon couple, Bertin and Suzanne Farel. Bertin Farel was the president of the Bordeaux district for the Mormon church, with oversight responsibility for a variety of church branches in the region.
On the drive south from Bordeaux to Pau, Suzanne Farel rode in the middle of the front seat; passengers have conflicting recollections about whether the car had a bench seat or a console between two bucket seats. On the drive back north, the two women in the car switched positions; Leola Anderson was sitting up front between Romney and Duane Anderson, with the Farels and Wood in the back.
As they passed through the village of Bernos-Beaulac, in the midst of a verdant landscape known for its fine vineyards, they happened upon a car accident, with police still at the scene, in which a 34-year-old man had lost control of his vehicle and smashed into a tree, according to an article at the time in a regional newspaper, Sud-Ouest. The Romney party pulled over to remove a roof rack from the highway, and then resumed its journey.
"We were all talking about how dangerous how the highways were and the French highways, as you know, have the trees that line the road, and we were all talking about how dangerous that was,'' Romney said. "And literally as we were having that conversation, boom, we were hit.''
The accident, according to the Sud-Ouest article, took place in front of the post office on the north side of the village, which is sometimes referred to as Beaulac.
"We were driving, as I recall, through a curvy section of road where the speed limit is very low - I can't remember what it is, but a very low speed limit - and suddenly there was a car in my lane that appeared so quickly around the corner or over the hill, I just don't recall the topography terribly well at this stage, but it happened so quickly that, as I recall, there was no braking and no honking - it was like immediate,'' Romney said. "My understanding was he ... had been passing a truck and the truck driver said he estimated his speed at about 120 kilometers, which is about 70 miles per hour. And so we had an immediate head-to-head kind of collision.''
The road has been significantly improved since the accident, but it still curves in front of the post office; it is lined with large trees and one can see that it would be possible for a southbound driver to miss the curve and cross into the northbound lane.
Of the six people in Romney's car, three are still alive - Romney, Wood, and Suzanne Farel. The three said they have not communicated over the last four decades, but in separate interviews, all three offered similar accounts of the crash.
"We were leaving the village, we were going pretty slowly, and there was a little hill and a turn to the left, and a car was coming from in front, and we didn't have time to realize, it crossed the road, and we hit - it missed its turn,'' recalled Suzanne Farel during an interview at her home in Bordeaux. "My husband was the only one that got out of the car, and he went to get help.''
Wood, now an instructor of French and Latin at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts in Natchitoches, La., offered a similar description, although he noted that both he and Romney had been knocked unconscious in the crash so their memories of the moment of impact is weak.
Wood said he believes he received a settlement from the Mercedes driver after the accident; Romney has no such recollection.
Wood said Romney was a cautious driver.
"We were conservative - he was below the speed limit,'' Wood said. Wood also noted, in response to a question, that Mormons are prohibited from consuming alcohol, and said no one in their vehicle had been drinking.
Romney, asked whether he was obeying the speed limit, said, "Oh yeah, I was probably going less than the speed limit, so far as I know."
Photographs of the vehicles, obtained from the Salarniers and the Farels, are consistent with a head-on crash, showing that the front ends of both cars are smashed in.
Only Bertin Farel was able to walk away and call for help; Romney said he had to be pried out of the car - he was so seriously injured that the police officer who first responded believed him to be dead and wrote "Il est mort'' - he is dead - in Romney's passport.
The injured were transported by ambulance to a hospital in nearby Bazas, a small town famous for a grand medieval cathedral and for a local breed of choice cattle.
Word of the accident spread quickly through the Mormon world, and help began arriving within hours.
Under instructions relayed to Paris from Salt Lake City, missionaries Joel H. McKinnon, who was the senior assistant to Anderson, and Byron W. Hansen, who was the mission secretary, responded immediately. They left Paris at midnight and drove through the rain, arriving in Bazas at 8:30 a.m. the day after the accident, according to Hansen's journal entry, which begins, "tragedy struck last night.''
Hansen, now a Chevrolet dealer in Brigham City, Utah, recalled that "when we initially arrived, they thought Mitt had been killed - the nurses told us that was the initial report.'' McKinnon, now a mission president in Montreal, recalls that the young men had to inform Anderson that his wife had died; the doctors had declined to do so.
From Bordeaux, the Salarniers rushed to the scene.
Meantime, in Michigan, Romney's father, Governor George Romney, called on his son-in-law, Bruce H. Robinson, a medical resident then married to Mitt's sister, to fly to France and oversee the medical care.
"I was making rounds that afternoon in Michigan, and George Romney called me, and said, 'Mitt's been in a fatal car crash; he's survived so far, but we don't know the extent of his injuries,' '' said Robinson, who now lives in Idaho. Robinson drove straight to the airport and flew through the night to Paris, and then to Bordeaux, arriving June 18.
"Mitt was just coming out of his coma, but his face was all swollen, his eye was almost shut, and one arm was fractured,'' Robinson said. "We didn't have CT scans or MRIs in those days, but we got what tests we could to show that he was OK, and that he was certainly going to survive, although he probably came within a hair of not surviving.''
But Robinson said Romney recovered quickly without surgery, benefiting in part from his youth and general good health.
Anderson had a tougher recovery; Robinson recalls that he had a crushed chest, fractured ribs, a collapsed lung, and injuries to his liver and spleen. The church, Robinson said, rented a private train car to transport Anderson back to Paris on June 20, and the next day Robinson flew with Anderson back to Los Angeles for the burial of his wife in San Bernardino and for his own medical treatment. Anderson died in 1995.
Romney threw himself into work, and his fellow missionaries said they were struck by his resilience. But Romney says the accident affected him deeply - he recalls sobbing on his return to Paris when watching Anderson realize his wife was really gone - and says he talked about the accident repeatedly with his family.
"I was frightened of driving a car, or being in a car, and had a sense of vulnerability, that I had not experienced before,'' Romney said. His fear was described in a letter that his assistant at the mission home, Bill Ryan, wrote to his family in fall 1968; Ryan, who had been in an earlier accident himself in France, wrote of Romney, "He is as scared, if not more so, than I am of driving in France.''
The missionaries apparently had good reason for concern. In December 1968, they were in another accident, in which the Peugeot Romney was driving through Le Mons was hit from behind by a dump truck.
"I looked in the rearview mirror, and there was a garbage truck coming quickly behind us, with people in the front seat, all laughing and talking, and it was a snowy day,'' Romney said. "He ... slammed into the back of my vehicle, which caused it to slam into the car in front of us, and they kept going - bang, bang, bang, bang!"
No one was seriously injured, but Ryan, now a retired assistant US attorney in Utah, said Romney, who would return to the United States a few weeks later, had had it with French roads.
"Elder Romney is glad not to have to drive anymore,'' Ryan wrote.
Michael Paulson can be reached by e-mail at mpaulson@globe.com. Globe correspondent Julie Chazyn contributed to this report from France.
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
June 24, 2007, Boston Globe, Mormon church obtained Vietnam draft deferrals for Romney, other missionaries, by Michael Kranish, Globe Staff
As the Vietnam War raged in the 1960s, Mitt Romney received a deferment from the draft as a Mormon "minister of religion" for the duration of his missionary work in France, which lasted two and a half years. - See
Before and after his missionary deferment, Romney also received nearly three years of deferments for his academic studies. When his deferments ended and he became eligible for military service in 1970, he drew a high number in the annual lottery that determined which young men were drafted. His high number ensured he was not drafted into the military.
The 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 church district, to designate one male every six months to be exempted from potential duty for the duration of his missionary work.
Romney's home state was Michigan, making his 4-D exemption as a missionary all but automatic because of the relatively small number of Mormon missionaries from that state. It might have been more difficult in Utah, where the huge Mormon population meant that there were sometimes more missionaries than available exemptions. Most missions lasted two and a half years, as Romney's did.
Barry Mayo, who was counselor to the bishop of the ward in Pontiac, Michigan, where Romney attended church, recalled in an interview that wards were allowed to exempt one missionary every six months from the draft. He said that he could not recall any time in which more than one potential draftee sought an exemption in the ward in a six-month period, so Romney's deferment was never in doubt.
"I was aware of the fact that there was an agreement of some sort of between the church and the Selective Service because 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... So I don't believe that we ever had to discourage someone from going on a mission because he was above that two-per-year limit."
Mayo said no records are available from the period that would show how Romney's deferment was handled. But he said he recalled "the conclusion was `we really don't have to worry about [exceeding the quota] because we were never in that situation.' "
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." Mayo said the church would have considered Romney a minister.
Romney, who has said he would have served if he had been drafted, shed some light on his view of the matter in a recent interview with the Globe.
"I really don’t recall thinking about political positions when I was knocking at the door in France" as a missionary, Romney 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."
At the same time, Romney said, he was influenced by the statement of his father, then-Michigan Governor George W. Romney, who said in 1967 that he had been "brainwashed" by US officials about Vietnam. "When my dad said that he had been wrong about Vietnam and that it was a mistake and they had been brainwashed and so forth, I certainly trusted him and believed him," Romney said.
The exemption for Mormon missionaries created controversy at the time. Non-Mormons in Utah filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 1968. The suit was still in court two years later, at a time when "the church and the Selective Service System work hand-in-hand in deferring the missionaries," according to an article from the period published by The New York Times.
Richard Leedy, the lawyer who brought the suit, said in a telephone interview that 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."
Separately, Romney's draft service was deferred due to his status as a full-time student for about three years.
Romney registered with the Selective Service in April 1965 but was not considered readily available for military service until December 1970. His name was then put into the lottery based on an individual's birthday, and he drew the number 300 at a time when no one drawing higher than 195 was drafted.
"When Governor Romney's deferment for college and missionary service ended, he made himself available for military service, and his name went into the lottery, but he was not selected," Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said via e-mail.
Michael Kranish can be reached atkranish@globe.com
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