Mitt's Mission

In his last mission year, 1968, Romney's father was the front runner in the Republican presidential primary—and then, humiliated, was forced to withdraw. Mitt has said the experience barely affected him, but close observers have a different take. Romney Senior was exploring a presidential run when, in September 1967, he said the words that made him notorious. When he visited Vietnam in 1965, he said he thought the United States was engaged in a "morally right and necessary" war. But after investigating, Romney told a Detroit radio station he believed he had been "brainwashed" by the military and the diplomatic corps. "As a result," he said, "I have changed my mind." In retrospect, it sounds like a dramatically principled statement. At the time, the elder Romney was excoriated for "flip-flopping," and in February 1968 he dropped out.

Gerald Anderson, another missionary contemporary who is now an agrologist in Alberta, Canada, recalls visiting with Mitt in Paris around that time. One of the fellows asked Mitt, "What do you hear from your father?" and, says Anderson, Mitt answered, "I hope nothing." What Romney meant, Anderson believes, is that his father said more than he should have. Perhaps it was then that Romney learned the political value of keeping mute. "That's one reason Mitt is very measured in what he says—he doesn't want anyone to seize upon anything he says to scuttle his campaign like they did his father's," says Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who is a Latter-day Saint and says he knew the father well.

After the mission, Romney transferred to Brigham Young, where Ann was enrolled. Within three months, they were married. Outside Provo, the world was in chaos: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated; college students rallied against the war. But in Provo (a.k.a. Happy Valley) all was calm, and Romney flourished. "The idea of going to a place where there was a gathering of the Saints had an attractiveness to Mitt," says fellow missionary Dane McBride, a Roanoke, Va., physician who knew him at BYU. During his time there, Romney took on a backbreaking workload: he was a new father, a leader in the local church and, by the time he graduated in 1971, valedictorian of his class. One shadow fell over Romney's otherwise blissful time in Provo: in 1970, his mother ran for Senate in Michigan and lost.

His parents' campaign disappointments left Romney wounded, but it was not yet time for him to avenge their losses. At the dinner table in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., George Romney had taught his children a rule about running for office: wait until you've made enough money to be beholden only to yourself. "His rules were, you should be financially independent so that you don't have to win an election to pay your mortgage," Mitt says. After graduating with degrees in business and law from Harvard in 1974, Romney went to work as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, where he quickly earned a reputation as a "comer." The son of a celebrated politician, the most handsome man in the room, the ardent missionary, Romney had been rehearsing for the role of corporate go-getter all his life. "Mitt clearly thrived in that environment," says Todd Hixon, a Harvard classmate who worked with Romney at BCG. "He was one of those guys who got everything right."

Getting it right meant getting rich. In the mid-'80s, Romney launched Bain Capital, a private-equity spinoff of the esteemed Boston consulting firm Bain & Co. His success sprang in part from the values taught him by his father and reinforced by his faith. When evaluating a company for investment, Romney and his staff would tear apart company financials, grill managers and contact suppliers and competitors to produce an assessment of the business's strengths and weaknesses. Romney's genius as an investor, colleagues say, came from having the discipline to say no to most deals, even some that promised big windfalls in the short term. Bain's ethic was essentially Mormon: make good choices because you'll have to live with their consequences.

In his private life, Romney stuck even closer to the principles of his youth. In 1971, he and Ann bought a house in Belmont, a quiet bedroom community that would be the Romneys' home base for the next 30-plus years. Here, Romney could raise his five sons much as he had been raised. The boys were children of privilege, but were nonetheless expected to follow a strict routine of Saturday-morning chores, youth group on weeknights and church on Sunday. The Romneys wanted their boys to live a life of order, discipline and faith, but most important, they had to choose it for themselves. "There was never any 'You have to go to church or else'," Romney's son Tagg told NEWSWEEK EARLIER this year. "They led by example."