Free The Real Romney by Michael Kranish, Scott Helman Page B

presidency. Mike reveres his family’s history, and he takes special pride in having recovered and restored the well-worn organ that Hannah had insisted be taken on the family’s journeys across the American Southwest and Mexico.
    Mike has followed Mitt Romney’s career and thinks he would make a great president, but as of mid-2011 he had never met or spoken to his cousin and can only hope that Mitt takes pride in the family’s remarkable history—and especially its distant patriarch. “Miles Park was a pioneer in every sense of the word. He helped form part of the United States; he helped form part of Mexico. He was faithful to his church, he was faithful to his God, he was honest in his dealings. He was a good man, and I don’t know what more I could ask.”
    T he fourth and fifth portraits that were mounted on the wall in Belmont were, of course, of George and his treasured son Mitt. Mitt Romney rarely discusses the details of his family ancestry, but when he has discussed his faith at length, he has left no doubt of the importance of his family legacy, even as he has stressed that he would never let church leaders influence him if he became president. He has rejected suggestions by some that he distance himself from his religion.
    It is a faith that has deepened year by year. By the time Mitt left the insular world of Bloomfield Hills, leaving Ann behind and heading to college, he was still discovering how being a Mormon put him outside the mainstream of American life. Unlike many Mormons, he did not instinctively head to Brigham Young University in Utah or another institution affiliated with the faith. He felt he had much to explore and discover, so he enrolled at Stanford University in California, near the counterculture haven of San Francisco. As Mitt left for this new journey, much of what his faith and upbringing had taught him would be tested anew.

[ Three ]
     
    Outside the Fray
     
I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam.
    —MITT ROMNEY ON HIS COLLEGE YEARS
     
    I n the fall of 1965, Mitt Romney moved into the third floor of a Mission Revival–style freshmen dormitory on the sprawling campus of Stanford University. All seemed serene on the grounds known fondly as The Farm. Soaring palm trees lined the pathways, and an orderly group of sandstone buildings topped with red-tile roofs clustered around the 285-foot-tall Hoover Tower, named for the former president—a Stanford alumnus—and topped with a forty-eight-bell carillon. The university had begun heavily recruiting the children of the eastern establishment to join the California-heavy student body, and Mitt, in his sporty blazer and narrow tie, seemed to fit right in. He had grown taller, his face was more angular and handsome, and he walked with the stride of a student who expected great things for himself.
    The initial calm would prove deceptive. The freshmen had begun their year as if closed in a bubble, but that wouldn’t last long. “The campus was quite isolated from the real world,” said Wayne Brazil, who lived in Romney’s dormitory. Day by day, Brazil said, “the air started leaking out of that bubble.” On the dorm’s first floor, one of the resident advisers, David Harris, started talking angrily about the United States’ escalation of the war in Vietnam and began organizing protests. Students went to Harris’s room or attended his speeches and got an earful about what was wrong with U.S. policy. The discontent began to smolder.
    Mitt’s third-floor room in the Rinconada dormitory seemed a haven from all that, at least at first. He placed a picture of his father on his desk, hung up his camel-hair overcoat, and shelved his books. His roommate completed the all-American picture. Mark Marquess had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in nearby Stockton and was the first in his family to go to college. He had made his way to Stanford as one of the greatest athletes of