Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Romney: A Reckoning," by McKay Coppins.
When I first told Romney I wanted to write a book about him, my pitch was straightforward. Few political figures in the twenty-first century had undergone a more interesting transformation than his. In less than a decade, he’d gone from Republican standard-bearer and presidential nominee to party pariah; from careful and calculating politician to unlikely model of moral courage in politics. What had happened? Why had he changed? Were there lessons in his evolution that might benefit future leaders? Still, I worried that he might not be ready to answer these questions honestly. I remembered his presidential campaigns, the tightly controlled talking points, the near-religious conviction in staying on message. Some of his friends tried to wave me off the project. “He’s not going to give you what you need,” said one. I figured he’d balk when I told him my conditions—full access, complete candor, and to yield no editorial control. (He’d get to read the manuscript before it was published, but I’d be the one to decide what went in it.)
To my surprise, Romney responded to my terms as if they were a dare. He instructed his scheduler to start blocking off evenings for interviews, and told me no subject would be off-limits. He handed over hundreds of pages of his private journals, and years’ worth of personal correspondence, including sensitive emails with some of the most powerful Republicans in the country. When he couldn’t find the key to an old filing cabinet that contained some of his personal papers, he took a crowbar to it and deposited stacks of campaign documents and legal pads on my lap. He’d kept all this stuff, he explained, because he thought he might write a memoir one day, but he’d decided against it. “I can’t be objective about my own life,” he said.
In the spring of 2021, we began meeting every week he was in Washington. Some nights he vented; other nights he dished. He’s more puckish than his public persona suggests, attuned to the absurdist humor of political life and quick to share stories others might consider indiscreet. I got the feeling he liked the company—the conversations sometimes stretched for hours.
“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said, and it came as a surprise. Romney had internalized the partisan idea that Democrats were the ones who abandoned Constitutional principles in the name of “progress,” while Republicans were committed to conserving them. But it’s hard to live through an attempted insurrection that was instigated by the leaders of your party and still believe they mean it when they talk about their reverence for America’s founding documents.
Now he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of his party a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? Was the rot on the right new, or was it something very old just now bubbling to the surface? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing that rot to fester? To find the answers, he would need to go back, to pick through his thirty-year political career, accounting for the compromises he’d made and looking for clues.
I had never encountered a politician so openly reckoning with what his pursuit of power had cost, much less one doing so while still in office. Candid introspection and crises of conscience are much less expensive in retirement. But Romney was thinking, perhaps for the first time, beyond his own political future.
Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a long rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through four thousand years of human history. When he first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire reigned for some nine hundred years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventually collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.”
“This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”
For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure if the cathedral would hold.
Mitt took Ann to prom later that year and told her that he wanted to marry her one day. She said she felt the same way. But when he suggested that he might skip his Mormon mission so that they could start their lives together sooner, she balked. Somehow, she knew better than he did how important his faith would become to him.
“You’ll resent me for the rest of your life,” she told him. “You have to go.”
At one point during the tour, Trump pulled Romney aside. “You’ve got to see this,” he said. They entered a large walk-in vault, where Trump excitedly opened a drawer to reveal a set of gold-colored silverware. “They didn’t know this was here when they sold me the place,” Trump boasted. “The silverware is worth more than I paid for the house. I’m gonna make a fortune on this place.”
Romney, who doubted they were actually looking at solid-gold silverware, chose to smile and play along.
“You know,” Trump went on, “the bank has me on $140,000 a month.”
Romney was confused. “What do you mean?”
Trump explained that his businesses owed more than a billion dollars to dozens of lenders. “The only chance they have of getting anything back is if we keep up appearances,” he said. “So, they loan me $140,000 a month” to maintain the Trump brand. He seemed tickled by this fact, as if he was getting away with something hilarious.
Romney had no idea if Trump was telling the truth, and he didn’t especially care. This was the Trump experience he’d been hoping for—memorable, low-stakes, and deeply weird. Trump might not be a serious person, but he was undeniably entertaining. When the weekend ended, Romney thanked his host, departed Mar-a-Lago, and filed the weekend away as a funny story to tell friends. He doubted he’d ever see Trump again.
Night after night, Romney castigated himself in his private diary.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he wrote.
“Awful, shameful, sorrowful,” he wrote.
“How I will have let so many down,” he wrote. “I can’t dwell on it—it is overwhelmingly depressing, even agonizing. I am so, so very sorry.”
Mike Leavitt, the former governor of Utah and a close friend and adviser, had once told him that political leaders are often defined by the things they least expect. For Leavitt, it had been the Salt Lake City Olympics. For Jimmy Carter, it was a helicopter crash in Iran. Romney now feared that this would be what he was remembered for—a surreptitiously recorded rant that ran directly counter to his true motivations for seeking the presidency.
Because for all his ego and self-regard, for all his visceral love of emergencies and catastrophes, Romney still believed he was running to help the Americans who were in trouble. And yes, that included—especially included—those who were poor and wallowing in the federal welfare system. “The rich will do fine with or without me,” Romney wrote in his journal. “It’s the rest that need my experience and economic direction.”
It did not escape Romney that he was now entering the same terminal stage of a campaign that his father once had, and for roughly the same reason. Mitt’s diatribe wasn’t a perfect parallel to his father’s “brainwashing” comment. (In some ways it was worse.) But the spectre of George’s gaffe-induced meltdown had haunted his son’s entire political career—somehow, it seemed darkly fitting that his own quest for the presidency would end in a similar whimper.
As Romney spiraled, his advisers sought to rally him. A “war council” was convened in Boston, where a retinue of Republican governors and party elders took turns assuring the nominee that he could recover from the 47 percent video. (“I get lower and lower as I think about how I have messed up, with such consequences for everyone who has been counting on me,” he wrote. “I leave the session pretty depressed.”)
George W. Bush called to buck him up. Don’t worry, he said, if Obama is anything like me, he’ll screw up before this election is over.
After he was elected, Romney had begun typing out a list on his iPad of all the things he wanted to accomplish in the Senate. By the time he took office, it contained forty-two items and was still growing. The legislative to-do list ranged from complex systemic reforms—overhauling the immigration system, reducing the national deficit, addressing climate change—to narrower issues such as compensating college athletes and regulating the vaping industry. His staff was bemused when he showed it to them—even in less polarized, less chaotic times, the kind of ambitious agenda he had in mind would be unrealistic—but Romney was undeterred. He told his aides he wanted to set up meetings with all ninety-nine of his colleagues in his first six months, and began studying a flip-book of senators’ pictures so that he could recognize his potential legislative partners.
Romney began each meeting roughly the same way: “Look, I’m obviously new to this body,” he’d say. “I’m happy to share with you the things I would like to accomplish as a senator, but I’m here to understand what things are most important to you.” He took notes, asked follow-up questions, and seemed genuinely interested in picking their brains. Many of the senators, who knew Romney primarily from TV, were surprised. “I don’t think there was a single senator who assumed that’s how Mitt Romney would approach his time in the Senate,” Waldrip recalled.
In one early meeting, a colleague leveled with him: “There are about twenty senators here who do all the work, and there are about eighty who go along for the ride.” Romney saw himself as a workhorse, and wanted others to see him that way, too. “I wanted to make it clear: I want to do things,” he’d later recall. He quickly became frustrated, though, by how much of the Senate was built around posturing and theatrics. They gave speeches to empty chambers; spent hours debating bills they all knew would never pass. They summoned experts to appear at committee hearings only to make them sit in silence while they blathered some more.
The hearings were especially irksome to Romney. “They’re not about learning. They’re not about fact-finding. They’re about performing,” Romney complained. “Sometimes I get a little frustrated.… If we have someone there who’s interesting, why are we giving speeches?”
There was something strange about all this restless plotting, a manic quality that seemed out of character for the measured management consultant. As a rule, septuagenarian senators on the verge of retirement don’t spend their spare time earnestly game-planning long-shot schemes to save democracy. But Romney couldn’t just stop. He felt, as ever, that he had something unique to offer—that if he didn’t solve this problem himself, well, who would? This meld of moral obligation and personal hubris was, in some ways, Romney’s defining trait. It was why, when so many fellow Republican statesmen were content to fade into the background of American life as their party left them behind, Romney insisted on clawing his way back into the fray. It was why he spent years running for president despite finding almost everything about the process unpleasant, and why he left Bain at the height of its success, with hundreds of millions of dollars still on the table, to take over the Olympics. When he was feeling sentimental, he attributed this impulse to the “Romney obligation,” and talked about the sense of duty and public service he’d inherited from his father. When he was in a more introspective mood, he talked about the surge of adrenaline he felt when he rushed toward emergencies and catastrophes. Both, of course, were true.
Romney is an “easy grandparent,” his son Matt tells me. The boys like to joke about how the same man who used to drag them out of bed on Saturday mornings to do yard work now tells the grandkids not to bother with the dishes and slips them money for sodas when their parents aren’t looking. “I’m like, oh, that’s pretty rich coming from you!” Matt says. The grandkids, who call him “Papa,” respond by messing with him relentlessly. At one point, Romney takes a gaggle of grandkids out wakeboarding and becomes so engrossed in telling me about the John D. Rockefeller biography he’s been reading that he doesn’t realize two of his grandkids have pushed a third off the back of the boat. By the time Romney notices, the marooned kid is bobbing in the water several hundred yards off.
“Guys,” Romney grumbles, turning the boat around as the perpetrators double over in laughter.
Watching Romney in this setting, I can’t help but think of a certain former president, cocooned in his Palm Beach Xanadu with his third wife, fuming over something he saw on cable news, walking into ballrooms to bask in the applause of strangers. Researchers who study the effects of power on the brain have found that it can be enormously damaging. Powerful people tend to become more impulsive and less empathetic; the neural process that enables them to simulate others’ experiences ceases to function. To mitigate these effects, experts say, it’s essential to have a “toe-holder” in your life—someone to keep you grounded and admonish you when necessary. Romney has built a life full of toe-holders, chief among them Ann—the girl he fell in love with sixty years ago, the woman whose approval he still desperately courts.
In our two years of interviews, Romney’s efforts to process his party’s evolution—and his own—were halting and messy. He’d seem to confess complicity in one meeting, then walk it back in the next. He’d get angry and then cool off. Some days he worried he was being too harsh to certain fellow Republicans, who weren’t entirely bad after all—no one ever is. Later, after reading a draft of this book, he will complain that I made too much of his transformation in the Trump years, and that I dwelled too much on the self-serving rationalizations he employed earlier in his career. Those lapses, he argued, have been the exceptions in his life, not the rule, and they’re hardly unique to him. Fair enough. Romney is the ultimate authority on how often he’s deferred to his better angels. I wouldn’t presume to know better than him.
But his rationalizations fascinate me because they’re so common in Washington. The path to this fraught moment in American history is paved with compromises made for political advantage that didn’t seem like compromises at the time. What makes Romney unusual as a political figure is not his capacity for self-justification but the fact that he recognized it in himself and worked to guard against it. I once asked him if he would have taken the same lonely, principled vote to convict Trump if he’d been put in the same position thirty years earlier. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he reflected. “I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self-interest. And I don’t know that I recognized that to the same degree back then.”
At a moment when courage is in vanishingly short supply in politics, it’s worth considering what made Romney finally choose to do the right thing instead of the convenient one—and whether the phenomenon can be replicated.
