The Bentley Historical Library|The Associated Press|Getty Images|Romney Family|ReutersThe Caucus | The Other Romney Parent: In style and temperament, Mitt Romney may have been influenced as much by his mother Lenore as his father George.
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney was 22 when his father came to him and his siblings in search of political advice in December 1969. George Romney, the former Michigan governor, was mulling the electoral prospects of another Romney: his wife, Lenore. The Inspiration
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George and Lenore Romney, in an undated photograph with their children, from left, Mitt, G. Scott, Jane and Margo Lynn. A onetime Hollywood starlet who quit acting to get married, Lenore Romney had few political credentials. But she had been a popular first lady, and her husband was tied up in Washington as President Richard M. Nixon’s new housing secretary. Top Michigan Republicans were wooing her to run for a United States Senate seat. “The children laughed about it,” Elly Peterson, a Romney confidante and party strategist, later wrote in a private memoir. “Then Mitt, first, and gradually the others, began to change their minds. They finally decided she should go with it.” Today Mitt Romney is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, facing a tough primary battle here in the state where he grew up. His Michigan campaign brochures and commercials are studded with black-and-white images of him with his father, a businessman-turned-politician he once called “the real deal.” But a look at the lesser-known Romney, Lenore, suggests that in style, temperament and outlook, Mitt Romney is very much his mother’s son. A faithful Mormon and stay-at-home mother who eventually emerged as an advocate of women’s involvement in business and politics, Lenore Romney, who died at 89 in 1998, had a “steely will,” in the words of Phillip Maxwell, a childhood friend of Mitt’s. Her larger-than-life husband was blunt and candid, a fiery campaigner who burst into a room. Lenore was controlled and self-contained, traits that friends say they see in Mitt, her youngest child. “George was very unlike Mitt — he was kind of a bull in the china shop, and he would speak his mind regardless,” said Mr. Maxwell, a classmate of Mitt Romney’s at the Cranbrook School, an elite private academy here. “Lenore was much more measured. Everyone is focusing on the father, but he is really much more like his mother in that he is much more private than his father was.” Just two years after Mr. Romney learned the brutality of politics through his father’s failed 1968 presidential bid, he witnessed his mother’s bruising 1970 defeat. Then 23, and already married, he had taken a summer break from his studies at Brigham Young University to campaign for her, appearing on college campuses and county fairs — an experience that he later said “taught me how to get out and see people and listen to what people are saying.” She was ill-equipped for the rigors of politics — “Lenore was no George as a political candidate,” says Bill Ballenger, the editor of a political newsletter here — and lost badly to a popular Democratic incumbent, Phil Hart, much as Mitt Romney would later lose his 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts to another entrenched Democrat, Edward M. Kennedy. And though Lenore Romney expected a glide path to the Republican nomination on the strength of her family name, she faced a difficult primary challenge from her party’s right wing, just as her son faces in his race today. “There’s been a lot of conversation about whether Mitt Romney can excite the Republican base, the Tea Party-type people,” said Sara Fitzgerald, whose biography of Elly Peterson recounts Lenore Romney’s uphill struggle as a candidate. “One of the things his mother went through was being sniped at by the conservative right wing of the Michigan Republican Party. People commented that she got more opposition from the conservatives than she got from Phil Hart.” Mitt Romney declined to be interviewed for this article, as did other Romney relatives. On the campaign trail, if he mentions his mother, he casts her in a supporting role to his father. But while Lenore Romney was a traditionalist — she had little use for the “strident voices” of the women’s liberation movement, and believed “a wife is a vital part of a husband’s development” — she also had a strong message about the influential role women could play in business and government. 