From Harvard to the White House: Willard Mitt Romney

One impeccable smile. One slick shock of black hair, graying at the temples. Two Harvard degrees.

Mitt Romney has checked off the basic points of a presidential persona.

But behind the pristine grooming lies a unique political figure—a man whose time at Harvard exemplifies how his presidential credentials are at once typical and unprecedented.

So far, Romney has distanced himself from the University as he campaigns for president. He has even derided his opponent Barrack Obama, who attended the Law School, for spending too much time in the “Harvard faculty lounge.”

But in fact, Romney spent four years at Harvard to Obama’s three. And he has the diplomas to prove it—from the Business School and the Law School in 1975.

DUAL THREAT

“It’s obvious that anyone who gets into both the Business School and the Law School is pretty special,” says Malcom S. Salter ’62, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. Salter, along with law professor Detlev Vagts, co-chaired and helped design Harvard’s joint J.D./M.B.A program from its launch in 1969.

The dual degree program typically accepts fewer than 20 candidates each year—a cadre of super-achievers, who take classes at the Law School and the Business School to obtain both degrees in four years.

“Nearly all of them made a lot of money,” says Vagts, who chaired the program for decades and watched many of his former students succeed wildly in business and academia.

Willard Mitt Romney began this rigorous program in 1971, fresh from Brigham Young University with his wife Ann and infant son Taggart in tow. The infamous student riots of 1969 were still fresh in Harvard memory, and while Romney took classes, Richard M. Nixon was ousted from the White House—after Romney’s father had resigned from his Cabinet—and the United States began its withdrawal from the war in Vietnam.

“Everybody was filled with the political ferment that was going on in the country,” recalls Howard Brownstein, another J.D./M.B.A candidate at the time whose roommate was in Romney’s study group. “The vast majority of people going to law school at that time were some brand of liberal activist.”

“Mitt was kind of a throwback,” adds Brownstein. “He just wasn’t a part of all that.”

Professors and classmates alike remember Romney’s engaged attitude in classes at both schools. Always ready to speak when called upon, Romney brought a sports coat and his trademark clean-cut grooming to class.

“My recollection of Mitt was that his hair looked pretty much the way it does it now,” says Law School classmate Robert C. Brown with a chuckle, recalling that many law students at the time wore their hair long and attended lectures in combat fatigues.

But Romney was not the typical law student—he seemed to gravitate toward the Business School from the beginning. Across the river in Boston, the Business School remained something of a conservative enclave in a University that had been dramatically radicalized in the late 1960s. “The Charles River might as well be a moat,” Brownstein says.

According to friends, Romney had always wanted to attend business school, but his father George—longtime governor of Michigan, then Secretary of Housing—wanted him to go law school.

“He compromised—and did both,” laughs Howard Serkin, who sat next to Romney in several first-year business classes.

PREP SCHOOL ‘COUNTRY BOY’

While juggling two distinct academic fields, Romney straddled two social worlds as well—the life of the driven graduate student and that of the Mormon father.

Romney’s graduate school colleagues consistently remember him as “hard working,” “mature,” “nose to the grindstone”— a portrait that contrasts with recent accounts of his pranks and slapstick antics as a prep schooler and then as a Stanford freshman.

“Mitt was always prepared; he was really always prepared,” emphasizes Serkin, a member of Romney’s study group. “He was very demanding. He said, ‘Look, we’re a team, and we want to be number one.’”

Although he was not an intellectual standout, Romney worked hard. He graduated with honors from the Law School and finished in the top 5 percent of his Business School class. “He knows how to do his own homework, let’s put it that way,” says Salter.

Friends and acquaintances say he seemed warm and personable, contradicting his current perception as “cold” or “robotic” on television.

“I didn’t ever think of him as mechanical. He was more of country boy,” recalls Rasmussen. “And it wasn’t phony. It was really the way he was.”

Brownstein remembers that Romney would sometimes make small jokes about his abstension from caffeine, alchohol, and tobacco because of his religion. But his distinct lifestyle and young family separated him from most graduate students. Dinner with other married couples, an occasional game of pick-up basketball, and church functions filled most of his spare time.

“He was always friendly, always cheerful, but he never really opened up to a lot of people,” says Garret G. Rasmussen, a classmate in Romney’s Law School section.

Indeed, as Brown puts it, his time at Harvard was closer to an “office job” than the typical all-encompassing student schedule.

“His life was divided into work with school, work with his family, and work with his church,” says Law School classmate Mark E. Mazo.

Still, Romney interacted with classmates, often inviting friends to his suburban home in Belmont. Outside the Church, he kept his Mormonism low-key—though he attended services regularly, he never proselytzed, according to classmates. Charles Ed Haldeman, a J.D./M.B.A. classmate, says he is not even sure that he knew that Romney was Mormon at the time.

PRAGMATIST TURNED POLITICIAN

Classmates remember Romney as a man driven by pragmatic, analytical concerns mostly disconnected from the tumultous politics that defined the Watergate era.

“We had many conversations over lunch every day. Very few of them were about politics,” says Serkin. “It was very clear he just wanted to be a businessman. He loved business.”

Several remember Romney as a pragmatist, less interested in the theory taught at the Law School than the hands-on case studies essential to the Business School curriculum.

“I didn’t get the sense that he liked ideas for their own sake—only instrumentally,” says Vagts, who taught Romney in a seminar class on law and business and advised him during his time in the joint program.

Some students, like future Senator Charles E. Schumer ’71, who was one of Romney’s Law School classmates, were noted as markedly political. Romney was not, in spite of his widely known political pedigree. “I think he was just a guy who wanted to make a ton of money,” says Brown.

Like many graduates of the J.D./M.B.A. program, Romney never practiced law, and several of his peers remark on traces of his Business School training in his political style.

Haldeman, who served as CEO of Freddie Mac, says he sees the hallmarks of a Harvard-trained private equity manager in Romney’s record of political negotiation. Attending two institutions as politically different as the Law and Business Schools can have a moderating influence on a J.D./M.B.A.’s outlook, he adds.

“Some political balance comes to someone who’s gone through these two schools at a such a unique time,” says Haldeman.

Given his data-driven, adaptable approach, perhaps it is not surprising that some old classmates see a different Mitt when they turn on the television.

“When I see him on the TV attacking President Obama or taking extreme positions, he doesn’t seem like he’s being natural,” says Brownstein. “It’s an adopted persona.”

—Staff writer Jared T. Lucky can be reached at lucky@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: Nov. 1

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Mitt Romney graduated from Harvard Business School. In fact, he graduated from both the Business School and the Law School in 1975.