comMITTed to Romney!

The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly

In June of 1968 Mitt Romney died. Twenty-one years old, he had spent the previous two years on a Mormon mission in France, trying to bring French people into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at a time when they were generally more inclined to lecture a young man from Michigan about America’s misadventures in Vietnam. Several months earlier he had watched the presidential aspirations of his father, George, the governor of Michigan, implode over a single word—”brainwashing”—intemperately uttered. But these tribulations had scarcely discouraged Mitt, and he had begun to think hard about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

One night, as his mission was coming to an end, the Citroën he was driving was struck head-on by a Mercedes coming around a curve. Of the five passengers Romney was carrying, several were injured and one died. The policeman who found Romney on the side of the road wrote “Il est mort” on his passport; he had been declared dead.

Back in the States, Mitt’s girlfriend, Ann Davies, got a phone call from George Romney saying that there had been an accident and they’d heard reports that Mitt was dead. So it was that Ann, a senior in high school, ended up spending hours at the Romneys’ Bloomfield Hills home that night, trusting desperately in the invulnerability of youth and in her boyfriend’s capacity to survive. In the middle of the night word finally arrived from a family friend—Sargent Shriver, the U.S. ambassador to France. The policeman had been wrong: Mitt was alive.

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