Bullying Story Spurs Apology From Romney
By ASHLEY PARKER and JODI KANTOR
Published: May 10, 2012
The day after President Obama endorsed gay marriage, Mitt Romney found himself responding to allegations that as a teenager he harassed a prep school classmate who later came out as gay.
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
A description of Mitt Romney in his high school yearbook recalled the “boisterous, exuberant laughter” he was known for.
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
Mr. Romney in another yearbook photograph from Cranbrook. Old acquaintances described an episode in which he bullied a fellow student. Mr. Romney acknowledged playing “pranks.”
The account put Mr. Romney, who has struggled on the campaign trail to cast off his rivals’ image of him as privileged and insensitive, on the defensive about events nearly 50 years ago.
The episode, reported by The Washington Post, occurred at Cranbrook, a private school that Mr. Romney, the son of an automobile executive-turned-governor, attended in Michigan. Mr. Romney returned from spring break in his senior year to find that John Lauber, a quiet, offbeat type, had bleached his hair blond.
Mr. Romney, brandishing a pair of scissors, led other boys on a hunt for Mr. Lauber, teasing him and holding him down while Mr. Romney snipped off his long locks.
“As to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why, I’m afraid I’ve got to say sorry for it,”Mr. Romney, 65, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a Fox News Radio interview on Thursday. He said he also had no reason to believe “the fellow was homosexual,” which was “the furthest thing from my mind back in the 1960s.”
Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer in Michigan, who participated in the episode, recalled it in an interview on Thursday. “It started out as ribbing, sort of a pointed ribbing about his hair, but it very quickly became an assault, and he was taken down to the ground, pinned,” Mr. Maxwell said. “It all happened very quickly — it was like a pack of dogs.”
Mr. Lauber is no longer alive, but several classmates confirmed the account. Others, in interviews on Thursday, said that they were surprised by the accusations, and that they had never known Mr. Romney to act in a vicious or cruel manner.
“One of the last words I would ever use to describe Mitt would be bully,” said John French, a Cranbrook classmate. “If you’ve ever been around guys in a boys’ school, you kid each other and pull little pranks on things, what you might call sophomoric humor, but I really, honestly, do not remember anything being malicious.”
Published against the backdrop of Mr. Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage and Tuesday’s North Carolina vote to ban it, the Cranbrook story was also a measure of how much social attitudes have shifted since Mr. Romney’s youth. Even at his otherwise-strict school, pranks were tolerated with boys-will-be-boys indulgence, and the term “bullying” was decades away from being a subject for assemblies and school psychologists.
Reached for comment, Mr. Lauber’s family said in a statement that they were “aggrieved that John would be used to further a political agenda.”
All day Thursday, the Cranbrook account set off a debate: Was this a sole episode of youthful poor judgment by Mr. Romney or a larger statement about his character? Presidential elections are sometimes described as high school popularity contests on a national level, and the Romney campaign clearly was worried that the episode could define Mr. Romney as a familiar yearbook character: the rich kid with a mean streak.
Some friends and associates of Mr. Romney, including several who are gay, said they had a hard time reconciling the seemingly insensitive younger man with the tolerant, considerate one they have known as an adult.
In Massachusetts, the political director of Mr. Romney’s campaign for governor was openly gay, as was his secretary of transportation. Jonathan Spampinato, the former political director, described their relationship as warm and easy. Mr. Romney was quick to acknowledge his contributions, he said, and wrote recommendations for him for graduate school when the campaign was finished.
“I have no idea what he was like as an 18-year-old, but that is not the Mitt Romney I worked for,” Mr. Spampinato said, referring to the account published by The Post.
When Rich Tafel, the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group for gay men and lesbians, met with Mr. Romney during his 1994 Senate campaign, he found the candidate entirely pragmatic.
“He was like, O.K., I have gay people in my company — what do I need to do to get gay people to support me?” Mr. Tafel said in an interview. Mr. Romney committed one small faux pas, questioning whether gay men would make good Boy Scout leaders, he said. (The implication was that pedophilia could be an issue, Mr. Tafel said.) But “in 1994, everyone was offending me with those kinds of comments,” he said.
For months, the Romney campaign has been trying to turn away from questions about the candidate’s character and focus on his proposals to improve the economy. On Thursday, his aides struggled to deal with the account, first telling The Washington Post that Mr. Romney had no recollection of it. Mr. Maxwell, however, said he was skeptical that Mr. Romney did not remember something that had haunted all of the other men involved, even years later.
“I would think this would be seared in his memory,” said Mr. Maxwell, who identified himself as an independent who tends to vote Democratic. “Certainly for the other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten.”
As the day went on, campaign aides were e-mailing reporters with quotations from classmates with more positive recollections.
And Mr. Romney’s response shifted from a do-not-remember to a vague apology for any high school pranks taken too far, and efforts to deal with any damage.
“There’s no question that I did some stupid things in high school, and obviously, if I hurt anyone by virtue of that, I would be very sorry for it and apologize for it,” he told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto.
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