The Real Romney
July 12, 2012
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The Real Romney
Michael Kranish’s book, published amid the campaign, is lauded for providing a rare complete and balanced view of the enigmatic presidential candidate.
The discerning American voter has a helpful guide to the presumptive Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential campaign. A book about Mitt Romney appeared in print just as the former Massachusetts governor began his second bid for the Oval Office.
Veteran political reporter Michael Kranish '79 BA (PSc) is the co-author of The Real Romney (HarperCollins), which weaves together the Boston Globe's last five years of Romney coverage with both new and previously unpublished material. The result is a far-reaching examination of the disparate political and personal lives of the first Mormon contender for the position of chief executive, a book that the New York Times called "absorbing and fair-minded" and theWashington Post praised as "a more thorough record of Romney's life than has yet appeared."
Kranish, currently deputy chief of the Globe's Washington bureau, co-wrote the book with Scott Helman, a Globe reporter who had covered Romney's gubernatorial term. The pair worked on alternating chapters, drawing from articles both they and eight other Globe staffers had previously written.
"We had great daily and hourly coverage of the candidate," says Kranish, a Washington native. "We want[ed] to complement that with a book that gives you the broadest possible perspective of his life, the context of the times he's lived in - his family, his faith."
From the time he majored in political science at Maxwell, Kranish recalls, he wanted to be a political reporter. (He also earned a journalism degree from SU's Newhouse School.) Soon after graduation, Kranish was hired by Florida's Lakeland Ledger and then the Miami Herald. He joined the Globe in 1984 and became its New England correspondent. In 1987, he moved to Washington to cover Congress, the White House, and the presidential campaigns.
The book was built on a 35,000-word, seven-part Globe series on Romney from 2007, to which Kranish had contributed. When Romney's camp declined to participate in the book, Kranish drew from archival Globe material and unpublished interviews with Romney staffers and family members. He also personally conducted dozens of new interviews, "so we had an oral history, if you will, that's available to no one else outside the Globe."
Since the book's publication in October, Kranish has noticed familiar patterns in Romney's campaign. "As I've seen the campaign unfold, a lot of the things we wrote about in the book have been playing out again," Kranish says. "You can see some of the difficulties he's had and a lot of them are repeating difficulties he's had in prior campaigns."
The Real Romney is the second time that Kranish has tackled a politician on the presidential trail. He co-authored 2004's John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography, another Globe-sponsored effort that incorporated pre-campaign coverage.
For his next book, in 2010, he switched gears. Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War is a piece of historical nonfiction that takes place in 1781. The experience allowed the author to tackle a different genre, "but with the same allegiance to trying to be fair and thorough and documented."
The Real Romney is even-handed in depicting its subject. It catalogues his tangled business dealings, distancing from past moderate stands, and Mormon proselytizing. But it also recounts achievements that made Romney a political innovator in the Bay State and a leading contender for the Republican nomination.
The book's impartiality and thoroughness are what distinguish it. USA Today, for example, lauded The Real Romney for "balanced and rigorous reporting on Mitt Romney's life and career."
"We really went out of our way to give credit where credit's due and document things," Kranish says, "so [the book] wouldn't be challenged. And it hasn't been."
— Jay Blotcher