No Apology: The Case for American Greatness

305 Pages·2010·1.32 MB·English

by  Mitt Romney

No Apology: The Case For American
Greatness
No Apology: The Case For
American Greatness
No Apology
By
Mitt Romney
ALSO BY MITT ROMNEY
Turnaround:
Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games
NoApology
THE CASE FORAMERICAN GREATNESS
Mitt Romney
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
The extract on pages 177–78 were originally published in The
New Yorker. The chartsthat appear on pages 140, 141, 207, 209, and
238 are reprinted with permission.
NO APOLOGY. Copyright 2010 by Mitt Romney. All rights
reserved. Printed in theUnited States of America. For information,
address St. Martin’s Press,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Design by Kathryn Parise
ISBN 978-0-312-60980-1
First Edition: March 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Allie, Joe, Thomas, Chloe, Nick, Mia,Nate, Grace, Wyatt,
Owen, Nash, Soleil, Parker, Miles,and all of Ann’s and my
grandchildren yet unborn
We must be ready to dare all for our country.
For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak
or the timid.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Contents
Introduction
1. The Pursuit of the Difficult
2. Why Nations Decline
3. The Pursuit of Power
4. Pathways of American Power
5. A Free and Productive Economy
6. The Worst Generation?
7. Healing Health Care
8. An American Education
9. Running Low
10. The Culture of Citizenship
11. America the Beautiful
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index
No Apology
Introduction
Running for president of the United States is an extraordinary
experience. New, profound friendships are unquestionably the greatest
reward; they will last a lifetime. And there were moments of laughter,
such as when Ann got up from a collapsed stage in Dubuque, Iowa,
dusted herself off, and later ad-libbed, Well, I fell on de butt in
Dubuque. There were times of exhilaration: winning the Michigan
primary, the state where I was raised and where my dad had served
three terms as governor, was one of them. And then there were the
inevitable lessons learned. My dad, George Romney, used to say of his
1968 presidential campaign that it was like a miniskirt . . . short and
revealing. Mine was a little longer, but just as revealing.
I’ve run for office three times, losing twice, winning once. Each
time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an
adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say. Some of
that is because debate answers are limited to sixty seconds, ads are
thirty seconds, and lengthy position papers are rarely read at all. This
book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign.
That established, my interest in writing the book goes back well
before my political life. My career in the private sector exposed me to
developments abroad and conditions at home that were deeply
troubling. At the same time, I saw that most of us were not aware of
the consequences of blithely continuing along our current course: We
have become so accustomed to the benefits of America’s greatness that
we cannot imagine any significant disruption of what we have known.
I was reminded of a book I had read when I was in France during
the late 1960s. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was a journalist and a
businessperson, and he became convinced that France and Europe
were in danger of falling far and irretrievably behind the United States.
His book, The American Challenge, stirred his countrymen to action
and helped galvanize pan-European economic and political
collaboration. While I am sufficiently realistic to recognize that this
volume is highly unlikely to have as great an impact as did his, it is my
hope that it will affect the thinking and perspectives of those who read
it.
Thus, this is not a collection of my positions on all the important
issues of the day; in fact, a number of issues I care about are not
included. This is not a policy book that explores issues in greater depth
than do scholars and think tanks—I treat topics in a single chapter that
others have made the subject of entire volumes. Nor is this an attack
piece on all the policies of the Obama administration, although
criticism is unavoidable with policies that I believe are the most
harmful to the future generations of America.
This is a book about what I believe should be our primary
national objective: to keep America strong and to preserve its place as
the world’s leading nation. And it describes the course I believe we
must take to strengthen the nation in order to remain prosperous,
secure, and free.
There are some who may question the national objective I
propose. I make no apology for my conviction that America’s
economic and military leadership is not only good for America but
also critical for freedom and peace across the world. Accordingly, as I
consider the various issues before the nation, I evaluate our options
largely by whether they would make America stronger or weaker.
In my first chapters, I consider geopolitical threats and lessons
from the history of great nations of the past. In subsequent chapters, I
describe domestic challenges to our national strength and propose
actions to overcome them. My final chapter is intended to provide a
means for future Americans to gauge whether we have been successful
in setting a course that will preserve America’s greatness throughout
the twenty-first century. It describes as well the source of my optimism
for America’s future.
These are difficult times: homes have lost value, nest eggs have
been eroded, retirees have become anxious about their future, and
millions upon millions of Americans are out of work. Inexcusable
mistakes and failures precipitated the descent that has hurt so many
people. But even as we endure the current shocks, we know that this
will not go on forever; we know that because America is a strong and
prosperous nation, the economic cycle will eventually right itself and
the future will be brighter than the present.
While I will touch upon today’s difficulties, my focus is on the
growing challenges to the foundations of our national strength. How
we confront these challenges will determine what kind of America and
world we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren.
This is a book about securing that future of freedom, peace, and
prosperity in the only way possible: by strengthening America. A
strong America is our only assurance that prosperity will follow
hardship and that our lives and liberty will always be secure. The
strength of the nation has been challenged before—at its birth, during
the Civil War, in the peril of world wars. It is challenged again today.
In our past, Americans have risen to the occasion by confronting the
challenge honestly and laying their sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
We must do so again.
No Apology: The Case For
American Greatness
1
The Pursuit of the Difficult
I hate to weed. I’ve hated it ever since my father put me to work
weeding the garden at our home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was
planted with zinnias, snapdragons, and petunias, none of which
seemed to grow as heartily as the weeds. After what seemed like hours
of work, I never could see much progress, and I’d complain to my dad.
Mitt, he would reply, the pursuit of the difficult makes men strong. It
seems now like an awfully grandiose response for such a pedestrian
task. I complained about the weeding often enough that I heard his
homily regularly. I’m sure that’s why it sticks with me to this day.
My father knew what it meant to pursue the difficult. He was born
in Mexico, where his Mormon grandparents had moved to escape
religious persecution. At five years old, Dad and his family were
finally living pretty well. They had a nice home and a small farm, and
Dad even had his own pony, called Monty. But in 1911, Mexican
revolutionaries threatened the expatriate community, so Dad’s parents
bundled up their five kids, got on a train, and headed back to the
United States. Their furniture, their china, his mother’s sewing
machine—everything they had worked hard to accumulate—had to be
left behind. Once back in the States, they struggled. They moved time
and again, and work was always hard to find. My grandfather
established a construction business, but he went bankrupt more than
once. Dad used to regale us kids with claims that one year in Idaho his
family lived on nothing but potatoes—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Dad began to contribute to the family’s income early on. During
his high-school years he worked long hours as a lath-and-plaster man,
finishing the interior walls of new houses. He never was able to put
together enough time and money to graduate from college.
Three decades later, by the time I was weeding that Bloomfield
Hills garden, my father had become a successful businessman. I know
he worried that because my brother, sisters, and I had grown up in a
prosperous family, we wouldn’t understand the lessons of hard work.
That’s why he put us to work shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing
the lawn, planting the garden, and of course, weeding—always
reminding us that work would make us strong.
About this time, Dad faced a difficult pursuit of his own. In 1955,
only five months after he became vice president of the newly created
American Motors Corporation (AMC), the company’s president,
George Mason, died and the board of directors selected my father to
succeed him. With news of Mason’s death and mounting losses, the
company’s stock collapsed from 14.50 a share to 5.25. The banks
didn’t have much more confidence in the company at that moment
than its stockholders did. I remember hearing my parents discussing
with certainty that if the banks pulled out, the company wouldn’t
survive.
My parents had sold our home; we were living in a rented house
while they prepared to build a new one. With my mother’s blessing,
Dad took the money they had put aside from the sale of their house
and used it to buy AMC stock. He even used the savings he had given
me for Christmases and birthdays to buy stock. He believed in himself,
and he believed in hard work and what it could achieve.
Dad spent long days at the office, and when he was home, the
work continued. He met with the company’s bankers, shareholders,
and employees, explaining his vision for the company’s future:
dropping the venerable Nash and Hudson brands and focusing instead
on the Rambler compact car. He would eventually close the company’s
Michigan plant to consolidate production in Wisconsin. He agonized
over that decision, but concluded in the end that to save a patient this
sick, surgery is necessary.
In 1959, AMC’s stock was selling for more than 95 a share. Dad
made the covers of Time and Newsweek. He and Mom built their
dream home, and we kids, now even more prosperous, were given still
more chores.
What Dad accomplished at American Motors prepared him for
the challenges that would follow. He served as leader of Michigan’s
Constitutional Convention, as three-term governor of Michigan, as
secretary of housing and urban development in the Nixon
administration, and as founder of the National Center for Voluntary
Action. And I have to admit that the weeding and chores probably
didn’t hurt me, either—something I understood well by the time I took
the reins of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the value of pursuing the
difficult applies much more broadly than only to individuals. When I
met Tom Stemberg in 1985, he had come up with an idea for a new
business, one he believed would revolutionize the retail industry, and
in particular the business of selling and distributing office supplies.
Tom’s vision was to create the world’s first big-box office products
chain, one with hundreds of stores, tens of thousands of employees,
and billions in revenues. Most people I spoke with thought it would
never work, believing that businesspeople wouldn’t leave their
workplace to shop for office supplies, no matter how great the savings.
But they were wrong, and today Staples is what Tom dreamed it would
be.
Reaching Tom’s goal was difficult. At first the manufacturers of
supplies didn’t want to sell to him because his idea threatened their
traditional distributors. Stores were hard to locate in real-estate-
cramped New England where he began. A warehouse with multistore
capacity had to be built and financed, even though at first there were
only a handful of stores to serve. Copycat competitors sprung up
everywhere; at one point, we counted more than a dozen. And money
was tight. In the end, because Tom and his team achieved success in
the face of so many challenges, Staples and its management team
became very strong indeed, and now lead the industry.
Today the United States faces daunting challenges, and I am
similarly convinced that if we confront them and overcome them, we
will remain a strong and leading nation. Just like individuals,
companies, and human enterprises of every kind, nations that are
undaunted by the challenges they face become stronger. Those that
shrink from difficult tasks become weaker.
Consider our nation’s history and the strength we developed as
we faced our greatest threats. George Washington’s army was in no
way comparable to the British forces he faced: his troops were
untrained, unpaid, and out-manned. The British navy boasted 270
vessels, while the Continental navy had only twenty-seven. In April
1775, British warships laid siege on Boston Harbor and successfully
took command of the city. But under General Washington’s direction,
during the following winter, Colonel Henry Knox and his men hauled
fifty-nine heavy cannons on ox-drawn sleds three hundred miles from
Fort Ticonderoga, New York, where they recently had been captured.
Finally positioned on Dorchester Heights, a hill overlooking the
harbor, the cannons threatened the annihilation of the British armada.
The British navy withdrew and Boston remained in American hands.
The victory was emblematic of the entire conflict: American ingenuity,
derring-do, and faith in providence helped win our improbable
independence from the world’s superpower.
I was born after the Second World War and can only imagine the
confusion, incredulity, and fear that must have overwhelmed the nation
when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet once again, the United
States rose to the occasion. In Detroit, where my father was already
working in the auto industry, factories that once made cars were
quickly turned into assembly lines for military aircraft. Cars and
planes aren’t very similar, but in only a year, Detroit was making
bombers and fighters. We ultimately lost 418,000 men and women in
World War II. The financial costs were great as well. But we also
became far stronger. Women joined the workforce—a trend that would
wane, then wax again to our economic advantage. Our factories
became the most productive in the world. Returning GIs went to
college in what was the greatest expansion of higher education in
history. And Americans recognized that while we constitute much of a
continent, we are not an island—alone and isolated from the rest of the
world.
I was in grade school when Sputnik was launched by the Soviet
Union in 1957. Mr. Garlick, my high-school science teacher, hung a
model of the small satellite from the ceiling of our classroom as a
reminder, he said, that America had fallen behind the Russians in
science and technology. The future was up to us, he’d say, sounding a
lot like my dad.
Three months after the Soviets’ first successful satellite launch,
we attempted to enter space. Our Vanguard rocket failed to develop
enough power to lift off the launch pad. It toppled over on its side and
exploded into flames. Over the next three years, NASA tried and failed
to launch eleven more satellites. Despite our dismal record, President
John F. Kennedy called for us to put a man on the moon. Young people
all over the country grew enthusiastic about studying physics,
engineering, and the space sciences. We became a more technically
proficient people. And we became the first nation on earth to put a
man on the moon.
Facing Our Challenges Head-on