Despite the school's rarefied air, it was still a high school, so the jocks tended to be the most popular. Mitt's singular distinction as an athlete was an embarrassing one, classmates recall. He competed in a 2.5-mile race held during a football game, setting off with the rest of the runners at the start of halftime.

Everyone returned before the second half of the football game began, except Mitt. He didn't resurface until about 10 minutes after the last runner. He staggered around the oval for the final lap, collapsing twice in the last 15 yards but drawing cheers from the crowd when he finally crossed the finish line. "It had to be one of those moments that made you feel good, but inadequate," Bailey says. "But those kinds of things didn't bother him."

During Mitt's sophomore year, his father leveraged his popularity as a business-turnaround artist to get elected governor of Michigan. George Romney would revive and moderate a moribund Republican Party, impose the state's first income tax and emerge more popular than ever.

On campus, Mitt downplayed his father's fame, though others showed less restraint. The Detroit News report on a small fire at Cranbrook carried this headline: "Romney Son Helps Fight School Fire." Deep in the article, one learned that Mitt's heroism consisted of opening the building's front door and directing the firefighters toward the small blaze.

More important to Mitt was sharing his father's front-row seat on government, first as a campaign aide and then as an intern in the governor's office.

Dick Milliman, who served as Romney's press secretary, was struck by how much the governor delighted in having his teenage son around. "They would hug upon meeting, and not just any hug," he recalls. "He would give Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss."

To Milliman, it was clearly not just a father-son bond but almost a "partner relationship." Around the office, just like around the family home, Mitt seldom held back. "He would chime in, 'Have you thought about this?'" Milliman says, admitting, "Sometimes you'd think, 'That kid oughta shut up!' But he was always nice to be around."

All of George Romney's success in Michigan prompted talk of him as a presidential candidate in 1964. That didn't happen, but he arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco that summer as a star, inviting Mitt to come orbit around him.

George Romney made headlines by walking out on nominee Barry Goldwater because of his opposition to civil rights. In a subsequent letter to Goldwater, Romney wrote, "The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others."

Romney's progressive views on race earned him critics not only in the right wing of his party but at the highest levels of his church. In 1964, a top LDS official wrote to Romney, calling a civil rights bill "vicious legislation" and warning Romney that it was not man's job to remove what he termed the Lord's "curse upon the Negro." Romney refused to back down.