"Dad!" he yelled. "Gross!" A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours. As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station.

There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

And it offered his sons a rare unplanned stop.

"Think about it," Tagg says, "a 12-hour drive and the only time we stop is to get gas. When we stop, you can buy your food and go to the bathroom, but that's the only time we're stopping, so you'd better get it all done at once."

Yet there was one exception to Mitt's nonstop policy. "As soon as my mom says, 'I think I need to go to the bathroom,' he pulls over instantly and doesn't complain. 'Anything for you, Ann."'

Tagg didn't get it back then, but now at age 37 he finally understands why his father has been willing to suspend his regimented ways when it comes to his wife. "When they were dating," Tagg says, "he felt like she was way better than him, and he was really lucky to have this catch. He really genuinely still feels that way, thinks, 'I'm so lucky I've got her.' So he puts her on a pedestal."

He had always treated Ann that way, especially since he'd nearly lost her.

'Dear Mitt'

Back in 1967, when Romney was moving into a Paris apartment with fellow Mormon missionaries at 126 Rue du Chateau, his eyes were immediately drawn to a wall covered with hand-written letters. They were all "Dear John" break-up notes that other missionaries had received from their girlfriends back home.

Staring at the wall, Romney worried, "Is this what's in store for me?"

Ann Davies had said yes to his informal marriage proposal when she was just 16. After Romney went to France, his father personally baptized her a Mormon.

But the 2 1/2-year mission took its toll on the romance. Under the rigid rules for missionaries, Romney was forbidden from telephoning Ann more than a couple of times a year, and his two visits with her were brief and supervised.

Ann, meanwhile, was living the life of a co-ed at Brigham Young University. The Provo, Utah, campus was flush with men who had just returned from their own missions, with sharpened skills of persuasion and a determination to find a wife made more urgent by the Mormon ban on premarital sex. Not for nothing was the place nicknamed B-Y-Woo.