According to friends, Romney had always wanted to attend business school, but his father George—longtime governor of Michigan, then Secretary of Housing—wanted him to go law school.

“He compromised—and did both,” laughs Howard Serkin, who sat next to Romney in several first-year business classes.

PREP SCHOOL ‘COUNTRY BOY’

While juggling two distinct academic fields, Romney straddled two social worlds as well—the life of the driven graduate student and that of the Mormon father.

Romney’s graduate school colleagues consistently remember him as “hard working,” “mature,” “nose to the grindstone”— a portrait that contrasts with recent accounts of his pranks and slapstick antics as a prep schooler and then as a Stanford freshman.

“Mitt was always prepared; he was really always prepared,” emphasizes Serkin, a member of Romney’s study group. “He was very demanding. He said, ‘Look, we’re a team, and we want to be number one.’”

Although he was not an intellectual standout, Romney worked hard. He graduated with honors from the Law School and finished in the top 5 percent of his Business School class. “He knows how to do his own homework, let’s put it that way,” says Salter.

Friends and acquaintances say he seemed warm and personable, contradicting his current perception as “cold” or “robotic” on television.

“I didn’t ever think of him as mechanical. He was more of country boy,” recalls Rasmussen. “And it wasn’t phony. It was really the way he was.”

Brownstein remembers that Romney would sometimes make small jokes about his abstension from caffeine, alchohol, and tobacco because of his religion. But his distinct lifestyle and young family separated him from most graduate students. Dinner with other married couples, an occasional game of pick-up basketball, and church functions filled most of his spare time.

“He was always friendly, always cheerful, but he never really opened up to a lot of people,” says Garret G. Rasmussen, a classmate in Romney’s Law School section.

Indeed, as Brown puts it, his time at Harvard was closer to an “office job” than the typical all-encompassing student schedule.

“His life was divided into work with school, work with his family, and work with his church,” says Law School classmate Mark E. Mazo.

Still, Romney interacted with classmates, often inviting friends to his suburban home in Belmont. Outside the Church, he kept his Mormonism low-key—though he attended services regularly, he never proselytzed, according to classmates. Charles Ed Haldeman, a J.D./M.B.A. classmate, says he is not even sure that he knew that Romney was Mormon at the time.

PRAGMATIST TURNED POLITICIAN