No Apology: The Case For American Greatness Read online

  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 re
ligious 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

  I can remember only one time during my life when most Americans presumed that we didn’t really have an
y great challenges. It was during the period that largely coincided with the Bill Clinton presidency. George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had pushed the Soviet Union to the wall and won. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and here at home, there was talk of a new economy that sent the bulls running on Wall Street. Columnist Charles Krauthammer has called it our holiday from history. We believed that peace and prosperity were here to stay—without threat, without sacrifice.

  In some ways, we advanced as a nation during these years. The Internet boomed, and the pockets of millions of average Americans grew deeper. But did these years of ease make us a stronger, more free or secure nation? We shrunk our military by 400,000 troops during the 1990s, retired over one hundred ships from the navy, and decreased the size of our air force by more than a quarter. More ominously, we gutted our human intelligence capabilities, and never took any real steps to infiltrate the violent jihadist groups like al Qaeda that had declared war on America. At home, births to teenage mothers rose to their highest levels in decades, teenage drug use climbed, and pornography became the Internet’s biggest business. Our dependence on foreign oil rose from 42 percent of our total consumption in 1990 to 58 percent today.

  I don’t wish challenges and hard times on this nation, even though I believe they have made us the country and people we are today. But neither do I fear them. My sole concern is that Americans will choose not to act, not to face our challenges head-on, not to overcome them.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, our economy has suffered its worst crisis since the Great Depression. We have amassed an unprecedented amount of debt and liabilities, and added to that, the Obama administration plans trillion-dollar deficits every year. Russian belligerence is on the rise. China holds over 750 billion of U.S. obligations. Iran and North Korea threaten the world with unbridled nuclear ambition. Violent jihadists like those who attacked us on 9/11 plot our destruction. The consequence of failure to act in response to these perils is unthinkable.