Mitt Romney's prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign stop in Chantilly, Va., May 2, 2012. / AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

This article was written by Washington Post staff writer Jason Horowitz

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. -- Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn't having it.

"He can't look like that. That's wrong. Just look at him!" an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann's recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber's look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school's collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber's hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them -- Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal -- spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama's campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

"It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me," said Buford, the school's wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was "terrified," he said. "What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do."

"It was a hack job," recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. "It was vicious."

"He was just easy pickins," said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. In a radio interview Thursday morning, Romney said he didn't remember the incident but apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said "might have gone too far."

His campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said in a statement that "anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn't have a mean-spirited bone in his body. The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents."

Campaign officials denied a request for an interview with Romney. They also declined to comment further about his years at Cranbrook.

After the incident, Lauber seemed to disappear. He returned days later with his shortened hair back to its natural brown. He finished the year, but ultimately left the school before graduation -- thrown out for smoking a cigarette.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, David Seed noticed a familiar face at the end of a bar at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

"Hey, you're John Lauber," Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.

"I'm sorry that I didn't do more to help in the situation," he said.

Lauber paused, then responded, "It was horrible." He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, "It's something I have thought about a lot since then."

Lauber died in 2004, according to his three sisters.

Romney came of age during his six years at Cranbrook. First as a day student and later as a full-time boarder, he embraced and became emblematic of the Cranbrook way -- a strict disciplinary code and academic rigor that governed the school by day and a free-wheeling unofficial boys code of "Crannies" at night. Wherever the action was, so was Romney. He wrote the most letters to the girls at the sister school across the lake and successfully petitioned to get placed in the top classes. He was not a natural athlete, but found his place among the jocks by managing the hockey team and leading megaphone cheers for the football team. Although a devout Mormon, one of the few at the school, he was less defined by his faith than at any other time in his life. He was a member of 11 school organizations, including the Spectator's Club and the homecoming committee, and started the school's booster outfit, the Blue Key Club.

It was at Cranbrook where he first lived on his own, found his future wife and made his own decisions. One can see the institution's influence on his demeanor and actions during those years, but also how it helped form the clubbiness and earnestness, the sense of leadership and enthusiasm, apparent in his careers as a businessman and a politician. "He strongly bought in to community service," said Richard Moon, a schoolmate at the time. "That hard work was its own reward." What is less visible today is what was most apparent to his prep-school peers: his jocularity.

Now, nearly half a century later, Romney's presidential campaign has turned to the candidate's youthful antics as evidence of his capacity for harmless, humanizing pranks and as an indication of his looser, less wooden self.

"There's a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out," Romney's wife, Ann -- a graduate of Cranbrook's sister school, Kingswood -- attested in a television interview this month, evoking what she saw as his endearing and fun-loving prep-school persona. Many of Romney's peers from his high school days echo that version of the candidate, describing him as the humble son of an automobile executive-turned-governor who volunteered at the nearby mental hospital. They recall an infectious laugh, a characterization first documented in his senior yearbook.

"If you should ever by chance be walking down the [Stevens Hall] corridor at 2:00 a.m. and hear rising tones of boisterous, exuberant laughter, you are almost sure to find its source is Mitt Romney," the yearbook reported. "A quiet joke, a panicky laughter and another of the Friedemann-Romney all-night marathon contests has begun."

But Friedemann and several people closest to Romney in those formative years say there was a sharp edge to him. In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, "Atta girl!" In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.

Saul, Romney's campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident.

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[riddelup]

What is the big deal, everyone was a bully in school. Wait that would be impossible. Only a very few arrogant, mean, and self involved people were bullies and from my experience they do not change much only to go on to larger and more bainfull projects.

[olyboy]

How can this possibly be journalism? This is simply an attack piece on a candidate CBS apparently doens't support. We have a president about whom we know little and the press does nothing to investigate his history of illegal drug use, association with know domestic terrorists and felons and this is the best you can come up with on Romney? He may have been amoung a group who teased another student who might have been gay (although his family disputes this) in high school? Once again, we are faced with a clear explanation of what the BS in CBS stands for.

[hypnotoad72]

Just wait for the clock - something else will come out about Obama. At which point, the folks who currently whine "liberal media" will quickly become sycophants, while forgetting how articles slamming each candidate come out from time to time...

[LZ_Xray]

You guys still have this article up?? It must be a slow, SLOW news cycle. If you need someone to pick interesting stories, let me help: let's run an article about Obama being an admitted heavy drug and alcohol user, a student slacker, a dog eater and a bullier of school girls.

[hypnotoad72]

I'm sure they will.

GWB was a cokehead and AWOL, and going back to Clinton and others (psst: Reagan was originally a Democrat too), there's plenty of dirt on them all. What they do now is important, and - right now - Romney has shown to be the king of all flip-floppers.

[TJphoto]

I don't car what he did as a teenager, I do care about the fact that He doesn't remember this. We all have memories, both good & bad from High School. Quite frankly I think he is lying and that's the one thing I will not tolerate.

[hypnotoad72]

That's okay. Most kids who torture animals, play with matches, bully, etc, turn out to be role models for society...

Oh, wait, most of them turn into serial killers...

It depends on who you ask...

[robert1129]

I just read the entire article. I came away with a feeling of a spoiled, arrogant brat whose father used his influence to keep Milt in this school. Although a person can change, the risk is way too great. Had all of this come out during the primaries, either Nwet or Rick would have been the GOP nominee. Now it is just too late. The GOP again has lost the Presidential election before it has even begun. A thousand thanks to the GOP. The race is now Obama's to lose.

[nancy_naive]

And this differs from John McCain, how exactly? The GOP ranks are swollen with 2nd and 3rd generation of worthless trash produced from dynastic wealth and the rank and file just eat their $#!^ up.

[AttyFAM]

The New York Times Magazine Section today has an article about callous, non-empathetic children and how they may be young psychopaths. Maybe, we should have Romney tested. He certainly does not display any empathy for anyone now. "I don't care about the poor," etc.

[lg144]

Mitt Romney famously said "Corporations are people" clearly he cares more for them than actual people.

[AttyFAM]

And it is troubling that he says he does not remember the incident. (One of the other men involved says that it has bothered him all his life that he was part of it.) Either (1) Romney is lying - and that is the lesser of the two evils here, or (2) he really is a psychopath who has no feelings whatsoever about what he did. Psychopaths do like power, of course. Then they can hurt people without consequences.

[vkbarefoot]

I think the most telling element of this attack is that Mitt was not disciplined for it. In what is described as a strict school this incident was ignored. I believe that one can extrapolate that he was not normally disciplined for his unacceptable behavior. This would result in a person that is unable to tell the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. He cannot be a competent leader if he does not know the difference between right and wrong social behavior. This incident demonstrates that he does not have empathy and a president cannot lead without empathy.

[cokomo2]

Some people grow up and their attitudes and actions change, but not Mitt. What he did in his youth was wrong and mean spirited. He has no idea how his prank affected that young mans life. Mitts apology now is empty, he even had the nerve to laugh during it. He stated that he did not remember the incident, but he does not think the young man was gay. So either you remember or you don't remember the incident, so he lied. Mitt stated during his apology that if he offended someone he is sorry, of course he offended that young man he and his gang bullied, attacked and violated. It is clear to see that Mitt's attitudes did not change he is still that same soulless person. He no longer is cutting ones hair, now he is more subtle he just cuts a person civil, equal and human rights from them. He still is violating the rights of others that are not like him. He still is running with his posse. If you are running for President, your character does. Why would we want a person who constantly lies in the Oval Office? I don't

[Xenophanes101]

Kool aid anyone?

[Xenophanes101]

Soooo, after years of vigorously persecuting homosexuals in a blatantly hypocritical manner, the Federal Government has finally formally embraced the notion that same sex marriage is ok (even though it heartlessly destroyed many homosexuals from 1950 - 2000+ while screening them for future/continued employment) and now a few mentally challenged individuals with no sense of what is important whatsoever dredge up some horseplay in Mitt Romney's teen years that involved an individual who turned out to be gay. OMG! To those of you who sympathize with making this a campaign issue consider the following quote from a retired CIA polygraph examiner:

"Only one question relating to homosexual activity was included in the early version of the applicant polygraph test, but no issue was pursued more vigorously. "Homophobic" seems an appropriate adjective to describe the attitude of OS/IRB toward homosexuals during the Crawford era."

This practice was embraced by Republicans AND Democrats alike and it wasn't just limited to the CIA. This country is in a dangerous downward spiral on many fronts (e.g., the economy, education, unemployment and underemployment, immigration, national defense, and on and on and on...) and a presidential candidate's position on same sex marriage is important?!? Let's get a grip on reality folks and start taking on what's really ailing this country starting with the Nanny State mentality of numerous slugs living here.

[pfister2]

Romney's callousness as a young person tells volumes about his upbringing, and makes him unfit for the presidency. Because the young man turned out to be gay doesn't mean Romney was right. We need a right-thinking president.

[Xenophanes101]

What does "right-thinking" mean? According to who? What we need is a country that is firmly committed to solving the serious problems we face as a nation vice the lot of mindless citizens and illegals that always tend to give lip service on the issues solely for the purpose of political gain and who speak or want the truth (whatever that is) only when it suits them. I suppose John Edwards would have been a "right-thinking" vice-president if only he wasn't caught-up in his own self defeating conduct. What we need is less government and more people who aren't afraid to govern themselves as the founding fathers of this nation intended.

[marychgo]

John Dickerson thinks the "Mitt the Bully" story is a one-night wonder. I beg to differ. The way Mitt Romney and his high school friends dealt with their classmate with the bleached-blond hair is precisely the way Mitt the corporate raider dealt with the worker bees at the companies he LBO'd -- and precisely the way Mitt and Paul Ryan and friends want to deal with the American people. It ain't gonna happen!

[cokomo2]

I totally agree. Not to mention is that in one of his apologies he laughed about it. He also lied saying he dd not recall the incident but remembers he did not think the young man was gay. Mitt lies alot and is never called on it. He has been getting a free pass. He is no different than what he was as a teen. He may not be cutting hair, now he is cutting equal and human rights. A Presidents character does matter.

[pfister2]

I agree.