So here it is again. At a time when the Republican candidate is
being portrayed as a cold-hearted businessman interested only in
profits and shipping jobs to China, it seems as if it ought to have
some relevance.
Meet the Real Mitt Romney
By William Tucker
Here’s a story that may help New York Times columnist
Gail Collins get over her obsession with the incident of Mitt
Romney and the dog on the car.
In 1996, two years after Romney had returned to Bain Capital
after running unsuccessfully against Ted Kennedy for Senate, Robert
Gay, a partner at Bain, came to him and confided that his
14-year-old daughter Melissa was missing. She had sneaked out of
their Connecticut home three days before, gone to a rock concert in
New York City and hadn’t been heard from since.
Gay was embarrassed about confessing his dilemma and didn’t
expect anything more than a little commiseration. Instead, he was
amazed at Romney’s reaction. The co-founder of Bain
immediately informed the other partners of the situation, then
closed down the firm and mobilized a temporary move to New York
City to search for the girl. As the New York Times
reported it at the time:
Bain Capitals Partners closed down the firm and drew on
friendships and connections to find volunteers for the search. R.R.
Donnelly, the firm’s printer, printed more than 300,000 fliers
bearing Ms. Gay’s picture and last known whereabouts. Duane Reade,
a drugstore chain in which Bain Capital is an investor, had clerks
at 52 stores insert fliers in shopping bags. Price Waterhouse,
which does the firm’s accounting, sent nearly 100 volunteers to
distribute the powers, and Goldman Sachs, Bankers Trust and Morgan
Stanley dispatched more than 60 people.
Command centers to dispatch volunteers and get in touch with the
press were set up at the Marriott Hotel and La Guardia Airport, the
Connelly offices and the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. Volunteers with
cellular phones fanned out to clubs like the Limelight and the
Tunnel, the Lollapalooza concert at Downing Stadium on Randall’s
Island, parties in Tompkins Square and Central Park, to Madison
Square Garden and the Port Authority.
The Boston Globe, which covered the story day-to-day,
filed the following report:
Yesterday, in their first day of searching, [Bain Executives]
pounded the pavement, plastering the city with 300,000 fliers and
quizzed teen-agers at concerts and parks.
But as of last night, Melissa Gay was nowhere to be found.
“Our children are what life is all about,” said W. Mitt Romney,
founder and managing partner at Bain Capital. “Everything else
takes a back seat.”
Six days later, the Marriott Hotline received an anonymous call
from a teenage boy asking if there was a reward for the missing
girl. The caller immediately hung up but police traced it to a
house in Towaco, New Jersey. As the Globe reported:
[A]fter attending a rave concert on Randall’s Island… she took
the drug Ecstasy and then “wandered the city.” During her
wandering, her father said, she met a young man who took her to his
parents’ [New Jersey] home. The young man, whose name was not
released, kept her in the home without his parents’ knowledge, the
police said.
Melissa was discovered hidden in the basement, still recovering
from an overdose and shivering through detoxification. Doctors said
later that had she not been found, she might not have lived another
day.
Six months later, in a end-of-year review, the Globe
again revisited the story:
Last week, the partners of Boston’s Bain Capital Inc. drew up
their annual list of accomplishments: Number one was the week they
spent last July combing Manhattan in search of Melissa Gay, the
missing 14-year-old daughter of one of the partners.
“It really overshadowed everything we did from a money
standpoint,” said Mitt Romney, the Bain Capital founder who won the
1994 Massachusetts Republican Senate nomination partly on his
reputation as a venture capital wiz. “The days and nights spent
looking for Missy Gay were more valuable than some financial home
runs that made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I mean,
money is just money.”
Nor were the Bain partners unaffected by their odyssey through
the dark recesses of New York City:
“It was a shocker,” [Romney] said. “The number of lost souls was
astounding.”
Romney said one partner still talks about a runaway he spoke
with in search of information about Melissa.
“The girl asked, ‘Why are you looking for her?’ and he said,
‘Because her parents miss her,’” Romney said. “She replied, ‘I wish
my parents missed me like that.’”
Romney has never made much of the incident, but in 2007 Gay
insisted on making a commercial for the New Hampshire primary. He
appeared on camera saying:
My business partner stepped forward to take charge. He closed
the company and brought almost all our employees to New York. He
said, “I don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to find her.” He
set up a command center and searched through the night. The man who
helped save my daughter was Mitt Romney. Mitt’s done a lot of
things that people say are nearly impossible. But for me, the most
important thing he’s done is to help save my daughter.
Despite Romney’s reticence, the story is beginning to
make the
rounds. It appeared on Snopes.com
in January and was recently
fact-checked by Jacksonville’s Florida Times-Union,
which found it is all true. The liberal press probably will ignore
it as long as possible and then try to find some negative way to
spin the story. One respondent on the Jacksonville website has
already given it a try:
Romney had an unrealistic response to a bad situation. Flying 30
workers to NYC to search for a girl, shows his concern, but was a
ridiculous waste of resources that turned out not to be needed. Not
the response I would want from a President.
Still, it’s a revealing candid shot of the Republican nominee
for President.
Had Obama done something like this in his life — not that he
ever could have — Hollywood would be making a movie of it right
now. But with Romney the pattern seems to be that the liberal press
is happy to ignore it while conservatives are embarrassed because
it makes Romney look too soft. I think
one Huffington commentator said it best: Mitt
Romney is much more than a great leader. He is a great man.
