Though the incident in Salt Lake City and the 1981 arrest at Lake Cochituate are the most extreme indications that Romney might have a temper, there are, scattered in his past, a handful of other occasions on which his anger seems to have flared. Lees, for instance, recalls Romney being angry the night of the 2004 election, when a major Republican push to reclaim seats in the Massachusetts legislature fell far short. Romney blamed poor execution by the state party, and, Lees says, “He got pretty impassioned.” In 2007, Romney grew angry during a meeting in which Sandy Rios, then a conservative talk-show host at Chicago’s WYLL, challenged the reliability of his opposition to same-sex marriage. According to her account at the time: “Romney lost his temper. He said it wasn’t true and in so many words that I was lying. He asked if I was an attorney, and I said, ‘No, sir, I am not.’ ‘I am a graduate of Harvard Law School,’ he stated. ... He continued coming after me [and] would not stop when interrupted by an aide.”

Interestingly, Jamie Burnett, who served as Romney’s New Hampshire political director in 2008, notes one type of situation where Romney seems guaranteed not to lose his cool—when he is challenged about his religion. Burnett was with Romney in 2007 when he went into a diner in Dover, New Hampshire, to greet patrons. When he marched up to one older man, Burnett recalls, “The guy just turned and yelled at him and said, ‘I’m not going to shake the hand of a Mormon!’” What struck Burnett most was Romney’s response. “He was taken aback a little, but he said, ‘That’s fine, I just wanted to say hello, you don’t have to vote for me.’ He went on, and it didn’t faze him that much.” A few months later, at a town hall meeting in California, a man asked Romney, “If you were elected president, how many first ladies could we expect?” Romney smiled and pointed at Ann, who was with him. “Just the best one in the country. This one here,” he said.

AS I ASKED AROUND about Romney’s temperament, I heard a few different theories as to from where it might come. One centered around his adolescence. As a student at Cranbrook, the elite boarding school outside Detroit, young Mitt—the governor’s son—was hard to figure out. He was no athlete in a school where jocks held sway, and he was a good but not great student. If he got noticed for anything, it was for his practical jokes: He clowned around with a bunch of fellow jesters that went by “Romney and the gang,” and his yearbook entry features a photo of him grinning maniacally in oversized fake glasses and fake Groucho Marx eyebrows. “Mitt was not particularly outstanding at that time in his life,” says classmate Sidney Barthwell, now a Detroit magistrate. “He wasn’t a great athlete, he wasn’t a leader of the school in terms of elected office. ... Mitt was kind of silly at times in those days.”

And he came in for his share of ridicule—not for being Mormon, though that may have driven some of the ribbing, but for generally being a bit different and hard to categorize. Another classmate, Eric Muirhead, recalls a student government meeting where Romney, who was not an elected officer, piped up with a “rather flip” remark, only to be viciously turned on by two students, one of whom stalked off, ending the meeting. Muirhead, who recently retired as an English instructor at San Jacinto College in Houston, does not recall the exact words of the attack, but he says that it was “ugly,” that it denigrated Romney’s “personal manner,” and that it “seemed to have a lot behind it.” What Muirhead remembers most is Romney’s reaction. “He just sat there and took it,” Muirhead recalls. “The meeting was adjourned and I apologized that he had to go through that, and he just shook his head.” Having watched Romney from afar over the years, Muirhead is pretty sure that his tendency to flare up on occasions like Perry’s interruption of him traces to such moments: “He had to survive some belittling as a schoolboy, and when that happens you become tough or you become passive—and he became tough.”