He would fly in to Boston’s Logan Airport from Detroit, take the bus to the subway, catch the Blue Line into the city, pick up the Red Line outbound to Cambridge, take it to the end of the line, and then walk, wheeling his bag, the mile or so to campaign headquarters. Then he’d walk upstairs and say simply, ‘Is Mitt here?’ ... Campaigning for his son one day at a nursing home in Salem, north of Boston, George was asked if Mitt wasn’t very much like himself back in the day. ‘He’s better than a chip off the old block,’ George replied. ‘No. 1, he’s got a better education. No. 2, he’s turned around dozens of companies while I turned around only one. And No. 3, he’s made a lot more money than I have.’

The last point was certainly true. As head of American Motors, George Romney earned a salary of $1.8 million in today’s dollars and turned down bonuses equal to a fifth of his pay. By contrast, his son, operating in a rather different era, amassed a fortune estimated at $250 million; he has made more than $20 million in each of the past two years simply from his investments and his stake in Bain Capital. George Romney, who had worked his way up from nothing and never graduated college, looked upon Mitt’s success with pride, but one cannot help but wonder if this was a case of the son taking the father’s advice rather too much to heart. Mitt didn’t just make enough to pay the mortgage before entering politics—he made enough to leave his five sons a $100 million trust fund and pay the mortgages on a whole bunch of houses, from Lake Winnipesaukee to Utah to La Jolla. And in the process he created a real liability for himself as a future politician. His outsized wealth only exacerbated his image as a privileged man with little understanding of average Americans. And his work in the “real economy,” unlike his father’s, raised serious moral questions, revolving around the collateral damage of Bain’s success—the workers laid off, the companies loaded up with debt while Romney and his partners pocketed their customary fees.

Romney has struggled with these questions from the very start. Kranish and Helman describe him at his first election win, claiming the GOP nomination to challenge Kennedy. “If Romney was beaming from behind the podium on primary night, the smile slipped from his face the moment he descended the stage. A TV reporter, nudged by the Kennedy camp, immediately challenged Romney on his record at Bain. Hadn’t the firm slashed some jobs? ‘You saw the flash of anger,’ said one former Kennedy aide, describing Romney’s reaction. It was something of an epiphany for the Democratic campaign: Romney seemed to have a glass jaw.” But it is not hard to understand Romney’s shock. How dare they challenge his success, when he had only been doing what dear Dad had instructed him to?

As comprehensive as their account is, Kranish and Helman all but admit that they are unable to deliver fully on their stated goal to “to plumb the many chapters of [Romney’s] life for insight into his character, his worldview, his drive, and his contradictions.” The real Romney, some have suggested, may just be too deeply hidden, perhaps bound up with his closely guarded religious beliefs. Recently a counter-argument has arisen that the search for a “real Romney” is beside the point—what matters is not what lies within the well-coiffed exterior, but rather what is on the surface: what Romney says, does, and intends to do.