Mitt Romney has been trying to relate to voters by letting them know he’s more than a rich businessman who makes $10,000 bets. Over the past week, Romney has been discussing his time as a missionary for the Church of Latter-day Saints in France in the late 1960s. He describes living an austere life on a limited budget, rooming in a series of apartments without proper toilets or luxury items like refrigerators. “I lived in a way that people of lower middle income in France lived,” Romney said. But Romney may have stretched the truth a bit.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph decided to check into Romney’s account of his time and France. They found that, for about 8 months out of his 30-month stay in France, Romney lived in a mansion in Paris, living a comfortable, upper-class lifestyle. The building, someone familiar with it said, could be described as a “palace”:
It featured stained glass windows, chandeliers, and an extensive art collection. It was staffed by two servants – a Spanish chef and a houseboy…The building, on Rue de Lota, was bought by the Mormons in 1952, having been seized by the Nazis during the Second World War. The Church sold it again in the 1970s, and it was until recently the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. It is currently worth as much as $12 million.
Romney wasn’t thinking about his housing in Paris when he told supporters, “I don’t recall any of them having a refrigerator. We shopped before every meal.” The head of the mission at the time, Duane Anderson, told the Telegraph that the house not only had refrigeration, but a chef who cooked for Romney and the other missionaries five days a week. Romney also made comments that most of the places he lived didn’t have a bathtub or shower, but the Telegraph discovered that this was at least unlikely. If that were the case, it would be an outlier, one Mormon who met Romney in Bordeaux told the paper.
From food to plumbing, the way Romney described living to supporters this week doesn’t square with the Telegraph’s account of how he spent 8 months in Paris. Mr. Anderson claimed some campaign aides had asked him not to talk to the press about Romney’s time there.
