Roy Romer grew up in Colorado during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. At 98, he had much to share with Phil Weiser about truth-telling.
by Allen Best
Where do I start with this extraordinarily rich conversation on Tuesday afternoon between a former Colorado governor and the future governor?
Phil Weiser will be sworn in as governor in January, of course, and he was posing the questions to Roy Romer, the governor from 1987 until 1999. The agenda at the gathering, which was held at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, called for Romer to provide advice to Wieser about leadership.
Romer, who is now 98, told Weiser that one of the most crucial things a good leader can do is honor criticism, even solicit criticism, and to listen, listen, listen. He also said that it was important to be open to new ideas. “You’ve got to be open to new truths,” he said. To illustrate that, he told about how, at the age of 60, he opened himself up to gay people.
“I was governor of Colorado, and I had no understanding of gay people. I happened to see a family of five children in my own church, and they just radiated love within that family. It was so astounding. I went to them individually and said, ‘You have something I don’t have. Will you teach me?’”
The couple apparently was gay, as he was invited to attend meetings of gay and lesbians. He did so for several months.
“Then I realized that I had inherited a culture which was very biased about gays, and I needed to break out of that, and I did at age 60.”
Unmentioned was the famous case Romer vs. Evans. In 1992, Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment that would have prevented any city, town, or county in the state from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to recognize homosexuals or bisexuals as a protected class. In other words, voters said they did not want affirmative action for these individuals.
Romer had opposed the amendment, but as governor, was sworn to represent the state. It went to the Supreme Court, which in a landmark 1996 decision overturned Colorado’s law.
The danger of group think
Weiser had asked Romer how to build a high-functioning culture. “You built an incredible culture in state government. I know that because there are probably a whole bunch of people here who worked with you in some capacity,” Weiser said. “What advice do you have for me on that?”
“Let me start with a simple story, because it’s the basis of culture,” Romer answered. “I had five children, and we were on our way to Yellowstone National Park for a vacation. We had an old station wagon, and we stopped for gas. Ninety miles down the road, somebody said, ‘Hey, X — one of my children — had taken five cents worth of candy and not paid for it.’ I stopped the car. We cut off one day of our vacation to go back and pay for that five-cent candy. I didn’t have to discipline the child who was involved at all because the family ate him up. It was the beginning of a culture in our own family about honesty, that whatever you do, you’ve got to be honest every day.”
Truth-telling, even if uncomfortable, is crucial to creating effective culture in governance, he said. That belief is reflected in the name of the institute that bears his name, the Romer Institute of Evidence-based Policy. The institute sponsored the event. The 57-minute recording can be found on YouTube.
Romer said he surrounded himself with people who would be willing to disagree with him.
“I wanted people who were not yes people. I wanted people who would help critically evaluate me every day because you need that feedback.”
Romer wore hearing aids, as did many in his audience (and this writer wears additional head jewelry – a cochlear implant). He needed a bit of help getting about. But he was clear-headed and articulate in ways many people several decades younger wish they could be as he told about days long ago and the times we’re in. About artificial intelligence, for example, he said we need to be very, very wary.
“I feel the world can be manipulated in a bad way with AI, and we need to be very smart, much smarter than we’re doing right now. And all this hands-off stuff is crap. We’ve got to regulate this problem.”
There was sometimes laughter and many smiles amidst their conversation. Once this occurred when a phone began ringing. It was Romer’s. He fumbled at length to find it in a pocket and silenced it only to have the phone ring again a few moments later. “Here, can you deal with this?” he told Weiser, handing him the self-important telephone.
Weiser and Romer are politically close and perhaps personally, too. Romer served as the honorary chair of Weiser’s campaign for governor. He nominated Weiser at the Democratic State Assembly in Pueblo, driving himself to and from the event, Weiser said. Then Romer joined Weiser on his bus tour across Colorado.
Might Romer’s comments seemed not quite so wise were he 68 instead of 98? Then, in 1996, he was in his third and last four-year term as governor. In Eagle County, I had one former ski industry executive dismiss Romer as a typical — and corrupt — politician. He had contributed to Romer’s campaign, he said, but the campaign contributions were duly recorded. This, suggested my ski source, was evidence of greater access to the governor to those who contributed.
I don’t know that there is any truth to that. I bring it up only because it must be acknowledged that mere survival at some point will often overshadow turbulence and mistrust of earlier times. And, again, he got elected three times, suggesting a high comfort level of voters. And this was, it must be noted, during a time when Republicans commonly dominated the legislative bodies.
Among those in the audience on Tuesday was Russ George, who represented much of northwestern Colorado in the Colorado House of Representative for six years while Romer was governor. George endorsed Weiser’s candidacy this year.
Barely mentioned in the hour-long talk were other elements of Romer’s extraordinary life. He had owned an implement business in Holly, then later was co-owner of a short-lived ski area, Geneva Basin. He was a land developer during his career and was state treasurer prior to becoming governor.
Oh, and at age 72, Romer moved to Los Angeles to become superintendent of public schools there for six years. Education, he said at the Denver event, is the most neglected policy issue in the United States. This includes better training of teachers. “Teachers are wonderful people, but they don’t know how to do their jobs.”
Early years along the Arkansas River
Romer was reared along the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado during the 1930s and 1940s. As a child, he lived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and then, as an older boy, a local manifestation of World War II injustice, the Amache concentration camp.
“Things were really tough back in those times. We were killing jackrabbits because they were eating the grass that we needed for our cattle. There was a competition of elements and weather. And when you live in that kind of a circumstance, you don’t you don’t kid with the truth. The truth drives you hard.”
In his conversation with Weiser, Romer told about visiting the cemetery of his hometown of Holly, noticing the Hispanic names all clustered in a corner. He was told it was because the people with Hispanic names preferred it that way. He was only six years old, he said, but he didn’t buy it.
“I lived with a lot of different people in the Dust Bowl and the Depression. One of my mentors was a guy who didn’t know the English language; couldn’t sign his own name. He was my cowboy. Mick was his name. He taught me how to approach tumbleweeds around a fence post without getting snake bit. So I learned from a lot of different people that there was a culture of truth always there.”
Officially called the Granada Relocation Center, Amache was not a concentration camp of the same type created by Germany in World War II. But leaving was not permitted. Roy Romer likely placed football with inmates of Apache on this plot of ground. Photos/Allen Best
At age 16, he oversaw 12 prisoners from Amache, where people of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned, in harvesting broom corn, a common crop in Colorado at the time. He would collect their knives at the end of the work day and go home. They would be returned to Amache.
At other times, though, he played football with the boys from the Amache internment camp, which is about 12 miles from Holly.
About Amache, he said that even as a high school student he knew the prisoner-of-war camp was wrong. His government was lying to him.
Again, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government lied. After an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 1966 (when this writer first saw him at a campaign event in Brush) Romer left the Democratic Party for about a decade. During that time he went to Vietnam himself to investigate. From the evidence he found, he concluded that the government had not told the truth. He cited David Halberstam’s 1972 book about the Vietnam debacle, “The Best and the Brightest.”
Repeatedly, Romer stressed the importance of a leader surrounding himself with truth tellers. That, he said, included his way of evaluating what judges to appoint. Never, he said, did he pay attention to whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Instead, he focused on them as people.
“I broke all the rules,” said Romer. “I would ask the questions of potential judges, which you’re not supposed to ask, like you know, ‘What’s the greatest crisis you’ve had in your life?’ You know, ‘What pains you the most today?’ And I, I got, I really got to know people who I work closely with, and honesty is so important. There are very different points of view in life, but you got to have an honesty about your point of view. And I — I just happened to be around people who were exceedingly talented and exceedingly honest.”
Weiser reminded Romer of something he had told him. “Don’t be the smartest person in the room. But the one who understands what people are feeling.”
“I’m scared of the people who believe that they’re the smartest people in the room. Also, group think. Group think leads us to a lot of errors. In the Vietnam War — I really honored those troops who had to fight that war, but I was very, very disgusted with the political leadership that led us into group think.”
Weiser told Romer that a whole body of literature called psychological safety exists and describes what the former governor had said. Did the literature influence Romer in his approach?
No, said Romer, his approach was based on his experiences in life, going back to his boyhood in Holly, working with an amputee 56 years his senior at a laboring job. “It wasn’t things I read, it was the experience of life that I had dealing with them and their problems.”
Romer and Weiser talked about much more, including the tragedy during his governorship of a state highway worker who accidentally dislodged a boulder that killed 10 people and injured many more in a bus crossing Berthoud Pass.
On getting to 98
There was also time for questions. Ernest Gurulé a long-time Denver journalist, told Romer that he considered him to be the “gold-standard governor” of modern times but that he continued to wonder about a decision he had made. He chose not to commute the death sentence of Gary Davis.
Davis, then living in Byers, and his companion kidnapped a neighbor in front of her children, drove her to a deserted field then raped her and then shot her 14 times with a rifle. Davis was executed in 1997, having been refused his last request, a cigarette. Colorado later abolished the death sentence.
“[T]here undoubtedly had been some rehabilitation of his character and his demeanor. But I do not believe that whatever remorse or rehabilitation that is displayed here justifies reaching that extraordinary event that would cause this governor to give him clemency,” Romer said at the time.
Now, at age 98, does Romer have moral qualms?
Romer answered indirectly.
“I spent a lot of time on that, very much time, and decided there were not sufficient mitigating circumstances. The law was a bad law, but it’s the law, and I’m governor. I’m going to let it happen. If I were to face that again, I would take a different approach, and it is institutionally the death penalty has become a very big evil, and we just ought to avoid it. But I did that at the time, trying to be a proper governor, doing my job, not saying what the law ought to be, but saying what the circumstances are on mitigation. It’s a decision I didn’t particularly like.”
Roy Romer said the key to his longevity has been continued curiosity.
Still another question, from a different individual, was about the pros and cons of having one party in control of both branches of the Legislature as well as the governor’s mansion, as has been in the case in Colorado since 2019.
Romer replied that he distrusted Democratic dominance of Colorado’s state government. “I like a government that has a give and a take, and that you have to compromise to make things happen.”
When he was governor, he said, he had Republican leaders who wouldn’t look at him when they talked. “They’d come in and speak to my aides, but speaking to me, they wouldn’t look at me. It was okay with me as long as we did business. Let’s do business, and I got used to having a bipartisan government. So I like bipartisanship.”
Then there was the matter of Romer’s age. “Everyone’s wondering how do I get to be 98 years old and be as incredibly active, engaged, and with it as you are. What’s the secret, Roy?” Weiser asked.
“The secret is curiosity,” Romer replied. “I am a very curious person. I love to know how things happen, how things work.”
Romer then told a story of being on his way to deliver a speech. Enroute to his venue he was on a sidewalk when he noticed a building being torn down there. He stood watching, in his curiosity forgetting to get to the speech.
And then he stressed once again, the value of criticism.
“It so important that we get in the habit of being able to accept self-criticism. Most of us don’t like to have criticism. We learn so much from criticism. I learn so much from people telling me, Roy, you’re better than this. You can do it better.”
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