Huntsman and Huntsboy

From The New York Times:

SALT LAKE CITY — Jon M. Huntsman Jr. was 10 years old when his father packed up their growing family to move east in 1970, leaving behind his fledgling company to work for President Richard M. Nixon.

A driven businessman with deep roots in the Mormon Church, the elder Huntsman found little to like about his experience in the Nixon White House. It was poorly run, in his view — not at all like a business — and he felt terrorized by H. R. Haldeman, the mercurial chief of staff.

“You asked me what I took out,” he told an interviewer years later. “I didn’t take anything but fear out.”
Yet Mr. Huntsman did leave Washington with something that proved valuable when he resettled his family here: a thick Rolodex and a deep understanding of politics. In the years that followed, as he became a billionaire industrialist, a philanthropist, a campaign donor and one of Utah’s most powerful men, his connections and wealth proved critical in carving a path into politics for his namesake and eldest son.

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Today the younger Huntsman is a Republican candidate for president at the back of a crowded pack. He is best known as a former Utah governor, conversant in Mandarin and politically moderate, who crossed party lines to become President Obama’s ambassador to China. On the campaign trail, he has cultivated a reputation as “the civility candidate.”

But here in Utah, where many still call him Junior, he remains, for better or worse, Jon Huntsman Sr.’s son. It is both his blessing and his burden.

The father-son bond preoccupies political circles here. Some say Mr. Huntsman, who has alternated between the family business and public service — including a stint as ambassador to Singapore at age 32 — has been groomed for politics. Some see him as struggling to emerge from his father’s shadow, or wonder if, in pursuing the presidency, he is chasing his father’s dream.

Captain Underpants, Mittsie, Chimpy, and now Jonny Boy.  What’s with them and their trying-to-outdo-daddy issues?

Mr. Huntsman, 51, says he is pursuing nobody’s dream but his own.

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As founder and chairman of the Huntsman Corporation (the company is run by Peter Huntsman, Jon Jr.’s brother), the elder Huntsman presides over a global chemical manufacturer with 2010 revenues of $9.3 billion. Having briefly flirted with a run for governor in 1988, he has worked over the years to ease his son’s path, according to those who know them both.

In Washington, allies like Jake Garn, a Republican former senator from Utah, who later worked for the Huntsman Corporation, recommended Mr. Huntsman for jobs. In Utah, the father quietly pressed state leaders to install the son as the head of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics — a job that ultimately went to Mitt Romney, one of Mr. Huntsman’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. He has been a financial backer of his son’s campaigns.

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American politics has long been rife with dynasties — the names Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Bush leap to mind. But in Utah, where politics and business are deeply entwined with the Mormon faith, there is no dynasty quite like the Huntsmans.

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Mr. Huntsman’s mother, Karen — just as ambitious for her children as is her husband, many here say — was the daughter of one of 12 Mormon “apostles” who serve under the church president. Mr. Huntsman Sr., descended from Mormon pioneers, is revered for the hundreds of millions of dollars he has given to charity.

It is impossible to spend any time in Utah without stumbling across the Huntsman name. There are Huntsman teacher awards, Huntsman sporting events, a Huntsman arena and the gleaming glass and granite Huntsman Cancer Institute, the crown jewel of the family’s philanthropy.

“He had 94 percent name ID the day he started,” said Nolan Karras, who lost to Mr. Huntsman in a primary for governor.

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The family fortune grew out of the elder Huntsman’s invention of the plastic foam “clamshell” container for McDonald’s Big Macs.

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Their two years in Washington, where the elder Huntsman eventually became staff secretary to the president, left an impression. Young Jon Jr. met the president — “I remember a certain stiffness and formality,” he said — and trusted aides like Henry A. Kissinger and Alexander M. Haig.

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By 1978, the family home in the foothills of the Wasatch mountain range here was a magnet for budding musicians, including Jon Jr., a keyboard whiz who could play almost anything, from Emerson, Lake and Palmer to Chopin. He ran for senior class president in high school, but lost. Later, he dropped out to join a rock ’n’ roll band — a test, but not a break, of the father-son bond.

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Over the next two decades, Mr. Huntsman held a string of government jobs under President Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes: advance man, deputy assistant commerce secretary, ambassador to Singapore, trade ambassador.

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At each turn, Mr. Huntsman’s family network played a role. One former official during the Reagan and first Bush administrations remembers the elder Huntsman seeking specific jobs for his son.

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Mr. Garn, the former senator, said he spoke to Reagan about Mr. Huntsman after the young man sought his help. Fred Malek, a Nixon administration colleague of the father’s, recommended the son as ambassador to Singapore.

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Mr. Huntsman acknowledges that his father’s “vast network” has helped open doors. But what matters, he says, is how he fared when he walked through them.

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In substance and style, there are differences between the two men. The father, forceful and conservative, is close with the commentator Glenn Beck (yet is a sometime donor to Democrats). The son, soft-spoken, is often at odds with his party. In 2008, they split on presidential politics: the father backed Mr. Romney; the son, Senator John McCain.

Still, Mr. Huntsman has faced questions about whether he is his own man — so much so that when he first ran for governor, his campaign aides joked about making silver spoon lapel pins.

“I don’t think there’s much question that he would not have been ambassador to Singapore without his father’s strong support, and his father had a very good Rolodex in those days,” said Robert F. Bennett, a Republican former senator from Utah and Romney supporter, “but all reports are he did a very good job.”

Others are less charitable. “Look at where he’s been, look what he’s done,” said Bob Springmeyer, a Salt Lake businessman and Democrat who lost to Mr. Huntsman in 2008. “If you had dropped out of high school, could you have gotten into Penn? Do you think you’d be named trade ambassador without major campaign contributions?”

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When Mr. Huntsman sought the governorship in 2004 — his first bid for elective office — aides insisted he would not buy his way into the job. Huntsman Corporation employees, its political action committee and family members gave $188,634 of the $2.8 million Mr. Huntsman raised that year, making the company his top contributor, according to records compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, an open government group.

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In late June, Mr. Huntsman Sr. hosted his son’s top donors at his home in the Utah resort town of Deer Valley. David Fischer, a close Huntsman family friend who has just quit the campaign, told Politico last week that the elder Huntsman expressed concern about internal feuding and disarray.
“But there’s a limit to what the father can do,” Mr. Fischer was quoted as saying.