Last night, just as I was about to go to sleep, I clicked on a link tweeted by Ben Smith, which resulted in my reading, in the dark, on my iphone, all about George Romney, until 1:00 a.m.
In The Making of Mitt Romney, John R. Bohrer provides a detailed historical analysis of George Romney's political career, and the implications of his career on his son, Mitt.
The article opens with:
Everyone agrees: Mitt Romney is not like his father.
The article proceeds to completely undermine this statement.
The late Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate George Romney is remembered as a principled man of spontaneity and candor. His example is regularly invoked by both admirers of his son's disciplined campaign style and critics of Mitt's back-and-forth pandering. George, it is said, told the truth about the Vietnam War before it was popular to do so, with an unfortunately worded comment about “brainwashing” by U.S. government officials that cost him the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. “Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”
This rejection of his father’s example, the thinking goes, is what has made Mitt a more successful presidential candidate — self-controlled but hard to pin down, flipping from moderate to conservative to moderate once again. It is observed that Mitt would never draw a line in the sand like his father did in 1964, when George dramatically "charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party's foot-dragging on civil rights," as the Boston Globe's authoritative biography, "The Real Romney," put it earlier this year. Outlets from the New York Times to the New Republic have recalled this story of the elder Romney's stand against Goldwater's hard-line conservatives. Frontline’s documentary “The Choice 2012” reported it as a formative event: “when Goldwater received the nomination, Mitt saw his father angrily storm out.” A Google search for the incident produces hundreds of pages of results. In August, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne cited the episode to write that Mitt “has seemed more a politician who would do whatever it took to close a deal than a leader driven by conviction and commitment. This is a problem George Romney never had.”
With respect to the walking-out-of-the-convention legend, which Mitt cites as evidence of his father's decision to stand up in favor of the civil rights movement, Bohrer explains:
[George Romney] did no such thing. After the platform votes were completed, there was nothing left to do that night except for him to leave. Romney then returned to the convention the next day and the next while his name was being batted around as a longshot vice presidential nomination. Though it is true that he was disappointed with the civil rights plank, Romney no more walked out of the convention than Barry Goldwater did. He was present for the madhouse that was the Wednesday balloting, when Michigan delegates adorned with Romney buttons were subjected to shouted insults and allegedly spat upon. When the Goldwater tally reached a nominating majority, George Romney did not walk out of the convention hall. He leapt to his feet and seconded the motion to make the Goldwater nomination unanimous. Romney had actually followed through on what he’d said in Cleveland about supporting the platform and nominee.
Perhaps because his last name is Romney, George managed to engage in a bit of flip-flopping regarding his position on Goldwater.
He left the convention holding open the possibility of endorsing Goldwater and then, after a unity summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, momentarily endorsed the Arizona senator. Then he changed his mind while his top aides polled “all-white and race-conscious” Michigan communities for a “secret” white backlash vote against LBJ’s civil rights advances — a backlash that might have made a Goldwater endorsement palatable at home. Finding the Republican label even more unpopular than civil rights in Michigan, Romney ultimately distanced himself from the entire party, including his own moderate Republican allies.
After illustrating the widespread reporting of the George Romney-Myth from a variety of sources (Rolling Stone, New York Times, New Republic, Frontline, and E.J. Dionne), Bohrer writes:
Exactly where the 1964 myth entered the public consciousness is difficult to pinpoint, but it has been promoted by Mitt, who made one of its earliest print mentions in an interview during his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign. . . . “[My father] walked out of the Republican National Convention in 1964, when Barry Goldwater said, 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,'" he told Bay Windows, a LGBT interest magazine in Boston.
"I don't remember him walking out, no,” Walt DeVries, a George Romney aide who was with him at the 1964 convention, told BuzzFeed in an interview this October 13. “Every time I see that quote from Mitt, I just don't remember.... I've searched my mind, and I think I would have."
Notwithstanding what actually occurred, Mitt continued to affirm this myth in his
2008 campaign.
The article is VERY LONG but worth the read.
Other interesting tid-bits:
There's this...
"It was at the very start of his 1962 campaign that George Romney became the first person to walk back a Mitt Romney statement."
and this...
Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Detroit in June to lead a march down Woodward Avenue and Romney declared it “Freedom March Day” in Michigan, but since the event fell on a Sunday, and he didn’t practice politics on Sundays, he had representatives march in his place. The conspicuous absence left a sour taste in some mouths. If a man of the cloth like Dr. King and some 125,000 other souls could march for God-given rights on a Sunday, why couldn’t George Romney?
Although Romney did not actually attend the MLK march,
George Romney would later claim to have marched with MLK in Detroit, a story Mitt repeated in his campaigns.
and this...
As Theodore White wrote in The Making of the President 1964, “Romney perplexes his less-principled observers, for no one is ever exactly sure what his principles will tell him to do.”
The article closes with the following;
But Mitt was there at the start in 1962. He was there throughout 1964, and he saw what made his father a winner: a chameleonic approach to politics, never sorry, always righteous. To his credit, Mitt Romney has spared the moralizing and all the talk about principles, coming across as more calculating than his father ever allowed himself to be depicted. The calculation has actually served the son better in the long run. Mitt’s reversals seem willful while George’s just seemed manic. Neither, however, displayed a solid core. During the 1968 campaign, someone asked George Romney’s top supporter, Nelson Rockefeller, why Romney was so scattered. Rockefeller replied privately, “You’d better ask a psychiatrist.”
To answer the same question about Mitt Romney, one need only look to history.
My general impression of George Romney after reading this article is that he was a very intelligent, savvy, politician, who said and did what was necessary to advance his political career, but who did not possess a strong set of beliefs. Hmmmm, sounds like someone else I know.
Although I included lots of quotes, the article is much longer, well worth the read!