The Brainwashing of George Romney
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, in American politics, frontrunner status isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Take the example of George Romney, the popular three-term governor of Michigan (and father of the current presidential candidate Mitt Romney), who many insiders expected would easily lock up the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 despite Richard Nixon’s early lead in the polls. Handsome, energetic, and tremendously successful at everything he did, Romney was thought to be the GOP’s best hope at capturing the White House—until September 4, 1967—40 years ago today—when his candidacy suddenly imploded.
“Can a politician who is his party’s leading prospect for the Presidency a year before its national convention be eliminated from serious consideration before the preliminaries of the primary election have even begun?” The New York Timeswondered a few days later. “It doesn’t sound possible, but there were people in the Washington Hilton Hotel last week who swore that George Romney was on his way to achieving just such an enviable distinction.”
For the better part of 1967, the contest for the Republican nomination seemed likely to pit Romney against former Vice President Richard Nixon, who had lost a painfully close election to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Nixon was a formidable candidate and had built up considerable good will among party activists since his departure from government service. In 1964 he had stumped hard for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, delivering more than 150 speeches in 36 states and earning real political capital with grassroots conservatives who resented the refusal of moderate and liberal Republicans to work for the party’s right-wing nominee. In 1966 Nixon stepped up his political activities, headlining dozens of fundraisers for congressional candidates and delivering more than 600 speeches in 40 states.
Romney, on the other hand, was a relatively liberal Republican who had openly refused to endorse Goldwater, criticizing him as an extremist, and who had led a 10,000-person civil rights march in Detroit in 1965 to protest the events of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama. And many party leaders in 1967 were in no mood to listen to the party’s growing conservative wing. Barry Goldwater’s candidacy had proved an unmitigated disaster and resulted in a landslide victory for the Democrats.
What’s more, Richard Nixon was damaged goods. After 20 years in public life, his no-holds-barred style of political combat had made him a highly controversial figure. Sam Rayburn, the rough-hewn Texas Democrat who served 48 years in the House, including 10 terms as speaker, called him the most “devious face of all those who have served in Congress all the years I’ve been here.” Former President Harry Truman said that “all the time I’ve been in politics, there’s only two people I hate, and he’s one.” Once, when a guest brought Nixon’s name up at a dinner party, Adlai Stevenson protested, “Please! Not while I’m eating!” Nixon even inspired occasional bipartisan revulsion. Robert Taft, the Ohio senator known popularly as “Mr. Republican,” described him as “a little man in a big hurry” and decried his “mean and vindictive streak.” Nixon himself realized the depth of animosity he inspired in his political enemies. “You know, a lot of people think I’m a prick,” he told a reporter for the Washington Post, “but I’m really not.”
George Romney was cut from different cloth. A devout Mormon who didn’t smoke, drink, gamble, or use strong language, he had served as a missionary in Great Britain before moving on to a successful business career, first with the Aluminum Corporation of America and later as head of American Motors, a company he rescued from near-bankruptcy with his introduction of a new fuel-efficient car, the Rambler. Decades ahead of his time, Romney asked, “Who wants to have a gas guzzling dinosaur in his garage? Think of the gas bills!” Consumers agreed, preferring AMC’s compact to those of the Big Three automakers, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. "Romney was David taking on three Goliaths—and the public loved it,” one expert said.
In 1962 Romney, a lifelong Republican, won the first of three terms as governor of Michigan. He soon became known as a voice of racial reconciliation and an advocate for moderation in a party that was drifting rightward.
His troubles began in 1965, when he visited Vietnam on a fact-finding tour. Like most Americans, he was convinced that America’s war in Southeast Asia was both necessary and winnable, and as late as April 1967 he delivered a speech in Hartford, Connecticut, supporting the Johnson administration’s policies. By late 1967, however, he was having second thoughts. In a program taped on August 31 and broadcast on September 4, he told a Michigan television interviewer that he no longer believed that the U.S. could win in Vietnam. And then he made his big gaffe. He said top military officials and diplomats in Saigon had given him a “brainwashing” in the fall of 1965, misleading him into thinking that America was sure to defeat the Communists.
The public reaction was swift and merciless. Though Romney tried to qualify his statement, explaining that he had not been subject to a “Russian-style but [rather an] L.B.J.-style brainwashing,” the damage was done. His admission suggested both naiveté and weakness when the country was looking for strength and certitude. On November 18 he formally declared his candidacy, but his campaign got nowhere, and late the following February he withdrew from the race. After Nixon narrowly won the election that fall, he named Romney as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In that office, Romney continued to advocate liberal policies, pushing for public housing in suburban neighborhoods and supporting wage and price controls to check the pace of inflation. Following Nixon’s reelection in 1972, he retired from the cabinet.
It was Romney’s great misfortune to be among the first public opponents of the Vietnam War. Months later Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota came surprisingly close to defeating President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary as an antiwar candidate. The always acerbic McCarthy said of Romney’s “brainwashing” comment that “a light rinse” would have been sufficient, but he, too, had—like virtually every politician in America—supported the war before he opposed it. Unlike Romney, though, he had timing on his side. He launched his New Hampshire campaign shortly before the dark days of the Tet Offensive. Whereas Romney’s reward for sincerity was a political death sentence, McCarthy, who ultimately proved a hopelessly ineffective and aloof candidate, was able to ride a wave of public adulation, though he didn’t come close to winning his party’s nomination. Later that spring, his campaign distributed posters showing him in a solitary pose with the legend “He Stood Up Alone, and Something Happened.”
Forty years later, Romney’s son Mitt is a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. More conservative than his father, and certainly more cautious, he may be the least likely of the major contenders to commit a crippling verbal gaffe. But fair warning to him and candidates Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, and Thompson: Politics is a brutal game, and frontrunner status is no great gift.