Romney's Amateur Hour
SANDOZ, ROBERT
WASHINGTONU.S.A. Romney's Amateur Hour By Robert Sandoz Washington White House reporters claim to have come up with a new Johnson credibility detection system: If the President wrinkles his...
...The White House promptly expressed its "appreciation...
...His quixotic statements on the affairs of state, his vacillation and apparent ignorance when it comes to issues more precise than the nation's moral fiber, a syntax which he must have learned at Eisenhower's knee, and a boundless deficiency of political acumen have earned Romney a national press which only George Hamilton could envy...
...There are several ways of looking at the Governor's vacillation on Vietnam...
...In 1966, he added that we should be bombing installations around Haiphong...
...In April, in a speech billed as the definitive Romney position, the door revolved again...
...Romney's Amateur Hour By Robert Sandoz Washington White House reporters claim to have come up with a new Johnson credibility detection system: If the President wrinkles his nose, he's telling the truth...
...But there are many who will shout "Long Live Rockefeller" if it does...
...Robert McNamara, in a classic case of the pot and the kettle, said Romney was "blind to the truth...
...nominate him, Romney is performing like a runner-up on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour...
...he had the gop professionals from the beginning...
...none of them bodes well for the future of the Republic under a President Romney: 1) Romney is an awkwardly expedient politico, ready to be hawk or dove as the ornithological winds dictate...
...Romney is many things that Johnson presumably is not: sincere straight solid, pure pristine principled...
...once uttered, though, the Administration and rival Republicans swooped in for the overkill...
...Henry Bellmon, a former governor of Oklahoma and director of the Nixon effort, said that in the first place the Nixon campaign was not directed against other Republicans, and in the second place Romney's brainwashing remark demonstrated a weakness that could be most damaging to the party in a Presidential campaign...
...Merely by announcing his candidacy, Regan could pick up most of the Southern delegates, thus seriously impeding the Nixon bandwagon...
...Magnificent jaw...
...At the same time, he is quick to remind listeners that "I have never indicated we shouldn't bomb...
...But the view from here is that he's through...
...Romney dismissed the News editorial as "amusing," but there is nothing even faintly amusing about the crisis confronting Republican moderates...
...Romney countered by explaining that he had actually been talking about the credibility gap, news manipulation and a snow job...
...The Citizen Politician...
...3) Romney is genuinely bewildered and out of his depth when it comes to complex national issues...
...If he scratches his ear, he's telling the truth...
...Romney does not...
...Stories such as this, which bloom almost every time the President opens his mouth, illustrate one reason why George Romney would appear to be an ideal Republican candidate to challenge Lyndon Johnson next year...
...All he required was a light rinse...
...He has been an able enough governor, but he has learned few tricks of his trade...
...Sane Western observers who have seen Reagan campaign believe he could win not only the nomination if he pursued it, but the election as well...
...Charles Percy is waiting in the wings, but no one is yet perceptibly anxious to bring him out...
...Our military effort must succeed...
...he said...
...But Goldwater didn't need the press— or much of anything else—to win the nomination...
...Most observers lean toward the last interpretation...
...Many of the regulars will never forgive him for refusing to support the Goldwater-Miller ticket...
...If he moves his lips, he's lying...
...This is his first and last shot at the White House...
...The imponderable for Nixon, as indeed for the entire Republican party, is Ronald Reagan...
...The brainwashing remark, it said, illustrated the Governor's "unfortunate incapacity to achieve stability and constancy in Presidential politics . . ." Quite sensibly, the News recommended that Romney bow out in favor of Nelson Rockefeller...
...The News, long a Romney backer, said that for months it had "puzzled over his inexplicable blurt-and-retreat habit in the unfamiliar realms of national and foreign affairs...
...Whether he wants it or not, his prospects of getting it are exceedingly dim...
...Reagan stoutly denies an interest in the Vice Presidential nomination, but then so did LBJ...
...But by then the damage was done...
...He indicated that he had doubts about the "moral right" of the U.S...
...Product of the free enterprise system...
...Rockefeller, the devil incarnate to almost every regular west of the Alleghenies and the mortal enemy of his next-door neighbor, Richard Nixon, may believe his one chance is a convention so hopelessly snarled that finally it will resign itself to victory in November and turn to him...
...Which leaves Nixon and you know who...
...However, he is being presented to the people in a manner not calculated to gain their respect, much less their votes...
...Has met a payroll...
...We must use military force as necessary...
...If he rubs his eyes, he's telling the truth...
...Romney is an effective person-to-person campaigner, and conceivably he could regain momentum in the primaries...
...It was uncomfortably reminiscent of Gold-water's labored definitions of what he had or had not meant to say...
...Such a strategy need not conflict with Rockefeller's insistence that he has neither the ambition nor the need to court the nomination...
...Snow job or no snow job, Romney has always had difficulty with Vietnam...
...or shouldn't escalate...
...There was no need to brainwash the Governor," said Senator Eugene McCarthy (D.Minn...
...He attacked the "stumbling, one-man decision for military escalation," called Johnson's policy "clumsy, ill-timed and poorly coordinated," and concluded that "it was a mistake to get involved in a land war...
...Barry Goldwater proved that a Presidential aspirant could survive a bad press up to a point, that point being a Republican convention...
...Says so all the time...
...Since early 1962 when (after a well-publicized 24-hour fast) he first announced his candidacy for Governor of Michigan, he has been elected to the office three times...
...More recently, Romney has denounced our involvement in Vietnam as a "tragic error" and said that the cop will be the peace party in 1968...
...But this is not likely to happen until Romney is beaten in two or three primaries next spring, and perhaps it will not happen even then...
...But he was one of the first—and certainly the most prominent—to admit that he had been had...
...Even then, his admission might have gone unnoticed where it not for his suicidal choice of words...
...In July 1965, four months before he was taken to the cleaners in Saigon, Romney emphatically endorsed the Administration's conduct of the war...
...generals and diplomats during a visit to Vietnam in 1965...
...The Virgin George...
...Ten months before the Republican National Convention that he hopes will Robert Sandoz ij a free-lance writer working out of Washington...
...The trouble is that while we like our statesmen unsoiled, we will brook no clumsiness...
...Romney has long had a propensity for putting his foot in it, but he outdid himself when he charged that he had been "brainwashed" by U.S...
...to fight in Vietnam...
...It would be an unpleasant and rather treacherous arrangement, and it probably will not materialize...
...Romney was not the first visitor to Saigon to confuse patriotism with progress or valor with the validity of America's presence in Vietnam...
...Certainly the Detroit News did in its devastating editorial urging Romney to get out of the Presidential race...
...Knows the value of a dollar, the power of prayer, the blessings of democracy...
...he must come to the convention a favorite of the people...
...It is not hard to imagine Nixon winning every primary he contests, breezing into Miami with enough delegates to nominate, and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in November...
...Just when the Readers Digest was about to outbid Life for the first-person story, Romney explained, "I wasn't talking about Russian-type brainwashing...
...Percy will be lucky if he arrives at the convention with his own Illinois delegation intact...
...One pictured an emaciated Romney stubbornly invoking the Geneva Convention, until at last the subtly sadistic General Westmoreland (Vincent Price In His Greatest Role) and Ambassador Lodge, crafty old Lodge (David Niven As You've Never Seen Him Before), broke the poor devil...
...2) Romney is the perpetual victim of brainwashing, swayed by the last voice he has heard, terrestial or otherwise...
...And this is where George Romney falls mortally short of the mark...
...If the moderates do not pull themselves together soon, the events of 1968 might destroy their effectiveness for years to come...
...His intellectual laxity on this issue alone has convinced many observers that he would make a weak candidate and a weaker President...
...The situation is a desperate one for the moderate wing of the gop...
...He changed his mind—or perhaps only his tune—early this year...
...Chasity is fine, but they'd damn well better know all the positions...
...Perhaps a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket is the moderates' last best hope...
...He has heard the call, and he may not let a few piddling primary defeats derail his rendezvous with destiny...
...I was talking about LBJ brainwashing...
...All that Romney has going for him now are Rockefeller and the polls, and he is slipping in the polls: One shows him in the first choice of only 22 per cent of Republican voters (compared to 43 per cent last November), and even his private polls show him being clobbered by Nixon in New Hampshire, 65-35...
...The Governor is 60 years old...
...involvement in Vietnam, he said, was both "morally right and necessary...
...Romney's support must be broadly based...
...Romney is a superb specimen, actually...
Vol. 50 • September 1967 • No. 19
