THE MICHIGAN MISSIONARY
BRODER, STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S.
George Romney THE MICHIGAN MISSIONARY by STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S. BRODER This is the concluding installment of a two-part portrait of Michigan's Governor George W. Romney. The first,...
...He was nominated as the Michigan favorite-son candidate and received all but eight of its forty-eight votes...
...The Vietnam war has proved particularly puzzling to Romney...
...In 1948 the chairman of Nash-Kel-vinator, George Mason, asked Romney to become his personal assistant...
...When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Romney was the industry's choice to head the Automotive Council for War Production, and in that post served as the liaison man between the Government and the auto companies in scheduling and expediting military production...
...Selig S. Harrison reported in The New Republic that when asked what he would do about countries that lean toward Communism, Romney answered, "Persuade them they're off the track, by precept and example...
...But somehow Romney had come through the experience deeply distrustful of political parties, both Democratic and Republican...
...The reason, he said, was that it was held on a Sunday...
...He appeared with and plugged other candidates for state office...
...He would handshake his way through dense crowds, using a modified Australian crawl, left hand, right hand, left, right...
...Romney, once again the lone wolf, stayed aloof from the Rockefeller-Scranton-Hugh Scott effort to line up support for a series of liberal amendments and, instead, after theirs had been defeated, offered his own revisions of the civil rights and extremism planks...
...He wobbled visibly several times, but in the end his Michigan advisers prevailed and he recalled his pledge to seek a second term as governor...
...Wendell Willkie was undone by the 1944 Wisconsin primary, Harold Stassen by Oregon's in 1948...
...Romney's behavior at the Republican convention in San Francisco is the subject of endless debate...
...What does that mean...
...But the primaries are Romney's natural arena...
...But I can tell you that many rank and file Republicans got a bad taste in their mouths when they saw leaders of their own party failing to support a national ticket...
...After nine years with Alcoa Romney joined the Automobile Manufacturers Association as manager of its Detroit office...
...While Romney has been peddling these ideas for a decade he is still without any important disciples...
...the small and seemingly quixotic electorate of New Hampshire...
...Had they lost only four or five elections, they might not have been quite so enthusiastic...
...In main points, his position paralleled that of the Johnson Administration and the President expressed his "gratitude" for Romney's stand...
...His clever campaign against the "gas-guzzling dinosaurs" also had obvious social overtones and would have fascinating ramifications when Romney entered political life...
...Romney decided he could not support him...
...The basis of his economic thought is the belief that the nation is endangered by the "enormous aggregations of power" in both business and unions...
...Romney was re-elected by 382,913 votes while Goldwater was losing Michigan by 1,076,463...
...Yet Romney has taken risks: he fought for the new constitution, which narrowly was adopted...
...The stage now was set for George Romney to become the first man to use the business world as a springboard into high elective politics since a "barefoot boy from Wall Street," Wendell Willkie, stepped out of the corporate offices of Commonwealth and Southern to capture the 1940 Republican Presidential nomination...
...As one auto company executive explained, "You plug your own product...
...If this conflict is what we seem to say at times it is, then we need to risk the ultimate because...
...He begins with the backing of two men who bled profusely in the 1964 struggle and of most others who share with them the overriding purpose of avoiding the political catastrophe of that year...
...In plain fact, Romney in 1961 had been a businessman for fourteen years...
...Policy (Detroit News, July 30, 1965...
...Johnson and older than all but seven Presidents in our history at the time they took office...
...Romney Favors Widening Bombing of North Vietnam (New York Times, June 13, 1966...
...He traveled the state alone and made no mention of his ticket-mates...
...The real question is: What do people look for in a President, or what will they be looking for in 1968...
...In Michigan Romney was a bit more of a regular in 1964 than he had been in 1962...
...If he was against the Big Car, therefore he was for the Little Man...
...If he hasn't, I don't see why a governor should...
...and his experience with American Motors (his scheme would break up General Motors and Ford...
...There are no simple answers...
...American Motors bought full pages in newspapers and magazines to present the face, signature, and message of its boss...
...Romney's press secretary later slipped into the press room and managed, amid general hilarity, to correct the unintended reference to plural marriage...
...While his purpose was to sell Ramblers, Romney also was selling Romney...
...the Governor looks like a middle-aged Eagle Scout: clean-cut, honest, sincere...
...Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton have long memories and have had time to plumb their experiences for the lessons of that fateful year...
...But even extemporaneously he is not a facile performer...
...The Governor's margin was 527,047 votes...
...This is as unconscionable to our tradition as it is resented by other free countries...
...A sort of pied piper of politics, he had—thanks to those years of Rambler advertising—the instant recognition that every novice candidate dreams of and few achieve...
...When Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton announced a week later that he would make the futile fight against Goldwater, Romney conspicuously withheld his endorsement of the effort...
...We will have to wait and see what he stands for...
...Romney, with his evangelical fervor, is obviously not everybody's cup of tea...
...The first, ccMormonism Made Him What He Is" appeared in our October issue...
...I'm concerned on that score, number one, and I'm not going to answer your questions completely, but number two, if this conflict involves the question of our stopping Communism, the international Communist conspiracy, and stopping it in South Vietnam, if this conflict is really being supported by the Red Chinese and the Russians, and if this really is naked Communism, international conspiracy, then I think we have to weigh the question of how much we can escalate without their continuing to escalate if we agree that's the real issue in Vietnam...
...Is a Political Animal...
...I have refrained from taking a clear-cut position one way or the other, ah, I just . . . the President hasn't either...
...Romney, to put it charitably, is not his match in this regard...
...rT*he best training I ever had was my church training," says George Romney, the son of a poverty-plagued Western farmer and carpenter...
...Fortunately for young Romney his shorthand was so bad that his employer switched him to tariff research...
...Selling Ramblers was not the end in itself...
...Held suspect by the professionals, his obvious tactic is to take his case to the people...
...A commitment of the character and mas-siveness of ours in a country the size of Vietnam has the inevitable result of turning it into an American dependency," the Governor said...
...office seekers...
...On April 7, 1967, in a major speech on the subject in Hartford, Connecticut, the Governor ruled out as unrealistic both United States withdrawal from Vietnam and "massive military escalation" of the conflict...
...The program that has brought Romney successively enlarged majorities is called "Total Michigan Progress" (a slogan that will never rival "compact car" or even "The Great Society...
...Operating under differing rules, each offers a unique opportunity for disaster: the open field of contenders in Nebraska and Oregon...
...I do not think there is any college training that is a substitute for my religious training...
...The party regained the state Senate and earned a tie in the House...
...He was the only Republican to win statewide office...
...The heaviest blow came from a longtime supporter, The Detroit News, which said that Romney's "unfortunate incapacity...
...But the first time Gold-water came to Detroit, Romney gave him a polite, non-endorsing introduction, and during Goldwater's second appearance the Michigan Governor was in Massachusetts campaigning for Attorney General Edward Brooke...
...Watching Romney on such a day, Mary McGrory of The Washington Star, wrote, "The Republican women responded to him, as the ladies of Florence to Savonarola...
...He is pledged to support the nominee of his party, whoever he is...
...The "brainwashing" statement stirred angry rebuttal in both parties, but Romney stuck by his charges, even though his supporters conceded it was an "unfortunate" word...
...These people kicked us out because they envied the prosperity of my people...
...And, hearing them both, would the voters conclude that there is wisdom in Lyndon Johnson that neither Mormonism, motorcars, nor Michigan has given George Romney...
...Republican Party leaders, having run seven consecutive losers, hailed his decision...
...There is the suspicion of the Federal Government ("an octopus-like creature"), the accent on action at the state level ("states give individuals greater opportunity for direct participation...
...The Governor looks like a President...
...The first indication that he was publicly pulling away from Goldwater came at the Governors' Conference in June 1964 when he broke his rule against politicking on Sundays to issue a Sabbath blast at the Arizona Senator, implying that his nomination would "commence the suicidal destruction of the Republican Party...
...It was a holy war...
...The closest Romney came "L.B.J...
...In 1966 Romney had two labors to perform...
...Governor Opposes Escalation (Lansing State Journal, January 30, 1966...
...A University of Delaware professor of speech, D. Duane Angel, who had written a doctoral dissertation on "The Campaign Speaking of George Romney," analyzed the "accept-endorse" statement...
...As Governor, Romney has been first rate in the tradition of Earl Warren and Thomas E. Dewey, Herbert Lehman and Adlai E. Stevenson...
...Unlike others in the Republican field, Romney has no choice about avoiding a race with the incumbent...
...The chief lesson is solidarity...
...He was reminded that he meant North Vietnam...
...George Romney's entry into Michigan politics came in late 1956 when he became chairman of a citizens committee to conduct a two-year investigation of Detroit's educational needs...
...On a good day, standing above the crowd, this is George Romney at his best—missionary, salesman, inspirationalist...
...As a candidate for the 1968 Republican Presidential nomination, George Romney's record is now in the process of being carefully dissected by friend and foe...
...But he was not fully initiated until he formed Citizens for Michigan in 1959...
...That way is to convince them that he is a winner—by meeting and defeating all comers in a series of Presidential primary contests...
...At the time of the 1968 election, he will be sixty-one—a year older than Mr...
...his association with Alcoa, then a monopoly...
...In the frantic three days that followed, Romney was pushed hard by Richard Nixon and some moderate Republican Governors to get into the race himself...
...He did not always play by the rules of the game...
...The excuse Romney gave for not endorsing the Republican candidate was that he had been unable to have a "conversation in depth" with the Senator to clarify Goldwater's views on civil rights and extremism...
...Second, he had to carry to victory with him now U.S...
...But he was a bit disingenuous in doing so, for Romney also staked out ground for serious criticism of the President if Vietnam remains an issue in 1968...
...But even victory did not markedly improve his opinion of the G.O.P...
...Attending his first Governors' Conference in Miami Beach in 1963, the Michigan Governor, now dubbed "the lonesome end of politics," failed to attend his party's caucus...
...Never one to neglect an opportunity for moral instruction, Romney issued a formal statement declaring that no conference business should be transacted on Sunday, a day, he said, that he, like most Americans, chose "to spend at church and with my families...
...However, there is a way he can bring around the larger group of party-oriented conservatives who were vexed3 but not fatally antagonized, by his 1964 defection, and at the same time unite behind him not only Rockefeller and Scranton but the young moderate Governors, Senators, and Representatives who have hung back from endorsing him in 1967 out of an abundance of caution...
...Reliable polls . . . well before the San Francisco convention/' Romney later admitted, showed that Goldwater would take a drubbing in Michigan...
...Nineteen sixty-eight is Romney's last chance...
...and battled repeatedly for an income tax, which was finally enacted this year...
...For George Romney was the most ill-fitting Republican since Fiorello La Guardia...
...Yet in the year before the election they had two private meetings in Washington and two semiprivate meetings...
...In December, 1964, he wrote Romney: "I don't claim for one moment that had you, Governor Smylie, Governor Rockefeller, Senator Keating, Senator Javits, etc., supported me, I would have won...
...His group made some two hundred recommendations, most of which were accepted by the city's board of education...
...Yet, until Romney entered the national arena, neither his policy views nor his convoluted syntax affected his rapid political ascent...
...He was a celebrity in an age of the celebrity-candidate...
...Romney named names...
...The Michigan Governor's world view is bounded by his rural roots, his business experience, and the Mormon church...
...Nor did Romney make any concessions to the Republicans once he became their candidate...
...the end was converting people to economical cars...
...His campaign literature did not indicate his party affiliation...
...As a political leader in Michigan, Romney has made his moral fervor an effective tool for focusing public attention on practical problems, without being excessively literal about putting his specific "philosophy" into practice...
...After my experience in 1964, I think I have a right to...
...He gropes for the right word, and not infrequently comes up with a conspicuously wrong one...
...His dilemma was this: Should he support Barry Gold-water and face possible defeat himself or should he cut Goldwater and face the future hostility of the party's faithful...
...It lasted well over an hour and not a single word was spoken about politics or political differences...
...His vocabulary is not large...
...And perhaps also because he has never doubted that he has a mission to lead and lead well...
...If the first law of politics is survival, Romney's strategy had been grandly successful, but there were some who would never forgive him his success...
...Some, but not all, of his literature and bumper strips included the word "Republican...
...he asked...
...To columnist James Reston, Romney is "the anti-big candidate...
...However, it was a great improvement over the unwieldy document which preceded it, and its ratification in April, 1963, by the narrow margin of 10,760 votes in a total vote of over 1,609,000 marked the beginning of a new era in Michigan government...
...Nineteen sixty-four, both a Presidential and a gubernatorial election year, presented special problems for Romney as a Republican...
...The President, whatever the reality of his conduct, often appears sly and devious...
...The contradiction and confusions of his Vietnam position have continued to plague Romney, and to do serious damage to his Presidential prospects...
...He said the United States should seek a "peace with amnesty" for all combatants but should not permit a coalition government involving the National Liberation Front, political arm of the Vietcong...
...His work on the tariff bill came to the attention of the Aluminum Company of America, which hired him as a Washington lobbyist...
...For rarely have the words and deeds of a public man run on such separate tracks...
...At various times these headlines have correctly stated his views: Romney Backs Viet Policy (Detroit News, July 29, 1965...
...He said that, once military victory was achieved, the pacification of South Vietnam was a task for the South Vietnamese and warned against "Americanizing that other war...
...Governor Criticizes U.S...
...Griffin won by 294,146 votes to become the state's first elected Republican Senator in fourteen years...
...Midway through con-con, Romney announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor in 1962...
...Now as a young boy I got kicked out of old Mexico...
...Equally hardened by his own experiences in 1964 is Barry Goldwater...
...I think there are ample reasons to wonder whether or not the people of South Vietnam still want us there...
...In July he called for a de-escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam...
...No doubt the gubernatorial years have matured Romney as a politician...
...At a 1966 news conference in Exeter, New Hampshire, he gave a disquisition on "Learn to use 'em—but don't ask me how" the British "blockade of Nigeria...
...Two years and three months later, he said, "I cannot forgive him...
...By a modest majority of 78,000 votes out of 2,760,000, George Romney was elected Governor...
...As New York Times editorial writer William V. Shannon has summed up the Romney administration in Harpers' Magazine, "In place of the myth of the fiscal miracle man bringing the magic of 'citizen participation' to government, there is, in fact, the story of a shrewd, hardheaded, reasonably pragmatic politician who very much wants to win and has demonstrated how Republicans can do it in a major industrial state...
...Romney won in 1962 the only way he could win, by running away from his state party's label and its reputation...
...CFM quickly concluded that the root problem was the state's antiquated constitution, written in 1850, somewhat revised in 1909, amended almost seventy times...
...Romney's greatest assets would be his demonstrated ability to appeal to normally Democratic and independent voters and his image on the television screen...
...This presentation is adapted from their forthcoming book...
...I mean then that's in the hands of the enemy, not our hands...
...George Romney THE MICHIGAN MISSIONARY by STEPHEN HESS and DAVID S. BRODER This is the concluding installment of a two-part portrait of Michigan's Governor George W. Romney...
...He said the President had bypassed Congress and excluded the public from the decisions to escalate the American commitment in Vietnam and thereby had provoked an unprecedented "rupture of trust" in the government...
...In a September interview, asked how he had come to take such a critical view of a policy which he had called after his 1965 visit to Vietnam "morally right and necessary," Romney said he had been the victim of "brainwashing" by American military and diplomatic officials in Saigon...
...But on a personal level there is probably no way Romney can reconcile Goldwater and the irreconcilables...
...I've seen the type of conflict that's going on...
...In George Romney's campaign to become the first Presidential nominee from Michigan since Lewis Cass in 1848, certain initial advantages and disadvantages are clear...
...In parades, he never rode in his assigned convertible, but loped a half block in front of the lead drum majorette, coatless, always coatless, French cuff rolled up to the right elbow for easier handshaking, while the kids ducked under police barricades to run alongside him...
...Romney could not claim to be its originator...
...The authors are Stephen Hess, a former assistant to President Eisenhower, co-author (with Malcolm Moos) of Hats in the Ring, author of America's Political Dynasties, and now a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics...
...Copyright © 1967 by Stephen Hess and David S. Broder, to be published by Harper & Row.—The Editors...
...Except for his exotic economic ideas, an emphasis on the citizen in politics, and heavy doses of Mormon theology, Romney's public philosophy is not very different from the kind of small-town Republicanism that the late Senator Kenneth Wherry brought to Washington from Pawnee City, Nebraska...
...It was conceived by Meade Moore, American Motors' engineering vice president, and had long been the dream of George Mason...
...He carried all but the largest and smallest counties, Wayne (Detroit) and Keweenaw, while gaining the second-greatest gubernatorial majority in Michigan history, topped only by the election of 1928...
...Would they and their fellow Americans make the Good Man their President if they had a chance...
...An acquaintance remarked at the time to the Wall Street Journal's Alan L. Otten, "When he [Romney] meets with Party professionals, it's like a Salvation Army girl in a burlesque house...
...George of the Compacts/' Fortune magazine dubbed Romney...
...Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, the platform chairman, insists that Romney's suggestions could have been accepted had he offered them earlier, instead of saving them for a dramatic floor presentation, and strongly implies that Romney was looking for an excuse to repudiate Goldwater...
...Asked about Romney's prospects in early 1967, Goldwater said, "It depends if he decides to come back to the Republican Party...
...Whatever the real motivation, the most charitable thing that can be said about Romney's performance is that it left almost everyone confused and many people, both allies and opponents, irritated...
...Romney was chosen a "con-con" delegate, but, because it was a partisan election, he was "forced" (he said) to declare his allegiance to the Republican Party...
...The primaries are strewn with dangers...
...Says the New York Governor, "I am determined not to be used as an instrument to split the unity of progressive Republicans behind a candidate who can win in 1968...
...Romney insists his purpose was to take the policy questions, which he described as "vital," out of the political context of the anti-Goldwater forces...
...you don't knock the other fellow's...
...The new group, Romney hoped, would be a third force that could resolve the stalemate between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislature...
...Perhaps because he learned on street corners, Romney is ill at ease with a prepared text...
...As a former foreign missionary, Romney's talk about world affairs still has a strong undercurrent of we know what is right for them...
...No matter that his speeches on economics echoed the conservatism of a Ludwig von Mises...
...National political reporters, who are probably beyond his redemption, find his preachings irritating...
...The resulting furore has seriously and perhaps even permanently impaired his campaign...
...The basis of the success, of course, was the "compact car...
...When in Saigon in 1965 with a group of governors, he told a news conference about the enemy in North Korea...
...Romney's major contribution to con-con's success was his ability to resolve differences among the Republicans...
...We must avoid such future entrap-ments...
...The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the G.O.P...
...That Romney, "The Rambler Man," was to take American Motors to a peak annual profit of over $60 million within five years rates as one of the great corporate success stories...
...Examining the words first, one finds that the candidate uses a limited inventory of rather simple economic and political principles collected in the course of his career and compiled rather than systematized into a philosophy of public affairs that could be called, as columnist Robert Novak has, "Rambling Romneyism...
...The reason is that probably fewer people have voted for him because they agreed with him than because they admired him...
...Romney's unique contribution was his ability to sell the concept to the American people...
...Says the former Pennsylvania Governor, "I have been preaching . . . [that] it is important to stick together...
...But when this does not work, Romney adds, "we might just as well face the fact that we have to push them in the right direction...
...I don't know," he said, answering his own question...
...The end result was a series of compromises on reapportionment, home rule, and other issues...
...Early declaring his own support for Richard Nixon, Goldwater displayed a consistent distaste for Romney...
...I know the conflict is far more than a military conflict, and we could still lose the struggle...
...A Goldwater aide, Edward K. Nellor, later recalled one of the Goldwater-Romney meetings he attended: "It reminded me of two retired Army sergeants, long parted but now rejoined to swap fibs and fairy tales about old times...
...He was reminded that he meant Rhodesia...
...He maintained a separate headquarters in Detroit, unsullied by party label or pictures of other G.O.P...
...It was as bloodless as a Girl Scout picnic, and about as useful politically...
...George Romney was becoming both rich and famous...
...I think it should . . . the question is this—there's been a great deal of interest in the governors' position on Vietnam and would I give my views...
...Senator Robert Griffin and reclaim at least two or three of the four Congressional seats that the party had lost in 1964...
...put through a complete administrative overhaul of the executive departments...
...He personally delivered his company's commercials on Disneyland, a popular television program...
...In part, he did this by turning himself into a sort of Detroit David opposing the three mighty Goliaths of the industry...
...to acknowledging that he was a Republican at all was to say, when pressed, "I'm a citizen who is a Republican, not a Republican who is incidentally a citizen...
...First, he had to "win big...
...Considering that the legislature during his first term was controlled by the oxcart wing of his party, and that the legislature during his second term was controlled by the Democratic Party (for the first time since 1934), the Governor can be said to have gotten along reasonably well with his co-equal branch of government...
...and the call for voluntary cooperation ("That's what made America unique...
...The News said Romney should quit the race in favor of Nelson Rockefeller —a step both men immediately rejected—and the past month's public opinion polls have shown Romney falling behind Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Rockefeller...
...The consternation was complete when Romney, acting on impulse, leaped to his feet to second the motion that made Goldwater's nomination unanimous—a step that, in the view of his own advisers, undercut a long and careful effort to show Michigan voters that he was not a Goldwater man...
...This is not a simple situation...
...I was born down in old Mexico...
...In the presence of the national press corps at the 1966 Governors' Conference, Romney provided one of the most damaging quotations ever inflicted by an American politician on himself: "Well, look...
...Despite this pretentious title, it is not a systematized approach to dealing with state problems, but just another honest and energetic attempt to meet needs as they rise to the surface, with as much cash as it is possible to raise...
...Before that, for nineteen years, he had been a Congressional assistant, Washington lobbyist, and trade-association executive, all jobs in which it was his duty to know the operations of government's wheels within wheels and to know where to squirt the oil...
...Six years later the company merged with Hudson to form American Motors, and, when Mason died in 1954, Romney was given the dubious honor of heading a firm that would lose $7 million in its first year...
...to answer substantial national questions with something other than nervous bombast" disqualified him for the Presidency...
...At the moment, with the echoes of the "brainwashing" controversy still ringing, Romney appears to be a long-shot for nomination, let alone election...
...In 1926, after a year of college, Romney left for a two-year hitch as a Mormon missionary in England, where he developed a style of oratorical evangelism that may ultimately determine whether he is to be the next President of the United States...
...Yet, in an irony that is characteristic of the contradictions in Romney, his very lack of verbal polish can be highly effective on occasion...
...As Judd Arnett of The Detroit Free Press wrote, Michiganders "look upon him as a Good Man and vote accordingly...
...When he returned from his European mission, at the age of twenty-two, Romney settled in Washington, D. C. On his third day in the capital he answered a want ad in The Washington Post and was hired to do secretarial work in the office of Democratic Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts...
...In August he said the American commitment to Vietnam had been a "tragic mistake" and asserted that a Republican President could end the conflict more quickly than President Johnson...
...After the convention, Romney said he would "accept but not endorse" Goldwater...
...For, by some sleight-of-hand syllogism, it made him a political liberal...
...both the new open field and the old cross-over problem in Wisconsin...
...The job kept him out of uniform in World War II, though Romney's recollection is that he never asked for a draft deferment or discussed his status in any way with his local board...
...Economic Romneyism probably is an amalgam of his Mormon experience...
...The problems Romney faced in 1966 were of an entirely different order...
...His tone is earnest, his appearance commanding, his message filled with endless "fundamental principles" which gild the commonplace...
...Romney's war on the auto giants was something special in the annals of American business...
...But Lyndon B. Johnson knows this country and the world as only a man who has stood at or near the center of power in Washington for more than three decades can know them...
...If Romney bores the press," hypothesized columnist Roscoe Drummond, "he may bore the nation...
...While Romney has some first-hand knowledge of Europe and Latin America, geography is not his forte...
...Yet in Michigan, the only place where Romney has really been tested, the people have responded to his message...
...What would it be like—a Romney-Johnson contest...
...He has done so well because he is (1) lucky, (2) a fine administrator, (3) a good judge of people, (4) attuned to the needs of his state, and unwilling, as he has said, to put money ahead of people as public priority...
...Broadly speaking, a Romney foreign policy would have these three goals for the world: to feed it, trade with it, convert it...
...When it broke up everybody exchanged smiles, handshakes, and boloney about how worthwhile it had all been...
...George Romney had performed his Herculean labors of 1966 and now was positioned for the assault on the Presidency...
...The resulting victory, Romney rightly said, was "sensational," exceeding his "most optimistic expectations...
...Each can find what he is looking for...
...Seeking to tell an interviewer that he had been given a singularly misleading view of our mission and prospects in Vietnam by briefing officers in Saigon in 1965, he groped—and said he had been "brainwashed...
...A constitutional convention was called for October, 1961...
...Although it was still to be honed, the Romney style of campaigning was already distinctive...
...A candidate seeking the Presidential nomination is not unlike Hercules performing his twelve labors...
...his surest political talent is as a person-to-person campaigner...
...and David S. Broder, nationally syndicated political correspondent and political analyst for The Washington Post...
...He endorsed the use of "military force as necessary to reduce or cut off the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam, to knock out enemy main force units, and to provide a military shield for the South...
...Romney promptly called on two young men from the Ripon Society to "clarify" his statement, but not before Thomas O'Neill of the Baltimore Sun had summed up his performance: "Down deep he's shallow...
...Its hallmark was a great explosion of energy that sought out and assaulted the voter...
...Five marginal Congressional seats were captured by the G.O.P...
...The hard thing is to know what is right...
...The President, despite the efforts of his tailors and his television advisers, looks like a weather-beaten ranch hand...
...For a time, the Hartford speech seemed to have disposed of the Vietnam problem for Romney, but it was not long before he went beyond its careful terms and found himself in further trouble...
...However, his main efforts centered not on derailing Goldwater but on revising the platform...
...While each year raising the state budget, he remains on good terms with Michigan's businessmen, in part, because—in the manner of Lyndon B. Johnson and his electric lights—he has specialized in symbolic, visible economies (like driving an Ambassador instead of a Continental...
...Johnson was greatly admired for the genius of his performance in his first two years in office, then came to be distrusted and disliked for his personality...
...His solution is to (1) break up any company that controls twenty-five to thirty-five per cent (using different yardsticks) of a basic industry, and (2) limit labor unions to not more than ten thousand members and prohibit industry-wide collective bargaining...
...I've been there...
...Or would Lyndon Johnson be able to persuade the country that he is telling the truth when he says, "It's not hard to do the right thing when you are President...
...On the political level, Goldwater's hostility is tempered slightly by the fact that he will be running for the Senate in Arizona in 1968 on a ticket that, he recognizes, may be headed by Romney...
Vol. 31 • November 1967 • No. 11
