The Real Romney (11 page)

Ann, in the end, decided to be baptized and asked George to do the honors. Dressed in white, she followed George into the baptismal font, where she was immersed. By February 1967, Jim had also persuaded his parents to let him join the church, and again George performed the baptism. Even Rod’s girlfriend, Cindy, decided to become a Mormon, though her father forbade it, warning her that she would become “a social outcast.”

When Mitt lamented in letters home about the difficulty of gaining converts, his father tried to cheer him up. After he had been a missionary in Britain, George wrote to Mitt, he couldn’t definitively say whether he had converted anyone, so “I can appreciate how discouraging your work is.” George said Mitt should consider himself a success given the conversions he was doing on Mitt’s behalf in Michigan. “I was thrilled to stand in for you in connection with Jim’s baptism,” George wrote back. “This makes two converts here that are certainly yours so don’t worry about your difficulty in converting those Frenchmen! I am sure you can appreciate that Ann and Jim each are worth a dozen of them, at least to us.” A few months later, even Rod, the family rebel who had been enjoying the pub-crawling life during his year abroad, returned home a baptized Mormon. Mitt had arranged for missionaries to contact him in England. Thanks largely to Mitt Romney, in less than one year the entire progeny of Edward Davies had joined the Mormon faith.

F
rom afar, Mitt followed the progress of his father’s soaring political career. George won reelection less than five months after Mitt arrived in France. By the beginning of 1967, George was considered a leading presidential candidate, and Mitt tracked his progress as closely as he could. A Gallup Poll showed George Romney leading former vice president Richard M. Nixon by 39 to 31 percent. Another poll said that if Romney were the nominee facing the Democratic incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Romney would win by eight points. Romney, as a perceived front-runner, came under fire for the Mormon Church’s refusal to allow blacks to become ministers. He said that his church’s view did not influence him on civil rights, casting himself as one of his party’s strongest proponents of racial justice. Appearing in North Carolina, he took on segregationists who opposed civil rights measures on the grounds of states’ rights, saying, “As far as I am concerned, states have no rights. Only people have rights . . . obstructionism masquerading as states’ rights is the height of folly.”

The major issue in the campaign was Vietnam. Romney, who had no foreign policy experience, had visited the country in 1965 and received a full briefing from U.S. officials, after which he had visited Mitt at Stanford. He had remained hawkish for the following year and a half, saying as late as April 7, 1967, “It is unthinkable that the United States withdraw from Vietnam.” But the summer of 1967 deeply affected George as he prepared for a presidential bid. He began to reconsider his support of U.S. policy in Vietnam. At the same time, civil unrest rocked the nation, stoked by protests against racial injustice and the war. When racial disturbances broke out in Detroit in July 1967, the governor took a reconnaissance flight over the scene and reported that “it looks like the city has been bombed on the west side,” with fires stretching for several miles. He asked President Johnson to send in federal troops and blamed the White House for delaying the response to his request.

Johnson, in turn, said his potential opponent in the 1968 election had “been unable to bring the situation under control.” The troops did arrive, but by the time the riots were over, more than forty people were dead and thousands were injured across Michigan. Romney took the riots to heart, vowing to improve conditions for inner-city blacks and provide them with access to better housing. But his poll numbers had dropped sharply. He canceled a visit to Europe—on which he might have seen Mitt—and planned a tour of inner-city slums, expressing empathy for those far less fortunate than him. All of this further stoked his skepticism about an array of U.S. policies, and he seemed to have reaching a tipping point when he made a fateful decision to be interviewed by a local television personality.

Lou Gordon, a popular Detroit broadcaster, had recently begun a program on channel 50 called
Hot Seat
. Landing the governor and prospective presidential candidate was something of a coup. But when he took his seat on the set, Romney looked distracted. His family would explain later that he had just come from the state fair, where he had spent the afternoon with his grandchildren, and one had gone missing long enough to give the governor a good scare. Gordon’s interview seemed, at first, to be uneventful. When Gordon got around to asking him about Vietnam, Romney swiveled in his chair, began speaking in a casual tone, and allowed a slight smile.

Gordon:
Isn’t your position a bit inconsistent with what it was? And what do you propose we do now?

Ronmey:
Well, you know, when I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get. When you—

Gordon: By the generals?

Romney:
Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there. They do a very thorough job. Since returning from Vietnam, I’ve gone into the history of Vietnam all the way back into World War II and before. And, as a result, I have changed my mind in that particular. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression in Southeast Asia . . . and I’ve indicated that it was tragic that we became involved in the conflict.

Gordon didn’t follow up. But Jeanne Findlater, Gordon’s producer, knew news when she heard it. She was listening to the interview from the control room and remembered thinking, “Hot dog! That’s good stuff; I’ll use that.” Chuck Harmon, Romney’s press secretary, was at his desk the morning after the Gordon program aired. When a reporter called asking about the “brainwashed” line, Harmon, who hadn’t seen the show, stalled long enough to get the transcript. Then his stomach sank. He and a few other aides went to Romney, advising him to backtrack and do damage control. But Romney refused. Coverage began slowly, with an AP story and then a small piece in
The New York Times
. Then it snowballed as rival campaigns—notably those of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson—delighted in highlighting the comment. How can we trust this guy to sit across the table from the Russians, they asked, if he couldn’t resist pressure from a few U.S. generals and diplomats?

Years later, George Romney downplayed the damage done by that one line. More to blame, he said, was that he got boxed out by Nixon from the right wing of his party and by Nelson Rockefeller, his onetime supporter, from the left. In reality, the remark was probably more of an accelerant than the cause, exposing how flimsy Romney’s national support was. Before long, the former
Time
magazine cover boy became the punch line of a national political joke. The
Detroit News
, once a reliable supporter, blasted Romney’s “blurt and retreat habits” and urged him to get out of the race.

Mitt watched it all closely. One day, he wrote to his father that he was preparing to deliver a lecture on American politics and asked for help in explaining the primaries. “I would be VERY happy if you would send me a brief brosure [
sic
] or explanation of the system as it stands in the states, perhaps mentioning some of the dis and advantages,” Mitt wrote. “The rest of our system I know pretty well—only one thing I can’t understand: how can the American public like such muttonheads?”

With dismay, Mitt also followed his father’s political collapse. Every ten days or so, his family had sent him sheaves of newspaper clippings about George’s race, and he often stayed up late at night reading them and culling them into files. The news got worse throughout the year: George was the favorite of 31 percent of Republicans in February 1967 but had dropped to 14 percent by November, in part due to the fallout from the television interview, the Gallup Poll found. The impact on the son could hardly be overstated. “Mitt was very passionate; he couldn’t believe people were not portraying his dad the way they should be,” said fellow missionary Byron Hansen. For months, while knocking on doors, Romney had defended the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. But, he said years later, “When my dad said that he had been wrong about Vietnam and that it was a mistake and they had been brainwashed and so forth, I certainly trusted him and believed him.” The younger Romney stopped giving blanket support to U.S. war policy. In other words, it seemed, the protesters at Stanford had gotten it right, even if Romney hadn’t agreed with their tactics. Romney had initially believed the war was being fought for “for the right purposes,” but his father made him realize that “I was wrong.” A few years later, he put it even more starkly, using words that directly echoed his father. “I think we were brainwashed,” he said. “If it wasn’t a blunder to move into Vietnam, I don’t know what is.”

Mitt did not view the “brainwash” footage that caused his father such trouble until it was shown to him thirty-nine years later. But his sister Jane said the episode had a lasting impact on her brother. “The brainwash thing—has that affected us? You bet. Mitt is naturally a diplomat, but I think that made him more so. He’s not going to put himself out on a limb. He’s more cautious, more scripted.”

T
wo and a half months after the devastating interview, George formally declared his candidacy for the presidency, and three weeks later he traveled to France with Lenore as part of an international fact-finding tour, including talks with leaders in Paris. Mitt met his parents at a Mormon church in Versailles on December 10, 1967. He helped translate for them, and George addressed the audience. George then went to Vietnam, insisting he would not be misled this time.

Shortly afterward, George headed for the first-primary state of New Hampshire, starting his day at 6:30 a.m. shaking hands outside a Nashua factory. He soldiered on for another seven weeks, but he couldn’t shake the “brainwashing” episode. Years later, Romney’s analysis would prove to have been prescient; President Nixon eventually adopted a policy of “Vietnamization,” similar to what Romney had suggested. But his campaign was doomed. On February 28, with polls showing that former vice president Nixon was leading Romney in New Hampshire polls by a five-to-one margin, Romney flew to Washington and made his announcement. “It is clear to me that my candidacy has not won the wide acceptance with rank and file Republicans that I had hoped to achieve,” he said. Privately, he told a friend, “It’s a great relief.” He would refocus on the governorship and his family.

M
itt’s missionary years also kept him far from the great national tragedies of 1968. The civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by a gunman in April 1968, and riots spread across the United States. Now Romney and other missionaries heard not only complaints about U.S. policy in Vietnam but also questions about why the United States was being rocked by such violence. King had been a popular figure in France, and the missionaries encountered a growing anti-American sentiment. “We were the only Americans they met,” and the French people would ask, “Why are Americans such racists?” Dane McBride, the fellow missionary, said.

Romney, now two years into his mission and twenty-one years old, was still in Bordeaux in southern France when he learned he had won a promotion. It meant he would move to Paris and become assistant to the president of the Mormon mission to France, H. Duane Anderson. But as Mitt prepared to make the move into the mission’s grandiose headquarters in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris, the city was rocked by riots. Labor strikes had spread across France, and student unrest was also growing. An aircraft factory near the town of Nantes had been occupied by many of its 2,800 workers, followed by many other such sit-ins, accompanied by demands that President Charles de Gaulle leave office. Thousands of students occupied Paris landmarks such as the Odéon. Talk spread that revolution would lead to the ouster of the government. Communication was difficult. Mail and telephone service was suspended during much of May due to the strikes, and Mitt had not heard from his family for weeks. He finally found someone who had communications equipment that enabled him to get in touch with his father. The disorder appalled him and further solidified his respect for control in a civil society. He had seen what had happened at the single sit-in at Stanford and now at mass sit-ins across France. Turmoil seemed to be everywhere. “The feeling that we had and discussed was that the world is falling apart,” McBride, his fellow missionary, said. “It was that there was disorder and anarchy, and we were very grateful for the order that was in our own lives because the life of the Mormon missionaries is pretty well ordered . . . and there’s a security in that.”

Amid the strife, the mission president, Duane Anderson, and his wife, Leola, tried to get in touch with the far-flung missionaries, including Romney, who they hoped would soon arrive in Paris in his role as an assistant. They were worried about their safety as well as the security of the missionaries. “Nobody has gas, many are out of money,” Leola wrote in her diary. Electricity was shut off regularly, and Leola worried that the scattered missions were in danger. Romney, meanwhile, was apparently able to cross the border into Spain to find some funds. Day after day, the news worsened. On May 30, Leola wrote that the strikers continued to agitate for a new government. Amid talk of dissolution, crowds that Leola estimated at up to one million people filled the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Leola saw no choice for the mission other than to “prepare for an evacuation.”