George W. Romney - 1968 Presidential Campaign

1968 Presidential Campaign

Romney's wide margin of re-election as governor in November 1966 thrust him to the forefront of national Republicans. In addition to his political record, the tall, square-jawed, handsome, graying Romney matched what the public thought a president should look like. Republican governors were determined not to let a Goldwater-sized loss recur, and neither Rockefeller nor Scranton wanted to run again; the governors quickly settled on Romney as their favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

Former Congressman and Republican National Committee chair Leonard W. Hall became Romney's informal campaign manager. A Gallup Poll after the November elections showed Romney as favored among Republicans over former Vice President Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, 39 percent to 31 percent; a Harris Poll showed Romney besting President Johnson among all voters by 54 percent to 46 percent. Nixon considered Romney his chief opponent. Romney announced an exploratory phase for a possible campaign in February 1967, beginning with a visit to Alaska and the Rocky Mountain states.

Romney's greatest weakness was a lack of foreign policy expertise and a need for a clear position on the Vietnam War. The press coverage of the trip focused on Vietnam and reporters were frustrated by Romney's initial reluctance to speak about it. The qualities that helped Romney as an industry executive worked against him as a presidential candidate; he had difficulty being articulate, often speaking at length and too forthrightly on a topic and then later correcting himself while maintaining he was not. Reporter Jack Germond joked that he was going to add a single key on his typewriter that would print, "Romney later explained...." Life magazine wrote that Romney "manages to turn self-expression into a positive ordeal" and that he was no different in private: "nobody can sound more like the public George Romney than the real George Romney let loose to ramble, inevitably away from the point and toward some distant moral precept."

The perception grew that Romney was gaffe-prone. The campaign, beset by internal rivalries, soon went through the first of several reorganizations. By then, Nixon had already overtaken Romney in Gallup's Republican preference poll, a lead he would hold throughout the rest of the campaign. The techniques that had brought Romney victories in Michigan, such as operating outside established partisan formulas and keeping a distance from Republican Party organizational elements, proved ineffective in a party nominating contest.

Romney's national poll ratings continued to erode, and by May he had lost his edge over Johnson. The Detroit riots of July 1967 did not change his standing among Republicans, but did give him a bounce in national polls against the increasingly unpopular president.

Questions were occasionally asked about Romney's eligibility to run for President owing to his birth in Mexico, given the ambiguity in the United States Constitution over the phrase "natural-born citizen". (Romney departed the race before the matter could be more definitively resolved, although the preponderance of opinion then and since has been that he was eligible.) Romney's membership in the LDS Church was scarcely mentioned at all during the campaign. What indirect discussion there was helped bring to national attention the church's policy regarding blacks, but the contrast of Romney's pro-civil rights stance deflected any criticism of him and indirectly benefited the image of the church. Some historians and Mormons suspected then and later that had Romney's campaign lasted longer and been more successful, his religion might have become a more prominent issue. Romney's campaign did often focus on his core beliefs; a Romney billboard in New Hampshire read "The Way To Stop Crime Is To Stop Moral Decay". Dartmouth College students gave a bemused reaction to his morals message, displaying signs such as "God Is Alive and Thinks He's George Romney". A spate of books were published about Romney, more than for any other candidate, and included a friendly campaign biography, an attack from a former staffer, and a collection of Romney's speeches.

On August 31, 1967, in a taped interview with locally influential talk show host Lou Gordon of WKBD-TV in Detroit, Romney stated: "When I came back from Viet Nam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." He then shifted to opposing the war: "I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression in Southeast Asia." Decrying the "tragic" conflict, he urged "a sound peace in South Vietnam at an early time." Thus Romney disavowed the war and reversed himself from his earlier stated belief that the war was "morally right and necessary".

The "brainwashing" reference had been an offhand, unplanned remark that came at the end of a long, behind-schedule day of campaigning. By September 7, it found its way into prominence at The New York Times. Eight other governors who had been on the same 1965 trip as Romney said no such activity had taken place, and one of them, Philip H. Hoff of Vermont, said Romney's remarks were "outrageous, kind of stinking ... Either he's a most naïve man or he lacks judgment." The connotations of brainwashing, following the experiences of American prisoners of war (highlighted by the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate), made Romney's comment devastating, especially as it reinforced the negative image of Romney's abilities that had already developed. The topic of brainwashing quickly became newspaper editorial and television talk show fodder, and Romney bore the brunt of the topical humor. Senator Eugene McCarthy, running against Johnson for the Democratic nomination, said that in Romney's case, "a light rinse would have been sufficient." Republican Congressman Robert T. Stafford of Vermont sounded a common concern: "If you're running for the presidency, you are supposed to have too much on the ball to be brainwashed." After the remark was aired, Romney's poll ratings nosedived, going from 11 percent behind Nixon to 26 percent behind.

He nonetheless persevered, staging a three-week, 17-city tour of the nation's ghettos and disadvantaged areas that none of his advisors thought politically worthwhile. He sought to engage militants in dialogue, found himself exposed to the harsh realities and language of ghetto areas, and had an unusual encounter with hippies and The Diggers in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Romney formally announced on November 18, 1967, at Detroit's Veterans Memorial Building, that he had "decided to fight for and win the Republican nomination and election to the Presidency of the United States." His subsequent release of his federal tax returns – twelve years' worth going back to his time as AMC head – was groundbreaking and established a precedent that many future presidential candidates would have to contend with. He spent the following months campaigning tirelessly, focusing on the New Hampshire primary, the first of the season, and doing all the on-the-ground activities known to that state: greeting workers at factory gates before dawn, having neighborhood meetings in private homes, and stopping at bowling alleys. He returned to Vietnam in December 1967 and made speeches and proposals on the subject, one of which presaged Nixon's eventual policy of Vietnamization. For a while, he got an improved response from voters.

Two weeks before the March 12 primary, an internal poll showed Romney losing to Nixon by a six-to-one margin in New Hampshire. Rockefeller, seeing the poll result as well, publicly maintained his support for Romney but said he would be available for a draft; the statement made national headlines and embittered Romney (who would later claim it was Rockefeller's entry, and not the "brainwashing" remark, that doomed him). Seeing his cause was hopeless, Romney announced his withdrawal as a presidential candidate on February 28, 1968. Romney wrote his son Mitt, still away on missionary work: "Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact, we are relieved. ... I aspired, and though I achieved not, I am satisfied."

Nixon went on to gain the nomination. At the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Romney refused to release his delegates to Nixon, something Nixon did not forget. Romney finished a weak fifth, with only 50 votes on the roll call (44 of Michigan's 48, plus six from Utah). When party liberals and moderates and others expressed dismay at Nixon's choice of Spiro Agnew as his running mate, Romney's name was placed into nomination for vice president by Mayor of New York John Lindsay and pushed by several delegations. Romney said he did not initiate the move, but he made no effort to oppose it. Nixon saw the rebellion as a threat to his leadership and actively fought against it; Romney lost to Agnew 1,119–186. Romney, however, worked for Nixon's eventually successful campaign in the fall, which did earn him Nixon's gratitude.

Presidential historian Theodore H. White wrote that during his campaign Romney gave "the impression of an honest and decent man simply not cut out to be President of the United States." Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio more memorably said, "Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football."