Abstract
For Mitt, the episode was even harder to make sense of because it happened in the middle of his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in France. When he left Michigan in 1966, his father was en route to resounding reelection as governor of Michigan and the drumbeat grew louder for his presidential run. When Mitt came home in 1968, his father was already a footnote. Since then, he's heard plenty about his father's fateful interview, but, amazingly, Mitt Romney had never seen the actual footage until I showed it to him last month. Or maybe that's not so amazing. For decades, political writers have invoked the exchange as Exhibit A of the perils of presidential runs. But the narrative they have collectively stitched together makes the interview seem much more dramatic and portentous than it actually was, suggesting that many people who wrote about it may have done so without ever having seen it. Unlike [Mitt] and his siblings, who grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit, their father had known poverty as a child. George was born in a Mormon outpost in Mexico. His grandfather's family had fled there in 1871 in response to US laws against polygamy. (Polygamy in the Romney family ended with Mitt's great-grandfather.) When Mexican rebels seized the territory, George's family bolted for Texas. As a young man, George made his way to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an aide to Democrat David I. Walsh, Massachusetts's first Irish- Catholic senator. A subsequent job with an auto trade group paved the way for his move to Detroit to be an executive with what would eventually become American Motors Corp. After becoming president of that financially troubled company, he boldly bet its future on the compact Rambler. America bit, and American Motors, and [George W. Romney], were hits. As [Lou Gordon]'s image comes up on the screen, Romney chuckles, "Bad toupee!" Then he stares silently, transported back in time. When it's over, Romney shakes his head. So does his communications chief, Eric Fehrnstrom, who'd been watching along and says that in today's controversy-a-day news cycle, "there's no question he would have survived something like that." Romney says that, until now, he had assumed his father's brainwashed line had been more of straight- ahead statement. "But it was a parenthetical comment leading into a discussion about why he had changed his view. . . . It was a word that slips into your head. You're on TV; you don't stop and say, 'No, let me take that back. Let me use this word instead.'"