Crashing the Party: The Ill-Fated 1968 Presidential Campaign of Governor George Romney

Crashing the Party: The Ill-Fated 1968 Presidential Campaign of Governor George Romney by Chris Bachelder Governor George Romney of Michigan is most commonly remembered for his 1967 comment that he had been subjected to "brainwashing" by American military and diplomatic officials when he participated in a 1965 fact-finding mission to Vietnam. This remark is generally considered to have destroyed his prospects of winning the 1968 Republican nomination to be president of the United States. There ismuch more to Romney's story, however. Perhaps because he has not been the subject of much serious scholarly analysis, the "first draft" of history penned by journalists has gone largely unchallenged. This article will argue that Romney's chances of winning the Republican nomination had become fairly remote by the time of his famous gaffe. When he said that he had been brainwashed, his status as the front-runner in public opinion polls, which he had enjoyed at the end of 1966, had already evaporated. Nor, despite the concern in 2007 about his son Mitt's Mormonism as a possible impediment to his own presidential hopes, does the elder Romney's religious faith appear to have played a direct role in his failure to become his party's nominee. Instead, this article contends that Romney's presidential quest was severely hampered by his refusal to endorse Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, his unwillingness to enthusiastically align himself with the Republican Party organization, and his ultra-independent personality and style. In contrast to two prior academic articles on the demise of the Romney campaign,1 this article contends that Romney's Mormonism The author wishes to thank Professor Tracy Campbell of the University of Kentucky, Professor Burt Folsom of Hillsdale College, and the archival staff of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan for their assistance in preparing this article. 1 Dennis L. Lythgoe, 'The 1968 Presidential Decline of George Romney: Mormonism or Politics?" Brigham YoungUniversityStudies 11 (Spring 1971): 219-40; Andrew L. Johns, "Achilles' Heel: The Vietnam War and George Romney's Bid for the Presidency, 1967 to 1968," Michigan Historical'Review 26 (Spring 2000): 1-29. Michigan Historical Review33:2 (Fall 2007): 131-162 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 132 Michigan Historical Review had little electoral impact and that his difficulty positioning himself on Vietnam was merely a secondary cause of his defeat. Rather, Romney's fundamental hindrance was that he was temperamentally wedded to a strategy which had won him his record of political success inMichigan but which was unlikely to translate into victory in a national Republican nominating contest. Romney's upset triumph inMichigan's 1962 gubernatorial election and his two successful reelection campaigns set a pattern for his national efforts. This pattern involved working outside the estabhshed partisan structure while simultaneously attacking what he characterized as "extremism" within the Republican Party.2 During his presidential campaign Romney struggled with his trademark approach, which had proven repeatedly to be a winning electoral formula in Michigan. Moreover, the method he employed seems to have been an outgrowth of his basic character, rather than a calculated strategy to win elections. George Romney moved to Michigan in 1939, at the age of thirty two, after working for a decade inWashington, D.C, as a Senate staffer and a lobbyist. Born in Mexico3 and raised in the American West, Romney entered a Michigan business community that was heavily Republican, being largely composed of families that had immigrated to Michigan from New England and upstate New York generations earlier. This business establishment could look back fondly to times in the 1920s when the entire Michigan Legislature was comprised of Republicans. By the 1940s, however, Michigan had become a competitive two-party state, in part because of the Great Depression 2 Of course, one person's extremist is another person's valiant defender of principle. Mary Brennan suggests that while "extremism" was undoubtedly present within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, the "extremist" label was often used indiscriminately by various detractors. See Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina...