Mitt Romney on life with his late father George and the lesson of his derailed presidential bid, by Sridhar Pappu for Capital New York
When Americans of Romney’s vintage turn to the subject of 1968, it is often to talk regretfully about a future that never came to pass, and of what a country led by Robert Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, or Eugene McCarthy might have looked like.
But because it was Romney, we were speaking of his late father George—once the governor of Michigan and, more importantly, the ghostly engine of his son’s own ambition to seek out the presidency no matter the political or financial price.
George Romney’s presidential bid was undone when the early advocate of the Vietnam War went to Southeast Asia to find not a successful military effort, but a disillusioned armed forces waging an unwinnable campaign.
“I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam, not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there,” Romney said some time afterward. “And they do a very thorough job.”
