FAITH OF OUR FATHERS:
George Romney for President, 1968: When the governor of Michigan ran for the Republican nomination, in 1968, he tried to stand up against the more radical wing of his party. His defeat was swift, tragic, and, for his son, instructive. (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, May 20, 2012, New York)
If you forget for a moment the scrim of weirdness that shades even the word Mormon--the underwear, the rites, the space-alien temples, the fact that before a 19-year-old George Romney was sent on his mission he was taken inside the Salt Lake City temple and stripped and doused with anointing oils--what you are left with is a system of belief in which America itself is hallowed. Not just the abstract ideas of freedom, liberty, and self-determination, but the design of the country is believed by Mormons to be divinely inspired: the Constitution, the separation of legislative and executive powers, even the structure of the American corporation. Jesus appeared, in the Mormon tradition, not in Jerusalem or Rome but upstate New York. The most mundane spots on the map of American suburban sprawl are empowered and made holy: Palmyra, New York; Kirtland, Ohio; Nauvoo, Illinois.
Until early in the twentieth century, Mormons had a unique, supplicating position toward the United States: They believed the country had been touched by God, and it disdained them as members of a dangerous sect. It was in George Romney's generation--and this is in some ways the story of George Romney's own life--that Mormon culture remade itself, from an outlaw sect into the most buoyantly, enthusiastically American thing going.
George Romney was born in 1907 in a Mormon colony in Mexico, where his grandfather had moved the family two decades earlier after the American government outlawed polygamy. (George's parents were monogamous.) Around his 5th birthday, the colony was ransacked by Mexican revolutionaries, and the family, returning to the U.S., effectively became nomads while his father chased work as a builder. By the time he was in the sixth grade, George had attended six elementary schools; the lowest point came in Idaho, when the family's failed attempt at potato farming barely got them through the year. As a 12-year-old, George was already doing hard agricultural work, trimming the tops of sugar beets by hand.
In Romney's papers, archived in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, there is a long reminiscence he wrote about a trip he took back to the Mormon West with his father. George was 34 and already a success, and his essay reveals a tender nostalgia for rougher times. He recalled the polygamist families he'd known as a boy--the practice was "repugnant," but the families had "high character" and "unity." He visited the Mormon temple in St. George, Utah, and pronounced it as stylish as the White House. Traveling with his father, he thought about how frequently his family had been in "great distress," and how infrequently he had realized this at the time.
Mormons earn salvation, in part, through their deeds, and in this respect the religion is more like Catholicism than Protestantism. When scholars explain the extreme success some Mormons have had in business, they tend to emphasize this feature. But Matthew Bowman, a young historian at Hampden-Sydney College and the author of The Mormon People, thinks there is another implication, too. Institutions have an essential place in Mormon thought; they are the mechanisms by which the individual is transformed. In Romney's private correspondence this theme is vivid: Asked repeatedly by young men for his advice, he suggests they dedicate themselves to their church, to their professional organizations, to volunteerism. This was the sustaining idea of his life--that buying in would bring rewards.
There was always a purposefulness about Romney, an intensity to his ascent up the social ladder. At 17, he fell in love with Lenore LaFount, the strikingly beautiful daughter of a successful Mormon businessman. (One day, she would be offered a studio contract by MGM.) His pursuit was assiduous. In Scotland, serving a church mission, he deflected accusations that the Mormons were out to steal Scottish lassies by brandishing a picture of Lenore; rather than finishing college, he followed her to Washington, D.C., and took a job as a stenographer in Senator David Walsh's office to prove his dedication.
This won him Lenore (they would be married 64 years, and each morning he would place a fresh rose by her bedside); it also gave him a career. Soon, the Walsh job became a substantive staff position working on tariff policy, and from there he moved into a career as a lobbyist with Alcoa, and then went into the automotive industry. Three decades after his family went bust farming potatoes, Romney was overseeing Detroit's work for the war effort, and this, too, had for him an Evangelical tone; by 1942 he was sending enthusiastic dispatches back to church headquarters detailing the "many miracles" he was watching American industry achieve.
After the war, Romney was hired as an assistant to the president of what would become American Motors, and eventually became president himself. By the late fifties, convinced that Detroit was betting too heavily on expensive, unnecessarily large cars, Romney committed his company to a smaller, cheaper, more efficient model, the Rambler, and the resulting success landed him on the cover of Time. In front of Congress, he testified against the concentration of power in large companies and unions; in Detroit, he built the beginnings of a political career, working to reform the city's schools and, eventually, the Michigan constitution.
What was taking shape was his vision of a perfect society, one in which government need not intervene because the "independent sector"--community organizations, professional and religious groups, and American businesses--could fix social problems on their own. Whenever they were detailing a solution to a policy problem, Romney's aides learned to look first to these groups before turning to the government. He believed "that these contexts would help the individual, that they would give meaning," says De Vries. No one, after all, is more invested in a good elite than the outsider who has had to work to join it. "I think he believed that America would always work," De Vries says, "because America had always worked for him."
Summer, 1967.
The riot started Sunday at dawn in Detroit, July 23, 1967, after police tried to raid an unlicensed after-hours club, but it took several hours before it was clear that the crowds that gathered there, throwing bottles at the cops, were not going away. Romney's aides were soon driving down Interstate 696 from Lansing to Detroit, and as Bill Whitbeck arrived the streets were almost empty of cars. "Eerie," he remembers. From the freeway he could see smoke rising from the West Side, where the conflict had begun, but also from the East. As another group of aides inched along, trying to navigate the roadblocks, they noticed that the looting seemed strategic--some stores had been left alone while others on the same block had been emptied entirely. "We observed that we were the only white men in the area, driving," they would write in a memo. "We decided that it would be to our advantage to leave the vicinity as soon as possible."
Romney had been at home in Bloomfield Hills that first day, working on a foreign-policy speech, but in the evening he took a helicopter flight over the city to get a feel for the scale of the damage. The fires had spread over an area of eight square miles. Romney had asked a contingent of National Guardsmen to deploy to Detroit and stand by, but it wasn't clear whether these forces could contain the violence. When he held a press conference with the Detroit mayor after midnight, the two officials told reporters that "the difficulty" now consumed 139 square miles, and Romney told reporters he had called the attorney general to request federal reinforcements. "It is the only prudent thing to do," he said. But it was Lyndon Johnson's attorney general, and Romney was a political threat, and so Washington seemed to delay: First, Romney was told the request needed to be in writing; then, when he sent a telegram, that he had used the wrong language. Romney, furious, was convinced that the Democratic White House was cynically stalling.
The city continued to burn. What would come to characterize the Detroit riots--and make them uniquely terrifying--was the presence of a novel figure, the radical black sniper. Two days into the riots, a group of 40 National Guardsmen and police were pinned down at Ford Hospital by snipers. A 51-year-old white woman named Helen Hall, visiting Detroit on business, was shot through the window of the Harlan House Motel. It now appears likely she was actually killed by a Guardsman's errant bullet, but the cops at the time insisted it was a sniper with a deer rifle.
The imagery of Vietnam was replicating itself; for a few days, the ghetto really was a war zone. To Nixon, the implications were clear. "We must take the warnings to heart," he would later declare, "and prepare to meet force with force if necessary." The reaction to the riots, in his hands, was an incubator for the politics of white backlash. To court conservative voters, Nixon could play "the white side's field marshal," as the historian Rick Perlstein writes in Nixonland. In private, the former vice-president was negotiating with Senator Strom Thurmond the terms of Southern influence within the party--his White House would not oppose integration, but neither would it implement it speedily. In public, the riots allowed him to focus racial anxieties on something more immediate: the fear of violence. Nixon would tell a national radio audience, "our first commitment as a nation in this time of crisis and questioning must be a commitment to order."
Romney's perspective was different, and his reaction to the riots far more fraught. The governor had spent years working to improve Detroit's black inner city, to incorporate it, to give it access to the broader society. Though his church refused to ordain black clergymen until 1978, Romney was deeply committed to civil rights and clearly felt a bond with members of another persecuted minority. One of his great causes was the integration of the suburbs (his aides called it the "Romney Right to Walk to Work Program"), so blacks could join the middle class, too.
But the black middle class itself was revolting. When Romney staffers drove through Detroit during the riots, they noticed that "the looting and the fire bombing was supported by a number of middle-income Negroes." The black homeowners they interviewed refused to intervene; the black ministers they encountered blamed the extortionate practices of the burned businesses. Blacks were repudiating Romney's buy-in from the left, just as Nixon was repudiating it from the right. Driving toward Woodward Avenue, on the city's West Side, the staffers noticed that many buildings had signs written on them, in chalk or paint: "Soul Brother lives upstairs. Please do not burn." "Soul Brother. Do Not Burn." Then, simply: "Soul Brother."
It took about a week for the violence to dissipate, once the troops sent by Washington finally arrived. Forty-three people were killed in the rioting; hundreds of stores were looted. Romney was, first, furious at the White House. His second reaction, De Vries says, was deeper: "I think he had a hard time explaining why this had happened."
Fall, 1967.
On August 31, one month after the riots, Romney showed up at a Detroit television station for an interview on The Lou Gordon Program, which mattered quite a lot locally and not much at all to anyone else. The summer had both preoccupied and diminished him. When he could get away from Michigan, Romney was focusing on small campaign events where the force of his personality might move a few votes. Nixon, meanwhile, was running a brilliant mass-media campaign, soon to be orchestrated by his aide Roger Ailes--"no baby-kissing, no handshaking, no factory gates," Nixon said. At the beginning of the year, the race had been a dead heat; now Romney was eleven points behind.
Romney had been devoting his attention to the wrong cataclysm. The race riots were important, their political aftereffects profound. But the crisis that the news reporters kept returning to--the question that for them defined who could handle the presidency--was not the riots but Vietnam, and here Romney had less familiarity, and even less clarity. On the eve of a big Vietnam speech, unsure of himself, he'd sent the draft to Rockefeller for approval. Now, as he trudged from doorstep to doorstep, the governor's Vietnam position was still "unresolved," Moore says. Reporters had noticed. At the taping that day, Gordon asked whether Romney had changed his position since 1965, when he had just returned from a rushed governors' trip to Vietnam, when he said the intervention in Vietnam was "morally right."
Romney moralized everything; whether something was morally right was the question that interested him the most. That trip, back when the war was smaller and still dimly understood, when the governor had pinned Purple Hearts on wounded soldiers, had convinced him to support the president. In the years since, his doubts had coalesced--as Johnson tried to bully him into support, as figures like Martin Luther King Jr. issued denunciations--and he was becoming "more and more convinced that the war was a mistake," says Moore. "And yet he had this patriotic instinct he had to get past."
Somehow that resistance broke on The Lou Gordon Program. In Vietnam, Romney told the host, referring to his 1965 trip, "I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get ... Not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job." More recently, he had "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 ... I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam." He went on, issuing a torrent of national guilt--"We have created this conflict that is now a test between Communism and freedom there." The governor, normally controlled, was on a rare bender, and Gordon let him go.
Brainwashing had a specific connotation then: It was the term used to describe the ways in which the Communist state sought to control people's minds; it conjured images of The Manchurian Candidate. The reference suggested that Romney was paranoid and naïve, and perhaps it also subtly reinforced the suspicion that his religion might be a cult. The Detroit News, for years his firmest supporter in the press, condemned him, and so did virtually everyone else--the chairman of the Republican party in Iowa, even his old friend Robert McNamara. In the Gallup poll, Nixon's lead ballooned to 26 points. But Romney kept trying to explain his own alienation, kept doubling down. "I'm concerned about truth and credibility in government," Romney began a fund-raising speech in Oregon seven days later.
"I believe we face a credibility crisis in America today." He blamed the Johnson administration, and then he went further: The crisis, he said, "involves a growing disbelief in some of our nation's basic truths."http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2012/05/faith_of_our_fathers.html
