Word: fathers
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...across a letter he recognized well: typewritten, single-spaced, six pages long. He has read it so many times that he can recite parts of it by heart. Romney first opened it four decades ago, when he was in France doing Mormon missionary work. The letter was from the father he had idolized growing up, and still does, the man he has described as "the definition of a successful human." This, however, was an epistle about failure - about the one time his father had attempted something big and fallen short...
...There was so much to tell the son who had been spared by distance from having to witness the father's humiliation, but the most important thing George Romney wanted Mitt to know was that he had no regrets. "Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact, we are relieved," he wrote on the last page. "We went into this not because we aspired to the office, but simply because we felt that under the circumstances we would not feel right if we did not offer our service. As I have said on many occasions...
...FATHER'S LESSON...
...there's anything the psychodrama of the two Bush presidencies should have taught us, it is that what fathers bequeath their sons is complicated. When you look at the old pictures of George Romney, it is impossible to miss the physical resemblance - the chiseled jaw, the bountiful hair, the athlete's bearing. At every turn, Mitt Romney has steered his life into his father's groove, becoming a leader in the Mormon Church, a business whiz, a Republican Governor who defied his party's orthodoxy and won in a Democratic state. Each engineered the spectacular rescue of a failing enterprise...
...lies perhaps an important difference from the earlier Romney. Whereas George stood firm and true against the prevailing political winds, Mitt seems as if he can dress himself as a politician for any season. You can't help wondering whether what he learned from his father's steadfastness was an object lesson in what not to do if he doesn't want to end up as a footnote in someone else's Presidential memoirs...