Word: romneys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Acquaintance with Romney's political allies, aides, and family leaves no doubt about his utter sincerity--or his simple-mindedness. At every step in his seemingly well-planned political career, he has claimed, and there is every reason to think he has really believed, that he had not decided to take the next one. He came to the decision to run for Governor in 1962 only after a well-publicized day of fasting and prayer. The fact that it was well publicized and that there were plenty of Romney-for-Governor buttons available in Bloomfield Hills the next day only...
...most important thing to remember about George Romney is that he is a public relations man by trade--the first professional PR man to become a serious contender for the Presidency of the United States. For twenty five years he has held jobs in which his main function has been to publicize products of varying quality to convince a not-too-skeptical public that they are all tops. During the '40's he was the head of the Automobile Manufacturers' Association. He moved to Nash-Kelvinator as PR Vice-President in 1953, and when the floundering company became American Motors...
...Romney's political career seems to have been planned and timed with the same skill as the Rambler ad campaigns. He moved from a supposedly non-partisan Citizens for Michigan group to become Vice-President of a Republican-dominated state Constitutional Convention in 1961 and, finally, a successful Republican candidate for Governor in 1962. All the while he carefully preserved a non-partisan facade (the word Republican never appeared on any Romney campaign literature until 1964). The voters bought the package...
More interesting than this success story is the necessarily more speculative history of what has been going in Romney's mind. Anyone who wants to prove that he is an unvarnished Chicago Tribune sort of Republican can go back to his AMA speeches and find the usual derisive references to Walter Reuther, creeping socialism, etc. But people's minds--even Midwestern businessmen's minds--can change. Romney apparently had an idea sometime in the late '50s that Michigan could be saved from the twin evils of big labor (the Democratic Party) and big business (the Republican Party) by a knight...
...that men like Williams and Hubert Humphrey fought for in the fifties. What the Detroit newspapers railed against ten years ago, they now accept, and Cavanagh, like LBJ, knows how to use their acceptance to make further gains. At the same time, Republicans--even Michigan Republicans--have changed. George Romney managed to convince voters that he was not the same kind of politician as the reactionaries that controlled the State Senate (although he is closer to them than most people think). Sixties Liberals have worked uneasily with Romney, but the Fifties Liberals have not been able to adjust successfully...