San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How Romney was inspired by dad’s 1964 S.F. battle
The photos are from 1964, but they seem much older.
Hundreds of Chronicle archive images show a GOP convention in San Francisco — the last one in a city that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor or supervisor since 1973.
But zoom in closer and closer, and there’s one story on that floor that is still developing, even in 2020. Michigan Gov. George Romney came to the convention hoping to derail the Republican platform of presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, who had been using notsosubtle racist language to rally white voters while refusing to embrace civil rights.
And following Romney from the airport, to the St. Francis Hotel, to the Cow Palace arena floor is his son, 17yearold Mitt.
“My dad was not enthusiastic about Barry Goldwater, because he felt that ... he had cozied himself up to the extreme in our party,” Romney said. “My dad was a real champion of civil rights in that era and was very much of the view that Goldwater was not leading the charge as he should have.”
When the younger Romney, now a U.S. senator from Utah, joined a march in protest of George Floyd’s death in Washington last month, it seemed like a surprise — even coming from one of the few Republicans willing to defy President Trump.
But it makes more sense in the context of Romney family history, including that 1964 convention, which was a bitter defeat for George Romney, and one of the lessons that his son remembers to this day. Teenage Mitt Romney was used to campaigning with his father, working at county fairs passing out buttons and bumper stickers before George Romney was elected governor in 1962. But the San Francisco trip was memorable.
“It was exciting to go to San Francisco and go to the Cow Palace,” Romney said, during a recent phone interview. “Is the structure still standing? I don’t know.”
The Chronicle documented a smiling George Romney and his family (including wife Lenore, and older son Scott) getting off the plane and shaking hands with locals.
What was billed as “a fight over the soul of the party” at the Cow Palace arena on July 14, 1964, quickly turned toward the extremists, as Goldwater and his supporters reacted bitterly to the Republicans with a more progressive message. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, also pushing for civil rights, was booed by Republican delegates with chants of “We want Barry” after he was introduced. George Romney followed with a passionate speech, warning Republicans that they needed to include African American and Latino voters, not demonize them. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower later singled out Romney for his sincerity and logic.
“I’m here at this convention because I profoundly believe that present basic trends and perils are rushing us toward a national crisis,” Romney said from the podium in the center of the Cow Palace.
Goldwater, urged by many in the party to work with the progressives, bitterly dismissed all of their civil rights planks, even the ones that were mostly symbolic.
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater said from the floor, effectively turning his campaign into an usagainstthem referendum. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
The Chronicle covered the political bloodbath with a giant headline across the front page: “BARRY’S CRUSHER: The Fall of the GOP Liberals”
Fiftysix years later, Mitt Romney still isn’t sure what initially motivated his father to take on racial equality as a cause. The older Romney was a U.S. citizen born in Mexico and lived in poverty in El Paso, Texas, but mostly grew up in whitedominated communities in Idaho and Utah.
“I’ve wondered since, whether having been in government housing, having grown up poor, gave him an appreciation for those who continued to be discriminated against,” Romney said.
In any case, dinnertable discussions with his children often turned to race.
“We spoke at great length about his feeling that (African Americans) were unfairly discriminated against in housing in particular, but also in employment,” Romney remembered. “That racism had an enormous impact on preventing African Americans from realizing what kind of potential they had.” Others who supported even more progressive platforms ended up endorsing Goldwater in 1964, and campaigning on his behalf. George Romney said he would only support the candidate’s campaign once it was free of “hatepeddling and fearspreading.”
“Senator Goldwater has always found some reason for not being able to meet with me,” Romney said weeks before the November election. “I haven’t had any indication that he’s interested in my support.”
Goldwater was trounced by Democratic candidate Lyndon B. Johnson, who carried all but six states. Romney was easily reelected as governor.
For the rest of his career, including a run for president in 1968 followed by four years as Richard Nixon’s secretary of housing and urban development, Romney continued to push for desegregation and housing for the poor. While governor, he led a march alongside NAACP officials, opposing housing discrimination.
Early in his 1968 presidential run, George Romney went on a 17city tour, visiting the poorest areas of each. He made headlines in San Francisco on Sept. 23, 1967, when he toured a home for runaways on Haight Street, and ended up in the Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle for a sort of impromptu town hall with more than 100 confused hippies.
They occasionally heckled him, before engaging in dialogue, and leaving the governor of Michigan and his wife with a flower, ZigZag cigarette papers and an ear of corn.
“I think they show that we’re not listening enough,” he told a Chronicle reporter later. “The lines of communication are down. Not only with hippies, but also minority groups.”
When Mitt Romney put on a mask and marched in support of Black Lives Matter on Sunday, June 7, he said he was thinking about his father, who Romney said “without exception” did things for principled purpose, not political purpose. “He was a man driven by what he thought was right. And said and did what he thought was right and did not worry about the consequences,” Romney said. “I try to live by the same approach. But I’m weaker than my dad.” George Romney died in 1995, and didn’t live to see his son win an election. Mitt Romney followed his father’s advice — George Romney told his children don’t run for office until your children are out of the house and you’re financially independent — and didn’t enter politics until he was in his mid40s. His first big win, running for governor of Massachusetts, came in 2002 at age 55.
After losing his own presidential race to Barack Obama in 2012, Mitt Romney’s career appeared to be defined. But he later ran as a senator in Utah, and since assuming office in 2019 has shown willingness to cross party lines — most notably in February, when Romney became the only Republican voting to impeach President Trump.
Romney said that unlike his father, he’s occasionally chosen politics over principle during his career, “and I regret that.” At this stage of his life, he’s just not as worried about the fallout.
The parallels between the nationdividing 1964 Goldwater campaign that Mitt Romney witnessed and the 2020 Trump campaign are obvious. Except George Romney didn’t have a social media firestorm to deal with every time he went against the party line.
When Mitt Romney is asked whether he hesitated before deciding to march in a Black Lives Matter demonstration, knowing Trump and party leaders might use it as political ammunition, the senator sounds a little like a 17yearold again — still looking up to the man who showed him the way.
“There’s an old Christian hymn, which the first line reads, ‘Do what is right and let the consequences follow,’ ” Romney said. “I hear a number of people who say, ‘Well, wait, sometimes you have to put your principle aside, because the bigger outcome is more important than doing what’s right up front.’ … And that’s a sentiment that’s sometimes entered into my own brain.
“At this stage in life, it’s like, ‘No, you do what’s right, and you let the consequences fall where they may.’ And I surely saw that in my father’s life.”