For Romney, a course set long ago

Mr. Romney, for his part, says he often imagines his father in heaven looking down at the race. “There is no question in my mind that he is chomping at the bit, saying, ‘Let me in there, coach! Let me go down there and give him some help!’” the younger Mr. Romney said. “Can you imagine in a presidential race how much he would like to be giving me advice?”

George Romney introduced Mitt to politics at the age of 14. The elder Romney was leading dual campaigns for the governor’s office and a new state constitution. Mitt was the only one of the four Romney siblings still at home, and his father often took him to political meetings or on the campaign trail. “Not only did I watch it, he taught me how to do it,” Mitt Romney recalled.

When his father was leading a drive to collect signatures for a revision to the Michigan Constitution, he would drive to softball games or other gatherings, then send Mitt into the crowd with a clipboard. “We would drive from event to event in the evening and he would sit in the car and tell me, ‘Go out there and see how many signatures you can get,’” Mitt Romney recalled.

Born in 1907 in Mexico in a colony of Mormons who had fled an 1885 crackdown on polygamy, George Romney watched his own mother and father go bankrupt twice as the family tried to make a living in Idaho and Utah. As a Mormon missionary, he was assigned to proselytize from a soap box in Hyde Park in London, where he developed a gift for salesmanship that became the hallmark of his career.

He first came to Washington in 1929, dropping out of college to pursue his high school girlfriend and future wife, Lenore LaFount, whose father was named a communications commissioner in the Coolidge administration. Inspired by their friend J. Willard Marriott, whose root beer stand would grow into a hotel empire, George Romney opened a dairy bar across the Potomac River that quickly folded. But he talked his way into a job as a legislative aide in the office of Senator David I. Walsh, a Massachusetts Democrat.

Revolving door
“It was that first job that gave him the perspective of, ‘Hey, I can do this, too,’” Mitt Romney said of his father’s interest in politics.

It also opened a familiar revolving door. A year later, George Romney left to become a lobbyist and spokesman, first for the aluminum monopoly Alcoa and then for the Automobile Manufacturers Association.

It was late in his career, in 1950, when the company that later became American Motors hired him and put him in charge of promoting its novel compact car. Four years later, he became chief executive and bet the company on the small vehicle, called the Rambler. He drove one around the country as pitchman-in-chief, railing against “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.” By 1959, the company’s stock had soared to $90 a share from $7 a share, and Time magazine had put him on its cover.

Even at American Motors, though, George Romney was never far from politics or Washington. He made headlines testifying on Capitol Hill about the twin evils of “big labor” and “big business” and calling for a federal breakup of the Big Three car makers. He led a push for a tax-increase to improve the Detroit schools, then a new state constitution to make raising revenue easier. And as soon as he became governor he flirted with a run for the White House, drawing a friendly reprimand from the editorial page of The Detroit News: “Come Home, George.”

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