For Romney, a course set long ago

Mitt Romney always idolized his father. As a child, he was so fascinated by his father’s work that he learned to imitate car-engine noises and devoured issues of Automotive News. Their bond was so close that 19-year-old Mitt welcomed his father’s help in keeping up the courtship of his high school girlfriend, Ann Davies, while Mitt was in France on his own Mormon mission.

George Romney, then governor, cultivated a bond with Ann, taking her to events and converting her to Mormonism. “Your gal looked lovely, as always,” George Romney wrote to Mitt on Feb. 16, 1967, saying he had sat next to her in church and asked about “that ring of yours on her engagement finger.”

At Harvard, Mitt Romney carried an old leather brief case bearing his father’s initials, GWR, and wrote a seminar paper on a car maker and its dealerships — an issue his father had faced. Later, Mr. Romney arranged a private meeting for his father with William F. Weld, then governor of Massachusetts.

George Romney talked about volunteerism — a personal passion — for an hour, but his son’s reaction is all Mr. Weld remembers. “He sat there hunched forward a bit with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands just beaming at his father from a distance of two or maybe three feet,” Mr. Weld recalled. “It was undiluted hero worship.”

A campaign begins
After urging his son to take on Senator Kennedy, George Romney “just about came out of his skin” with delight when the younger Romney entered the race, Mitt Romney recalled. His father stood with him when he announced his candidacy, and practically moved in with him for the race.

Mitt and Ann woke up each morning to find that his 87-year-old father had already gone running, made breakfast, and filled a yellow legal pad with campaign ideas. “It was like, ‘Oh dear,’” Ann Romney recalled. “We would be just barely getting up, and he has already got 10 things he has just got to tell us.”

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At the bitter end, when polls showed Mr. Kennedy had re-election locked up, George Romney insisted that the family could still turn it around. Summoning scores of children and grandchildren, he assigned each a precinct for a last face-to-face push. “We can still win this thing for Mitt,” he told them, Mitt’s older brother, G. Scott Romney, recalled.

Mitt Romney went along with the plan. But when he walked into the hotel conference room where the army of Romneys had gathered, he lay on the floor with a white lily on his chest. “Welcome to my funeral,” he said.

George Romney died the next year, before Mitt Romney was ever elected to office. But the 1994 defeat did not end the pull of his father’s ambitions. Three years later, citing Steve Forbes as an example of a businessman-candidate, Mr. Romney mentioned to his brother that he was thinking of a run for the presidency.

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“I didn’t tell him he had not even been elected dogcatcher yet,” said Scott Romney, a Michigan lawyer.

When he did start planning a run for the presidency, Mitt Romney said, he set out to avoid the mistakes of his father’s campaign: failing to raise enough money, to build an effective national campaign team, to start early enough in the first primary states, or to end feuding between his dual headquarters in Washington and Detroit.

Mitt Romney also studied up. He said his father had jumped into the race unprepared, before he was “fully briefed” on national issues. One result was a visible change over time in his reactions to the Vietnam War, epitomized by his disastrous remark about “brainwashing.”

Some challenges are different. Attention to George Romney’s membership in the Mormon Church concentrated on its policy at the time of excluding blacks from full participation. Today, the conservative Christian movement is focusing scrutiny on Mormon theology itself.

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