Monday, April 2, 2012

Vicious TV Attacks on 1960s Politicians

So those who don't watch Mad Men woke this morning to find that a TV show had taken a shot at Mitt Romney's dad. Let's get into it!

First: the character who calls Michigan Governor George Romney a "clown" is an operative for New York City Mayor John Lindsay, and for that matter not one who we in the audience are supposed to be, as far as I can tell, particularly fond of.* At the time, both Romney and Lindsay were positioning for the 1968 Republican nomination, on the hope that the Goldwater debacle of 1964 would make a liberal Republican the choice -- and, as Garry Wills tells it, on the assumption that Kennedy-like "charisma" was needed against LBJ (see also  here for more Wills quotes on G. Romney; and here for Brad DeLong on Nixon Agonisties).

Dave Weigel says:
This episode of Mad Men was set in 1966, when George Romney was about to be re-elected governor. He was one of the best-known critics of the GOP's conservative wing; he trashed Barry Goldwater for his Civil Rights Act vote, and would say in speeches that "state's rights" was a weasely term that excused racism. A liberal New York Republican would like Romney.
 Would Francis feel otherwise because Romney threatened his client's national ambitions? Maybe, but the "clown" line still sounds out of place. The myth of Romney's foolishness really got going when he gave an interview in 1967 about his shifting position on the Vietnam War. He said, mea culpa, that he'd had "the greatest brainwashing" from generals and the diplomatic core.
See also Ezra Klein, who says that "In 1966, George Romney was an incredibly admirable politician."

Two things. One is that Wills has Robert McNamara helping Romney to get his political career going (remember, they were both auto industry executives), but later believing that the problem with Romney was "no brains." Unfortunately, Wills doesn't tell us where he got that from, or more to the point when he got it from, and I couldn't find it after a quick search (and remember -- it was McNamara's DOD and generals that Romney was criticizing). My impression is that (as Wills basically says) George Romney was always vulnerable to getting a "no brains" reputation, and that one reason the "brainwashed" gaffe hurt him was that it was taken to confirm something that political insiders already believed.

The second and more important thing is that it's certainly very possible that a politician could hold positions on matters of public policy which one agrees with, and which may even be courageous in a way, but still be widely viewed as a moron; indeed, it's possible that such a politician might actually be a moron. There's a natural tendency to attribute smarts to those who agree with us on issues, and moreover to assume that the side politicians take on pressing issues of the day tell us something about those politicians. But neither of these is a safe assumption. It's true that many choices politicians make come from their beliefs about the world; it's also true that choices politicians make are just responses to the incentives they are faced with. Granted, one might believe that a politician is admirable even when (and again, not saying it's true in this case) she's a moron and her positions are just what her pollster told her to take, but I probably wouldn't agree.

As for George Romney...I really don't know whether his reputation among insiders was already formed in 1966, pre-brainwashing. But I suspect so.Nor do I have any idea at all whether the reputation was deserved. I am certain, however, that admirable positions on public policy give us surprisingly little hint about the intellectual firepower of politicians.



*100 years from now, Lindsay will be even more forgotten than he is now -- but will achieve immortality as Gotham Mayor Linseed on the Adam West Batman show. Hey, you take what you can get in politics.

13 comments:

  1. In Rule and Ruin, Geoffery Kabaservice writes that Romney's reputation pre-dated the brainwashing interview. Apparently a lot of prominent moderates thought that his speeches were garbled and confusing; and Romney had a tendency to talk about God's plan for America in an era when that was a lot less common. (Plus he was a Mormon.) And generally, it seems as if moderate support for his presidential candidacy was lukewarm at best.

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    1. And as regards Henry Francis, I don't know that the issue of his political judgment has ever been raised. Mad Men is only scantly interested in the electoral politics of the era, so I doubt that Matt Weiner included the line because he wanted to take a shot on George Romney. It's more likely that Henry Francis is a moderate Republican strategist to show that he, like a lot of the characters on the show, is part of an old guard that will struggle as the sixties progress.

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    2. Of course, Francis is working for Lindsay, not Rockefeller, by the time he calls Romney a "clown.". While Rockefeller initially backed Romney for the '68 nomination (with many seeing the Michigan governor as his stalking horse), I have no idea what Lindsay's attitude was. Rockefeller and Lindsay didn't always see eye-to-eye, and eventually fell out big time.

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  2. I'm always struck, in looking at presidential politics of the 60s, by how people who'd been governors for maybe a year and a half were considered perfectly viable presidential candidates (Rockefeller in '60, Scranton and Romney in '64, Reagan in '68). Did the post-68 reforms end these sorts of candidacies, deliberately or unintentionally?

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    1. Unsure about that, Chris. But, don't forget that Cleveland was barely in politics for a few years before he became president.

      Oh, and governors for half-terms? I don't think their presence in the GOP has come to an end, yet (*cough* Palin *cough*)

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    2. This is an excellent question. My own wild guess is that in that era, getting nominated for a big-state governorship meant you were already a national political player to some degree: Rockefeller was a Rockefeller, Romney the head of a major corporation, Reagan a well-known figure who had already spoken at a GOP convention, Scranton the son of a grand family whose relatives were already politically prominent (his mother was a longtime member of the GOP national committee), etc. The age of the Jesse Venturas and Jan Brewers and Sarah Palins was not yet upon us.

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  3. Are we really not supposed to like Henry Francis? He's a far better husband to Betty than Don was, and he's far nicer than she deserves half the time. He doesn't seem to be a drunk or a brute or a philanderer, putting him well ahead of basically every other male character on the show. I suppose his two alleged faults would be that he's politically ambitious (I don't see that as a fault) and that he met Betty when she was married and made his intentions known even then, although, to both their credit, they didn't do anything until she was divorced.

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  4. The 'moron' reputation, if true, explains something I've wondered about for many years - why George Romney got so hammered for the 'brainwashing' remark.

    The conventional wisdom that the remark itself did him in has never rung true. After all, a lot of people at that time were feeling they'd been taken in by official happy talk about the Vietnam war. But if the people who knew him already thought he was a doofus, they would see the remark in a very different light.

    History explained! (Maybe.)

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    1. Eugene McCarthy responded to Romney's gaffe by saying that a full brainwashing was overkill, and that in Romney's case 'a light rinse should have been sufficient.'

      Insults that good don't come from nowhere.

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    2. Owww! Indeed they don't!

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  5. In a hundred years, sure -- but right now, is Lindsay all that forgotten? Didn't a book defending his reputation (on all the issues that were not the skyrocketing crime rate during his tenure as mayor) just come out last year?

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  6. I think the comment makes most sense if we remember Henry Francis' Rockefeller connections and the 1964 race. Romney was one of the moderates floated as an anti-Goldwater candidate as it became clear that Rockefeller wouldn't succeed. In that context his comment may reflect more of a personal animus than Lindsay's political position. Even if Rockefeller did back Romney in '68, that doesn't mean a former campaign aid would have gotten over it by '66.

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  7. Really? at 26, I know Linsey from reading Buckley's "the Unmaking of a Mayor".

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