Romney lied about dad walking out of 1964 GOP convention

10/15/2012 7:30am by 1,043

People already know that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney both have a bit of a problem with the truth. And today things just got a little worse.

John Bohrer at Buzzfeed:

It is observed that Mitt would never draw a line in the sand like his father did in 1964, when George dramatically “charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party’s foot-dragging on civil rights,” as the Boston Globe’s authoritative biography, “The Real Romney,” put it earlier this year. Outlets from the New York Times to the New Republic have recalled this story of the elder Romney’s stand against Goldwater’s hard-line conservatives. Frontline’s documentary “The Choice 2012” reported it as a formative event: “when Goldwater received the nomination, Mitt saw his father angrily storm out.” A Google search for the incident produces hundreds of pages of results. In August, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne cited the episode to write that Mitt “has seemed more a politician who would do whatever it took to close a deal than a leader driven by conviction and commitment. This is a problem George Romney never had.”

Only George Romney did not walk out of the 1964 Republican National Convention. He stayed until the very end, formally seconding Goldwater’s eventual nomination and later standing by while an actual walkout took place. He left the convention holding open the possibility of endorsing Goldwater and then, after a unity summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, momentarily endorsed the Arizona senator. Then he changed his mind while his top aides polled “all-white and race-conscious” Michigan communities for a “secret” white backlash vote against LBJ’s civil rights advances — a backlash that might have made a Goldwater endorsement palatable at home. Finding the Republican label even more unpopular than civil rights in Michigan, Romney ultimately distanced himself from the entire party, including his own moderate Republican allies.

Exactly where the 1964 myth entered the public consciousness is difficult to pinpoint, but it has been promoted by Mitt, who made one of its earliest print mentions in an interview during his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign. (Romney’s longtime spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom did not an inquiry about Mitt’s recollection of the incident.) “[My father] walked out of the Republican National Convention in 1964, when Barry Goldwater said, ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,’” he told Bay Windows, a LGBT interest magazine in Boston.

Bay Windows? That must have been back when Romney was claiming he was more pro-gay than Ted Kennedy. Another lie. Or is Romney lying today when he claims he agrees with Pat Robertson and the rest of the religious right gay-haters?

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