Romney, Figuratively Speaking

Mitt Romney is fond of recounting a proud moment from his family's past. In his big "Faith in America" speech at the George H.W. Bush library, Romney declared, "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King." Days later, to contrast the Mormon church's foot-dragging on racial equality with his own family's more progressive attitudes, he told Tim Russert, "My dad marched with Martin Luther King."

Well, from today's Detroit Free Press comes word that the Romney Sr./King Jr. alliance may have been a tad exaggerated.

On Wednesday, Romney's campaign said his recollections of watching his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant to be figurative. "He was speaking figuratively, not literally," Eric Fehnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate.

---

---

Go figure. It seems there is no record of George Romney and MLK Jr. locking arms and marching together. Call it a familial myth. How did it start? Mitt's older brother recalls his father telling him he "marched with King, possibly in 1963, but he could not remember exactly when the event took place."

Though George Romney was clearly sympathetic to the goals of the Civil Rights movement, there's not a whit of evidence to substantiate Mitt's vision of his father and King together. If, as Romney initially claimed, he carries around an actual mental picture of the two men together, then we may be dealing with an instance of false memory. It's a fascinating subject, and we are all subject to the odd sensation of feeling certain we have witnessed events that never transpired. In Romney's case, the story of his father and King was not only propagated by his dad and family members, but also reproduced through external sources.

Washington Post columnist David S. Broder, the dean of whatever, co-wrote a book on the GOP back in 1967 which contained the claim that G. Romney "has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Point suburb of Detroit."

The thing is, King himself never marched in Grosse Point, much less with Romney Sr. by his side. So what about the "figurative" defense? Perhaps when Romney said he "saw his father march with Martin Luther King," he merely meant he "envisioned" such a possibility. Or maybe Mitt meant "saw" in the sense that he "knew a time" when such a thing happened, rather than actually laying his own eyes on the men at a march. Literally speaking, however, the physical pairing of Romney Sr. and King Jr. is not much more than a figment of the imagination.

And read my update of this story, and Mitt's explanation here.