Video: This archival campaign footage shows Lenore Romney, Mitt Romney's mother, in her 1970 campaign for U.S. Senate.
DETROIT — Mitt Romney has been busy in recent weeks conjuring up images of his family heritage here — at least a portion of it.
In TV ads and newspaper op-eds that have run in the lead-up to Tuesday’s GOP primary , he has referred to himself as a “son of Detroit.” He has reminded voters of the legacy of his father, George Romney, who remains an iconic figure in the state where he headed the American Motors Corp. and served three fondly remembered terms as governor in the 1960s.
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But the presidential candidate has mostly avoided talking about a less sterling period in the family’s political history: his mother’s ill-fated run for the U.S. Senate in 1970.
Lenore Romney’s failed bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Philip A. Hart that year caused a bitter split in the state’s Republican Party, resulted in a crushing general election defeat and, as one reporter wrote, “seemed to close the pages on the Romney chapter of Michigan political history.”
Forty-two years later, that race is largely forgotten even here in Michigan. But the experience has certainly remained with Mitt Romney, who along with his siblings campaigned throughout Michigan during her troubled run.
The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment, nor did other relatives. But his older brother, Scott Romney, told a newspaper reporter in 2007 that for all of their father’s success, their mother’s doomed race provided valuable and lasting political lessons.
“You need to define yourself, and not let others define you,” he told the Boston Globe. “And it’s no fun to lose.”
‘I am a stand-in for no one’
In early 1970, Michigan GOP leaders tried to recruit George Romney to run for the U.S. Senate in an effort to unseat Hart, a popular incumbent. Romney had resigned as the state’s governor the previous year to serve as President Richard Nixon’s secretary of housing and urban development, but he remained beloved back home.
He turned down the overtures, but soon encouraged Lenore Romney, then 61, to run for the seat, even gathering family members at their Bloomfield Hills home to mull the possibility.
She had grown up in Utah, graduated from George Washington University and given up a promising Hollywood film career to raise four children and hitch her fortunes to her husband’s rising star.
Waiflike at 110 pounds, with hazel eyes, brown hair and size 7AAA shoes, she had become a well-known and eloquent speaker during her years as Michigan’s first lady. She campaigned tirelessly for her husband throughout the state, often with Mitt by her side. She spoke frequently to civic groups and did not shy from encouraging women to take a more active role in government.
“Why should women have less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?” she said in one 1966 address, adding that women “represent a reservoir of public service which has hardly been tapped.”
But when her family and a handful of prominent Republicans pushed her to run for office in 1970, Lenore Romney at first seemed reluctant.
“I am not interested in the nomination,” she said only weeks before she began seeking it. “I am hoping deeply that they find another candidate. Nothing would please me more.”
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