The one about how Bob Stafford helped end Romney's White House hopes

When Mitt Romney’s father ran for President forty years ago, it was a Vermonter who became one of his most vocal critics.

George Romney had gone from running American Motors to becoming the Governor of Michigan in 1962, and was viewed as a top-tier candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination in a field that included Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller.

But in a TV interview in August 1967, Romney announced that after a visit to Vietnam, he had switched from supporting the war in to opposing it.  "When I came back from Viet Nam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get."

The brainwashing comment became national news – in a time when candidates could say something to a Detroit TV affiliate and not assume it would be broadcast across the country. 

Robert Stafford, then a five-term Republican Congressman from Vermont (he had served as Governor and would later spend seventeen years in the U.S. Senate) emerged as one of the most vocal spinners against Romney.  "If you're running for the presidency, you are supposed to have too much on the ball to be brainwashed,” Stafford said in a line that appeared in newspapers and on TV and radio reports nationally.

He dropped out of the presidential race in February 1968, and when Republicans met in Miami to nominate a presidential candidate, Romney had won just fifty first ballot votes – 44 of the 48 from his home state, and six from Utah.