But in other settings the father could be a patient listener -- a trait that the son has consciously sought to emulate.
"I got the benefit, being the baby of the family, of going to the office with my dad, listening to business meetings, looking at new cars that were being designed, and then in politics, going out with him collecting signatures," Romney said. "It obviously imprinted in my mind the way you gather people together, how you get opinions from different folks, how you organize your thinking."
One key lesson: the importance of the devil's advocate.
"If people began to reach a consensus, he started pushing in the other direction to see if he could open up different avenues of thought," Romney said. "That gave me a perspective of how important decisions are made."
And he applied those lessons, said Thomas R. Phillips, a former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, who was in Romney's five-member study group in a dual-track graduate program at Harvard in which students pursued both a law degree and a master's in business administration.
Romney carried his college papers around in an old, battered leather briefcase that bore his father's initials -- and that Phillips initially thought Romney toted as a badge.
"I thought at the time it might just be a subtle way of saying, 'My dad's an important figure,' " Phillips said. "Then I learned enough about him to conclude he was just being economical."
Romney still speaks of his father in reverential tones and has a painted portrait of him hanging in his house "that captures the sincerity and sweetness of his soul. When I look at that, I am moved and inspired by the kind of character that he had."
When Romney ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994 against Edward M. Kennedy, the father moved into Romney's home and served as an unofficial advisor.
"He'd come downstairs in the morning with long notepads of comments and thoughts and suggestions," Romney said. "Sure, we didn't see everything the same way. But we had a lot of perspectives in common."
When Romney began contemplating a presidential bid, George Romney was there, too, at least in the form of his legacy.
"There's no question I knew what he would have wanted us to do," Romney said. "The decision came down to my family, my kids, my daughters-in-law and my wife. . . . Surely we'd all know what he'd want me to do -- which is get in and fight."
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scott.martelle@latimes.com
