Not in his father's footsteps

"No, I will not."

"Why not?"

"Well, because I choose not to."

It portended disaster. Romney issued clarifications that clarified nothing.

On Sept. 4, a TV interviewer asked him about Vietnam: "Isn't your position a bit inconsistent with what it was, and what do you propose we do now?" Romney decided to lay it on the line: "When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only the generals but also the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job."

He was improvising.

"And since returning from Vietnam, I have gone into the history of Vietnam all the way back into World War II and before that, and as a result I have changed my mind in that particularly -- I no longer believe it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop aggression in Southeast Asia and to prevent Chinese communist domination of Southeast Asia."

An intelligent observer studying America's history in Vietnam since World War II might come to the same conclusion. But all people heard was the word "brainwashing."

"Brainwashing" as a term came into use after the Korean War to explain why some prisoners of war, supposedly insufficiently sturdy in their patriotism to resist, chose to stay behind in enemy territory and denounce the United States -- what the ruthless did to the soft-minded. Neither side of the association appealed to voters: the notion that the architects of Vietnam were ruthless, and the notion of a president who was soft-minded.

As Romney attempted to "clarify," the Detroit News demanded that he step aside so his financial backer, Nelson Rockefeller, could enter the race in his stead. The paper pointed out that he'd supported the war publicly for two years after his trip: "How long does a brainwashing linger?" In the next Harris poll, Romney dropped 16 points.

Meanwhile, Nixon got the world's attention when, in the middle of a patriotic stemwinder in a rural town, he said that "if in November this war is not over, I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific." He simply told Americans what they wanted to hear: not that Vietnam was an unmanageable mess, but that under a President Nixon, Vietnam would be over.

A limping Romney dropped out two weeks before the New Hampshire balloting. Overnight, he had transformed himself from national messiah to national laughingstock, a ruined man. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: Can you imagine what it would be like to watch that happen to your dad?

If you ended up going into the same profession, you just might choose to do things differently.