• LAMB: : Well, you know, if you ever look at the history of your father and running for president, they all say the same thing, it’s all the ”brainwashing” comment. Why would that have been the issue? I mean, why would he have been accused of saying something stupid about being brainwashed in Vietnam?

• ROMNEY: You know, I don’t know what the real reason was that his campaign came apart. But you are right. Everyone attributes it to him saying that he was brainwashed in Vietnam, and he didn’t mean literally brainwashed, of course it’s a figure of speech.

But for whatever reason, his opponents in the media seized on the figure of speech and tried to ascribe greater meaning to it than he intended. His point was that McNamara and Johnson had been lying to the American people and that what he had said in the past about Vietnam that he no longer agreed with was because in the past he had swallowed hook, line, and sinker what he had been told by military generals, by McNamara, by Johnson, and that they were wrong.

And interestingly, much later in life, he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t, you know, go back and bemoan the fact that he had lost campaign or the brainwashing word, but I remember that when McNamara came out with his book about ”The Fog of War,” and admitted that he had lied to the American people, my dad took a certain degree of satisfaction in the fact that the people now knew that what he said was true.

Actually, when dad said that McNamara and others had lied about Vietnam, Secretary McNamara, then secretary of defense said, well, George Romney wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him in the face.

Well, as it turned out, he did know the truth. And he used to say that in politics being right too early is not a good thing. But he was right and it was too early. And I think we can all learn a lesson from that. When someone says something bold and outrageous, you had better listen carefully.

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