Lesson Learned

"A few years earlier, George Romney had been the front runner for the Republican nomination for president. Romney was probably tied with Nelson Rockefeller as the most preferred candidate of the liberal and moderate Republicans, largely from the Midwest and Northeast, who wanted to regain control of the party following the devastating defeat of conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964. A 1966 New Yorker story declared Romney the leading contender for 1968—so long as someone didn’t come along who would unite the Republican Party’s warring Goldwater and Rockefeller wings. Someone, the article says, like Richard Nixon.
"It’s not hard to imagine that the 21-year-old Mitt Romney, freshly returned from his Mormon mission tour abroad shortly after the 1968 election, noticed that his father, a dedicated public servant with a passion for social justice, lost the nation’s top job to a notoriously unprincipled paranoiac whose main qualification for the presidency was an unchecked willingness to do literally anything to reach it. The guy who didn’t believe in anything won."

Alex Pareene in Salon wonders how George Romney's political humiliations affected Mitt.

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast compares Mitt Romney more directly with Nixon.