MATTHEW WEINER'S "OLIVER STONE" MOMENT

I am a devoted fan of Mad Men.  I'm not such a fan of showrunner Matthew Weiner.  In addition to Mad Men, Weiner is associated with one of my other all-time favorite television dramas, The Sopranos.  The brilliance of the work helps me to overlook the fact that Weiner is also a typical Hollyweird liberal, with all the biases and ignorance that it entails.

The incident occurred on April Fool's Day last year during the second episode of Season 5, entitled Tea Leaves.  In the episode, Betty's husband, Henry Francis, a political operative who used to work for Nelson Rockefeller but who is now working for NYC's Republican mayor, John Lindsay, tells someone on the phone, "Well, tell Jim his honor's not going to Michigan. Romney's a clown, and I don't want him standing next to him."

This, of course, was a reference to Governor George Romney of Michigan.  It was like a bolt of lightning that hits the ground, visible for a split second and then over.  There were no further references to Romney during the episode or the season.  The next morning, Mitt Romney's oldest son, Tagg, tweeted the family displeasure at the dig at his grandfather, who died in 1995.

"Seriously, lib media mocking my dead grandpa?" Tagg wrote. Moments later, he added in a second tweet, "George Romney was as good a man I've ever known. Inspirational leader, worked for civil rights, promoted freedom. We need more like him."

When questioned, AMC's spokeswoman Marnie Black said the incident was based on historical information. "Lindsay and Romney were known political rivals," she said.

Fast forward to Weiner's April 4th interview with CNN's Jake Tapper.

"I pick up a "Newsweek" from that year, and George Romney is the frontrunner," says Weiner. "And Lindsay is someone who, as the Republican Jack Kennedy, they’re all trying to get an endorsement from. He’s trying to take pictures with all of the candidates who are about to run. And they’re trying to take pictures with him. And I know for a fact that there was a decision not to take a picture with George Romney, because he...did not have the same political leanings as Lindsay." 

And that's where Weiner gets it wrong.  Deliberately wrong.  Romney and Lindsay were potential rivals for the GOP nomination in 1968 but they were both from the moderate wing of the party.  Weiner is implying that since Lindsay was moderate and his flunkie Henry calls Romney a "clown" that therefore Romney must be ultra conservative, which he wasn't.  The line (which is an insult, not "criticism") is accurate but only in the sense that they were rival contenders, not because of an ideological schism.

This is why I call it an "Oliver Stone" moment.  Weiner is rewriting history to suit his own political viewpoint.  That's exactly the kind of thing for which Stone is notorious.  If there was an ulterior motive on Weiner's part with regards to the 2012 election it would be to deny Mitt Romney whatever benefits he might have accrued if Mad Men viewers were reminded that his father was very much a moderate Republican, indeed hostile to the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the GOP.

But since Weiner wants to hide behind the history, fine, let's talk some history. On May 23, 1966 (five weeks before the telephone conversation depicted in the episode), Rockefeller shocked the political press when he bowed out of national politics "completely and forever, without reservation" and passed the moderate mantle to Romney - not Lindsay - during a joint appearance at Long Island's Garden City Hotel.

The move was part of a deal with Senator Jacob Javits: in exchange for not challenging him in the 1966 gubernatorial primary, Rockefeller would back him as Romney’s 1968 running mate. Romney was apparently surprised but delighted with the endorsement.  Lindsay, of course, resented this, hence the hostility displayed by his flunkie, Henry Francis.



In typical Rockefeller fashion, he set about putting all of New York’s Republican political muscle behind Romney: money, research and campaign aides. In all likelihood, the person on the phone that Henry Francis yelled at was a Rockefeller aide.  By mid-November the Harris poll had Romney beating Lyndon Johnson 54 to 46; nobody else in the GOP (including the "Republican Kennedy" John Lindsay) came close to that.  One of the aides Rockefeller donated to Romney was a foreign policy wonk named Henry Kissinger. 

Rockefeller and Lindsay (who prior to his 1965 mayoral victory had been the representative in Congress of Manhattan's so-called "Silk Stocking District") never had a particularly good relationship and it would get progressively worse as the years went by.  So it is in the small world of New York Republicans.  Think of the 1990s and Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senator Al D'Amato if you want to get an idea of what GOP rivalries look like in the Empire State.

George Romney

In July of '66 it's entirely plausible that an aide to John Lindsay would refer to George Romney, a Mormon who lacked a college degree, as a "clown."  Lindsay, an Episcopalian, was an elitist snob.  A product of preppy boarding schools, Yale University and Yale Law School, he was, despite being a Republican, a classic "limousine liberal."  He was overly paternalistic towards minorities while being completely indifferent (sometimes hostile) to the white working class in the city, particularly those living in the outer boroughs.  It was this bad attitude that would help to make his time in the mayor's office such a dismal failure.

You can read all about Romney's career and political record here.  George Romney was everything that Weiner praised in the Republicans of the mid-1960s.  And yet he deliberately chose to ignore that indisputable fact and subtly gave the opposite impression.  In my opinion the interview is much worse than the "clown" line in the episode.  Technically speaking, the line in the script is plausible, just not for the reason Weiner wanted viewers to think.  But his smugness in the interview combined with his Stone-like distortion of George Romney's politics is unforgivable.  

Nevertheless, I do love the show.  The showrunner?  Not so much...

Romney (in shirtsleeves) marching with the NAACP in Detroit