This guy is just a pure scumbag...I don't think it's possible to be more full of shit. Anybody that would vote for this jerk has to be out of their mind...he really will say anything and his track record shows that. There is nothing good about him...

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Romney never saw father on King march

Defends figurative words; evidence contradicts story

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | December 21, 2007

Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together.

Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."

"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

But historical evidence, including news accounts at the time, shows that George Romney never marched with King, though he supported King's agenda.

Susan Englander, assistant edi tor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."

She said that when he was governor of Michigan, George Romney issued a proclamation in June 1963 in support of King's march in Detroit, but declined to attend, saying he did not participate in political events on Sundays. A New York Times story from the time confirms Englander's account.

A few days after that march, George Romney joined a civil rights march through the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, but King did not attend, Englander said. A report in the New York Times confirms Englander's account of that second march, mentioning George Romney's attendance but making no mention of King.

Romney has repeated the story of his father marching with King in some of his most prominent presidential campaign appearances, including the "Tonight" show with Jay Leno in May, his address on faith and politics Dec. 6 in Texas, and on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday, when he was questioned about the Mormon Church's ban on full participation by black members. He said that he had cried in his car in 1978 when he heard the ban had ended, and added, "My father marched with Martin Luther King."

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

Romney's account of his father marching with King was first challenged this week by the Boston Phoenix and then yesterday by the Detroit Free Press, each of which reported they could find no news accounts or other evidence that George Romney and King marched together.

Peppered with questions while campaigning in Iowa yesterday, Romney defended his account that his father marched with King, saying it had become part of the family's history.

"I can't even give you the time frame," he told reporters, according to an account on the New York Times' political blog. "I just remember we talked about it. My brother also remembers my dad having spoken about the fact he did not do political events on Sunday but that he decided at the last minute that he was going to break that self-imposed rule and participate, and I think he did so on a Sunday, as I recall."

His campaign this week also cited a 1967 book, "The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the GOP," by Stephen Hess and David Broder, the Washington Post columnist, which states that George Romney "has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit."

But the Phoenix reported that the Grosse Pointe Historical Society had no record of King marching in the town. The Detroit Free Press reported that its archives showed no record of King marching in Grosse Pointe in 1963. And Russell Peebles, who was a civil rights activist in Grosse Pointe in the 1960s, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the only time King ever came to the town was three weeks before his assassination in 1968, when he spoke at Grosse Pointe High School.

The Romney campaign cited another book, "Detroit, Race and Uneven Development," by Joe T. Darden in 1987, which describes a series of "Freedom Marches" sponsored by the NAACP and King in the Detroit area, including Grosse Pointe. The book says George Romney participated in one of those marches, but does not say that King was there.

Clayborne Carson, director of the King Project at Stanford, said he was not surprised by Romney's anecdote. He said he often jokes that if all the people who say they marched on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 had actually been there, the bridge would have collapsed.

"I think it's partly the desire of everyone that supported the civil rights cause to say it was not just rhetorical support but an active support," Carson said. "To say you supported civil rights and to say you never marched is just not the way you want to remember your past. So, I think easily I could imagine where 'I supported the march' became 'I was actually at the march.' "

Romney's political opponents, however, sought to link the comments to what they described as Romney's record of flip-flopping on issues, including gun control, gay rights, abortion, and immigration.

"Clearly, Mitt Romney will say absolutely anything to smooth talk his way to the Republican nomination, even if it means playing loose with the facts on his own father's civil rights record," said Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

Michael Levenson can be reached at [email protected].