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said, admitting, “Sometimes you’d think, ‘That kid oughta shut up!’ But he was always nice to be around.”
    Mitt’s sister Jane likened their upbringing amid the swirl of politics to “living in a drama.” It was, she said, a fascinating time, with interesting people always parading through, reporters often at the doorstep, the issues of the day deliberated at the dinner table. George Romney’s success in Michigan prompted talk of him as a presidential candidate in 1964. That didn’t happen, but he arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco that summer as a star, inviting Mitt to come orbit around him. The elder Romney would make headlines by walking out on nominee Barry Goldwater because of Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. In a subsequent letter to Goldwater, Romney wrote, “The rights of some must not be enjoyed by denying the rights of others.” Romney refused to endorse Goldwater’s candidacy, embittering conservatives within the party and solidifying Romney’s reputation as a more liberal iconoclast.
    When Goldwater complained about Romney’s failure to endorse him, Romney responded in a blistering letter—soon leaked to The New York Times —in which he took sharp aim at Goldwater’s right-wing philosophy. In what amounted to a Romney Manifesto, the governor wrote, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.” Years later, Mitt would run as a moderate and win the governorship of Massachusetts and as a conservative in seeking the presidency. Throughout his career, Mitt would be accused of changing his positions according to the politics of the moment. He would reject charges of opportunism, but his father’s blunt forthrightness, his adamancy on the divisive civil rights issue and others, was a trait he would not so fully emulate. George more easily, even proudly, embraced what some saw as philosophical conflicts. When Brigham Young University named an institute at its School of Management after George, it erected a plaque that boasted of the wide embrace of his spirit: “A liberal in his treatment of his fellow humans, a conservative with other people’s money.” George often said he hated political labels, knowing how they could typecast a politician and put off potential supporters. He was presumed to be conservative in his actions as a business and religious leader, but he would perhaps be best remembered as a liberal for his views of racial equality and social justice.
    George’s progressive stance on race earned him critics not only in the right wing of his party but at the highest levels of his church. The church policy at the time was that blacks could join as members but not become members of the priesthood. In 1964, a top Mormon official wrote to Romney, calling a civil rights bill “vicious legislation” and warning Romney that it was not man’s job to remove what he termed the Lord’s “curse upon the Negro.” Romney refused to back down. Mitt would be particularly proud of his father’s willingness to take on their own church when it came to the Mormons’ treatment of blacks. When Mitt was asked later in his life about the church’s refusal until 1978 to let blacks fully participate in Mormon rituals, he cited his father’s work on civil rights as evidence of how far the family had distanced itself from the church on the issue.
    Still, there weren’t many blacks in Mitt’s exclusive neighborhood of Bloomfield Hills. Mitt’s primary exposure to black people was his family’s beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and a fellow student, Sidney Barthwell, Jr., whose father had worked with George Romney in revising the state’s constitution. Coming from Detroit to attend Cranbrook, Barthwell had entered a different world. “It was primarily white WASP. I