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It would certainly rank as one of the swiftest launderings on record. The touring Governors spent only 31 days in Viet Nam, were exposed to formal briefings for only a few hours. (Oddly enough, one of the two State Department escorts for the tour was Jonathan Moore, now Romney's foreign policy adviser.) The fact is that Romney had done no homework on Viet Nam be fore his arrival there; he conceded that he had never read a book about the country. If he was really brainwashed, suggested one correspondent who covered the tour, it could have been because he brought so light a load to the Laundromat.
Two days after making his comment, Romney appeared in Washington, where newsmen gave him a chance to get off the hook by asking whether he might have been misunderstood. "I was not misunderstood," he snapped. "If you want to get into a discussion of who's been brainwashing who, I suggest you take a look at what the Administration has been telling the American people." With that, he whipped out a newspaper clipping in which Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was quoted as saying, just before the 1966 election, that draft calls might be cut the following year. "The information was not accurate," said Romney. The Pentagon quickly replied that "it is the Governor who is giving inaccurate information," noting that draft calls for the first ten months of 1967 are down 136,840 from the 1966 total. Said McNamara: "I don't think Governor Romney can recognize the truth when he sees or hears it."
Perhaps the unkindest cut of all, because of its unintentional but magnificent ambiguity, came from Leonard Hall, chairman of the Romney for President committee. "I think it finally comes down to an issue of credibility between Governor Romney and Secretary McNamara," he said. "And given that choice, I have no doubt whom the American people will support."
Quite possibly, Romney did not fully comprehend the implications of that ugly term to brainwash.* In any case, it is unlikely that his opponents in either party will allow him to forget his gaffe—not to mention the cartoonists, who henceforth will surely not miss a chance to picture the Governor's cranium wreathed in detergent foam. And all can do it with impunity, since he did it to himself.
Describing Romney as an "admittedly susceptible man," the previously sympathetic Chicago Daily News asked whether the U.S. "can afford as its leader a man who, whatever his positive virtues, is subject to being cozened, flimflammed and taken into camp." More damaging yet, the Detroit News, long one of the Michigan Governor's strongest supporters, announced in a lead editorial that it can no longer back him for the G.O.P. nomination and suggested that Romney quit the race in favor of New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a man "who knows what he believes."