For me the visual symbol of Romney’s ambition gone awry was that photograph of dinner with Donald Trump at Jean-Georges restaurant when Romney was auditioning to be secretary of state. Obviously surprised, Romney turns awkwardly to the photographer, while Trump, across the table from him, smirks. We don’t know what was on the menu, but the cat was having canary. Romney ought to have known that Trump’s only motive in hearing him would be to enjoy displaying dominance, but vanity — mixed, of course, with civic spirit — led him into the trap.
But losing can sober a politician up. I think of John Quincy Adams, whose ambition was drummed into him by the toughest parents in the early republic. When he was having trouble at Harvard, father John reminded him that if he did not rise “not only to the head of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness and obstinacy.”
JQA left his and his father’s party, the Federalists, when they took the pox of disunion during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. This partisan defection served his ambition, because his new (first) Republican Party friends were political winners.
But by 1820 he saw another emerging cadre of potential disunionists: southern slaveowners. In a March 3, 1820, conversation with fellow cabinet member John Calhoun (JQA was SecState, Calhoun SecWar), Calhoun told him that slavery “had many excellent qualities. . . . It was the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” JQA was shocked, not least because he respected Calhoun so highly. If this was what his colleague thought, his fellow southerners must think the same. Maybe, JQA wondered in his diary that night, the country should break up then, since it was bound to anyway.
But he had to become president first. Ambition took precedence over prophecy. By hook and by crook he beat Calhoun, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson for the White House in 1824. He had a plan to forestall the crisis — govern as a nationalist — but he kept his motives well concealed.
JQA lost his reelection bid in 1828, crushingly, to Jackson, whom he considered a barbarian. He sulked for a few years, even angling for the Anti-Masonic Party nomination in 1832. (He offered to reveal the secrets of Phi Beta Kappa; the Anti-Masons weren’t interested.) Then he got elected to a safe seat in the House.
Having nowhere else to go, he could finally speak the truth. He picked a point at which the champions of slavery were intellectually weakest — they had made a rule of the House to gag all petitions related to slavery. JQA would not attack slavery itself, only defend a First Amendment right and a congressional responsibility.
He used all his talents: stamina, eloquence, smarts. Also his vices: pride, wrath. Often he used them simultaneously. When Representative Thomas Marshall, nephew of the Virginian chief justice whom Adams’s father had put on the Supreme Court, said he was shocked to hear such tactics from a son of Massachusetts, JQA replied that he had known all four Virginian presidents and worked for three of them; that they all personally opposed slavery, which he could prove from their writings on the House floor; and he was shocked to hear such statements as Marshall’s from a descendant of Virginia. This is my America you’re talking about; take a back seat.
Mitt Romney fought no such dragon as slavery. He fought the dragon he had: a maniac bozo, his besotted followers, and the enablers of his followers. He had neither JQA’s abilities nor his vices, only his own: an earnestness, not unrelated to a certain almost-episcopal smugness.
He failed. But he did what he could, for which Republicans and conservatives should be grateful.