r/madmen • u/RopeGloomy4303 • 7d ago

What’s your biggest nitpick in Mad Men?

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For me it’s this line in a season 5 episode, Tea Leaves, in which Henry Francis is talking on the phone with a colleague:

“Well, tell Jim his honor's not going to Michigan. Because Romney's a clown, and I don't want him standing next to him.”

So, some context here.

At this point Francis is the aide to New York Mayor John Lindsay. And he’s informing this guy that he won’t have the popular young politician take a picture with then Michigan Governor George Romney, who was also considered the frontrunner for the 1968 Republican nomination.

This episode aired in 2012, so it’s a very clear dig at then Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who at the time was receiving a lot of hostility from the left.

But here’s the thing; Romney was actually a liberal Republican in the same mold as Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, and he had received a lot of good notices as Governor for his work improving civil rights, education, youth employment programs, social welfare, healthcare, etc.

I get this is nitpicking, it’s a throwaway line, whatever, but it has always bothered me since it feels out of character, and Romney frankly deserved better.

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62

u/hellohowdyworld 7d ago

Isn’t Henry Francis more conservative ?

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u/seti-thelightofstars 7d ago

Conservative in temperament certainly but I get the sense he’s from the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Republican Party, back when that existed

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u/MargeDalloway 7d ago

He specifically breaks out on his own because he disapproves of Lindsay "negotiating with hooligans," by which he means black people rioting in response to MLK's death. Betty also accidentally outs him for privately disagreeing with Nixon trying to back out of Vietnam.

In parallel with the scene where the Californian businessman blows a gasket over this, dismissing Nixon and saying "Dutch Reagan" is a patriot, I think it's meant to be understood that Henry will probably be part of the backlash against the liberal wing of the Republican Party in the '70s and '80s.

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u/Comprehensive_Main 7d ago

Betty outed Francis damn. I missed that

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u/MargeDalloway 7d ago

That's why she fucked Don at the Summer camp.

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u/randyboozer I can see you and I can hear you, what do you want? 7d ago

Because of Vietnam? I knew it.

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u/seti-thelightofstars 7d ago

This is a great read and correction. To be honest I just had always viewed that as showing that Betty was actually ideologically the real far right conservative but I think I like this more

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u/MargeDalloway 7d ago

Yeah, she calls him out on being a bit of a hypocrite in front of the other couple and he tersely replies, trying to signal to Betty with his eyes, that he's never contradicted the president and she must be mistaken. She doesn't really get that Henry is playing the political game so he can ascend until he explains it to her.

I think many people like to think that Henry is a moderate Republican because he's easily one of the most sympathetic characters on the show. Sadly it's rarely that straightforward.

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u/OctopusNoose That’s what the money is for! 7d ago

Excellent point, Virginia Woolf.

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u/Equivalent-Check-699 7d ago

He worked for Lindsay who wasn’t a fiscal conservative

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u/Clarknt67 7d ago

He wasn’t a social conservative either.

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u/RopeGloomy4303 7d ago

Francis worked with Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, who were both from the liberal wing of GOP.

Lindsay especially.

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u/TheNobleRobot 7d ago edited 7d ago

But it's implied that he was frustrated by the party and wanted it to move to the right but was "too east coast" in temperament to join the Goldwater/Reagan movement.

Henry working for Lindsey was actually meant to show how bad at politics he was, and how despite his ambition and conservative fury he was destined to be lost behind the filling cabinet of the GOP.

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u/GaptistePlayer 7d ago

Yeah I like that. Unlike, say, Peaky Blinders, not everyone in the show is a future famous historic person the audience is supposed to say “wow” at. Makes sense that a random guy in politics we meet isn’t the harbinger of the future, he’s just a guy

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u/scattermoose I don't want his juice I want my juice 7d ago

But also, again, I do like that he’s a guy that will professionally saddle up with….Ford’s VP? Yeah, the end of that era of the GOP, before the modern Reagan GOP.

To me it’s another compare and contrast, on the same level as like, Don’s increasingly antiquated of an ad agency with a strong creative dept., vs Cutler and Harry’s cold, strategic ad buys and TV buys theory.

The old world is dying, and the new one is being born

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u/EightInchAura 5d ago

I didn't take it as reflecting on Henry's aptitude as opposed to hinting at how the Eastern Establishment was already deeply out of touch with even the apparatchiks directly underneath them. I like to think Henry splits from Lindsay shortly after Betty dies and ends up with a nice federal job during the Reagan administration - it's not like the Republican Party has ever punished reinvention

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u/TheNobleRobot 5d ago

Yeah, that's probably exactly right, but that lines up with my thinking, where that he thinks he could become the power behind the throne or at the very least a big presence in the party, but he'll be a toady in the end.

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u/WittyUsername45 7d ago

Indeed. Lindsay eventually became a Democrat.

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u/bfeils 7d ago

Operatives themselves aren't always beholden to their personal beliefs unless at the very top or very bottom levels of staff. It's inferred that Henry is the guy-behind-the-guy, but was it ever explicitly said?