became Romney's informal campaign manager. A Gallup Poll after the November elections showed Romney as favored among Republicans over former Vice President Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, 39 percent to 31 percent; a Harris Poll showed Romney besting President Johnson among all voters by 54 percent to 46 percent. Nixon considered Romney his chief opponent. Romney announced an exploratory phase for a possible campaign in February 1967, beginning with a visit to Alaska and the Rocky Mountain states. Romney's greatest weakness was a lack of foreign policy expertise and a need for a clear position on the Vietnam War. The press coverage of the trip focused on Vietnam, and reporters were frustrated by Romney's initial reluctance to speak about it. The qualities that helped Romney as an industry executive worked against him as a presidential candidate; he had difficulty being articulate, often speaking at length and too forthrightly on a topic and then later correcting himself while maintaining he was not changing what he had said. Reporter Jack Germond joked that he was going to add a single key on his typewriter that would print, "Romney later explained ..." Life magazine wrote that Romney "manages to turn self-expression into a positive ordeal" and that he was no different in private: "nobody can sound more like the public George Romney than the real George Romney let loose to ramble, inevitably away from the point and toward some distant moral precept." Romney had the image of a do-gooder and reporters began to refer to him as "Saint George". The perception grew that Romney was gaffe-prone. The campaign, beset by internal rivalries, soon went through the first of several reorganizations. By then, Nixon had already overtaken Romney in Gallup's Republican preference poll, a lead he would hold throughout the rest of the campaign. The techniques that had brought Romney victories in Michigan, such as operating outside established partisan formulas and keeping a distance from Republican Party organizational elements, proved ineffective in a party nominating contest. Romney's national poll ratings continued to erode, and by May he had lost his edge over Johnson. The Detroit riots of July 1967 did not change his standing among Republicans, but did give him a bounce in national polls against the increasingly unpopular president. Questions were occasionally asked about Romney's eligibility to run for President owing to his birth in Mexico, given the ambiguity in the United