NYT: Dissecting Romney’s Vietnam Stance at Stanford
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/us/politics/at-stanford-romney-stood-ground-on-vietnam.html?_r=1
Interesting look into Mitt's early flip-flopping and draft dodging while at Stanford and in France.
For the governor’s son, however, “it was Mitt’s finest hour in the dorm to have his father, the governor, come and visit our group,” said Peter Davenport, a Rinconada resident. Others described the younger Romney as beaming with pride.
Afterward, Mr. Drake said, he argued heatedly with Mr. Romney over whether the government had given his father and others on the trip a true picture of the conflict — something he said Mr. Romney found nearly inconceivable.
“I remember trying to convey this to Mitt — that you can’t necessarily believe what the government is telling you,” he said. “He really got quite angry about this. My sense very much was he felt it was unpatriotic to question the information we were being given. He felt the criticism was a personal attack on his family’s integrity.”
...
That frustration may have been short-lived. In August 1967, as Mr. Romney proselytized in the south of France, his blunt-spoken father abruptly turned against the Vietnam War, calling himself a victim of “brainwashing” by officials from the State Department and the Pentagon, comments that helped doom his already faltering presidential candidacy. Not three years later, after George Romney had become the housing secretary in the Nixon administration, a journalist interviewed children of top administration officials about their views on the war. “If it wasn’t a political blunder to move into Vietnam,” the 23-year-old Mitt was quoted as saying, “I don’t know what is.”
