TNR: Man On A Mission (Romney's draft exemption for his missionary work)

[highplainsdem]

From Alec MacGillis at The New Republic:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-stump/100487/man-mission

These writers, like plenty others, cite as Romney's main reason for reticence the lingering anti-Mormon bias among many voters. But it seems to me there is another, more conventional factor at work: the country's lingering complex with the "what did you do in the '60s" question. If Romney were to be more open about his Mormon background, a natural place to start would be in talking more about his two and a half years as a missionary in France in the late 1960s, a formative period in which Romney survived a life-threatening car crash and discovered his talent for leadership. Bruni urges him to talk about this period as a way to remind voters of a time when he really struggled -- after all, proselytizing on behalf of Mormonism in a land of wine-loving Catholics is no easy thing. Romney ventured into this area two months ago, but only in terms of joking about the plumbing-related deprivations of life in France, a riff that was undermined by reports showing that he had lived out his final months in a stately mansion in Paris. Why not make more of these years when he was facing constant rejection in a strange, protest-riddled country, separated from his sweetheart who, he feared, was falling for another man at Brigham Young University? Why not turn the 30 months in France into a formative chapter equivalent to Barack Obama's short stint as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago?

Well, it should be obvious why not. Yes, partly because the notion of young missionaries in suits going door to door is discomfiting to the many Americans who are prone to turning off the lights at such an approach. But also because...there was a war on! Romney's trying years in France spared him the risk of some far, far more trying years in former French Indochina. As the new Romney biography by two Boston Globe writers recounts, Romney received a 4-D draft exemption as a "minister of religion or divinity student" that protected him from the draft from July 1966 to February 1969. The Mormon exemptions became more controversial as the war in Vietnam escalated, with some non-Mormons in Utah filing a federal lawsuit against them in 1968. When Romney's deferment ended, he drew a lottery number that ensured he would not be drafted.

And Romney, who kept his distance from the anti-war protests that were starting up at Stanford before he went to France, has been characteristically all over the map talking about his deferment in the years since. "I was supportive of my country. I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam," he said at one point. But at another point, he said, "I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft." Which of course isn't really accurate -- he did take actions to remove himself from the pool, for 30 months. He went to France.

Meanwhile, Romney's broader thoughts about the war have been less than clear. He supported it in the face of the incipient protests at Stanford in 1966, in line with his father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, who had gotten an upbeat briefing during a 1965 visit to Vietnam. But as his father turned skeptical -- marked by his infamous 1967 reference to having been "brainwashed" during the 1965 trip -- Romney also began to rethink the war. As the Globe authors write: "Romney had initially believed the war was being fought for 'the right purposes,' but his father had made him realize that 'I was wrong.' A few years later, he put it even more starkly, using words that directly echoed his father. 'I think we were brainwashed,' he said. 'If it wasn't a blunder to move into Vietnam, I don't know what is.'"

"But regardless of what he thought of the war," MacGillis concludes, "he had managed to avoid it."


Emphasis added.