Dissecting Romney’s Vietnam Stance at Stanford

[trailmonkee]

Mitt Romney, far right, at a counterprotest at Stanford in 1966. More Photos: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/09/12/us/politics/12stanford.html

It was late November 1965 when the poet Allen Ginsberg ignited the flower-power movement in Berkeley, Calif., urging protesters against the Vietnam War to greet the police with blossoms, not rocks. A few miles south, at buttoned-down Stanford University, young men would exchange chinos for jeans that academic year. An antiwar activist would become student body president; anti-draft protesters would occupy the university president’s office.

That same November, a newly minted Stanford freshman named Mitt Romney was in Berkeley on a less rebellious mission.

Mr. Romney was on the AxeComm, a school spirit committee. His charge was to keep students at the University of California, Berkeley, from stealing the Stanford Axe, an old lumberjack’s ax awarded to the winner of the universities’ annual football game. He succeeded, infiltrating a cabal of Berkeley students under the pseudonym Tim Yenmor (his name spelled backward), learning their plans and planting disinformation about the ax’s location.

“We were more concerned about protecting the ax from Berkeley students than about the war in Southeast Asia,” said Michael Roake, another freshman who joined Mr. Romney on the mission. “It sounds silly and trivial now. But at the time, we were very earnest.”

The cultural divide that opened that school year on California campuses forever changed some young men. The new Stanford student president, David Harris, was later imprisoned for refusing military service. Some freshmen in Mr. Romney’s dormitory, Rinconada Hall, joined an antiwar commune or fought the draft as conscientious objectors.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/us/politics/at-stanford-romney-stood-ground-on-vietnam.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www