Three Generations of Romneys Have Avoided Military Service While Pushing A Corporate War Agenda

Although the biggest news out of Massachusetts this week was about how Scott Brown worked to weaken Wall Street reform while taking Wall Street cash, there was an important Romney story we shouldn't let disappear in the corporate media vacuum without a trace. Sure, from March 2011 to June 2011, Brown and his leadership PAC received at least $660,000 from finance sector, and sure, he also received $70,500 from lobbyists that represented Wall Street clients such as Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, ING, and other securities and investment firms, but the Romney story goes way back to when Scott Brown was still fooling around with camp counselors and priests.

Romney's a year older than I am. We both came of age at the height of the war against Vietnam. Obama was still a child at the time of that war. I was very much opposed to it. Romney very much supported it-- at least verbally. We both went abroad. I wasn't drafted because we had a lottery system and my number was so high that I would have been one of the last to ever be called up but I didn't want to live in a country-- couldn't live in a country-- that was committing genocide against the peasants and workers in Vietnam. I had this idea that if I paid any taxes at all, it was like buying napalm to kill children. I spent almost 7 years abroad.

Romney went abroad too-- to avoid military service in a war he was all for. He escaped the draft by invoking his "right" to serve Mormonism as a missionary-- and lived in a palace in France. His dubious record is being looked at more closely.

On a stage crowded with war heroes, Mitt Romney recently praised the sacrifice "of the great men and women of every generation who serve in our armed services."

It is a sacrifice the Republican presidential candidate did not make.

Though an early supporter of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service at the height of the fighting after high school by seeking and receiving four draft deferments, according to Selective Service records. They included college deferments and a 31-month stretch as a "minister of religion" in France, a classification for Mormon missionaries that the church at the time feared was being overused. The country was cutting troop levels by the time he became eligible for the draft, and his lottery number was not called.

...But because Romney, now 65, was of draft age during Vietnam, his military background-- or, rather, his lack of one-- is facing new scrutiny as he courts veterans and makes his case to the nation to be commander in chief. He's also intensified his criticism lately of Obama's plans to scale back the nation's military commitments abroad, suggesting that Romney would pursue an aggressive foreign policy as president that could involve U.S. troops.

A look at Romney's relationship with Vietnam offers a window into a 1960s world that allowed him to avoid combat as fighting peaked. His story also demonstrates his commitment to the Mormon Church, which he rarely discusses publicly but which helped shape his life.

Romney's recollection of his Vietnam-era decisions has evolved in the decades since, particularly as his presidential ambitions became clear.

He said in 2007-- his first White House bid under way-- that he had "longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam." But his actions, Selective Service records and previous statements show little interest in joining a conflict that ultimately claimed more than 58,000 American lives.

Still, he repeatedly cites his commitment to public service and the nation's military while campaigning for president.

"Greatness in a people, I believe, is measured by the extent to which they will give themselves to something bigger than themselves," Romney said in San Diego last week to a Memorial Day crowd of thousands, flush with military veterans of all ages.

He did not address his own Vietnam history that day. And his campaign has refused to comment publicly on the subject over the past week.

Political rivals, military veterans among them, suggest that Romney's own decision not to serve in the military is in conflict with his pro-military rhetoric.

"He didn't have the courage to go. He didn't feel it was important enough to him to serve his country at a time of war," said Jon Soltz, who served two Army tours in Iraq and is the chairman of the left-leaning veterans group VoteVets.org.

Critics note that the candidate is among three generations of Romneys-- including his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, and five sons-- who were of military age during armed conflicts but did not serve.

As a presidential candidate in 2007, Romney told the Boston Globe he was frustrated, as a Mormon missionary, not to be fighting alongside his countrymen.

"I was supportive of my country," Romney said. "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."

Indeed, Romney strongly supported the war at first. As a freshman at Stanford University, he protested anti-war activists. In one photo, he's shown in a small crowd of students, smiling broadly, wearing a sport jacket and holding up a sign that says, "Speak Out, Don't Sit In."

But the frustration he recalled in 2007 does not match a sentiment he shared as a Massachusetts Senate candidate in 1994, when he told the Boston Herald, "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," Romney told the newspaper.

But that's exactly what Romney did, according Selective Service records. He received his first deferment for "activity in study" in October 1965 while at Stanford.

As Soltz notes, the younger Romney was under no obligation to seek a college-related deferment.
"Vietnam was a war that the poor and the people who couldn't afford to go to college had to go to," Soltz said.

After his first year at Stanford, Romney qualified for 4-D deferment status as "a minister of religion or divinity student." It was a status he would hold from July 1966 until February 1969, a period he largely spent in France working as a Mormon missionary.

He was granted the deferment even as some young Mormon men elsewhere were denied that same status, which became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s. The Mormon church, a strong supporter of American involvement in Vietnam, ultimately limited the number of church missionaries allowed to defer their military service using the religious exemption.

But as fighting in Vietnam raged, Romney spent two and a half years trying to win Mormon converts in France. About that same time, Romney's father would famously speak out against Vietnam, declaring that he had been "brainwashed" by military officials into supporting the conflict.

And when Romney's Mormon mission ended, he immediately requested and received another two years worth of academic studies deferments so he could study business techniques and dark skills he would later use as one of the nation's most disreputable vulture capitalists.