That sign Romney's carrying says, "Speak Out, Don't Sit In". It doesn't say Bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or Support the Draft. I can imagine giving a student similar advice -- go ahead and demonstrate, burn your draft card, even cut class to demonstrate and burn your draft card, but why obstruct other students in their pursuit of partial differential equations or romantic poetry?
Romney was 19 at the end of his freshman year at Stanford. Back then, a 19-year-old couldn't vote. As I recall, no one could even buy beer within a mile-and-a-half of any college in California. Romney was completely dependent on his father. If his dad said, here's the plan, kid, I'm sending you to France for a while in your best interest, he probably couldn't argue. And you can't find a much better example of a draft dodger than Bill Clinton, who also spent a couple of years out of the country at the height of the Vietnam War.
I followed one of your links and found an article by H. Bruce Franklin which sounded fairly factual on the subject. That brought back some memories. I never knew he'd been in the Strategic Air Command. |
