David D. Kirkpatrick's profile of Mitt Romney's post-adolescent years is this morning's must-read. Focusing on Romney's time as a missionary in France from 1966 to 1968, followed by his undergrad years at Brigham Young University, the piece highlights Romney's deference to Mormon church authority on issues such as Vietnam and civil rights. After seeing violent student unrest in the streets of Paris and hearing about antiwar turmoil back home, Romney rejected the left as as much because of cultural antipathy as ideology; the straight-laced Michigan governor's son simply couldn't support an anti-authoritarian social movement. But Romney later came to question his church's defense of American foreign policy. He said, "I was surprised when I heard my father, then running for president, say that we were wrong, that we had been told lies by our military, that the course of the war was not going as well as we thought it was and that we had been mistaken when we had entered the war. It obviously caused me to reconsider what I had previously thought. ... Ultimately, I came to believe that he was right." Privately, Romney has surely drawn his own conclusions about how applicable the lessons of Vietnam are to Iraq. Publicly, his campaign website contains a "Five Point Plan" for preventing a nuclear Iran and a promise to "Defeat the Jihadists." But unlike Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, Romney's campaign website doesn't list "Iraq" -- voters' number one concern -- as an issue of importance in the presidential race. Why? Pretending it's not there won't make it go away. --Dana Goldstein
