Mitt Romney was for the Vietnam War before he was against it. Sort of. As usual: real views unknown

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, what
are my views for the next town hall?
(Caricature by DonkeyHotey) Back in 1966, when the anti-Vietnam War movement was gathering steam, 19-year-old Stanford undergraduate Mitt Romney joined a protest. It wasn't, however, as Kaili Joy Gray noted in January, a protest against the war. It was a protest against antiwar protesters, specifically anti-draft protesters. Romney didn't just hold up a picket sign. He handled press relations for the counter-protest. That apparently paid off. His presence was noted by some newspapers the next day, his father being Michigan Gov. George Romney.

But by 1970, Romney, like his dad and millions of other Americans, seemed to have had a change of heart regarding the war. That's not the kind of flip-flop most people would hold against anyone. Over time, as they became better informed, large numbers of Americans changed their minds about the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War.

In the past few months, first National Public Radio and now Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed have taken note of Romney's apparent shift, as documented in a story published in the Boston Globe four years after the Stanford counter-protest.

By then, his father had moved from the governorship to the federal government after having been politically damaged in the Republican contest for the presidential nomination by a comment he made of having been "brainwashed" about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Titled "Cabinet kids against the war," the article stated:

Willard Mitt Romney, 23, uses his father's famous remark to show where he stands, 'I think we were brainwashed,' says the son of House of Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney. 'If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don't know what is.'

But young Romney agrees with Theodore Stans, 26, son of the Treasury Secretary, that the President's move into Cambodia was sincerely motivated.

That was a major shift from Romney's passionate overseas defense of U.S. policy up until early 1969. Two months after his Stanford counter-protest, Romney had gone to France on that standard right of passage for Mormon men, the mission. He told reporters in 2007 that during his 30 months of door-to-door proseltyzing in La Havre and Paris, he became a passionate advocate for U.S. involvement in Vietnam among the French.

His 1970 remarks about Vietnam were delivered in the wake of the national uproar over the six shooting deaths during protests at Kent State University May 4 and Jackson State College May 14. Those protests were part of nationwide opposition that flared up on campuses and elsewhere against President Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in late April. Romney's characterization of Vietnam as a blunder but apparent support for the Cambodian invasion hardly put him in the antiwar camp.

He was by then within a year of finishing his degree at Brigham Young University. Like other college students at the time, he had a student deferment from the draft, one of the key motivating aspects of the war. But by May 1970, he was in no danger of being drafted. In the national draft lottery, his March 12 birthdate had been paired with #300. He and others with that number were far down the list of men likely to be conscripted into the military. In fact, the highest number ever reached was #215. By then, U.S. combat troops had all been withdrawn from Southeast Asia.

As is the case with so much of what Romney says, his stance on the leading foreign policy issue in the era of his coming of age is murky, malleable and misleading.