In May 1966 Mitt Romney participated in a protest against a group of students had taken over the office of Stanford President Wallace Sterling, setting himself up in support of the institution of a test that was a first step toward the Vietnam-era draft.
The Boston Globe noted in 2008 that Romney stood out "among the long hair and ragged clothes of his classmates" for his "smart appearance and his ardent support of the war."
But according to a little known 1970 story that ran in the Boston Globe on the views of children in Nixon's cabinet, of which his father George was a member, Romney's views on the Vietnam War shifted with his father's. By 1970 it appeared the younger Romney was against the war effort.
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.