University, France mission, marriage, and children: 1965–75
Romney attended Stanford University during the academic year of 1965–66.[17] He was not part of the counterculture of the 1960s then taking form in the San Francisco Bay Area.[17] In May 1966, he joined a counter-protest against a group staging a sit-in at the university administration building in opposition to draft status tests.[17][27] He continued to enjoy occasional pranks.[nb 2]
In July 1966, he left the U.S. for a thirty-month stay in France as a Mormon missionary,[17][30] a traditional rite of passage in his family.[nb 3] He arrived in Le Havre, where he faced physical and economic deprivation in cramped quarters.[10][32] Rules against drinking, smoking, and dating were strictly enforced.[10] Most individual Mormon missionaries do not gain many converts[nb 4] and Romney was no exception:[32] he later estimated ten to twenty for his entire mission.[37][nb 5] He initially became demoralized and later recalled it as the only time when "most of what I was trying to do was rejected."[32] He soon gained recognition within the mission for the many homes he called on and the repeat visits he was granted.[10] He was promoted to zone leader in Bordeaux in early 1968, and soon thereafter became assistant to the mission president in Paris.[10][32][39] At the Mission Home, he enjoyed far more comfortable accommodations than he previously had elsewhere in the country.[39] When the French expressed opposition to the U.S. role in the Vietnam War, Romney debated them in return, and their hostility on the subject reinforced Romney's support for the U.S. effort.[10][32]
Mitt's father George (pictured here in a 1968 poster) lost the Republican presidential nomination to Richard M. Nixon but later served in Nixon's cabinet.
Mitt's mother Lenore (promoted here on a button) lost a Senate race in 1970, and he worked for her campaign.
In June 1968, an automobile he was driving in southern France was hit by another vehicle, seriously injuring him and killing one of his passengers, the wife of the mission president.[nb 6] Romney was not at fault in the accident.[nb 6] He became co-president of a mission that had become demoralized and disorganized after the May 1968 general strike and student uprisings and the car accident.[40] With Romney rallying the others, the mission met a goal of 200 baptisms for the year, the most for them in a decade.[40] By the end of his stint in December 1968, he was overseeing the work of 175 others.[32][41] As a result of his stay, Romney developed a lifelong affection for France and its people, and continued to be fluent in French.[43][44]
At their first meeting following his return, Romney and Ann Davies reconnected and decided to get married.[45] Romney began attending Brigham Young University (BYU), where she had been studying.[46] The couple married on March 21, 1969, in a civil ceremony in Bloomfield Hills.[47][48] The following day, they flew to Utah for a Mormon wedding ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple (Ann had converted to the faith while he was away).[47][48]
Mitt had missed much of the tumultuous American anti-Vietnam War movement while away in France. Upon his return, it surprised him to learn that his father had joined the movement during his unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign.[32] George was now serving in President Richard Nixon's cabinet as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In a June 1970 newspaper profile of children of cabinet members, Mitt said that U.S. involvement in the war had been misguided – "If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don't know what is" – but supported Nixon's ongoing Cambodian Incursion as a sincere attempt to bring the war to a conclusion.[49] At that time there was a military draft; Romney had initially received two 2-S student deferments, then, like most Mormon missionaries, a 4-D ministerial deferment while in France, and then two more student deferments.[27][50] When those ran out, the result of the December 1969 draft lottery ensured he would not be selected.[27][50][51]
At culturally conservative BYU, Romney remained isolated from much of the upheaval of that era.[32][46] He became president of the Cougar Club booster organization and showed a new-found discipline in his studies.[32][46] During his senior year, he took a leave to work as driver and advance man for his mother Lenore Romney's eventually unsuccessful 1970 campaign for U.S. Senator from Michigan;[22][47] together, they visited all 83 Michigan counties.[52][53] He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with highest honors, in 1971,[46] giving commencement addresses to both the College of Humanities and to the whole of BYU.[nb 7]
The Romneys' first son, Taggart, was born in 1970[34] while they were undergraduates at BYU and living in a basement apartment.[46] Ann subsequently gave birth to Matthew (1971) and Joshua (1975). Benjamin (1978) and Craig (1981) would arrive later, after Romney began his business career.[34]
Mitt Romney wanted to pursue a business path, but his father advised him that a law degree would be valuable to his career even if he did not become a lawyer.[56][57] Thus, he enrolled in the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.[58] He readily adapted to the business school's pragmatic, data-driven case study method of teaching.[57] Living in a Belmont, Massachusetts, house with Ann and their two children, his social experience in college differed from most of his classmates.[47][57] He was nonideological and did not involve himself in the political issues of the day.[47][57] He graduated in 1975 cum laude from the law school, in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.[54][58]
