As the year wore on, the Stanford campus became more radicalized, but Mitt stood firm. When demonstrators staged a sit-in of the administration building to protest Stanford's decision to hold draft-status tests, Mitt protested the protesters. The local newspaper carried a front-page photo of Mitt wearing a blazer and holding a sign that read "SPEAK OUT, DON'T SIT IN." The caption read: "Governor's son pickets the pickets."

Mitt's own draft status was secure for the next few years. Although his friends would continue to benefit from the deferment for college students, Mitt had decided to leave Stanford after his freshman year and go on a 30-month mission to spread the LDS faith overseas. It was the same path his father, and generations of LDS men before him, had taken upon turning 19. As a missionary, Mitt was declared "a minister of religion" by the church and, under an agreement with the Selective Service, granted an exemption from the draft.

As Mitt was winding down his freshman year, David Harris ran for student-body president on a platform of ending the university's cooperation with the war effort, abolishing its board of trustees and legalizing marijuana. For one rally, Harris recalls, "We traded a lid (an ounce) of weed to the Jefferson Airplane so we could use their sound equipment." He won the election handily.

Over the next few years, when Mitt was in France, many of his Stanford classmates who'd come from traditional backgrounds were transformed. Even Roake, a good Irish-Catholic boy and Navy ROTC student, would go on to question organized religion and seriously consider registering as a conscientious objector.

Roake often wonders what would have happened to Mitt had he never left. "Almost everybody I knew there changed," he says. "I know that as a thoughtful person Mitt would have been altered in some way."

Harris, who would go on to cement his counter-culture credentials by marrying Joan Baez, sums it up this way, "There were plenty of people who started to the right of Mitt Romney who ended up as full-scale hippies."

Campaigns, conversions

In 1966, as Mitt struggled to adapt to his grueling first year as a missionary in France, two events that would change his life were happening back in Michigan, out of his view.

First, his father made the decision to run for president in earnest. Second, when he wasn't crisscrossing the country, George Romney was guiding Ann Davies through her conversion into the LDS faith.