Mitt Romney As Mormon Missionary

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The New York Times delivers an illuminating look at this formative period in the presidential candidate's life this morning, showing how his two years at the Mormon mission overseas gave him his first taste of power and responsibility.

But David Kirkpatrick's piece is most powerful in showing what Romney didn't do - namely, voice any strong conviction about the two defining issues of his generation, the Vietnam War and civil rights. That is, until the authority figures in his life took a position. Then, he followed that position.

Romney left for France as a 19-year-old freshman at Stanford, and returned home two years later to transfer to Brigham Young University to be closer to his high school girlfriend and future wife, Ann.

His missionary efforts were interrupted when France erupted into chaos in May 1968, fueled in part by anger over the Vietnam War. He recoiled from the student unrest, and friends say it reinforced his respect for authority.

Many church leaders considered the war a godly cause, and Romney said at the time he thought it was essential to holding back communism. So it surprised him to hear that his father, George Romney, had turned against the war while campaigning for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

"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 into the war," Romney said. "It obviously caused me to reconsider what I had previously thought," he said, adding, "Ultimately, I came to believe that he was right."

Back in the U.S. at Brigham Young, when boycotts and violent protests over the university's virtually all-white sports teams broke out at away games, he stayed on the sidelines.

At the time, the Mormon Church excluded blacks from full membership, considering them spiritually unfit as the result of a biblical curse on the descendants of Noah's son Ham.

A handful of students and prominent Mormons called for an end to the doctrine, but Romney wasn't one of them. When he heard over a car radio in 1978 that the church would offer blacks full membership, he said, he pulled over and cried.

But until then, he deferred to church leaders, he said. "The way things are achieved in my church, as I believe in other great faiths, is through inspiration from God and not through protests and letters to the editor."

Philanthropists Step In Where GI Bill Falls Short

Long gone are the days when signing up for the military meant a free ride to college.

USA Today reports that the gap between the maximum GI bill benefit for a year ($9,609) and the national average tuition, room and board charges and estimated costs for books and supplies at an in-state four-year public university ($14,577) is so great that private philanthropists are stepping in to help close it.

The original GI Bill entitled World War II veterans to tuition, books and a living stipend that covered the cost of education. Today, it covers about 66 percent of the tuition, room and board charges and estimated costs for books and supplies at an in-state four-year public university. It covers a much smaller percentage of the average cost of tuition and fees at private universities, $23,712.

So well-to-do alumni are stepping in to help. For example, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., one of the priciest private institutions with an estimated annual cost of $47,000, officials announced Tuesday that two alumni had contributed "substantial gifts" to create need-based scholarships for up to 10 former servicemembers. Several other private institutions are funding other financial aid deals for military students.

Many of the gifts are fueled by anger that the government isn't doing a good enough job supporting the veterans in the first place.

"Frankly, I'm just angry that our country doesn't express their appreciation for what these people are doing for us," says billionaire financier Jerome Kohlberg, a World War II veteran.

Burglars Break Into South African Nuclear Reactor, Shoot Man, Steal Computer

With so much ink having been spilled over the tug-of-war between Iran and the Western world over its nuclear program, you'd think this story in the New York Times about a violent break-in to a nuclear site in South Africa would have gotten more play. But even the Times seems to be scratching its head on this one.

This much is known: Just after midnight on Nov. 8, Anton Gerber was sitting with his fiancé in the control room of South Africa's most secretive nuclear facility - where the nation's apartheid government conceived and delivered six atomic bombs in the 1970s and 80s - when four gunmen burst into the room.

Gerber pushed his fiancé under a desk and took four bullets in the chest as the attackers took a computer and fled. They dropped their booty as they later came under assault by guards, but got away cleanly, neither caught by security nor captured on the facility's security cameras.

A week after the assault, which the Times calls "the most serious on a nuclear installation in recent memory," the government is mostly mum about who was behind the break-in or why. The incident is giving ammunition to critics who question the wisdom of plans by South Africa and other African states to embrace nuclear energy as a solution to chronic power shortages and climate change.

The Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa said it suspended six security officials after the incident and hinted that the break-in was an inside job. But no one has offered an explanation of the assault. A Pretoria News report, withdrawn under government pressure, suggested a love triangle involving Gerber, his fiancée, a plant supervisor.

Although the government renounced its nuke program in the late apartheid era, some experts say the nuclear reactor holds bomb-grade enriched uranium. As if that wasn't troubling enough, the Times leaves us with this final question mark, saying it is "unclear if bomb-making information would be so casually stored as to be available to burglars."

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