According to a New York Times report, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney “left for France a 19-year-old freshman at Stanford, a sheltered child of privilege full of ideas about how to shake up [a] French mission.” He didn’t return home to the U.S. until December 1968 — and then he found an utterly changed country with which he was completely out of touch.

“While assassinations, race riots, sit-ins and marches transformed his generation, Mr. Romney spent more than two years cloistered in a strict regimen of prayer and proselytizing,” the publication reports. “The missionaries were discouraged from indulging in newspapers, radio, television or phone calls home.”

“There had been this whole revolution while we were gone,” Dane McBride, a close Romney friend, recalled to the paper. “While we had gone from being adolescents to grown-ups with a lot of responsibility, our peers - from our perspective - were just tearing down the country, becoming dangerously childish.”