Mitt Romney will make public his tax returns on Tuesday, the candidate announced on Sunday, one day after getting swamped by Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina Republican primary, in part based on Gingrich's attacks on Romney's business track record and wealth.

It was "a mistake" not to simply release the returns, Romney said on "Fox News Sunday," according to reports.

The Romney campaign will release Romney's 2010 return and an estimate of the taxes he will pay in 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported. But he will only go so far.

But he brushed off a suggestion from moderator Chris Wallace that he follow the pioneering example his father, George Romney, set in the 1968 presidential campaign, when he released a dozen years of federal returns.

"I'm not going back to my dad's year," Romney said, calling that a time before the Internet and maintaining that there was already "plenty of information" available about his financial holdings in the required public disclosures he has already made.

"We'll be putting our returns on the Internet. People can look through them," Romney said. 

He did not revive, at least on Sunday morning, the rhetoric of his concession speech the night before. In that address, Romney warned, not for the first time, that there was a risk to Republicans in the criticism and scrutiny that other campaigns — particularly Gingrich's — have heaped on his business record at Bain Capital. Criticizing Romney for his wealth, or the aggressive methods used to acquire it, will only paint a map for Democrats seeking to undo a possible future nominee, he warned: "Those who pick up the weapons of the left today will find them turned against them tomorrow."

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Ted Mann