Wrapped in the Flag (33 page)

The chasm between Barry Sadler and me was repeated day after day, all across the country. One writer put it like this, “Clearly, there were two Americas, Left versus Right.”
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Even a cursory peek at the 1972 presidential campaign proved the point. On the Left, the Democrats pasted together a coalition of labor, antiwar protestors, hippies, feminists, and African Americans with a smattering of druggies and draft dodgers thrown in for good measure. All of these discordant personalities led the Republicans to label the Democrats as the party of “acid, abortion, and amnesty
.”
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In contrast, many Christians, with their demure wives and respectful children, raced into the arms of the GOP along with anti–civil rights Southerners, anti-Communists, and America-love-it-or-leave-it patriots.
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I realized how deep the partisan rift had become when a wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet, Ron Kovic, was insulted and attacked by pro-Nixon Republicans at the GOP convention in Miami. “I gave three-quarters of my
body for America,” Kovic said to a reporter covering the convention. “And what do I get? Spit in the face. . . I sat in my chair still shaking and began to cry.”
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In the John Birch Society, the Vietnam War dilemma was still unresolved. On the one hand, the Birchers loved the idea of a strong military under the direction of a strong anti-Communist government, which they did not see happening in the Johnson or Nixon administrations. In addition, America had entered the Vietnam War without a formal declaration from the Congress. Thus, for many Birchers, the incursion into Southeast Asia was unconstitutional.

Despite that, my parents and the leadership in Belmont, Massachusetts, would have supported the war if the American military had been given the go-ahead to bomb Hanoi with nukes, if necessary. They wanted a decisive victory, no matter how it was achieved.

Robert Welch wrote about the failure to achieve victory in Vietnam as having “the stench of deliberate and blatant treason so strong, in the very top circles of our national life, that real patriotism is being downgraded and replaced by the same doubts, confusion and despair which are eroding all other American virtues that once were commonplace.”
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Welch spoke for my parents and every other right-winger I’d ever met. They wanted real patriots who fought for American virtues without counting the cost. Anyone, like me, who doubted the cause was a scaredy-cat and a traitor.

Despite our huge differences about the war and civil rights, my parents were determined to drag me back into the Birch fold. Whenever conversation veered toward these issues, tensions rose. My father yelled and swore just like he always had, but now I pushed back. My father only yelled and swore louder. As for my husband, who had come from a family where table talk was about the Chicago Cubs or the latest doings at the American Legion Post, the uproar at Conner family dinners was not to his liking. He counseled me to keep my mouth shut. I tried—I really did—but my silence riled my parents even more.

Mother attacked. “You’re half-baked. How can you be such a milquetoast in this critical moment in history?”

In 1971, I was invited to my parents’ home to meet one of their favorite young Birchers, a forty-one-year-old ex-Marine who’d used his powerful voice to stop a vicious knife attack. Despite the fact that the victim died, the man was lauded as a hero. Before long, he had joined the Birch Society, won election to the California State Senate, and then the Congress. He became
the youngest man to serve on the John Birch Society National Council, where he met my father. The two became good friends.

“He’s the society’s rising star,” Dad said.

My mother hailed him as a “staunch traditional Catholic” and “a man among men.”

I’d never met a congressman before, so I made sure I was at my parents’ home right on time. In the living room, my father was engaged in conversation with a dark-haired, mustached fellow who looked up at me and broke into a huge grin. “Claire,” my father said, “meet Congressman John Schmitz.”
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When I asked John why he’d joined the Birch Society, he said, tongue in cheek, “To get the middle-of-the-road vote in Orange County.”
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That answer was John’s standard response—to me, to my parents, to the press. Over dinner, John charmed me with stories of his wife, Mary, and their seven children. I remember him talking about three, three, and one: three boys, three girls, and one boy. He called his oldest girl “Cake,” and I had the impression that she was his favorite. Before long, I realized that John’s youngest son, Philip, and my little daughter (she’d arrived in April of 1970) had been born one month apart.
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By the time the evening ended, I quite liked the man. “He’s an honest man and a good dad,” I told myself.

A few months later, Congressman Schmitz caused a ruckus when he said, “I have no objection to President Nixon going to China. I just object to his coming back.”
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Apparently, the voters in his district did not appreciate these remarks, especially since Nixon’s San Clemente home was in Schmitz’s congressional district, and by the time the smoke cleared, John was out, beaten in the Republican primary by a Nixon-loving challenger.

Schmitz’s defeat stunned the Birch leadership. Robert Welch himself, in a long letter to Schmitz, decried the failure of the congressman to fly the Birch flag aggressively enough during the campaign. This failure, Welch wrote, explained why Schmitz had lost: “Birch membership is emerging as almost the one criterion on which the public can count for certainty that any ‘Conservative’ candidate really is a Conservative.”
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Welch saw Schmitz’s congressional primary in apocalyptical terms. Richard Nixon would use the Republican Party to take “our country and our people into a one-world Communist tyranny,” he claimed.
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In addition, Welch said, “the Insiders still hope and intend to have the formal framework [for that one-world government] . . . established by 1976.”
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The four-year time horizon made Schmitz’s loss devastating; he would be unable to use legislative power to slow the Communist advance.

A lot of folks, my father included, couldn’t make sense of the apparent missteps in Schmitz’s campaign. After all, he’d won five elections and each
time he’d touted his Birch membership as proof of his true conservative convictions. This time, though, his Birch affiliation had been ignored. Welch thought that Schmitz’s campaign was out of character for the candidate and had lost “all trace of its educational flavor, or purpose.”
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My father agreed. “What in the hell happened to John?” he asked.

Two months later, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Schmitz got a chance to redeem himself. When George Wallace’s party—the American Independent Party—gathered for its national convention in Louisville, Kentucky, the nineteen hundred delegates were leaderless: Wallace was still gravely ill from an assassination attempt that had nearly killed him.
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Someone had to step up and lead the party.

Wallace had blasted into the 1972 Democratic presidential primary contests with his usual bombast. But in this cycle, he painted himself as a moderate and insisted that he no longer favored racial segregation. He did, however, vehemently oppose busing students around their districts to achieve racial balance. Busing was hated almost everywhere, and Wallace’s message found a ready audience.
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In Florida, Wallace captured 42 percent of the total vote and notched victory in every county.
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Based on the first months of the primary season, it was clear that Wallace was still a force in U.S. politics. Then Arthur Bremer pumped six bullets into him.
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The delegates to what was now known as the American Party couldn’t accept their hero’s fate. Despite the injuries plaguing Wallace, they planned to draft him as their candidate. Finally, the governor put the whole idea to rest when he addressed the party delegates from his bed. “I have two open places still draining” and “another big pocket of infection,” Wallace told his fans.
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Those words ended the Draft Wallace idea. The American Party had to find another candidate to carry its law-and-order, voluntary-school-prayer, anti-busing, anti–women’s-liberation banner.

My mother called me the second she heard the news. “John Schmitz was nominated.”

“For what?”

“For president,” she answered.

“President of what?”

“Don’t be a ninny,” she said. “President of the United States.”
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I had no use for George Wallace or his party, but in 1972, I became an American Party activist anyway. That time, and for the only time in my life, I knew—not knew of, not knew about, I knew—the man at the top of the ticket. For me, knowing changed everything. I convinced myself that it wasn’t necessary
to agree with everything he said in order to help him. Within a couple of weeks, my home became the hub for the Schmitz campaign.

One day, my father called me over to talk about the campaign. When I arrived at his house, Dad was in the living room with a man I’d never met before. The fellow was short, at least an inch shorter than me, and hefty, which is a polite way to say he outweighed me by at least 125 pounds. By the way he fiddled with the collar of his shirt and wriggled in his suit coat, I guessed that those were his “Sunday” clothes.

The man was Thomas Stockheimer, the American Party’s candidate for the 70th Wisconsin Assembly District. Stockheimer presented himself as a spokesman for the little guy who’d been so downtrodden by the oppressive government. He hated Wisconsin’s high taxes—a position he shared with almost everyone in the Badger State. His approach to fixing the problem was simple—he proposed slashing state government and ending the legislature’s power to raise taxes. My father gave Tom his full-throated endorsement. From that point on, I not only worked for Schmitz; I worked for Stockheimer, too.

At first, I thought Tom was just another really conservative guy. But as the campaign wore on, I realized that Stockheimer spoke more like an anarchist than a small-government guy. He supported local militias and preached against taxes. He loved guns, not just for hunting but for carrying around everywhere. And he had a mile-wide mean streak coupled with a hair-trigger temper.

I went to my parents with my concerns. “Stop being melodramatic,” Mother said. “Tom’s a little rough around the edges, but he’s a good man.”

My father had a similar response. “Stockheimer appeals to farmers; he speaks their language. Stop being such a snob.”

I quickly learned that a political campaign is all about phone calls, knocking on doors, raising money, and advertising. Our little, upstart American Party campaign faced another challenge: we had to make the case that a third-party vote was not a vote wasted. The only way to accomplish that was to talk, face-to-face, with as many voters as possible. Over the next months, I found out for myself how many streets, avenues, roads, and lanes were in Marshfield, a town of over thirteen thousand. I rang doorbells on nearly every one of them.

John Schmitz might have been running for president on another planet for all the press he generated. Shortly before the election,
Time
reported that he “has sued the three TV networks for $20 million in damages because their failure to cover him, he claims, has prevented him from getting campaign
contributions.”
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Despite his inability to break through to the masses of voters, John was entertaining. From his campaign slogan—“When you’re out of Schmitz, you’re out of gear” (“When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer” was a major advertising campaign at the time)—to his classic one-liners, he kept his small audiences laughing. “There is nothing wrong with the Catholic Church that a good inquisition wouldn’t cure” was one of his favorites.
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Long before Election Day, I realized there was a zero chance of Schmitz getting even one Electoral College vote. On November 7, 1972, Nixon was reelected in a landslide. John Schmitz, as I expected, did not win a single state or a single Electoral College vote. The American Party, which had garnered over nine million votes four years earlier, had shrunk to a million-vote party. In Wood County, Wisconsin, we grabbed over 6 percent of the vote, a good result, all things considered.

A gloomy group spent election evening at the home of Marshfield’s former mayor. We tried to ease our pain with liberal doses of brandy and beer while we waited for the final vote tallies. Even though the national race was called early on, it took several hours to finalize the local contests. It was after ten before our local radio station, WDLB, gave the final Assembly District 70 results.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Stockheimer turned out to be the big loser, receiving just a hair over one thousand votes. Eight percent of voters had pulled the lever for Tom, and I was
not
one of them.
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