Wrapped in the Flag (34 page)

As the after-defeat party progressed, I could hear a ruckus punctuated by strong words and loud voices. I moved to the source of the noise and found Tom Stockheimer holding a mini-rally in the kitchen. It was immediately clear that Tom and his supporters were not taking defeat gracefully. The dozen or more people circling him were furious with the liberal establishment and its embrace of integration, big government, and high taxes.

Someone called for a “pure white race” and “putting Negroes back in their rightful places.” Others insisted that the ultimate enemy was not the black man but the Jews, who “controlled the banking system and the money supply.” The crowd was positive it was those same Jews who had caused interest-rate spikes and created inflation—two things killing the family farm.

The crowd was eager to “take back the country.” Real Americans, they said, had to arm themselves—to the teeth—and prepare to fight tyranny. All of this anger, hatred, and fear came with a gigantic dose of the Bible and the flag. Over the clamor, Tom shouted his final rallying cry: “It’s time for the Posse to ride, and I’m the man to lead it!”

I had no idea what that last statement meant, but after the months I’d endured with this man, I was in no mood to listen to another of his over-the-top rants. Ignoring the little voice inside my head that told me to shut up and go home, I jumped into the fray. “Tom, you’re a bigot and a fool,” I said.

Stockheimer responded by attacking me as a disgrace to my parents and a traitor to America. Before he was finished, I was declared unfit to be in the same room with real patriots. I looked around that circle, at folks I’d worked with over the last three months and waited for someone, anyone, to jump to my defense. No one did.

That night I slept fitfully and dreamed of guns and shouting.

The next day, I told my parents about the confrontation. To my shock, they defended Stockheimer and criticized me for starting the argument. “You missed the whole point,” Mother told me. “The federal government is the reason for all of this, not Stockheimer.”

My father agreed. “Big government is the culprit here, not Tom.”

In my parents’ view, all the issues of the campaign—civil rights, busing, gun control, taxes—were the result of big, intrusive government. Stockheimer and his friends were simply standing up for their rights as Americans.

I want to believe that my parents had no idea what Stockheimer was really up to: recruiting members for the Posse Comitatus, a group of militant anti-government folks who spread the idea that the troubles in the heartland, especially for farmers, were part of bigger international events. Author James Ridgeway, who has documented the rise of white supremacist groups in the United States, wrote about Posse beliefs: “Whites are the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and Jews, blacks and other minorities have sprung from Satan and are subhuman. Jewish bankers . . . are at the heart of the conspiracy against the Midwestern farmers.”
³³
That election year of 1972, Stockheimer was also organizing his “Little People’s Tax Advisory Committee,” described by Daniel Levitas in
The Terrorist Next Door
as “a protest group that he [Stockheimer] quickly transformed into a launching pad for the Posse Comitatus.”
³⁴

Over the next ten years, my parents would have plenty of reasons to rethink their support of Thomas Stockheimer, but the day after the 1972 election, they were still fans. “Tom and his friends may not be as refined as you’d like, but they are making an effort,” my mother told me. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing. I’m quitting,” I said. “I will not help you with another election or another Birch project, period.” I pulled on my coat and huffed to the door.

“Remember this,” my father shouted after me. “You worked for a good and honorable man in John Schmitz. Nothing else matters.”

I believed my parents. John Schmitz was nothing like Stockheimer. After the disastrous election, John returned to his old teaching position at Santa Ana College. I was glad he’d have a job until he found a path back into politics.

Almost everyone in the right wing wanted John back as soon as possible, and they made it clear by giving Schmitz a slew of awards. National groups with really pro-American names couldn’t do enough for him: We the People, the Congress of Freedom, and the Freedom Foundation all named Schmitz either Congressman of the Year or Man of the Year. Schmitz even landed the George Washington Medal from the National Economic Council.
³⁵
For these folks, he was the whole package: right-wing principles and “family values” personified. Now he just needed to win another election.

In the middle of August 1973, John and Mary Schmitz hosted the neighborhood for a barbeque and swimming party at their new home in Corona del Mar, California. Sometime in the afternoon, eleven-year-old Mary Kay—John’s “Cake”—was left alone to watch her brother. No one ever knew exactly what happened, but three-year-old Philip was discovered on the bottom of the pool, drowned.
³⁶

When my father told me the news, I was sick for John and his family. I worried for poor Mary Kay and the terrible reality that she’d have to carry: her little brother had died while she was babysitting. I hoped no one blamed her for the tragedy.

Some days after the boy’s death, I asked my father how John and his family were holding up. “They’re fine,” Dad said. “John continues to teach while he plans a return to politics.”

“They are remarkable people,” Mother added. “True models of Catholic life.”

Late in 1974, several cartons of John Schmitz’s memoir,
Stranger in the Arena: The Anatomy of an Amoral Decade, 1964–1974
, arrived at my parents’ home.
³⁷
The preface was penned by one of their favorite conservative Catholics, Brent Bozell, president of the Society for the Christian Commonwealth and ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s
Conscience of a Conservative
.
³⁸

“Brent framed the issue so well,” Mother said as she turned to the first page of the book. “Listen to this. ‘I salute this man [Schmitz] for his understanding of the duty to which God is calling America’s Christians . . . the essentially apostolic mission of making America Christian. Schmitz finished his
years in public office a better man than when he entered it—the opposite of what usually happens.’”
³⁹

In 1978, Schmitz returned to politics as a California state senator, determined to carry the John Birch Society message of small government, lower taxes, and family values to Sacramento. During his term in office, however, John’s behavior became increasingly erratic. No one knew why, but he seemed to be a gaffe machine, saying on one occasion, “A good military coup might be the best we could hope for if President Reagan’s policies are not successful.”
⁴⁰
After abortion-rights hearings in the committee he chaired, his office issued a press release titled “Senator Schmitz and His Committee Survive Attack of the Bulldykes” and describing witnesses as “imported lesbians from anti-male and pro-abortion queer groups in San Francisco and other centers of decadence.”
⁴¹
The fallout from these outrageous comments rumbled all the way to the Birch headquarters in Belmont.

In early 1982, John Schmitz was removed from the JBS National Council.
⁴²
When I asked my father about the situation, he refused to give me any details. “John expressed opinions contrary to the views of the Society,” was all he’d say.

On a warm August evening in 1982, while my husband was golfing and the kids were sleeping, I relaxed with the current issue of
Time
. In a short article, “Fouling Up,” the name Schmitz jumped off the page along with a shocking revelation: John actually had two families. In addition to his wife, Mary, and their six (living) children, he had two children with his mistress, Carla Stuckle. All of this had come to light when Stuckle’s thirteen-month-old, John George, was taken by his mother to the emergency room with some signs of possible physical abuse. During a court hearing to determine protective custody, Stuckle acknowledged the father of the baby as John George Schmitz.
⁴³

The next day, I pestered Dad for information, figuring that the inner circle of the John Birch Society would know a lot more about this than
Time
did, but my father was silent. He never spoke about John Schmitz or his family again, even as the sordid Schmitz scandals continued.

Beyond the hypocrisy and the lies, beyond the secret life and the other family, there was this: after his second family became public, neither Schmitz nor his wife did a thing to help the children borne by his mistress. Schmitz admitted to being the father of Carla Stuckle’s babies, John George and Eugenia, but he refused to pay child support. The courts eventually ordered him to pay $275 per month, but it’s not clear whether a dime was ever paid.
⁴⁴

In 1994, when Carla Stuckle died from complications of diabetes, her children were eleven and twelve years old. John Schmitz refused to take custody
of them, and the children ended up living with Jeane Dixon, the famous psychic, who was a friend of the Schmitz family. A few years later, when Dixon died, the children became wards of the state.
⁴⁵

“So much for the pro-life, pro-family, Catholic paragon,” I thought, musing that if I never heard the name Schmitz again, it would be too soon.

Several years later, a thirty-five-year-old sixth-grade teacher and mother of four was arrested for the rape of a thirteen-year-old student. It took me a while to realize that the woman the press identified as Mary Kay Letourneau was the all-grown-up “Cake” Schmitz, John’s favorite daughter.
⁴⁶
Letourneau went to prison, where she gave birth to her victim’s baby.

On January 10, 2001, while Letourneau was still serving her term, John Schmitz died at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by his family. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
⁴⁷
The website dedicated to his memory describes Schmitz this way: “He strove to be a devout Roman Catholic and a modern day Renaissance man.”
⁴⁸

The words on Schmitz’s website sounded so much like those that John wrote in his memoir. On the last page, after 314 pages chockful of morality and public-policy ideas to save our country, Schmitz explained what he would do after leaving Congress: “I shall be working for . . . an affirmation of Eternal Truth, Eternal Right and Eternal Being, timeless but ever new whose regenerative power is an undying echo and unsullied reflection of the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
⁴⁹

On first reading, those words made me mad. I could have gone on quite a rant about the hypocrisy and the lies and the deception. But then I felt something different, something personal: regret. I had to admit that I’d bought what John Schmitz was selling because he was friendly and funny—and because I wanted my parents to accept me as a good daughter.

Worse, I had tried to pawn off John Schmitz and Tom Stockheimer on Marshfield as conservatives with good ideas for the country. All the while, I knew that Schmitz was a John Bircher and Stockheimer was something even more sinister. I had to live with that.

In an effort to make amends, I promised myself that I would never embark on another political crusade, adding the phrase “anytime soon,” just in case. One of my friends laughed when I told her. “You will,” she said. “It’s in your blood.”

I thought about that conversation many times, especially after I found myself leading another crusade. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and wondered,
“Am I just like my parents?”

“No, no,” I told myself. Even when I was pretty sure that the answer was . . . yes.

I am outraged that [the abortion issue] is viewed from the perspective of the woman—a femme-centric perspective that condones the self-indulgent conduct of the woman who was damn careless in the first place
.