Would You Buy a Used Campaign Button ...

Washington is full of mysteries that seem fated to remain unsolved, forever giving us occasional pause. Did Ronald Reagan dye his hair? Did Millie really write the book? What exactly became, in those post-inaugural days, of Hillary’s headbands?

But few are as puzzling as the one now playing at a political souvenir store in Union Station, where a former California congressman spends two days a week as a clerk selling Socks the Cat T-shirts and life-size cardboard cutouts of the Clintons in barbecue aprons.

“It’s really sort of heartbreaking,” said a clerk who has worked with John G. Schmitz--Orange County’s firebrand congressman from 1970-73 and a state senator for several years before and after that.

It was not so very long ago that Schmitz was riding the crest of a new brand of conservatism in Orange County, railing about the evils of Communism and the virtues of the Moral Majority.

OK, so there was that little matter of him fathering two children by a woman who was not his wife. Are such indiscretions sufficient to lead a man of such political stature to this--a trendy train station souvenir shop where tourists pick over cups that say “Proud to Be a Republican”? If so, Washington is a mean place. Come to think of it, who ever said it wasn’t?

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Those who knew him say Schmitz breathed politics. It was his life source, the object of his desires, this slight man with a pencil-thin mustache and a better-dead-than-red philosophy that briefly took Orange County by storm.

A former Marine Corps pilot and instructor in Communist propaganda techniques, Schmitz was not supposed to win when he entered a broad Orange County field for a state Senate seat in 1964. He was a John Bircher, “a kook.”

“He wanted to abolish the income tax, suggesting the lost funds be made up by selling Yellowstone Park,” said retired Superior Court Judge Bruce Sumner, the candidate Schmitz beat. “I thought the audience would laugh at that. They didn’t.”

Schmitz won by a narrow margin and was on his way, never pulling punches, never mincing words. He captured a seat in Congress in 1970, and when Richard Nixon went to China, Schmitz said he should have just stayed there.

He ran against Nixon as the American Independent Party’s presidential candidate in 1972 and got more votes than Democrat George McGovern in four Iowa counties. “They love me in Iowa,” he once said.

No word or deed seemed too extreme for John George Schmitz. He was a shameless apostle of Joe McCarthy, even purchasing the Washington home where the redbaiting senator once lived. If Reagan did not win the presidency in ‘76, Schmitz said, a military coup might be in order.

But the 1980s were less tolerant of intolerance. When Schmitz called attorney Gloria Allred a “slick, butch lawyeress,” she sued him, winning $20,000 and a public apology. When court documents revealed he had fathered two children through an extramarital affair, Schmitz left politics in disgrace to live in an Orange County mobile home park and teach political science at a Santa Ana college.

“I didn’t agree with him, but I respected his honesty,” said Fred Mabbutt, a UCLA political science professor who once taught with Schmitz in Santa Ana. Told of the mystery, Mabbutt paused. “He wasn’t a spectator. He was a gladiator.”

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Tourists mill around Political Americana one autumn afternoon. In the neat display cases a Truman button goes for about $90, a Schmitz button for around $9. He has also supplied the store with a laminated campaign poster from his presidential try. Price: $25.

He’s been here for 4 1/2 years, showing up Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9:30 a.m., regaling tourists with his war stories--sans scandals--and leaving at 2 on the button.

Outside, the Capitol dome is so close you can almost see it. As a former congressman, he can still park there. It would seem his season has come back around, Rush Limbaugh and all, a time when no remark is considered too extreme.

Maybe Schmitz burned too many bridges to ever be resurrected from the nostalgic world of politics to the real one. Maybe at 64, he just doesn’t feel like it. In the store, he’s a “historical consultant.” Across the street, he’s a footnote.

One wonders which place he would rather be. But we won’t be hearing the answer from him.

“I don’t talk to reporters anymore,” he said curtly, dropping the hand he no longer wished to shake when informed it belonged to a member of the press.

Who can blame him, really? He’s found a niche, a living political relic in a store full of plastic ones. No harsh lights. No tough questions. No embarrassing past.

And anyway, there are a fair amount of people who still feel stung by Schmitz’s sword. As Allred said lo these many years later: “That retail store is as close to the Capitol as John Schmitz should ever get.”