John G. Schmitz - Quotes

Quotes

• "I wished to identify with the moderate wing of the Republican Party in Orange County." – on joining the ultra-conservative John Birch Society.
• "I lost the presidency by a mere 44 million votes." – on his 1972 run as the American Independent Party nominee.
• "I have no objection to President Nixon going to China. I just object to his coming back."
• "Jews are like everybody else, only more so."
  • Cf. " secret Communist looks and acts just like anybody else, only more so..." – Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1961), Section 4.
• "I may not be Hispanic, but I'm close. I'm Catholic with a mustache."
• "Martin Luther King, Jr. is a notorious liar."
• "I would have voted for a three-tier system—have one school that the blacks could go to, one school that all the whites could go to, and those who want to mix go to a third school."
• "A Communist operation" – in reference to the 1965 Watts riots.
• "A good military coup might be the best we could hope for if President Reagan's policies are not successful. A lot of people can't imagine anything like that happening in our country. These same people could never imagine themselves stealing to stay alive."
• "I apologize to Gloria Allred and to all others who may have been wrongly characterized, hurt or harmed in any way by these statements. Based upon my relationships with Gloria Allred, her husband and her family, I have never considered her to be, and recognize that she is not, a 'slick, butch lawyeress.'" – in a statement to settle Allred's $10 million defamation suit against him.
• "Hello, all you commies. I want to deny the rumors that I have been attending candidates' school in Chile or Argentina." – greeting reporters as he announced his 1982 candidacy for the U.S. Senate with Yasser Arafat at his side.
• "I ought to get the Right to Life man-of-the-year award for this." – upon the revelation of his having two children with his former student and mistress, Carla Stuckle.
• "I do not and will not support him financially. It is her responsibility to take care of him." – to the investigating police officer, in reference to his son by his mistress, Carla Stuckle (neither did Schmitz financially support or help to raise his daughter by Stuckle).
• "I don't talk to reporters anymore." – to a scribe who discovered him selling knickknacks in a Washington, D.C., shop in 1994.
• "No one has used the argument that statutory rape—at least according to the Blackstone dictionary—was solely a crime that a man could commit. It would seem to me that it became a woman's crime when you had this political egalitarianism which has led to Washington state's having an equal-rights amendment, although it was rejected by the United States. That makes this a very political case. I was one of the leading opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment when I was in the Congress, if not the leading opponent." – in response to the statutory rape charges against his daughter, Mary Kay Letourneau, for her extramarital affair with her underage male student.
• "Basically, an honest man who just didn't realize the immensity of what he was up against. In a way, I'm sympathetic to him despite his mistakes because he was so easily caricatured, and I've seen myself caricatured. And if I were a more important figure, I'd be caricatured in history books, too." – on his hero, Senator Joseph McCarthy.