Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House

3: Guess Who’s Coming to Congress

When Pat Schroeder announced her candidacy for Congress in May , she was such an unknown that the Denver Post didn’t even mention her name in the headline of the short story: “Woman Attorney to Run for Congress.” United Press International’s photographer had a request. Would Mrs. Schroeder please pose for a picture holding her child, her younger child? The attractive, thirty-one-year-old mother of two hoisted daughter Jamie, a curly-haired toddler still in diapers, into her arms. So was born a legendary politician who from the start seemed to be defined foremost by her gender. “My generation of women did not think you were meant to be a candidate ,” Schroeder said. “You voted, you worked on a campaign, but you weren’t a candidate.” Pat and Jim Schroeder were part of a group of younger, upwardly mobile Denver Democrats—this was before the term yuppie was coined— who were buying and restoring homes built in the Capital Hill, Cheesman Park, and Park Hill neighborhoods during the s silver boom in Colorado. They opposed the Vietnam War, favored environmental activism, and were not reluctant to challenge the status quo. Two years earlier, these rabble-rousing young Democrats had helped unseat incumbent Congressman Byron Rogers in a bitterly contested primary with a liberal lawyer, Craig Barnes. Rogers had been in office twenty years and hailed from an older, more staid generation. Philosophically, Rogers was moderate to liberal, but he had been reluctant to criticize the VietnamWar or even the conduct of the war. After a hard-fought primary, Barnes wound up defeating Rogers by a mere twenty-seven votes. Like a family feud, the Rogers-Barnes primary fight left Denver Democrats divided and bitter.That provided an opening in the general election for Republican James D. “Mike” McKevitt, a popular former law-and-   3 Guess Who’s Coming to Congress order district attorney. As a prosecutor, McKevitt had made headlines for closing a movie theater playing the controversial Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) and for threatening to close restaurants that catered to hippies.The key issues in the race were the Vietnam War, which Barnes opposed, and school busing, which McKevitt opposed. Denver had been involved for some years in court-ordered busing to end segregation, a volatile issue that had torn apart the local school board. On election day, the heavily Democratic city of Denver elected its first Republican congressman in more than two decades. In the two years that followed, Congressman McKevitt “was so likable that had his voting record not been so conservative, he would have been unbeatable,” Schroeder told the Denver Post. “He was the best-liked, and at one point either the first- or second-best-known politician, in Colorado.” It was Jim Schroeder who was supposed to be the politician in the family . He was considerably more active in the Democratic party than his wife. He had made an unsuccessful bid for the state legislature in , losing by only forty-two votes, and he would have run again, but in the intervening two years the legislature had redrawn district boundaries, and Jim found himself living in a district where a race for the state House was no longer plausible. Democrats should have been lining up to challenge McKevitt in , which was the first time he was up for reelection. Colorado’s First Congressional District had a substantial Democratic voter registration edge and McKevitt had been in office only two years. Conventional political wisdom holds that congressional incumbents are at their most vulnerable when they are still freshmen, before they have had a chance to cement their public image and earn the widespread gratitude of voters through political favors and services to constituents. Indeed, several of Denver’s most promising young politicos had looked hard at the race, but in the end they had all taken a pass. One reason was that all the portents indicated  was going to be a very good year for Republicans. At the top of the ticket was President Richard Nixon, who was poised to win reelection to a second term. Nixon had just scored a diplomatic and public relations triumph with his visit to China in February. He signed a major arms treaty with the Soviets that June, and he was promising to end the war.There was no region of the country where Nixon’s support was stronger than in the Rocky Mountain West and he was expected to run up...