Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House

5: In the Trenches

 Not long after joining the House Armed Services Committee, Schroeder and navy captain Jim Bush flew from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, for a series of special background briefings by the navy on how its ships and manpower were deployed and what its future needs would be. Schroeder had recently hired Bush to handle defense issues for her.The other committee members had gone to Norfolk for the same briefings a few weeks earlier, but because of a conflict in her schedule , Schroeder had arranged to receive the briefings separately. After a full day of meetings, Schroeder and Bush returned toWashington late that night. Shortly after he arrived home, Bush got a call at home from the admiral in charge of the Norfolk naval shipyard, whom he knew well. The admiral just wanted Bush to know that Armed Services chairman F. Edward Hebert had called him before Schroeder’s visit and had essentially ordered him “not to tell her anything” in the briefings. In other words, navy officials were to be polite and to go through the motions, but not to impart anything of significance. The admiral, who was a friend of Bush’s, decided to ignore Hebert’s command and give Schroeder the full briefing, but he wanted Bush to know of the chairman’s order. Hebert’s blatant attempt to thwart a committee member’s seeking information would normally be outside the bounds of accepted congressional behavior, but it was in keeping with the hostile reception Schroeder received after she lobbied her way onto the committee in . That animosity extended beyond Hebert to some of her more conservative colleagues on the committee and to many quarters of the Pentagon as well. Years after Hebert was no longer chairman, Schroeder still had to push harder than most other committee members to get the same basic information and cooperation from the Pentagon. “They just wanted to push Pat aside in the beginning, and she wasn’t willing to be pushed,” Bush said.   5 In the Trenches It was clear to Schroeder that her more hawkish colleagues would try to undermine her effectiveness by portraying her as ignorant of defense issues because she was a woman, because she had never served in the military , and because she was new to Congress. Schroeder fought back by using her office budget to hire her own defense expert rather than relying on the committee’s staff or the Pentagon for information as did most committee members. Bush’s background was in nuclear submarines and strategic forces. Like future president Jimmy Carter, he was one of “Rickover’s boys,” the brainy subordinates of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy. He was also an unabashed liberal who felt passionately about reforming the Pentagon. At the time he joined Schroeder’s staff, he had recently separated from the navy after a bout with cancer. There were forty-three members of the House Armed Services Committee in , few of whom questioned the status quo. For the most part, they were seasoned conservatives who had joined the committee so they could rattle their sabers, bring home defense contracts, and protect military bases in their districts. For generations the committee had been run by southern reactionaries like Hebert of Louisiana, L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, and Carl Vinson of Georgia. Slurs about “pinko-commie kooks” were commonplace. On one occasion, when Schroeder was pressing for answers about U.S. bombing raids in Cambodia, Hebert told her: “I wish that you’d support our boys like you support the enemy.” There was a cultural as well as an ideological gulf between the old guard and new upstarts on the committee. “You had to look at the  makeup of that committee,” Schroeder said. “They were all basically from the South. On Memorial Day they would start wearing little white suits.They looked like a bunch of ice cream salesmen. Ron [Dellums] and I used to laugh that you needed simultaneous translation to even understand what they were saying.” The only other women members of the committee in the s were Republican Marjorie Sewell Holt and Democrat Beverly Barton Butcher Byron, both of Maryland. Holt, who joined the Armed Services Committee the same year as Schroeder and Dellums, received a much warmer welcome from its hawkish members because of her zealous support for greater military spending and because she was seen as a counter to feminists like Schroeder. Holt was...