After winning the election to fill the seat of her late husband,
Beverly Byron went on to have a 14-year career in the House
of Representatives. She used the experience she acquired as
an unpaid aide to her husband and her family background
to assert herself as an influential member of the Armed
Services Committee. As a staunch defender of both military
and defense spending, Congresswoman Byron served as one
of the more conservative Democrats in Congress.
Beverly Barton Butcher was born in Baltimore,
Maryland, on July 27, 1932, to Harry C. and Ruth B.
Butcher. She grew up in Washington, DC, where her father
managed a radio station before becoming an aide to General
Dwight D. Eisenhower for a short period of time during
World War II. “My father was vice president of CBS early
in the days of radio,” Butcher recalled. “So it wasn’t at all
unusual for the house to be filled with people that were
just friends but they happened to be working at the White
House, or they happened to be in the center of government,
or they happened to be in Congress.”1 She graduated from
the National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, in 1950.
She married Goodloe Edgar Byron in 1952.
Beverly Byron participated in her husband’s successful
campaigns for the Maryland legislature, where he served in
the house of delegates from 1963 to 1967 and the senate
from 1967 to 1971. In 1970 she helped Goodloe Byron
run a successful campaign for a U.S. House seat that
encompassed western Maryland. During her husband’s
tenure as a Representative, she worked closely with him,
even debating his opponents on occasion when his official
duties prevented district visits.2 “And then you come to the
realization where you can do one thing or another,” Byron
observed when reflecting upon her decision to help her
husband’s political career. “You can be totally opposed to
it, not involved, or you can get very much involved. Well,
needless to say, I guess I got very much involved.”3
One month before the general election in 1978,
Goodloe Byron died of a heart attack while jogging along
the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Before finding time to gain
perspective on the tragedy, Beverly Byron was pressured by
local Democratic leaders, who faced a seven-day deadline
to name an alternate candidate. “Before I knew what was
happening, the officials from Annapolis were in my living
room with papers to sign,” Byron recalled. “My children
made the decision for me.” In addition to heeding the
advice of her children Goodloe Jr., B. Kimball, and Mary,
Byron further explained her motivation to campaign for her
husband’s seat when she commented, “I knew the things
he stood for and I understood how he felt. I wanted to
give it a try. All you can do is try.”4 In the general election,
Byron easily defeated her Republican opponent Melvin
Perkins, a “perennial office seeker” who, just before the
election, had spent 10 days in the Baltimore County jail for
assaulting a woman bus driver. Byron won with 90 percent
of the vote.5 In winning election to the 96th Congress
(1979–1981), she succeeded her husband, just as his
mother, Katharine Edgar Byron, had succeeded her husband
(Goodloe’s father), William Devereux Byron, following the
latter’s death in 1941. Unlike her mother-in-law, who pledged
to not seek re-election for a second term, Beverly Byron made
no such promise. Even though some Maryland Democratic
leaders viewed her as a temporary replacement after her
husband’s death, Byron had her own aspirations. “My
problem was that the party powers that be said, ‘Well, we will
nominate her, and then next year … we’ll get a real candidate
next year, in two years, somebody that we can run.’ I don’t
think they knew me very well. There’s too much work.”6
Representative Beverly Byron earned a reputation as a
conservative Democrat who voted for Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush administration policies, frequently
breaking ranks with moderate and liberal Democrats on
both fiscal and social issues. She opposed a national health
care system and a woman’s right to seek an abortion except
in extreme cases where the mother’s life was in danger. In
1981 she was one of only two Democrats from outside the
deep South in the House to support President Reagan’s
budget, declaring, “The system we’ve been working under
has not worked. I’m willing to give the President’s proposals
a chance.”7 Although she often angered fellow Democrats
with her conservative agenda, Byron’s party-crossing habit
worked well in her right-of-center district. As the fourth
person of the “Byron dynasty,” she, much like her late
husband and his parents, adopted a political agenda that
typically mirrored the conservative interests of the majority
of people living in western Maryland.8 Beverly Byron won
re-election to the next six Congresses without seriously being
challenged, accumulating between 65 and 75 percent of the
vote.9 She received her husband’s committee assignments
on Armed Services and the Select Committee on Aging.
“They had to give me a committee assignment,” Byron said
when she revealed how she attained her first choice—Armed
Services. “And I can assure you, they weren’t going to give
me Judiciary. And I can assure you they weren’t going to give
me Ways and Means. So they had to give me something.
And the rule is that you get one of the assignments that
you ask for. So I thought, ‘Well, my mother didn’t raise a
dumb child. I can figure this out.’ And so I put in what I
wanted.”10 In the 97th Congress (1981–1983), Byron served
on the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. She held all
three assignments until she left Congress in 1993.
Congresswoman Byron’s legislative interests gravitated
toward military policy. From 1983 to 1986, she chaired the
House Special Panel on Arms Control and Disarmament,
where she sought to limit the scope of nuclear test ban
proposals. She also backed the development of the MX
Missile (the experimental mobile nuclear missile system),
supporting the Reagan administration’s contention that it
would serve as a bargaining chip during future arms control
negotiations with the Soviet Union. In a 1984 debate, Byron
urged her colleagues in the House to support funding for the
weapon: “I think for this nation, at this time, to decide not to
go ahead with the MX, to let down our NATO allies, to not
support the continuation of the modernization of our missile
program is a wrong signal.”11 During her congressional
career, Byron visited numerous military facilities and built a
reputation for examining military hardware firsthand during
inspections. “I, as a Member on Armed Services, was given a
great opportunity to look at, see, go out, kick the tires, fly in
the aircraft, go in the submarines,” Byron remembered.12 In
November 1985, the Maryland Representative became the
first woman to fly in the military’s premier spy plane, the SR-71 “Blackbird,” capable of cruising at Mach 3 (three times
the speed of sound) at an altitude of about 90,000 feet.13
In 1987 Byron beat out Colorado Representative Patricia
Schroeder, a more senior member of the House Armed
Services Committee, for election as chair of the influential
Military Personnel and Compensation Subcommittee. Two
years earlier, Representative Leslie Aspin of Wisconsin,
chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had
deferred plans to create a new military subcommittee for fear
that a “civil war” would ensue; conservative members of Armed
Services wanted Byron as head of the new subcommittee
rather than Aspin’s political ally, Schroeder.14 Despite his
delaying tactics, Aspin failed to muster enough support for
Schroeder in 1987, thereby allowing Byron to assume a
leadership role. As the first woman to head an Armed Services
subcommittee, Byron oversaw more than 40 percent of the
Defense Department’s budget and had a hand in shaping
military policy that coincided with the dismantling of the
Warsaw Pact (the Eastern European Communist military
coalition) and the end of the Soviet Union itself. Though she
rarely wavered from her support for defense expenditures,
Byron openly criticized the military during the Navy’s
“Tailhook” sexual harassment scandal of the early 1990s.
As a Representative, Byron did not consider the
advancement of women’s rights a priority. Admittedly not
attuned to gender discrimination, she once stated, “It’s hard
for me to understand people who have doors closed on
them.”15 Although she joined the Congressional Women’s
Caucus, Byron rarely participated in the meetings and activities
of the organization. When caucus leaders modified the
bylaws in 1981 to bolster its effectiveness, Byron balked at the
changes, such as the new mandatory annual dues. She resigned
from the caucus shortly thereafter declaring that, “We each
have so many dollars to spend for our offices and spend for our
caucuses and our meetings … I think I can spend mine better
for something else for my district than the Women’s Caucus.”16
Despite her inclination to align herself with congressional
conservatives in both parties, Byron voted for the Equal Rights
Amendment in 1983. Undecided until the day of the vote on
the floor, she divulged that she found the legislation compelling
because it might lead to greater opportunities for her daughter.
When asked about her decision to back the amendment,
Byron proclaimed that she voted her conscience, remarking,
“Eventually, you just have to make up your mind.”17
By the early 1990s, Byron’s conservatism did not
rest easily with the liberal wing of her party and with
some of her constituents. “I go home and I get beat up,”
she said at the time. “Down here [in Washington], I’m
wonderful.”18 Throughout her career, Byron expended little
effort or money when campaigning for re-election, rarely
conducting polls or running advertisements attacking her
opponents. In March 1992, Byron’s hands-off approach
to campaigning played a part in her surprising loss in the
Democratic primary. Tom Hattery, a liberal state legislator
who insisted that Byron was out of touch with her district
because she agreed to take a large congressional pay raise
while western Maryland suffered from a nine percent
unemployment rate, garnered 56 percent of the vote in the
primary. Byron’s electoral upset—she was the first incumbent
woman to lose a House race since 1984 and the first sitting
Member to lose in the 1992 primaries—signaled an anti-incumbent
mood that proved decisive in the fall elections. It
also marked the first time in more than two decades that a
Byron would not represent western Maryland.19
After Congress, Beverly Byron returned to Frederick,
Maryland, with her second husband, B. Kirk Walsh,
and served on the board of directors for a major defense
contractor. In 1995 President William J. (Bill) Clinton
appointed her to the Naval Academy Board of Visitors. Four
years later, Byron became a member of the Board of Regents
for the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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