Former Congresswoman Dunn dies at 66

Jennifer Dunn, a Republican leader who broke through glass ceilings for women in the Washington state party structure and in Congress, died Wednesday at her home in Alexandria, Va. She was 66.

A Bellevue native and early supporter of Ronald Reagan, Dunn represented suburban King County in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years, starting in 1993, and spent the 12 years before that as the state GOP chairwoman. She retired from Congress in 2004, resisting the urgings of President George W. Bush to run for the U.S. Senate, saying she wanted to move on to a new phase of her life and spend more time with her family.

She suffered a pulmonary embolism and died suddenly, her family said.

“She certainly blazed a trail for women in Washington state,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who considered Dunn a mentor when she came to Congress. “She leaves a big hole.”

Members of both parties in Washington echoed those sentiments Wednesday, with Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed calling her the “ultimate stateswoman” and Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire calling the death “a loss for all Washingtonians.”

Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a longtime friend and political ally, said Dunn became involved in politics with her first husband, Dennis, who was a party official. But her first big political push was in support of a former governor of California who she thought should be president. She was such a fan of Reagan that she named one of her sons after him. Even after they divorced, the Dunns stayed involved in party politics; at one point, she was the state chairwoman and he was the state’s national committeeman, one of the state’s representatives to the national party structure.

“She ruled with a velvet fist, rather than brass knuckles,” former Rep. George Nethercutt, who was the Spokane County GOP chairman for part of her tenure, recalled Wednesday.

Dunn worked to push the GOP to a “big tent” philosophy, and was able to use that to her advantage in the late 1980s when Christian conservatives became a significant faction in the party. They supported the Rev. Pat Robertson for president; Dunn, a fiscal conservative who supported abortion rights, backed the senior George Bush.

“She was able to bridge the gap (between party factions) by not needing to defeat her opponents,” Nethercutt said. She pushed two concepts, he added: that all party members should concentrate on the 90 percent of the issues they agreed on rather than the 10 percent they disagreed on; and “winning is better than losing.”

Dunn’s tenure with the state GOP matched Karen Marchioro’s leadership of the state Democrats. They were studies in contrast – Dunn, the patrician suburbanite; Marchioro the blunt-spoken former war protester – whose candidates traded control of the Legislature several times. But they worked together to increase grass-roots political activity in the state, and on a personal level, they got along quite well, Gorton said.

Marchioro died last week of cancer.

Dunn helped Gorton return to the Senate in 1988 after his defeat in 1986, and he campaigned for her when she ran for an open House seat in 1992. That year, she was the lone Republican in the state’s nine-member House delegation. Two years later, Washington voters sent six more Republicans to the House, and Dunn, who had learned the ropes in her first term, became the new Republicans’ “den mother,” Nethercutt said.

She was one of the first Republican women to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee. She was elected vice chairwoman of the GOP Conference, which made her the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House.

In supporting small business, she told other Republicans that cutting taxes would help women, who were increasingly starting and running their own businesses.

When she decided to retire rather than challenge Democratic Sen. Patty Murray in 2004, Nethercutt entered that race and McMorris won the primary for the seat he was leaving.

Shortly after McMorris Rodgers won, Dunn called her with advice to seek the freshman spot on the House Republican Steering Committee, a post she herself had as a freshman. McMorris Rodgers did and got the seat.

When she got to Washington, D.C., McMorris Rodgers recalled, Dunn asked her to go to lunch, and the young congresswoman expected more tips on the inner workings of the House. Instead, Dunn had more personal advice.

“She said ‘No. 1, don’t wait too long to get married,’ ” recalled the congresswoman, who wouldn’t meet her future husband Brian Rodgers until the following year. ” ‘And No. 2, don’t ever forget there’s life after Congress.’ “

Dunn is survived by her husband, Keith Thompson, two sons, a daughter and two grandchildren.