Former Oregon U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, whose long and often influential career in politics ended in one of the messiest sex scandals in congressional history, died Saturday at the age of 93.
Packwood died at 12:45 p.m. in California, where he and his wife, Elaine Franklin, regularly vacationed, a family friend told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
During his nearly 27 years in the Senate, Packwood presided over the biggest rewrite of the federal tax code in modern American history, was one of the first major U.S. political figures to push for legalized abortion and repeatedly sought to steer his Republican Party toward the political center.
But his political career was indelibly marked by the sex scandal that sparked his downfall and forced him from the Senate in 1995.
The Senate Ethics Committee found that Packwood had made unwanted sexual advances to at least 17 women over the course of his Senate career — and that the senator had altered evidence in an attempt to deceive the Senate. As an angry Senate prepared to expel him, Packwood recognized political reality and resigned.
His resignation ended a three-year fight by Packwood to save his political career after The Washington Post reported accusations of his sexual misconduct shortly after he was re-elected in 1992.
The Packwood case came amid an intense national debate about the personal behavior of powerful men in the workforce. It had been sparked by the congressional hearings exploring Anita Hill’s charge of sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Longtime Republican Senator Bob Packwood, who was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, sits in his Portland home in 2014.LC- The Oregonian
Many of the feminists who had appreciated Packwood’s support of women’s rights turned on him. The senator’s defenders said old incidents from a different era were being dredged up to judge him by new politically correct standards.
In the end, the weight of story after story — of Packwood suddenly grabbing women, pressing himself against them and forcing his tongue into their months — turned most of his constituents and national public opinion against him.
Helen Dewar, the veteran Washington Post congressional reporter who wrote the foreword to a book containing the full ethics report, described the saga in Shakespearean terms:
“It was an account of an enormously talented man who was victimized by his own arrogance, loneliness, binge drinking and compulsive need to prove his sexual as well as political prowess.”
Following his resignation, Packwood split his time between a lucrative lobbying practice in D.C. and a home in Dunthorpe, the wealthy neighborhood wedged between Portland and Lake Oswego.
For the first time, he had real money, and he eventually came to be seen by many as a respected elder, asked to write op-eds and strategize about how to put the nation’s fiscal house in order.
None of it, Packwood said in a 2012 interview when he was 79, made up for what he lost.
“I would trade it all in a minute to be back in the Senate,” said Packwood, who also tersely admitted, “You look back, and I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.”
Senator & children Bill, 12 & Shyla, 8, pedal away worries and burn off some calories on ride down street near Maryland home. OregonianOregonian
Born in Portland on Sept. 11, 1932, Packwood came early to politics as the son of a Salem lobbyist for Columbia Empire Industries. The future senator loved to tell how his father, Frederick, brought elected officials, lobbyists and journalists home for dinner and was so respected that he wrote the nonpartisan summaries that accompanied bills.
But there was also a dark side he didn’t discuss publicly. Mark Kirchmeier, author of “Packwood: The Public and Private Life From Acclaim to Outrage,” described Frederick Packwood as a raging alcoholic who fought bitterly with Packwood’s mother, Gladys, and more than once landed in the local jail for public drunkenness.
“Negotiating between his bellicose parents became Bob’s first lesson in politics,” wrote Kirchmeier.
The younger Packwood, whose nearsightedness forced him to wear coke-bottle eyeglasses, at first seemed headed to a technical career.
He was admitted to the prestigious California Institute of Technology in 1950 but lasted only a few weeks before deciding he was out of his element.
Instead, he returned to Oregon and enrolled at Willamette University, where he found his calling in the intertwined worlds of politics and the law.
It was there that he met future Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, a popular young political science professor, dean of men and adviser to Packwood’s fraternity.
Packwood helped out on Hatfield’s campaigns for the Legislature and showed a burgeoning talent for debate. He graduated in 1954 and headed to New York University with a prestigious Root-Tilden scholarship to study the law.
Packwood returned to Oregon to launch his legal career with an eye toward running for office. Long before anyone took him seriously, he set his sights on defeating Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., the maverick party-switcher known by his admirers as the “Tiger of the Senate.”
Packwood began as a precinct committeeman and was elected to the state House in 1962 in a campaign so innovative that it was profiled in The Oregonian.
He blitzed the district with lawn signs — which were, believe it or not, uncommon in Oregon politics then — and energetic canvassers. More importantly, he harnessed the volunteer talents of the growing number of well-educated women who were then often excluded from the workforce.
“Women are much too valuable to be used in some auxiliary capacity,” Packwood told the paper. “Women should be given a part in all the crucial decisions that are made in a campaign.”
He persuaded powerful business figures to pay him to recruit and train Republican candidates for the House in 1964. Although Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in a landslide, Packwood steered the Oregon House into GOP hands, making it the only legislative chamber in the country to do so that year.
Bob Packwood talked to the City Club about partisanship and then went on to talk and talk some more after the meeting was over at the Governor Hotel. LC- The Oregonian
In the wake of the Goldwater debacle, Republicans entered a period of soul-searching. Packwood, who saw many of the party’s conservatives as hopelessly old-fashioned and narrow-minded, decided to form his own annual political event — the Dorchester Conference — to promote a more progressive version of Republicanism.
“Far right-wingers will be deliberately excluded,” he wrote in one letter describing the event.
Packwood had long since shed his thick glasses for the first generation of contact lenses and saw himself as a dashing young man about town.
In 1964, Packwood married Georgie Oberteuffer Crockatt, and the couple later adopted two children.
The end of their marriage, in 1991 after Packwood filed for divorce, also played a role in his eventual downfall. The Ethics Committee found that he had asked at least five lobbyists and businessmen to help financially support Georgie Packwood so he could reduce his alimony payments.
All that was far in the future as Packwood prepared to run against Morse in 1968. An ardent foe of the Vietnam War, Morse was more concerned about his primary opponent, Robert Duncan, who two years before had run unsuccessfully against Hatfield for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat.
Morse narrowly won his primary but didn’t seem to recognize how damaged it had left him — and how much more seriously he needed to take Packwood.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Packwood goaded Morse into an Oct. 25 debate at the City Club of Portland that attracted political reporters from around the country.
Packwood carefully prepared a series of concise answers to every conceivable question. On the issue of the day — Vietnam — Packwood had developed a carefully hedged position saying that South Vietnam needed to be spurred into giving more land to its peasants. It was as artful as presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war.
The debate played into Packwood’s hands. Morse, 68, was verbose and showed his age. In contrast, the 36-year-old Packwood “knew the answers so well they sounded spontaneous,” Packwood himself recalled decades later.
Packwood, who won a race so close that a recount was held, became the youngest member of the Senate.
In the ensuing years, Packwood never lost his reputation as a political opportunist above all. But he also developed a unique set of interests that brought him an eclectic support base.
Packwood faced calls to resign following revelations that he sexually assaulted multiple women while in office. LC- The Oregonian
In 1970, Packwood introduced the first bill to legalize abortion nationally — three years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Packwood came to the issue as a proponent of population control and became friends with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor who wrote “The Population Bomb.”
Packwood also introduced legislation reducing tax deductions for large families, a move that infuriated social conservatives.
At the same time, the senator was turning himself into one of the Senate’s biggest supporters of Israel. He churned out fundraising letters that gave him a national network of Jewish supporters and never hesitated to oppose such things as arms sales to Saudi Arabia that he saw as dangerous to Israel.
In his first term, Packwood achieved one of the greatest Oregon-related victories of his career when he went around the rest of the Northwest delegation to block additional dams in Hells Canyon.
That fight showed his growing skill as a legislative tactician, and it would mature as he rose in prominence on the Commerce and Finance committees, both of which he would eventually chair. Aides and lobbyists said no one was ever better prepared for debate and that few could match his mastery of the intricacies of a particular issue.
“He had half the Library of Congress working for him,” recounted Portland attorney Jim Beall, a longtime lobbyist for Northwest interests.
On Commerce, Packwood was a key player in pushing the deregulation of the trucking, railroad and telephone industries, all of which reshaped the country’s economy.
He also helped bring about the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to air opposing points of view.
As always with Packwood, legislative and political success were always tightly linked.
“He loved the game,” explained his longtime friend and confidant, Portland lawyer Jack Faust, in an interview the same year. “He loved the power.”
He turned his powerful committee positions — as well as his support for Israel and abortion rights — into lucrative fundraising tools.
Nobody in Oregon raised money like he did, and it deterred more than one powerful Democrat from running against him. So did the fact that he coopted so many Democratic interest groups, from environmental groups to abortion rights activists.
Packwood and his aides liked to show how the major groups — from the AFL-CIO to the American Conservative Union — all tended to give him marks somewhere around 50 percent.
Packwood also knew when to strategically distance himself from his own party’s presidents. In 1974, he was the first Republican senator to call for Nixon’s impeachment — a year when the senator was not coincidentally up for re-election.
In 1982, Packwood accused President Ronald Reagan of living in an “idealized America” where everyone looked alike and went to the same churches. He warned that Republicans couldn’t afford to write off everyone but white males over 40.
Packwood harbored his own presidential ambitions, and some said he even pondered whether Reagan might be politically vulnerable in 1984. Packwood said years later that he never would have challenged Reagan and that he never found a plausible opportunity to run.
Instead, Packwood had to worry more about his rocky popularity ratings back home as he came into the final years of his political career.
In 1986, he faced a serious primary challenge from Baptist minister Joe Lutz, who ran as a staunch opponent of abortion.
In 1992, then-Rep. Les AuCoin came close to beating him in the general election.
In both years, Packwood worked to dry up support for his challengers and to weaken them politically. He acknowledged that he may well have lost to AuCoin if he hadn’t run ads repeatedly attacking the congressman for bouncing checks at a bank run by the House.
In the midst of his 1986 re-election race, Packwood attained the greatest legislative victory of his career. And it was almost by accident.
Reagan had been pushing for a major revamp of the tax code, wanting to sweep away dozens of loopholes and breaks in exchange for lower rates.
Packwood, now chairman of the Finance Committee, had long championed using the tax code to achieve desired goals. “I sorta like the tax code the way it is,” he had once told reporters about Reagan-style tax reform.
But after the House passed a tax bill in late 1985, Packwood couldn’t ignore the issue. At first, Packwood and his fellow senators on Finance found themselves larding the bill with more tax breaks, to the point that it collapsed of its own weight.
Packwood and tax aide Bill Diefenderfer repaired to a nearby tavern, where they drank two pitchers of beer and sketched out a bill that would out-reform the reformers by lowering rates beyond what anyone thought possible.
Amazingly, the gambit worked. The final bill lowered the top personal rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, although some taxpayers could get hit with a surtax that drove their rate to 33 percent.
Packwood and his allies paid for the rate cuts by slashing at corporate and personal tax breaks. The plan brought him the greatest national acclaim of his career, uniting both liberal and conservative critics of the tax code. Still, it was not a pristine victory.
A 1988 Philadelphia Inquirer series showed that Packwood also inserted dozens of secretive special-interest tax breaks for specific companies and projects to help buy the support of his colleagues.
In the following decades, the 1986 tax law was repeatedly cited as the model for new attempts to clear out loopholes and complexities. And if Packwood had ended his career then, it would have been his unquestioned legacy.
The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings changed everything. They led freelance writer Florence Graves — who eventually joined forces with the Post — to examine sexual harassment in the Senate.
And that trail led her to Packwood. For decades, it was common gossip in Oregon politics that he was a womanizer or skirt-chaser — although few looked into exactly what that meant.
The Post’s revelations, and the resulting Senate investigation, showed that Packwood had a long history of groping and pressing himself on women.
“Bob Packwood had this predilection for coming onto women, and he was in this environment where everything revolved around serving those in power,” said Julie Williamson, a Portland political consultant who accused Packwood of assaulting her in 1969 when she worked for him.
Williamson told the Ethics Committee — which found her account to be truthful — that Packwood came up behind her when she was on the phone one day and kissed her on the back of her neck.
When she got off the phone, she told him not to do that again. Packwood followed her into another room and grabbed her, standing on her feet and yanking her ponytail to forcefully pull her head back while he kissed her with his tongue in her mouth.
The committee documented a series of similar incidents. There was a young mailroom assistant that he pinned to a wall or desk while he stuck his tongue in her mouth. A campaign volunteer whose face he grabbed and pulled toward him for a kiss. Another aide that the senator repeatedly tried to push down onto a couch in his office.
“He did it for years and nobody cared,” Williamson said. “The women cared, but nobody else did.”
Packwood either denied the women’s accounts or insisted that he didn’t remember the alleged incidents, all of which had happened years before. He also pointed out that no woman ever accused him of threatening her job if she refused his advances.
When the Post’s story first hit, Packwood flew off to the Hazelden Clinic, an alcoholism treatment center in Minnesota. After an 18-day silence, he held a press conference to apologize for his behavior and said, “I just didn’t get it. I do now.”
He said he was being counseled for his drinking, which had always been quite visible during his Senate years. In taverns, he sometimes ordered two beers at a time so he wouldn’t have to wait for a refill. Boxed wine was usually on tap at his office.
Packwood appeared to have been drinking in some of the incidents detailed by the Ethics Committee. But some of the incidents occurred in the morning, when he typically didn’t drink.
Calls for his resignation multiplied — particularly since he had managed to fend off the Post from publishing its story before the 1992 election by rounding up affidavits questioning his accusers’ stories.
“If he really wanted to show leadership in women’s rights, he should have accepted the real-life consequences of his wrongful conduct. Resignation, in my opinion, was his only dignified choice,” Gloria Allred, the prominent feminist attorney, wrote years later of why she was among those calling for an Ethics Committee hearing.
Once the committee began to investigate, Packwood soon turned from apologizing to fighting back. Some of his longtime supporters thought he only dug himself a deeper hole.
Elaine Franklin, his hard-charging chief of staff who later married Packwood, encouraged him to fight, according to several media accounts at the time.
Packwood’s troubles deepened when the committee learned that he had been keeping a diary for years. He fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful effort to keep the panel from obtaining key parts of the document, which he said eventually filled 15,000 typewritten pages.
The diary, which he had dictated for years and had transcribed by a secretary, contained plenty of embarrassing revelations. Packwood bragged of his successful sexual conquests, including trysts on his office rug.
Even worse for Packwood, the committee found that he had tampered with parts of the diary to remove damaging evidence. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican on the Ethics Committee who later served as minority and majority leader, called it a “crime against the Senate.”
With the committee recommending expulsion, Packwood, the great political maneuverer, realized that he had become boxed in.
“I was no babe in the woods,” he said in a 2005 interview. “I understand in politics when you’re in the water and you start to bleed and the sharks gather around, don’t expect your brethren to support you.”
Packwood is survived by his wife, Elaine Franklin of Lake Oswego; his son, Bill, and daughter, Shyla, two stepsons, Simon and Jonathan; and three grandchildren.
In memory of Bob Packwood donations can be made to Lakewood Center for the Arts and Packwood Archives at Willamette University.
