Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 8, 1995 TAG: 9509080110
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FROM KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
In an emotional farewell to an institution he has served in for nearly 27 years, Packwood told his Senate colleagues: ``I'm aware of the dishonor that has befallen me in the last three years, and I don't want to visit further that dishonor on the Senate. ... I think too much of my colleagues for that.''
Many senators sat sadly in their seats as he spoke. Aides lined the wall at the back of the chamber.
Packwood, 62, began the day making the rounds of TV interview shows, pleading for the chance to confront his accusers in a public hearing.
His resignation announcement came after he was assured by Senate leaders that enough votes existed to expel him if he insisted on resisting the ethics panel's recommendation that he be kicked out of the 100-member body.
Earlier Thursday, Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chairman, and Richard H. Bryan, D-Nev., co-chairman of the ethics committee, told reporters that the accumulated evidence against Packwood was unassailable.
``No workplace in America ought to tolerate the kind of offensive and degrading sexual misconduct that the committee finds Senator Packwood to be guilty of,'' McConnell said. ``These were not merely stolen kisses, as Senator Packwood has claimed. This was a habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a senator.''
The committee also found that Packwood had used his position to benefit himself financially by soliciting jobs for the wife he was divorcing, so his alimony payments would be lower.
And it accused him of obstructing the investigation by altering his diaries and audiotapes before turning them over to the committee and his own lawyers. On that count, the committee referred the charge to the Justice Department as a possible criminal violation.
In a 10,145-page investigative report released earlier Thursday, the committee went into excruciating and often lurid detail about complaints from 17 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, along with the other charges.
Packwood's resignation announcement summoned a blitz of sympathy from both Republican and Democratic colleagues, who took care not to condone his misdeeds but seized the opportunity to extol his record in the Senate.
``Bob Packwood has no peer,'' said Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., in comprehending and explaining complex issues ranging from taxes to Medicare to welfare reform. The Oregonian, who has served on the prestigious Finance Committee for many years, has been its chairman since January and was charged with pushing through the GOP's major reforms of welfare, Medicare and the tax code.
Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., a close Packwood friend, said women's groups who had once supported Packwood's political stands had, in the end, turned on him.
``He was the man who always fought so hard for women and their rights,'' said Simpson. ``He was the man who carried the banner for women's reproductive rights.''
Packwood recounted what he believed to be his major victories during his long Senate career, including bills permitting abortions, trucking deregulation, the 1986 tax reform act and tuition tax credits for parents of college students.
The speech was at times reminiscent of Richard Nixon's farewell address as president - often rambling, sometimes touching and never predictable.
``I leave not with malice but with love'' for the Senate, Packwood said, choking back tears. ``Good luck. Godspeed.''
Packwood's resignation would elevate Sen. William Roth of Delaware to chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee at a vital time for Republican efforts to implement their balanced-budget plan.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that the Senate Ethics Committee is exploring an entry in Packwood's diary suggesting that he and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, discussed ways to skirt federal election law to pump $100,000 into Packwood's 1992 re-election campaign.
Gramm, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said through a spokesman that he had done nothing improper and that Packwood had been confused about campaign finance laws governing ``soft money'' contributions by political parties.
``What was said in that room would be enough to convict us all of something,'' Packwood wrote in his diary March 6, 1992, describing a brief meeting with Gramm in Oregon following a Packwood campaign event. Packwood at the time was engaged in a tough election contest with Democrat former Rep. Les AuCoin, Ore. Gramm ``says, now, of course you know there can't be any legal connection between this money and Senator Packwood, but we know that it will be used for his benefit.''
Packwood added: ``I think that's a felony, I'm not sure. This is an area of the law I don't want to know.''
Packwood, who was elected to the Senate in 1968 and arrived at age 36 as the chamber's youngest senator, did not announce an exact date for his resignation. Oregon voters will determine his successor in a special election.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)
After he spoke, several of his colleagues - somber and subdued - praised his legislative accomplishments and empathized with his predicament.
``His record cannot be expunged,'' said Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., who was Packwood's college professor and preceded him to the Senate. ``He's a fellow human being and even though the media and public often treat us as objects, we are human beings with emotions and feelings. So I rise with a stout heart to say that I hurt with Senator Packwood in this moment.''
Some colleagues expressed bitterness with the Ethics Committee's processes and suggested that its purpose and procedures should be reviewed and reformed.
Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., complained that Packwood had not been granted the same basic rights as ordinary Americans to face his accusers and examine all evidence against him.
``A feeding frenzy was on, and the waters were blood-flecked by the scissored teeth of piranhas,'' Simpson said, referring to the media coverage of Packwood's case and his abandonment by women's rights groups that had long supported his legislative efforts.
Others celebrated their long friendship with Packwood. ``In 18 years on the Finance Committee,'' said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., ``I've had perfect trust in and profound admiration (for Packwood).''
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., noting that ``we are all complete with moles and warts and our own problems,'' recalled her father's advice to her in praising Packwood's record: ``Don't let a man be remembered for the last thing he does but for the best things he does.''
In the end, however, it was the crushing weight of the evidence against Packwood that brought him down.
``It was the cumulative nature of it,'' said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the only female member of the six-person, bipartisan ethics committee. ``And it built up not only in the many cases of sexual misconduct but on the issue of his tampering with evidence, cutting out damaging stuff from his diaries and (audio)tapes. The lawyers on the committee were especially horrified by that.''
Many members also were embarrassed by and weary of the five-term Oregon Republican's increasingly erratic defense against multiple charges of sexual misconduct - and wanted to put it all behind them.
McConnell said his decision to seek the Senate's supreme penalty began to crystallize after Packwood - who had twice earlier opposed public hearings in the case - switched gears and demanded the hearings.
``I could only conclude at that point that that was an effort to (further) delay the process,'' McConnell said, ``because I believe it would have taken probably four to six months to have gone through the public hearing process. And I thought we already had what we needed to make a decision.''
Politically, Republican leaders viewed the case as a major distraction that was diverting energy and attention from their ambitious legislative agenda and their own investigations of the Democratic president and his ethics in an Arkansas land deal.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)
``We've got a lot of very important issues to deal with over the next few weeks,'' said Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., third-ranking Republican in the Senate, ``and we don't need this. I know some members were concerned about that.''
For Bryan, the father of two daughters, there was a personal as well as a professional aspect of the case.
In calling for Packwood's dismissal, he said, the committee was sending the strongest possible message, for the first time in Senate history, that sexual misconduct was, as Bryant put it, ``unseemly, outrageous, intolerable and unacceptable.''
``The action taken indicates that the Senate has zero tolerance for this kind of conduct and should send a message to every woman in America that the Senate recognizes this conduct is unacceptable and will exercise the ultimate sanction - this is the atomic bomb; we can do no more than to expel a member,'' he said.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said Packwood hurt his case by ``strongly opposing public hearings and then calling for them'' after many members had gone out on a political limb to cast votes in opposition to such hearings.
``Nor did it help his case,'' Dorgan said, ``for Packwood to start attacking some of the victims on TV'' after initially waiving his right to hearings where he could have cross-examined them in a structured forum.
Finally, Dorgan said, a late-arriving allegation from a woman who said she was only 17 years old when Packwood suddenly embraced and kissed her ended doubts among some of the Oregonian's sympathizers that he was worth saving.
That complaint, he said, ``had a fairly substantial impact on how members of the Senate (at large) felt about the matter. ... talking about a minor had an impact on the Senate.''
Mikulski also cited what many others felt was a cultural debacle in 1991 when the Senate approved the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after a highly contentious and controversial set of Judiciary Committee hearings to air charges of sexual harassment by Anita F. Hill, a former Thomas aide at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The fallout from that episode, which left the impression among millions of women that the Senate's mostly male membership was indifferent to sexual misconduct, ``has had a serious effect on the psyche of the Senate,'' Mikulski said. She said she regarded the lessons learned from Hill's tribulation as a ``teach-in for this institution.''
After Packwood's departure - he did not announce an exact date for his resignation - Oregon voters will determine his successor in a special election.
by CNB