
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 14, 1995                   TAG: 9509150007
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

REFORM II

IN ADVANCE of his Oct. 1 forced retirement, Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, is trying to discredit the personal diaries that have greased his slide from the Senate. He asks the public to regard them, or at least juicy parts of them, as fiction.

Yes, says Packwood, his diaries report activities that never occurred, meetings that never took place, statements that no one uttered.

Few souls, fortunately, are inclined to take him at his word. Justice Department investigators, in particular, should carefully probe his claims, especially regarding diary entries that he altered before handing them to the Senate Ethics Committee.

Meanwhile, whatever the outcome of such investigations, it's clear that Packwood's diaries reveal truths transcending the tawdry tale of his amoral self-indulgence. They are an indictment not just of a corrupted senator, but of a corrupting system.

Packwood was senior Republican on the Finance Committee. It writes tax legislation, including obscure provisions that can mean huge breaks for special interests. The diaries describe endless cozy meetings with lobbyists seeking mutual rewards.

His recollections underscore the value of access to power, which special interests buy with campaign gifts. Indeed, money more than sex plays a central and corrupting role in congressional life.

Packwood's diaries also underscore the ease with which federal election laws, weak in themselves and weakly enforced, are ignored or skirted.

Among the statements duly recorded for posterity, but which Packwood now says were never made, is a curious one attributed to Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. In a March 6, 1992 entry, when Gramm was head of the GOP Senate campaign committee, Packwood wrote that Gramm promised to shift $100,000 of the party's so-called soft money to Packwood's personal re-election campaign.

Under federal law, soft-money gifts to political parties can be used only for party-building get-out-the-vote drives and the like. They can't legally be diverted to individual campaigns, for which contribution limits apply.

"What was said in that room would be enough to convict us all of something," wrote Packwood at the time. Both he and Gramm now deny any wrongdoing. Investigators should try to make sure.

In his diaries, Packwood also describes expenditures by the Automobile Dealers trade association that he knew about before they were undertaken to aid his 1992 re-election campaign. He wrote, too, about a National Rifle Association letter - supposedly independent of his campaign - that he saw before it was mailed out.

What will it take to spur ethics and campaign-finance reforms? If not these sordid diaries, then what?

by CNB