by Trip Gabriel
New York Times
August 29, 1993
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
While running for reelection in 1980, Bob Packwood was eager to meet his campaign chairwoman for Lane County, Ore. The Senator invited Gena Hutton to dinner at the motel where he was staying in Eugene for a get-acquainted meeting. Hutton, a 35-year-old divorced mother of two, had brought along pictures of her children and even her cats.
Then it was time to go and Packwood offered to walk her to her car. "As I started to put the key in the car door," Hutton recalls, "he just reeled me around and grabbed me and pulled me close to him." For an instant, she thought he was offering a good-night hug. But then the Senator planted a full kiss on her lips, wriggling his tongue into her mouth.
Hutton's first reaction was shame: she didn't think she had given any hint of a come-on. Then she thought of the scandal that might ensue if Packwood, a married man, was recognized by a passer-by. Hustling him into her car, Hutton drove the Senator across the motel parking lot to his room, where he tried to talk her into coming inside. "You really don't want me to do that," she said firmly. Eventually Packwood retired alone.
"I knew, without a doubt, I was not going in the room," Hutton says. "I was mortified that he would be willing to risk his reputation and everything he'd done by sexually coming on to his campaign chairperson. It was so totally inappropriate."
Hutton had joined the Packwood campaign after responding to a fund-raising letter signed by Gloria Steinem, in which she applauded the Republican Senator's long support of abortion rights. On the drive home, Hutton pulled off the road and burst into tears. "I was pretty innocent," she says. "I believed he was the great person I thought he was, and this hadn't happened with other people."
AH, BUT IT HAD. HUTTON, A Political novice in Oregon, hadn't heard the rumors swirling for years around Bob Packwood, the graying boy wonder and maverick of the United State Senate. Tales of Packwood's exploits as a masher, often involving members of his staff, had long been served up for the delectation of insiders, like canapes at a political cocktail party. In the years before sexual harassment became a national catch phrase, such incidents were usually winked away.
Then came a seismic shift in social values that relocated the fault line between what was private and what was seen as justifiably public. For Packwood, the rumors acquired flesh and blood last November, three weeks after he narrowly won re-election to a fifth term. An article in The Washington Post cited 10 women who accused Packwood of making unwanted sexual advances, spanning from 1969, his first year as a Senator, to 1990.
Amid angry calls for his resignation, Packwood fled from sight, checking into the Hazelden Foundation clinic for alcoholism in Center City, Minn. He had reportedly been drinking before several of the harassment episodes.
He reappeared at a nationally televised news conference in December and apologized to his accusers, admitting "My actions were just plain wrong." At the same time, he testily refused to discuss details. "I'm apologizing for the conduct that it was alleged that I did," he said, an utterance that struck critics as a gem of obfuscation. The feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, among others, filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee asking for an investigation.
Now after months of legwork by staff investigators, the committee is considering hearings that could re-expose to the public the raw nerve of sexual harassment -- Round 2 in a fight to define the meaning and moral valence of an issue first raised at the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. If anything has become clear in the two years since that agonizing confrontation, it's that the national debate over sexual harassment is far from over.
Is ardently kissing a woman goodbye, when a handshake would be expected, a form of harassment? Is telling a dirty joke? Is there a clear line between illegal harassment and simply an awkward and boorish pass?
Does it matter that most of the incidents in the Packwood case took place from the late 60's through the mid-80's, before society widely agreed to condemn sexual harassment? Does it matter that among the women who worked for Packwood and are prepared to testify, no one is claiming the Senator penalized her for refusing his advances, and that some even continued serving amicably in his organization?
Packwood's supporters argue that his critics are politically motivated and seek only to clear a Senate seat so they can win it. If Packwood is to be disciplined for sexual misconduct, they ask, why not other Senators, like Ted Kennedy, who have been dogged for years by rumors of improprieties?
The 60-year-old Packwood is cast in the unlucky role of lightning rod just when the Senate is under pressure to prove its newly awakened sensitivity to the issue of sexual harassment, following the rough, inquisitorial treatment Hill suffered at the hands of some Senators two years ago. Fifty-eight senators have adopted anti-sexual-harassment guidelines framed by the Capitol Hill Women's Political Caucus. Packwood, in an irony no one's failed to note, was an early signer.
The fire from women's groups, which has been especially withering, is being fueled by a sense of personal betrayal. For years, Packwood, the embodiment of a quirky Oregon species, the socially progressive Republican, has been a strong supporter of women's causes. A leader of the abortion-rights brigades, he introduced the first Senate bill to legalize abortion in 1970; a decade later, after Bill Bradley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan demurred, he led a lonely filibuster against his own party's bill to make abortion the equivalent of murder. He has also regularly hired women to run his campaigns and to serve as his top aides.
But after the first wave of news accounts, many more women came forward with accusations of sexual misconduct, raising the total to at least 24. (The Ethics Committee has also widened its inquiry to include Packwood's attempts to discredit his accusers before he apologized.) Many of the women are pressing for public hearings to prevent the matter from being swept under the rug. Packwood would prefer that the Ethics Committee, which has a long tradition of protecting its own, hear the evidence in private. A decision is expected soon.
The Senator, who has not publicly shared how it feels to see his pro-woman legacy mocked by a sexual misconduct scandal, declined to be interviewed for this article. But as one old friend says, "In all probability, he's going through tortured hell with this whole thing." Others close to him, however, say he's responding stoically, with little hint of inner pain. On a rare visit to Oregon in January, as demonstrators banged on his motel windows and ridiculed him as "Senator Peckerwood," he displayed tight-lipped composure.
"He's not a warm and fuzzy person," says his ex-wife, Georgie Packwood, whose marriage to the Senator ended in 1991 after 26 years and two grown children. She says her husband was never comfortable discussing intimate matters. It was probably no coincidence that he chose as his chief area of expertise the United States tax code. "The intellectual idea of tax reform is absolutely the most titillating thing in the world to him," says Georgie Packwood. "How it affects Mrs. Jones on 13th Street, he doesn't give a darn about."
Packwood lives alone in a two-bedroom basement apartment in Northwest Washington. At the time of his divorce, he testified that his combined checking and savings accounts held $700. He has never been driven by the need for money. Only power. He has whittled down his life to the one thing he cares about most: horse trading in the Senate, where he is the ranking Republican on the pivotal Finance Committee.
He works 13-hour days, arriving at his office even before the private Senate elevators are running, at 6:30 A.M. He is obsessive about details and has been known to scold staffers for turning in memos with minor typos. Although he may not wear his emotions on his sleeve, he was moved to tears when the 1986 Tax Reform Act passed in committee.
If Packwood is a classic policy dweeb -- a grown-up version of the debate team member in Coke-bottle glasses that he was in high school -- the origins of his troublesome behavior toward women may lie in the same persona. A bizarre feature of his attempted seductions, as described by his many accusers, is that they were less the actions of a sophisticated Lothario than of a shy and nebbishy teen-ager. It's as though his notions of relations between the sexes never evolved much beyond post-adolescence.
"Bob is not comfortable in his own skin," says Georgie Packwood. "I think he still sees himself as that person behind the Coke-bottle lenses. It's very pathetic."
AT A TIME WHEN SEXUAL harassment is such a highly charged issue, it can be dangerous to attempt to make distinctions between greater and lesser offenses. Still, there is a clear difference between Packwood's unwanted advances and, for example, those reportedly made by Brock Adams, the former Democratic Senator from Washington. In March 1992, eight women accused Adams of sexually molesting them, sometimes after he spiked their drinks to make them groggy. Adams strongly denied the charges, but immediately withdrew his bid for re-election.
According to Packwood's accusers, he was never this coercive. His advances consisted chiefly of dropping sudden, surprise French kisses on women, usually after forcefully seizing them by their arms or waists. The women, most of them members of Packwood's staff, lobbyists and campaign volunteers, deny sending any signals of romantic interest. When they acted shocked and resisted, Packwood invariably backed off.
The Senator was no Don Juan. He didn't flirt suavely or invite women for candle-lit dinners. No, he swooped down out of the blue, usually embracing a woman under the fluorescent lights of an inner office. According to many accounts, his groping was wooden and his open-mouthed kisses oddly passionless. "I have no idea," one alleged victim says, "why this man thinks women are going to suddenly rip their clothes off."
Friends from Packwood's pre-Senate days, when he was a young lawyer in Portland with a precocious appetite for politics, remember him as a womanizer manque. "As far as men-women relationships, he was always kind of a nerd," recalls a female attorney who knew him in the early 60's. "The joke was he dated women because they'd advance his political career."
Packwood was raised in Portland, the son of a lobbyist for state industries like timber and railroading. On long car trips, Fred Packwood would grill his son about current events, often to the point where young Bob burst into tears. Contemporaries of his parents recall that they fought often, especially after they'd had a few drinks. Bob would lock himself in his room to study or build model airplanes.
At Grant High School, he gave little hint of becoming a future leader. "Remember the movie 'Revenge of the Nerds'?" asks Mark Kirchmeier, a Portland journalist who is writing a Packwood biography. "Packwood probably identifies with that role." Shy and nearsighted in his thick glasses, Packwood was so self-conscious that in the late 50's he became one of the early users of contact lenses.
There are signs that Packwood has remained painfully ill at ease. During their years of marriage, Georgie Packwood recalls, she often had to reassure her husband of his ability to be charming at Washington dinner parties. But he didn't believe her and was convinced that nobody genuinely liked him. His former wife says he cited his persistent feelings of insecurity to justify his drinking. "I don't feel at ease and it helps me to drink," she recalls him saying. "I feel more charming when I drink."
The Senator may have inherited his social awkwardness from his mother, whose acute feelings of shyness sometimes led to strange behavior in public. At campaign headquarters on election night, when a camera panned her, Gladys Packwood would stick her tongue out.
While Packwood's chronic self-doubt may help shed light on his dealings with women, it fails to satisfy some critics. B. Carlton Grew, a lawyer for Oregonians for Ethical Representation, an organization that is attempting to unseat Packwood, notes that most people eventually outgrow adolescent patterns of behavior. "But he was immune to that because of his rise through the political system," Grew says. "The problem he's got is abuse of power. That's what it comes down to -- the way he treated the women, the way he's behaving now, the cynical manipulation of the whole Hazelden thing."
IN SOME SENSE, THE CASE against Packwood reflects a conflict between generations. Defense lawyers in harassment suits recognize this when they try to seat older jurors -- male executives, who came up believing that flirting with and even hitting on subordinates was a perk of the job, and older working women, who often take the view that female employees should just deal quietly with harassment and move on.
Some Packwood loyalists argue he's being judged ex post facto by newly sensitive standards. "I don't think people like the Senator should be judged by these new rules for things he did a long time ago," says Pamela Garvie, a Packwood aide in the early 80's.
Packwood is the product of a bygone world in which the only women in most offices were secretaries. His first job as a lawyer, in 1958, was for a rock-ribbed Portland firm that was still two decades away from hiring its first female associate.
Along with other eligible bachelors, Packwood formed the 528 Club, which met regularly for cocktails on a houseboat on the Willamette River. The name derived from the page number of an Irwin Shaw novel, "The Young Lions," about a lusty group of young men in Europe during World War II. On page 528, Shaw described a club whose one rule was that members had to bring a different date to each gathering.
"Not to say it's right, but there was a mind-set then that was totally different than today," says Ed Westerdahl, a member of the steering committee for Packwood's first Senate race in 1968. "Twenty years ago at parties, I'd see people doing much more than he's being accused of and nobody gave it a second thought. The pinching, touching, feeling was considered to be friendly, not harassing."
Packwood dates his awakening on women's issues to his early experiences in state politics. In 1962, he successfully ran for the Oregon Legislature by raising an army of volunteers to blanket his district with lawn signs and campaign literature. The majority of his doorbell-ringers were educated women who didn't hold jobs, and Packwood, realizing they were an untapped resource, promoted them to positions of authority.
"I remember him saying to me in about 1963 that the greatest wasted resource in this country was the talents of women," says Jack Faust, Packwood's longtime lawyer and adviser. "No one was saying things like that." In 1968, Packwood's army of mainly female volunteers became the shock troops in his upset victory over Oregon's liberal Democratic Senator, Wayne Morse.
Yet even in the early campaigns, there is evidence of a disconnect between Packwood's promotion of women as a class and his private treatment of individual women. In 1969, Julie Williamson, a 29-year-old legal secretary in Packwood's Portland office, was on the phone when the Senator suddenly kissed her on the back of the neck. Williamson, who was married, recalls saying "Don't you ever do that again."
But later, when Williamson walked into a back office, Packwood followed her. According to Williamson, the Senator approached her and, without uttering a word, stood on her feet, pulled back her ponytail with one hand and tried to yank down her girdle with the other. Williamson escaped his grasp and fled the room. Stalking past her, he said, "If not today, some other day." Williamson, a longtime Packwood loyalist, resigned and found another job, taking a cut in pay.
To those who say Packwood is being unfairly judged by more exacting contemporary standards, Williamson replies that in offices in the 60's men actually behaved more gallantly, addressing her by her married surname, never Julie, and holding doors. Conduct like Packwood's, she says, was never the norm.
"We're not talking about verbal harassment or lewd remarks, which were things that might have been acceptable at one time," Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, has said. "It's an insult to the Senate and the men in the Senate that he or anybody else would not have known it was wrong to tear at a woman's clothing, to stand on her toes, to stick his tongue in her mouth."
In those days, before the term sexual harassment entered the language, no one thought to give antics like Packwood's a special label. Incidents like Williamson's were lumped in with the Senator's general reputation as a womanizer. He was regularly rumored to be having extramarital affairs, often with staff members.
"People in Portland involved in politics one way or another all know each other, and everyone's known for years how he carried on," says a woman who has worked for candidates from both parties in the state. The consensus among those hearing the rumors was not that Packwood was guilty of sexual harasssment -- a new legal precept still being defined by the courts -- but that he was something simpler: a lout.
This was the conclusion of Gillian Butler, who in 1980 was a front-desk clerk at the Red Lion Motor Inn in downtown Portland, where Packwood often stayed. One day as the Senator was checking out, Butler told him about a letter she had sent his office protesting the military draft. Packwood asked her to write again, promising they would meet to discuss her views the next time he was in town.
Butler, who was 22 and admittedly naive, felt flattered. In a neat script, she wrote three painfully earnest pages analyzing "international aggression." Soon after, she says, Packwood invited her to discuss the subject over drinks. The Senator's choice of meeting place had upholstered, red walls like a Las Vegas lounge, and when Packwood entered, Butler was amazed to see he was greeted like a regular. Confused about why he wanted to meet in a bar, she had invited her boyfriend as an escort.
One day after that, according to Butler, Packwood unexpectedly leaned across the front desk of the Red Lion and kissed her on the lips. "I backed away and laughed it off," she says. "I was embarrassed, and I was trying to think what I could have done to make him think that was O.K." On another occasion, the Senator followed her into a luggage closet and kissed her again on the lips. Butler swiftly backed out. "I started telling people he was sleazy after that," she says.
Such stories, while legion in Oregon, posed little threat to Packwood. It was still the era when the media gave politicians virtual carte blanche in their private lives.
Nonetheless, Packwood's innermost circle feared he might one day step over the line and create a genuine scandal. They were especially concerned about the vulnerablity of the many female volunteers who turned out for him. A staff member who organized grass-roots operations and traveled the state with the Senator during his 1980 campaign says he was told by a top aide to refuse any requests by Packwood to help him pick up women.
"I was warned that I might be recruited by him to pimp for him, especially in my position recruiting volunteers," he says. "I can recall being taken aside and told: 'This kind of stuff may happen. Don't let it happen.' "
GEORGIE PACKWOOD HEARD the rumors of her husband's womanizing. But she discounted them, and on the few occasions she confronted the Senator, he denied he was unfaithful. In retrospect, perhaps she didn't really want him to confirm any rumors. "I was concerned that perhaps he was doing some womanizing," she says. "I thought, 'Well, I can weather that.' It hurts so deeply, but he keeps coming back to me."
For years, Georgie was the model, stand-by-your man political wife. She was all too willing to ignore unflattering aspects of her husband's behavior because, like others around him, she too was a bit awe-struck by his position. The daughter of an official of the Portland Boy Scouts, the-53-year-old Georgie is a down-to-earth and intelligent woman, with eyes the color of faded denim and blond hair going to gray.
When the Packwoods first arrived in Washington in 1969, after Bob's election to the Senate at age 36, everyone wanted to meet the young and energetic couple. They received three invitations a night, five nights a week. Bob Packwood and the young Dan Rather, both abrasive, became good friends.
For Georgie, that period was a high point. But soon she began to feel her husband withdrawing into the secret, all-male society of the Senate. Her friend Penny Durenberger, the wife of Senator Dave Durenberger of Minnesota, once quipped that being a Senator's wife was the ideal preparation for widowhood.
Campaign years were the worst. Bob didn't take re-election in stride. He went through periods of manic fund raising and personal paranoia, during which his consumption of alcohol would spike. Even in normal times, he was a hearty drinker, known for ordering two drinks at once and pouring white wine for his staff beginning around 4:30 P.M. Most observers thought he could hold his liquor, downing as many as 10 beers at a sitting without showing the effects. He boasted he never had a hangover.
But Georgie believed her husband had a drinking problem. "He's a binge drinker," she says over lunch at a restaurant in Lake Oswego, a Portland suburb she moved to last December after 23 years in Washington. "A binge drinker is someone who drinks sporadically, but when they do, they can't stop, and it alters their personality."
Georgie noticed how his body language altered, his voice grew louder; in the privacy of their home, he would cruelly berate her. Knowing his father had ended his career as a falling-down drunk, Georgie urged her husband for years to get treatment. Before his 1980 re-election campaign, she convinced him to meet with a professional counselor, a family friend who recommended he visit an alchoholism specialist. The Senator met with the specialist and reported back to Georgie: "I am not an alcoholic. I have what is called a drinking problem." He seemed relieved by the distinction.
Two years later, Packwood collapsed in a hotel room in San Francisco and was rushed to the hospital. His staff befogged the media with a release attributing the collapse to an intestinal virus, but the doctor told Georgie the real problem: the Senator had been drinking heavily and become dehydrated. He was en route to South Korea with a trade delegation and it fell to her to ask his Oregon colleague, Senator Mark O. Hatfield, to fill in at the last minute.
"I'm an enabler," Georgie says of the times she covered up for her husband's slips. "It's natural to do for people you love, but then when you're in public life, you want to protect him doubly from all the probing. It goes on and on. I used to marvel at it when I went to the Senate wives' lunch the First Lady gives every year at the White House. There'd be a roomful of capable and bright, loving, devoted women -- a whole get-together of enablers."
Shortly before the 1984 Presidential primaries, Packwood gathered his closest advisers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to explore a possible bid for the White House. Georgie believed her husband had much to give. But privately she told him she couldn't support him unless he quit drinking. He flew into a rage. "'You don't want me to be President!' " she recalls him shouting. "'You're just an albatross around my neck. If you're going to make me stop drinking, I'll leave you.'"
Georgie retreated to her familiar stance as the passive, dutiful wife. "I thought, 'He's such a success -- after all, a U.S. Senator -- he must be right; I must learn to accept more of his irregular behavior,'" she says, tears welling up in her eyes. "I just had to dig in and make this thing work and keep on trying harder."
During Packwood's 1986 re-election bid, fresh rumors reached Georgie about her husband's womanizing, this time linking him to his campaign manager, Elaine Franklin. Known for being a tough and efficient administrator, Franklin had risen through the ranks after starting as a volunteer in Packwood's Portland office. Georgie had noticed the relationship between her husband and his aide; they bantered easily back and forth, and when they traveled they had adjoining motel rooms. (Franklin, who has previously called the rumors of romantic ties between her and the Senator "outrageous," declined to comment.)
After he had won re-election, Georgie told her husband it was time for Elaine Franklin to go. But instead he promoted her, bringing her to Washington as his new chief of staff.
Georgie began spending long depressive hours in bed. At a Washington dinner party, the Senator got drunk and belittled her, to the embarrassment of other guests. The Packwoods left abruptly, and once in the car the Senator passed out. When he woke up, he began soliloquizing out of the blue about his father's failures.
Reluctantly, he agreed to visit a marriage counselor with Georgie in the fall of 1989. Their son Bill, now 26, and daughter Shyla, 22, also attended some sessions. But it soon became apparent that the Senator's real goal was not to keep the family together but to find a way out. "'I don't want any responsibility,'" Georgie remembers him saying. "'I don't want a wife. I don't want a home. I only want to be a Senator. That's all there is for me.'"
His son replied: "Dad, you say you only want to be a Senator now, but someday you'll be defeated. Where will everyone be then? We're your three best friends."
Packwood said that for him there was no life outside the Senate. He moved out of their family house in Bethesda, Md., on his son's birthday in January 1990. Bill was devastated. Later that year, the Senator sued for divorce, and in January 1991 the marriage was dissolved.
"When he left," says Georgie, "I asked him, 'Are you going to marry Elaine?' He said, 'No. I have thought about it and rejected the idea. She's far too tough for me.' "
ALTHOUGH PACKWOOD INITIALLY said that he would not dispute his accusers' accounts, he reversed field within two months. In interviews with Oregon reporters in January, he indicated his accusers could expect a tough cross-examination by his lawyers in front of the Ethics Committee. He has hired the influential Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter and quietly raised from political supporters a defense fund of more than $220,000.
He also plans to rely on character witnesses like a former staff member, Karen B. Phillips, now a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, who questions the seriousness of his alleged misconduct. "I'm not sure I would call his behavior sexual harassment," says Phillips, who worked for Packwood from 1982 to 1988. "What is sexual harassment? To me, it's always been where there was a potential for retribution. From everything his accusers have alleged, if someone said no that was the end of it."
Although the Packwood investigation is not a legal proceeding, the Ethics Committee will no doubt frame its deliberations within the scope of the Federal law prohibiting sexual harassment. So what does the law say about the Senator's alleged behavior?
Under guidelines issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980 and unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1986, there are two types of sexual harassment: sex for job favors and the creation of a "hostile working environment." Sex for job favors, also known as quid pro quo, is relatively straightforward. Hostile environment cases are harder to define and include the gray-zone behavior that has lead to rancorous debates around the water coolers and across the kitchen tables of America. Is displaying a centerfold a form of harassment? Is writing love letters to a fellow worker?
Packwood's defenders argue that his advances fall short of sexual harassment because he never punished anyone for refusing him; he was merely inviting a woman to enter a consensual relationship.
But according to Paul Grossman, the co-author of the American Bar Association's standard text on employment discrimination, the absence of retribution is not an adequate defense. "Involuntary French kisses with tongues involved is not a mere innocuous invitation to enter into a relationship," says Grossman. "You can't go grabbing people against their will, kissing them and holding their hair."
While it's true there are some gray areas in the law, Packwood's critics contend that his behavior, as alleged, doesn't fall into any of them; it's clearly sexual harassment. Still, some Senators on the Ethics Committee and lawyers holding Packwood's brief can be expected to look beyond the legal definitions and argue his behavior was not so serious; he understood that no meant no.
Yet they would be obliged to consider the experience of Paige Wagers. In 1975, Wagers was a 21-year-old mail clerk in Packwood's office. After being summoned by the Senator into his office, Wagers recalls, Packwood closed his door and suddenly embraced her. He then pulled back her long blond hair and stuck his tongue into her mouth. Wagers, a graduate of Lafayette College working her first job, remembers struggling to escape while Packwood whispered how much he liked her wholesome good looks and innocent manner. He finally let go and she left in tears.
When Wagers told friends and co-workers, they advised her not to quit because it was important to work in one place at least a year to get good references. Eventually, Wagers did move to a series of other Government jobs.
Six years after the initial incident, Wagers bumped into Packwood on Capitol Hill. She had just landed a dream job at the Department of Labor and, she recalls, the Senator greeted her heartily and told her to call on him if she needed help. He suggested she stroll with him back to his office and tell him all about her new job on the way. "I was feeling very proud of myself," says Wagers. "I actually knew a U.S. Senator I could count on. I'd never really had a job with responsibility like that. It was going to be great."
As they walked along a basement corridor beneath the Capitol, Packwood opened the door to an empty office. Pulling Wagers inside, the Senator moved toward a couch and swept its pillows away. Wagers recalls pleading with him to stop, speaking in a firm but soothing voice. "This was much more threatening," she says. "We were in the basement of the Capitol. I didn't want him to get angry and start ripping my clothes off."
Eventually Packwood let her go, but the painful memory remains intense. "I thought, 'Paige, how could you let this happen?' " Wagers says. "He totally sucked me in because of all the flattering things he said to make me trust him. At that moment, I died inside. I was humiliated. I wasn't even human to him. I was like a dog, someone who couldn't possibly have feelings."
A recommendation of expulsion, the most serious penalty the Ethics Committee could impose on Packwood, is unlikely; the only Senators ever expelled were judged guilty of felonies or treason. The committee could ask the full Senate to censure Packwood, with a possible loss of seniority -- a serious blow to a politician so consumed with his role as a lord of the Senate. The most lenient penalty would be a reprimand, entailing no loss of privileges. Or conceivably Packwood could be cleared of wrongdoing.
Though Packwood will almost surely survive and retain his Senate seat, the damage is likely to be long-lasting. He once said he wanted to be in the Senate until he had outdone the seven-term Strom Thurmond, but he shows signs of conceding his career is over. This spring he put up for sale his only Oregon property, a trailer on 20 acres south of Portland, leaving him homeless in the state he represents. On a visit to the state over the July 4th holiday, he was forced into a "stealth tour," addressing only friendly business groups and giving the news media scant notice of his appearances to lessen the risk of demonstrators. He refuses to speak to The Oregonian, the state's largest newspaper.
All this must be a devastating blow for a man to whom the Senate is a be-all and end-all, who's now cut himself off from almost everything else, even family life. Georgie Packwood, who says her former husband is obsessed with his place in history, is, in the end, sympathetic. She believes he's a decent man who became subtly intoxicated by power.
"We went to Washington together," she says. "I thought we were going to make some improvements. To me that's why you acquire power, to improve the lot of people whose lot needs improving. But it's a corrupting system. Maybe not because you take money under the table, but ethically and morally it can be corrupting.
"It just seems to me he lost his way."
Photos: Packwood got an earful during a statewide tour early this year, his first since allegations of sexual harassment became public. (Don Ryan/Associated Press)(pg. 30); Three accusers. From left, Gena Hutton, Julie Williamson and Gillian Butler. (Robbie McClaran for The New York Times); The Packwood family in 1971. (Jim Vincent/The Oregonian)(pg. 32); A moment of solitude in February. (Joe Wilkins 3d/The (Eugene, Ore.) Register-Guard); Georgie Packwood leaving court after her divorce trial in 1991. (Photograph by Dana E. Olsen/The Oregonian)(pg. 38)
Trip Gabriel is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
