SENATOR
PAIGE WAGERS had her skeevy encounter with the hardestworking tongue in Washington, D.C., in 1975, a few months after she finished college and went to work as a clerk for U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood.
She knocked at his office door one day. Here’s what she said happened next:
“Sen. Packwood was alone, and he immediately closed the door and did not say anything to me, but grabbed me and had me pinned backwards with my back to the wall. And before I could say anything — I was very shocked — he stuck his tongue in my mouth and was French kissing me, without ever asking me or saying anything … It took some force to get him to stop.”
The 21-year-old was far from alone in being set upon by Packwood.
Over a 25-year Capitol Hill career, the Oregon Republican smeared his saliva on dozens of others. And his “skirt problem” — the dismissive synonym for sexual assault in a political milieu — was an open secret.
His loutishness was uncloaked when a freelance journalist talked with dozens of women whom the married Packwood had assaulted with unwanted kisses, gropes and more.
After denials, the senator was hoisted on a petard of own words — an exhaustive, preening diary transcribed by a secretary from daily dictation that began in 1969 and continued until smoochy got his comeuppance in the 1990s.
Decades later, amid a firehose of similar allegations, the case stands as a template of the difficulty women have in calling out criminal sexual behavior by men empowered by fame or status.
Packwood was a political boy wonder. Elected to the Oregon legislature at age 30 in 1962, he won a U.S. Senate seat just six years later.
His political ideology would make him as rare as a unicorn today: a progressive Republican.
He supported abortion rights and equal rights for women. He counted Gloria Steinem among his fans. In 1979, Planned Parenthood gave Packwood its highest honor.
Progressive women loved his politics. And he tried to love them all back.
He ordered aides to load his Senate and campaign staffs with attractive young women, like Paige Wagers.
When she complained to a supervisor about being accosted, he shrugged and advised her to avoid spending time alone with the senator.
In 1992, Florence Graves, a Boston freelancer, spent months compiling a dossier of Packwood’s alleged assaults. She found 40 women who said they were his victims — 10 former staff members, a few journalists, hotel clerks and miscellaneous state employees.
Graves was turned down again and again when she pitched the explosive story to newspapers and magazines. Finally, the Washington Post paired her with an investigative reporter and agreed to publish their account — although the story was held until Packwood was reelected to a fifth term in November 1992.
He swore to Graves that he was as innocent as an altar boy.
“I just don’t make any approaches,” Packwood said. “It’s simply not my nature with men or women to be forward.”
When the story named names, Packwood skinned back.
“I never made a pass to anyone who was not receptive,” he said.
But among his accusers, the most damning assertion came from his estranged wife, Georgie, who left him after 27 years.
“I have been aware of these allegations for many years,” she said. “It does not come as any surprise to me.”
As the Department of Justice weighed criminal charges, Packwood faced scrutiny by the Senate Ethics Committee, chaired by a young Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell.
The ethics probe dragged on for two years as Packwood parried over release of his voluminous diary. He submitted some portions, including descriptions of how he got “just the right amount of bounce” in his combover hairdo, but redacted hundreds of entries concerning his sexual cavorting.
In the midst of this, William Safire of The New York Times played the Fox News role as the conservative scold who had the accused pol’s back.
In June 1995, when the Justice Department said Packwood would not be charged, Safire crowed that the senator had been exonerated. He called the Senate’s ethics investigation “pure McCarthyism” and ranted that the committee had “raped the privacy of every American” by demanding Packwood’s diary.
“Bob Packwood deserves an apology from this committee for a two-year ordeal of undeserved ridicule,” Safire declared.
But Packwood was caught in a web of his own dumbfounding (if exaggerated) words in the sexedup diary entries. He boasted of “22 staff members I’d made love to and probably 75 others I’ve had a passionate relationship with,” of copulation on his office rug with “a very sexy woman,” and of sympathy sex with a lonelyhearted staffer as an act of “Christian duty.”
In one of his final entries, Packwood acknowledged “perhaps overeagerly kissing women.”
McConnell saw it differently, accusing his colleague of 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.”
Facing expulsion from the Senate just 10 weeks after Safire’s screed, Packwood resigned in disgrace.
But he didn’t slink away from Washington. He went into lobbying and, in 1998, married Elaine Franklin, his former chief of staff. At age 85, he’s still a player in D.C.