Bread & circuses - Senator Bob Packwood's public and private stance on women

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by Kate O'Beirne

THE 1993 deposition reads, "After we arrived at my car, and I was in the process of unlocking it, he pulled me toward him, put his arms around me, and kissed me. He put his tongue in my mouth."

The woman who fended off Senator Bob Packwood's unwelcome tongue in 1980 had just joined his re-election campaign, having been urged by Gloria Steinem to help the GOP's most ardent supporter of abortion rights. Over the next few years, this victim of the Packwood Peck sent breezy notes and an ERA T-shirt to the senator, giving every appearance of remaining one of his most enthusiastic backers. She was not exceptional among Packwood's accusers.

The documents released by the Senate Ethics Committee reveal that Bob Packwood got away with his mistreatment of women for over 25 years, not because his male colleagues "just didn't get it," but because his feminist followers protected him. As far as they were concerned, he was free to pursue and seduce women as long as he faithfully promoted abortion on demand.

Rumors of Packwood as masher go back to 1968, when he was first elected to the Senate. In 1970, he introduced the Senate's first bill to legalize abortion, thereby acquiring feminist immunity for his behavior. A lobbyist for the National Abortion Rights Action League, whom he grabbed in 1982 in his Senate office, now explains, "I was a lobbyist on an issue that I cared deeply about. Senator Packwood was important to us."

In Washington, Packwood was widely known to be a womanizer. New female hires were routinely warned by veteran staffers to avoid being alone with him in his office, where the libations flowed freely.

His feminist targets, who remained silent for years, now implausibly claim that Anita Hill "helped a lot of women name it." Until Anita Hill, apparently, these women didn't know what Packwood had done to them? Less accomplished women could have put a name to Packwood's behavior when they were 12 years old.

As the Ethics Committee was deliberating Packwood's fate this August, a woman came forward who had been a 17-year-old intern when she was grabbed and kissed by the senator. Not one of his earlier victims had felt any obligation to blow the whistle on him in order to spare her a slobbering Packwood advance. "Sisterhood" was sacrificed on the altar of abortion rights.

Packwood first claimed no memory of the assaults, then attempted to discredit his accusers, and finally admitted wrongdoing, but raised the feminist defense. He reminded one Oregon audience of "those lonely and solitary hours in the late Seventies and early Eighties defending Roe v. Wade, trying to prevent its reversal or dismemberment. I led the fight." Only when the charges became public were the feminists forced to act. Women's-rights advocates quickly formed "Oregonians for Ethical Rep-resentation" to drive him out of office.

Other feminists took to the opinion pages to express their incomprehension over the apparent contradiction between Packwood's public and private behavior. Ellen Goodman couldn't figure out how "a certified friend of feminism" could take such liberties. It is difficult "to acknowledge bad seeds in good guys," wrote Mrs. Goodman.

Feminist "good guy" Packwood may be, but he evidently believes women are interchangeable and disposable. Packwood diaries disclose that when the charges became public late in 1992, he was busy juggling intimate relationships with two women. When he told his wife that he wanted out of their 26-year marriage, Georgie Packwood testified, he made clear "he did not wish personal responsibility of any kind and that . . . he did not want to furnish money or any support for the children or for me."

Packwood's contortions to avoid his basic obligations to his wife and family, despite a yearly income of $125,000, led to an ethics charge of soliciting improper favors from individuals with business before the Senate. According to the diaries, one lobbyist agreed to guarantee $7,500 a year for five years toward Georgie Packwood's support, which he said he could double if Packwood became chairman of the Finance Committee.

In fact, Bob Packwood's public and private lives can be easily reconciled by recognizing that the feminist philosophy he espouses encourages male irresponsibility toward women. Abortion provides a refuge for unreliable men like Packwood, who seek sex without commitment and flee from the responsibilities of marriage and family. In the Senate, he sought to advance his anti-family views by arguing that tax breaks should be denied families who had too many children, and by insisting that subsidized illegitimacy is a matter of "reproductive freedom."

THE Packwood diaries are a depressing display of world-class vanity and self-absorption. He writes of seducing one woman he had just met by taking her to the Senate gallery, where he points out important colleagues and she watches him vote. She's wowed. Who needs etchings when the U.S. Senate is so seductive?

His compulsion to detail his "successful exploits" means that Senate business gets short shrift in the diaries. Diary entry, Aug. 3, 1993: "I met very briefly with [name blanked out], who is up for some position. She's a controversial woman who headed the Health Department in Arkansas. She seems okay to me." One of President Clinton's most indefensible nominations thus won crucial support from this senior Republican senator.