Senator Robert Packwood - 15 September 1995

Once during the Civil War, the American Civil War 1860, 1865 I don't remember it, but I have it on impeccable authority once the Senate of the United States expelled one of its members for high treason. Since then no senator has ever been expelled for any reason until one day last week, when before a half empty chamber, the missing senators were not indifferent, they were probably too embarrassed to show up.

One Senator Robert Packwood, a handsome, taut-featured 62 year old moderate Republican from the western state of Oregon made a sad maudlin little speech about the precious friendships you acquire in the Senate and he ended by saying he was resigning of his own freewill because he's going would best serve the proper ideals of a United States senator namely duty, honour, country.

Well Charles Dickens at his most maliciously inventive could not have written a more packed significant speech for Mr Pecksniff. The simple fact is that after an investigation by a senate committee, the Ethics Committee, into charges by 17 women of past sexual harassment, the committee unanimously, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted to recommend his expulsion. It is the harshest treatment that the Senate can deal out to one of its own. They could have reprimanded him, gone a step further and censured him as they did with Senator McCarthy – the bad McCarthy not the good failed presidential candidate. Recommending expulsion means recommending to the whole Senate, which if the offender resists would then go to a vote and must vote for expulsion by a two thirds majority to have the deed done. So in a, in a hairs breadth, technical sense only, Senator Packwood was acting of his own free will in exactly the way you could say that Richard Nixon voluntarily resigned from the presidency, both of them were absolutely certain to be condemned voted down by the whole Senate they knew it and they quit.

It's possible I think that Senator Packwood might have weathered the gales of reminiscence that came at him from women who recalled how 10 year ago, 15, 20 years ago the senator had on one occasion pushed them against a wall and kissed them or put an arm round a waist and let the other hand explore the girls' dress. The incidents were boringly similar and all of them in the accuser's memory fell well short of a direct sexual attack.

In fact, take any one of these stories and you would swear you were listening to the confessional of a young college girl telling of her first giggling encounter with the freshman Don Juan. On the revealed evidence of all these women who since their presumably nubile girlhood have grown into middle age, what we were hearing about was something that has happened a million times in all the office buildings of the world. I don't doubt that every woman whose listening to me now has had several of the kinds of experience the senator's accusers remembered and saved up for the eventual moment when they could add their damning voices to all the others. When these accusations were first aired, oh it must be two years ago at least I was inclined to feel sorry for Senator Packwood. I saw him as a victim of the urge to which women's lib gave an extra push, the urge to have the law define as sexual harassment, acts of past ungallantry, of making clumsy passes which had been in Western society till then universally regarded as lamentable, vulgar, in bad taste, to be deplored but not to be made into a court case of assault, just as I believe every man listening to me now can recall an experience or two of a roving hand slapped down a kiss spurned in a taxi cab.

In my day, the taxi cab was the first battleground. I thought for a while that the senator would keep his seat, the Republican leadership was anxious he should most of all retain his chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee, a position of immense power when it comes to all tax and trade bills. Up to the last minute, the Senate's majority Republican leader Senator Dole was hoping to keep Mr Packwood there for a couple of months to navigate the budget cutting bills through the Senate even if he'd been formerly expelled without a date having being set for his departure. No such luck.

As I say, I thought the senator might survive the Committee's scrutiny and emerge with something more than a slap on the wrist censure say, but not the ultimate punishment, expulsion. However, what was to disillusion any early sympathiser, was an end of day duty the senator had performed for years and which surely no incoming senator will ever perform again: he had kept a diary. The diary was impounded by the Ethics Committee. It contains a record of his comings and goings of course, but most of it was given over to, to you might say undercover activities. One, sexual encounters and two, collecting money to run his election and re-election campaigns. He's been in the Senate since 1968. The sexual recollections are more often foolish boasts and far grosser than the clumsy passes of his public accusers, actual seductions, innumerable conquests, reported in a glow of self congratulation. And as you'd guess, it's this stuff, and the personal record of dissoluteness and drunkenness and promiscuity that the media have played up in print, or in melancholy tearful close-ups to camera of the wronged women for the delectation of an audience of millions, and so it would have been in any other Western democracy with a flourishing television and/or tabloid industry.

But there's been little reporting of the real scandal of the Packwood affair, which is the evidence in the senator's diaries of the overwhelming power in the American electioneering system of what is called soft money. Let me explain. First by citing one entry in the senator's diary at the end of 1989. The senator's marriage was coming to an end, his wife no longer able to take the bouts of drinking and infidelity. She might, the senator feared, ask for substantial alimony. The senator needed to tap his friends for help. One of these was a lobbyist for a big oil company, which desperately wanted to see a favourable tax bill passed. Senator Packwood was then the senior Republican on the Finance Committee and could have a big say in getting the bill through. Packwood needed money and the lobbyist friend needed the Bill and the senator wrote down: "Ron I still hate the oil companies, but I will do you a favour." The Bill was passed.

There's no evidence in that case of an actual gift of money. The bill's passage would be a token, probably of goodies to come when the senator needed campaign money. Anyway at that very time, on the eve of the divorce the senator wrote to himself in his diary, that if he was going to be able to meet alimony payments, he would have to hit it up, as he put it, with various lobbyists and company executives. His ingenious scheme: in exchange for favours he'd done them or would do them, was to have them hire his estranged wife. One lobbyist said, he'd pay her $37,500, but if Packwood became Chairman of the Finance Committee I can probably double that. The diaries are in truth a textbook guide to the way in which corporations, national lobbies, labor unions exploit the law-making system by delivering huge contributions theoretically to the party chest. Actually much of the time to the election campaign of a Senator with special influence. You know there are strict federal rules about the limits of campaign contributions: so much for a corporation or a union much smaller amount for individuals, but in practice the rules are everywhere violated. Since there's no limit on individual or corporate contributions to the party and its general upkeep, what happens is that much of that money is, unreported, diverted to the campaigning needs of an individual. A most naked example of this trick is sure enough recorded in Senator Packwood's diary.

In the spring of 1992, the Senator was running for re-election and needed all the money he could get. The head of the Republican Party's fundraising department was an associate, the Senator Phil Gram, who is now by the way, off and running for president. The two got together. Mr Gram talks of putting $100,000 dollars into the Packwood campaign but is reported in the diary as saying: "You know there can't be any legal connection between this money and Senator Packwood but we know it'll be used for his benefit." Mr Packwood in his own words responds: "I think it's a felony, I'm not sure it's an area of the law. I don't want to think about," and the senator adds: "What was said in that room would be enough to convict us all of something." Need I say that when this juicy entry was published, the media turned smartly to presidential candidate Senator Gram. The money, he blandly recalled, went for party voter turnout: You have a wooden leg lady let us take you to the polls in our fine limousine. That's my gloss not the senator's.

So soft money is money contributed to a party, its organisational upkeep, publicity and so on, but money often quietly turned over to a particular candidate who can be expected to return the favour in the company's or the lobbyists or the union's interest. In the last election, the Republicans raised 45 millions in soft money, the Democrats 40 millions. Because the practice is universal, the Ethics Committee didn't stress this theme so much as the outrageous gropings and the fumbled kisses. The scandal of diverted contributions has been alive and well for a century and a half. From time to time some poor senator tries hard to outlaw the system. Well not very hard.

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