Senate Call for Packwood Expulsion Ended Protection of Israel Lobby

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Bob Packwood's own diaries made it clear that he was a pig and that he was culpable."—Al Hunt, Wall Street Journal.

"Those diaries are cuckoo, let me tell you."—Syndicated columnist Bob Novak.

"His behavior has been despicable."—Eleanor Clift, Newsweek.

"He has no shame at all."—Kate O'Beirne, National Review.

"This guy didn't deserve the charity that he got." —Morton Kondracke, Roll Call.

Those comments, gleaned from two television talk shows, CNN's "Capitol Gang" and NBC's "McLaughlin Group," on Sept. 9, 1995, only a day after Oregon Senator Bob Packwood's tearful announcement that he was resigning "for the good of the Senate," will serve as the political epitaph of one of the most revolting American political figures of this or any other century. Packwood's announcement followed by a day the recommendation of the Senate Ethics Committee that he be expelled and marked the end of an almost successful three-year campaign to head off just such an expulsion motion. It also ended one of the longest, closest and least reported relationships between any member of Congress and Israel's American lobby, dramatically illustrating two facts about that lobby and its congressional supporters.

The first fact is that members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's principal Washington lobby, pledge openly that their support for a candidate will be based not upon questions of character, integrity, party affiliation or religion—but solely upon whether that candidate adheres to AIPAC instructions in voting for foreign aid for Israel and against arms sales to other Middle East countries. AIPAC dramatically redeemed that pledge when, as charges of sexual harassment and corrupt practices engulfed Packwood, his financial support from individual AIPAC officers continued, and Israel's supporters in the media visibly slowed and almost sidetracked the campaign for his expulsion. The second fact revealed by the drama is that eventually even the unstinting support of what presidential candidate Pat Buchanan calls "the most powerful lobby in America" could not protect Packwood. It's a lesson worth pondering by some other unsavory congressional figures whose connections to or interests in their own constituents have loosened as their ties to AIPAC have strengthened.

Packwood first was elected to the Senate in 1968 when, at age 36, he was known as the "boy wonder" of Oregon politics. He visited Israel in 1971 and wrote of his first view of Jerusalem, "It was dawn as we flew over in a small plane, and the city glistened golden in the early morning sunlight." (His reference to Israel's "golden domes" in his rambling farewell speech was a reminder to Jewish supporters of the symbiotic relationship that began with that trip 24 years earlier.) From that time on he began courting Jewish campaign donations with such statements as one he made in 1971 about Masada, scene of an ancient mass suicide by besieged Jews and their families, which has evocative nationalistic associations for Israel's supporters: "I was so impressed with the courage and resolution of that little group of people and what they cost the Romans; what an extraordinary act."

In his 1980 re-election campaign, Packwood received $12,500 from pro-Israel political action committees, all of them outside Oregon. During the 1986 election cycle, when pro-Israel PACs donated $37,500 to his campaign for a fourth Senate term, the Oregon press began calling him "Senator PAC-wood." It was after this that Packwood announced he no longer would accept money from PACs of any kind.

A Shameless Con Game

Then, however, Packwood began one of the most shameless con games in American political history. He approached the same pro-Israel PACs from which he had told Oregon voters he no longer was accepting money, and asked for their membership lists and the mailing lists of Jewish publications and organizations from which they solicited their own funds. Packwood then began his own periodic mass mailings of fund-raising letters to Jewish individuals that have continued ever since.

In the mailings he stressed his long record of unquestioning support for Israel. One such letter had an Israeli shekel coin glued to every copy. Another such letter began: "Dear Friend, Please forgive the informal nature of this letter, but it is late in the evening, and my secretary already has gone home. What I want to discuss with you is Israel's future. It simply could not wait until morning..."

Still another letter explained that "I share your determination to do whatever I possibly can to help guarantee Israel's security and freedom—now and forever. But to do that, I'm going to need your immediate help [because] instead of spending all my time raising money for my own re-election campaign, I'd prefer to devote my time and energies to protecting and defending the security of Israel..."

What gave these letters their uniquely shameless quality, however, were artful insertions seemingly designed to make the readers believe that Packwood was Jewish, or considered himself Jewish. In fact, Packwood is a Unitarian and he has written elsewhere that growing up in Portland, Oregon and going to Willamette University, a Methodist school in Salem, Oregon, he didn't know any Jews at all prior to his graduation from college. He only became acquainted with Jews after 1954 when he traveled east of Boise, Idaho for the first time in his life to attend law school at New York University.

One of his weirdly deceptive fund-raising letters read, in part, "It is not our fault that we were kicked out by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C., or later by the Romans. And don't ever say we left voluntarily..." Another read: "The Union Jack came down in 1948, and the war that followed was terrible, with all the Arab nations massed against us...How we survived, I don't know." Still another of these letters in which he persistently used the pronoun "we" when talking about the Jewish people or Israel read in part: "Israel is a great intelligence source and ally and has a better claim to the land...After all, we were there first."

While he continued mailing those tens of thousands of letters to potential Jewish campaign contributors, at some point between 1986 and 1992 Packwood quietly began accepting direct PAC contributions again. In the 1992 campaign he was the third highest recipient, nationwide, of contributions from pro-Israel PACs, which gave him $110,350 in that election cycle alone. This brought his career total of pro-Israel PAC contributions, not counting individual Jewish donations, to $161,850.

In the 1992 campaign, however, a Democratic primary candidate, businessman Harry Lonsdale, raised the issue of Packwood's contributions from pro-Israel and other out-of-state PACs. So did other candidates, although cautiously, since some Oregon members of Congress running against him had accepted pro-Israel PAC contributions themselves.

Such charges were picked up in the Oregon press. The Portland Oregonian wrote that Packwood would "have to start explaining at campaign stops just what he means when he refers to Israel as 'our own homeland.'" The Eugene Register Guard headlined a story on his national fund-raising: "Senator resorts to innuendo and scare tactics in pro-Israel solicitation letters." The Daily Astorian wrote that Packwood had "shaken down the American Jewish community" and thereby "raised mountains of money." Rep. Peter DeFazio, another Democratic primary candidate for senator, said that instead of Packwood, "we need a senator whose first and only allegiance is to the people of Oregon."

Packwood, however, emblazoned DeFazio's words across the envelope of his next fund-raising letter to Jewish supporters and, inside, noted with seeming pride that "that's not a description of Bob Packwood." He added that he needed contributions from his supporters around the country "to help fend off these attacks in Oregon." By raising more than $7.5 million, mostly from outside the state, and far outspending all of his rivals, Packwood eked out a narrow victory against his opponent in the 1992 general election, Democratic Rep. Les AuCoin.

It was this victory, despite home-state criticism and a highly controversial event in Washington during the final days of the campaign, however, that seemed to lead directly both to Packwood's subsequent reckless and self-destructive diary keeping, and to his final ignominious downfall three years later.

The fatal sequence of events began with the charges before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 by University of Oklahoma law instructor Anita Hill that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor in government positions. The fierce cross-examination of Hill by Sen. Arlen Specter and other senators piqued the curiosity of free-lance investigative reporter Florence George Graves.

Capitol Hill Inquiries

In mid-1992 Graves began inquiring around Capitol Hill about sexual harassment and, in her words, Packwood's name arose "whenever I broached the subject." She began following up the rumors and, with election day approaching, Graves approached editors with her suspicions and some specific reports to back them up.

She was persuaded by the Washington Post not to take the story to Oregon newspapers, but instead to accompany one of its own reporters on a visit to Oregon to interview a number of women who had complained of, in Graves' words, "sexual misconduct" by Packwood.

Finally, armed with complaints by 10 women, at least four of whom were willing to be named, Graves and the Post reporter approached Packwood about two weeks before the election. Packwood categorically denied every allegation and threatened counter-action against the Post. In a controversial and uncharacteristic decision—at least where Republicans were concerned— the newspaper then withheld the story until three weeks after Packwood had won reelection. Nor was the Post the only daily newspaper that chose to withhold the story. Oregon's largest daily, the Portland Oregonian, had on its staff a female reporter who told editors that Packwood had planted one of his sudden unwelcome kisses on her. The Oregonian also got wind of the Post's pre-election investigation but then accepted a false statement by Packwood chief-of-staff Elaine Franklin that the senator had not been questioned by Post reporters on the subject. Not only did the Oregonian fail to pursue the story aggressively, but in an Oct. 27, 1992 editorial endorsement headlined "Re-Elect Sen. Packwood," it wrote, "In a close call, the Oregonian recommends voters re-elect veteran Sen. Bob Packwood."

Subsequently, other Oregon newspapers strongly criticized the Post's decision, asserting that, in view of Packwood's narrow victory over AuCoin, had the Post released a story based on the complaints it already had documented, Oregon voters surely would have rejected Packwood. Whatever the motives of the Post's editors and its three-person editorial board (owner Katherine Graham, who inherited the newspaper from her father, Eugene Meyer; her son, publisher Donald Graham; and editorial page editor Meg Greenfield), there is little doubt that Republican Packwood attributed the crucial decision by one of the nation's leading Democratic newspapers to its, and his own, close ties with prominent American supporters of Israel.

The Post decision, in addition to making Packwood's re-election possible, certainly contributed to his own decision to brazen out the charges, which, according to Graves, have grown steadily more damning in the subsequent three years and now involve more than 40 women. (In his diaries Packwood wrote that he had had sexual relations with 22 of his female staffers, and implied that none of these were the women making the harassment complaints.)

Increasingly Packwood turned away from the people of his home state, which he visited less and less frequently, and generally without public announcements of his schedule, to avert hostile demonstrations by local women's groups. These Oregon women grew increasingly frustrated both by Packwood's arrogance and by the reluctance of national feminist organizations to attack him, supposedly because, in the words of one prominent national leader, "he has been good on our issues."

As his diaries reveal, Packwood increasingly looked to Washington lobbyists, including individuals associated with the Israel lobby, to support a "Packwood legal defense trust fund," to which he devoted leftover campaign funds, and also to contribute to a new "Bob Packwood in 1998" fund he had begun after his 1992 victory and which he also used to pay attorneys' fees.

An example of how these funds were replenished is provided by an appeal published in the Washington Jewish Week of Dec. 30, 1993 by former AIPAC legislative director Douglas M. Bloomfield. In his syndicated column for Jewish weeklies around the country Bloomfield wrote: "Jews have always supported Packwood because of his consistent and effective leadership in the Senate on issues important to our community...This is no time to forget his considerable contributions or to abandon a friend. I have worked closely with Bob Packwood over the past 14 years and have come to rely on his good judgment, superb political and legislative skills, energetic leadership and friendship. He has been part of the pro- Israel forces in the Senate since the days of Sens. Jacob Javits (R-NY), Henry 'Scoop' Jackson (D-WA), Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Clifford Case (R-NJ). To him it was a matter of 'we' and 'us,' not 'you folks.'"

Just how effective such appeals were both for the "Bob Packwood in 1998" committee, which raised $58,290 in 1993, and the Packwood Legal Expense Trust Fund, which collected $279,000 in the first nine months of that year, were revealed by some of the names and contributions listed on the defense fund's filings to the Federal Election Committee. Among them were former Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations chairman Lester Pollack, $9,000; former AIPAC chairman Robert H. Asher, $5,000; former AIPAC chairman Lawrence Weinberg, $2,000; and national capital area pro-Israel activist Stuart E. Eizenstadt, former President Jimmy Carter's domestic policy adviser who currently holds a Clinton administration ambassadorship in Europe, $100.

Strangely, throughout the increasingly desperate campaign on his behalf by the lobbyists he alternately served and exploited over the years, Packwood, the compulsive diarist, continued to dictate statements incriminating many of them into his current diaries even as he altered entries in the diaries of previous years which had been subpoenaed by the Senate ethics committee. In the end, Packwood stood virtually alone, deprived of the support of the wife he first betrayed and then divorced, estranged from his two children, abandoned by the lobbyists he so casually implicated, and finally forsaken by the Senate colleagues he had disgraced.

Long ago Senator Packwood chose a vanity license plate for his personal automobile to symbolize his loyalty to the most powerful of the special interests upon which he had based his political career. Over the years that symbol evolved into both the personal credo and an unwitting prophesy for this most shameless of senators. It reads, "MASADA."

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.