Oregon GOP Senator Bob Packwood, Who Resigned Over Harassment Scandal, Dies at 93

Article excerpt

Bob Packwood died Saturday at 93, and the central tension of his life was baked in from the start: he was the Oregon Republican senator who spent decades championing abortion rights and women's causes, and also the man whose Senate career ended in 1995 under the weight of sexual harassment allegations from more than two dozen women, including staffers and lobbyists who described years of unwanted advances. That contradiction was never fully resolved, and it is probably what most people remember. Packwood served three terms, arriving in the Senate in 1969 as a young moderate who broke sharply from his party's drift on reproductive rights, making him a genuinely rare figure in American politics. The unraveling was thorough. The Senate Ethics Committee subpoenaed his private diaries, and what they contained proved damaging enough to accelerate the calls for his resignation. He left before a full Senate vote could remove him, the first senator in decades to be pushed out under ethics pressure. His exit marked, in some ways, a preview of the broader party realignment that would eventually make a socially moderate Republican not just unusual but nearly impossible to sustain. He was a man who represented a constituency his party was already in the process of abandoning.