Former U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, a moderate Oregon Republican whose 27-year Senate career ended in resignation after a sexual misconduct scandal, died Saturday at age 93. His death was announced in an obituary sent to media outlets by his family, which included no additional details.
Packwood’s Senate career, which began with his election in 1968, produced two major legislative achievements. As chair and later ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he was the lead architect of the 1986 tax reform law, which lowered the top income tax bracket and eliminated many itemized deductions. He was also the Senate’s leading Republican advocate for abortion rights, earning praise from Planned Parenthood and other women’s advocacy groups across the country.
Those legislative accomplishments were overshadowed by the scandal that ended his tenure. In 1993, the Senate ethics committee launched an investigation after more than two dozen women — former employees and acquaintances — accused Packwood of making unwanted or uninvited sexual advances. The investigation later widened to include other alleged acts of official misconduct.
Packwood initially refused to resign, saying he did not want to be remembered only for that controversy. He ultimately left the Senate in September 1995.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who succeeded Packwood in 1996, issued a statement that drew a sharp line between the public record and personal conduct. “His horrible history as documented in his own diaries will forever overshadow that public record. Simply put, historians’ first line about Bob Packwood must include those women who he abused and assaulted for years and years,” Wyden said.
Packwood’s own diaries, which he had kept throughout his career, became a central piece of evidence in the ethics investigation. The committee subpoenaed the diaries, and their contents provided detailed accounts of the alleged misconduct.
MSI previously reported on the broader pattern of congressional resignations triggered by sexual misconduct allegations, most recently covering the April departures of Reps. Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales after separate investigations. Swalwell’s resignation and Gonzales’s retirement echoed the dynamics of Packwood’s case decades earlier.
The great-grandson of a member of the 1857 Oregon Constitutional Convention, Packwood established himself as a social moderate and fiscal conservative who frequently crossed party lines. He considered running for president in 1980. Over his career, colleagues described him as blunt, independent, and outspoken — a maverick, a boat-rocker, and, above all, a political survivor.
“I think they probably all ring true,” Packwood told the Associated Press in December 1992. “I would like to think that I am nobody’s lackey. I try to reach conclusions independently and then I’m willing to fight for those conclusions; if necessary, having to fight against my party or my party’s president.”
After leaving the Senate, Packwood started a lobbying business in Washington. In a 2002 interview with the Salem Statesman Journal, he said he had moved past the scandal. “People have told me it must have been tough on me, or it seems unfair,” he said. “But you cannot go through the rest of life and say look what happened. Pretty soon you become a bore to your friends. I told myself I was not old enough to retire, so I have got to get at life and not complain about it.”
Packwood is survived by his wife, Elaine Franklin, his former chief of staff who became a political consultant in Portland. The couple maintained homes in the Portland area and Washington.