Democrats in Oregon Want Packwood Out

The Oregon Democratic Party, still smarting from a narrow election loss to Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), called Monday for his resignation in the wake of sexual harassment allegations by 10 women, most of them former staff members.

At the same time, lawmakers and women’s groups urged a Senate investigation of the Packwood matter as well as a tightening of sexual harassment policies for congressional employees--even though protections were strengthened only a year ago after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Faye Hill hearings.

Packwood, reelected to a fifth six-year term Nov. 3, offered an apology in a written statement but an aide said that he would not consider resigning. The senator was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

“It is not now his intention to publicly discredit or criticize the women or their allegations,” Packwood’s chief of staff, Elaine Franklin, told the Associated Press. “It was never his intention to cause pain or embarrassment. If that happened, he is very sorry.”

Specifically, the women claimed that Packwood made unwanted and unreciprocated sexual advances, including grabbing them and kissing them forcefully and against their will. Some of the incidents occurred, they said, when he had been drinking.

Four of the women allowed their names to be used in an article Sunday in the Washington Post. None of the 10 women making the allegations have filed official complaints. Some said that they feared no one would believe them or that their careers might be jeopardized if they came forward.

The episode--coming on the heels of similar allegations against Sens. Brock Adams (D-Wash.) and Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii)--reflects a changing atmosphere on Capitol Hill. Women have begun demonstrating an unprecedented willingness to speak out on abuses that they once felt compelled to suppress to protect their careers and avoid humiliation.

Several leaders said Monday that the “courage” shown in televised hearings in 1991 by Hill, an Oklahoma University law professor, had served as a catalyst for other women to “come out of the closet” and take similar action. In hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hill charged Supreme Court Justice Thomas, then a nominee to the high court, with harassment.

The changes in Congress may well be accelerated when sharply increased numbers of women enter the House and Senate as the 103rd Congress convenes in January.

“I think hearing hard truths from (female) colleagues who are freer to speak fully and frankly will go a long way toward changing the old boys’ club environment,” said Judith Lichtman, president of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund.

The Oregon Democratic Party’s executive committee demanded Packwood’s immediate resignation, saying that he has “lost any credibility that he may have had with the Senate Democratic majority or with the incoming Clinton Administration.”

The party’s executive director, Carol Auger, called Packwood “truly a study in hypocrisy” because he “has always led Oregonians to believe that he has been a strong advocate for women’s issues.”

Women’s groups have been thrown into an awkward position by the Packwood case because of his leadership on abortion rights and other women’s issues. Some leaders such as Lichtman called for a Senate investigation while others, such as Harriet Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, suggested that a Packwood confession and apology might be enough, since most of the alleged incidents were in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Lichtman recommended a “thorough and fair airing” of the matter by the Senate ethics panel and by the Senate Office of Fair Employment Practices, which was created by the 1991 Civil Rights Act.

In response to the Hill allegations last year, Congress set up a grievance office and procedures for filing sexual harassment complaints but it declined to lift an exemption that excludes it from a 1964 federal law prohibiting sexual harassment. On Monday, there were calls by newly elected Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and others to lift the exemption.

“Congress ought to to be setting a good example and we are, in fact, setting a very bad example by not being covered by the law,” said Jean Dugan, press secretary to Sen. Jocelyn Birch Burdick (D-N.D.) and former chair of the Capitol Hill Women’s Political Caucus.

Feinstein, declaring that she and three other women were elected to the Senate with “a mandate for change,” said that she “will draft legislation to prevent any loopholes that exclude federal officials.”

Even before the Packwood matter became public, the Senate Ethics Committee was expected to consider a claim by Inouye’s barber that he molested her 17 years ago. A state legislator in the Democrat’s home state of Hawaii said that she had received calls from nine other women with similar complaints. Inouye has denied the allegations.

The committee did not look into charges against Adams by the daughter of a family friend and eight other women who accused him of fondling or drugging them. Adams, who denied the allegations, chose not to seek reelection this year.

“Clearly, the Hill-Thomas hearings have had a dramatic effect,” said Senator-elect Patty Murray (D-Wash.).