COLUMN ONE : Hard Fight Led to a Hard Fall : Bob Packwood’s pugnacious defense finally alienated even his closest Senate colleagues. The master negotiator lost his job by losing his ability to play the political game.

At the end, standing drained and exhausted in the well of the Senate to announce his capitulation, Bob Packwood tried to summon up memories of the good days spent and good battles fought with his comrades in arms. The 1986 fight for tax reform. The countless efforts to protect Israel. The rafting trip with fellow-environmentalists and the fight to save the Hells Canyon gorge from a massive dam.

Ringed by his peers though he was, Packwood was as alone as anyone has perhaps ever been in that storied chamber. A public lifetime of achievement had been washed away, overwhelmed by revelations of personal conduct so tawdry his friends could only avert their eyes.

The collapse came in a way that defied all expectations of both Packwood and the Senate itself.

Beyond his wit and intelligence, beyond the talent for campaigning that had won him five terms in the Senate, he had been admired on Capitol Hill for his skill as a legislator. On even the most divisive issue, colleagues said, he could read the Senate and its members so well that he found compromise and agreement where others saw only confrontation.

Yet the story of Packwood’s fall is, beyond everything else, the story of a man blind to the world around him, blind to the evolving values of American society, blind most of all to the attitudes and feelings of those he supposedly knew best, his fellow senators.

Given the seriousness of the charges, the massive nature of the evidence and the state of public opinion about the issues involved, severe punishment was almost inevitable for Packwood. Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he believed it would never be less than censure and loss of the Finance Committee chairmanship.

If Packwood had taken a different tack, however, some think he might have avoided his ultimate humiliation: his resignation Thursday under threat of expulsion.

The dramatic heart of Packwood’s fall is irony: At the most critical crossroads of his public life, the senator’s greatest talent failed him--his vaunted ability to read the institution he had made his life. In the end, that institution was full of people who saw a man losing his grip on decorum and on dignity, and dragging them along with him.

Faced with a hard-hitting Ethics Committee investigation into charges of repeated sexual harassment of women, of misuse of his office and of obstruction, Packwood responded with unremitting aggressiveness. He took the Senate to the Supreme Court to keep investigators from getting his personal diaries. Even before he lost in the high court, he began altering the diaries to remove incriminating passages. He seemed unrepentant in his testimony before the committee. He persuaded his Republican colleagues to oppose public Ethics Committee hearings on the matter--which they did at significant political sacrifice; then, reversing himself, he demanded open hearings and accused the Senate of denying him common fairness.

It was a strategy that again and again made life politically and personally difficult for his fellow senators--Republican allies and long-time friends on both sides of the aisle--who all wanted more than anything to avoid the whole issue.

“It was counterproductive,” said a well-placed Senate source. “It became more and more counterproductive. He thought he could bully his way through it.”

Codes of Conduct

By the end of the investigation, Packwood had been found guilty not only of violating the Senate’s formal code of conduct with his behavior over the last quarter-century. He also violated a more informal code of conduct--the tradition of comity and collegiality that softens the edge of partisanship and permits the Senate to function.

That the tortuous saga lasted three years and produced a far harsher result than anyone had anticipated is a measure of how high the stakes became.

The issue of sexual misconduct was especially sensitive for the Senate, seared as it had been by the widespread indignation among women at its handling of harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas by law professor Anita Faye Hill in 1991. On Thursday, when Ethics Chairman McConnell released the panel’s devastating report on Packwood, he paid tacit tribute to how long a shadow the Hill-Thomas episode had cast.

“I know that at various points in this case there were those out there who wondered whether the Ethics Committee would ‘get it’ in the Packwood case,” McConnell said. “Well, there can be no doubt today that the Ethics Committee got it concerning the gross and persistent misconduct demonstrated by Senator Bob Packwood.”

Packwood’s hard-ball response to the investigation also seemed to many senators to challenge their will to maintain the basic integrity of the Senate’s rules and procedures. Thus, for McConnell and others, the most offensive charge against the Oregon Republican was that he had brazenly altered tape-recorded diaries that the committee was seeking.

‘Crime Against Senate’

The tampering showed “utter contempt and disregard for the Senate’s constitutional self-disciplinary process,” declared McConnell, saying that was why he proposed expulsion. “The crime was committed against the Senate itself.”

Then there was the unrelenting glare of public attention on the Senate as the Republican majority was beginning to come to grips with welfare reform, tax cuts and Medicare spending, all of which Packwood’s committee would oversee.

Expulsion may have been a harsher punishment than they expected, but it was not harsher than they thought an increasingly critical public expected.

‘It is much more sweeping than I anticipated,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “But the public is setting a higher standard. The public is tired of business as usual.”

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It was clear from the outset that Packwood would take no prisoners. When the Washington Post in 1992 was preparing the article that first aired allegations by 10 women of unwanted sexual advances by Packwood, he denied the charges so emphatically that he managed to delay the story’s publication until after he narrowly won reelection.

It was equally clear, nationwide, that the 1992 election also changed the political climate in which the allegations against Packwood would be judged. The Hill-Thomas controversy gave a big boost to female candidates and helped deliver four new women to the Senate in 1993.

Seizing the opportunity that presented itself, the then-Democratic majority worked to make sure that the Ethics Committee would include one of their party’s women. They chose Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), an outspoken feminist who would emerge as one of Packwood’s harshest critics; her presence all but assured that the panel could not quietly sweep the allegations under the rug even if it wanted to. (By this week, on the eve of the Ethics Committee’s vote to expel Packwood, Mikulski declared bluntly, “He’s a bum.”)

The panel opened the Packwood investigation in December, 1992, clearly aware that anything less than a thorough investigation would open members to charges of taking short cuts to protect one of their own.

If the panel had not made the decision to cast a wide net, and essentially not be governed by traditional statutes of limitation, it could not have put together the devastating portrait of Packwood’s sexual misconduct, based on an accumulation of incidents over a long period of time.

Packwood demonstrated dogged determination to fight every step of the way. He engaged the committee and then the full Senate in a five-month legal battle to keep the panel from getting his personal diaries, in which he had confided enormous amounts of intimate and astonishingly damaging detail.

“That was an early signal that he wasn’t going to be particularly cooperative.”’ said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who later would lead the fiery fight for public hearings on the charges against Packwood.

After he refused to honor a subpoena from the Ethics Committee, the Senate, after two days of wrenching debate in November, 1993, voted, 94-6, to let the Ethics Committee go to court to enforce the subpoena.

Toll on Colleagues

In the middle of that debate, the Senate’s most senior member Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) called on Packwood to resign--an extraordinary demand in an institution where senators are loathe to criticize one another. It was an early sign of the toll Packwood’s intransigence was taking on his colleagues.

A federal judge ordered Packwood to turn over his diaries, a decision sustained by the Supreme Court in March, 1994.

By then, the case against Packwood had mushroomed. More women came forward, accusing him of sexual misconduct. The case expanded to include charges he had altered his diaries to obstruct the investigation and had improperly solicited a lobbyist for a job for his estranged wife to reduce his alimony payments.

From the start, the matter of altering the diaries was especially galling to committee members. “In the end, the effort to change them was more damning than anything actually in the diaries,” one source said.

In May, 1995, the Ethics Committee for the first time tipped its hand about how much sentiment had turned against Packwood behind closed doors. It announced it had found “substantial credible evidence” that Packwood may have violated Senate rules, and issued a bill of particulars detailing 18 instances of alleged sexual misconduct, as well as the charges involving diary tampering and job solicitation for Packwood’s wife.

Packwood then was given a chance to present his case to the Ethics Committee in three days of closed-door testimony. While he admitted to some instances of sexual misconduct and tried to explain away others, he said he could not remember many of them--a lapse he attributed in part to blackouts that afflicted him as a then-heavy drinker.

His testimony left the committee cold.

That was when Mikulski, for one, made up her mind that he should be expelled. “I detected no remorse, or no action that demonstrated remorse,” she said later.

Other committee members were slower to come to that conclusion, but Packwood’s testimony turned no one around on the basic question of guilt or innocence. “It was pretty obvious the committee was going against him,” a source said.

The panel’s unity on Packwood’s guilt was soon eclipsed by a divisive debate over whether to hold public hearings. Packwood had waived his right to a hearing, and opposed Democratic efforts--in the committee and on the floor--to force open hearings.

When the Senate voted, 52-48, to uphold the committee’s decision not to go public, all but three Republicans stuck with Packwood in opposing them.

The committee then revealed that two new allegations of sexual misconduct had surfaced--including one involving a woman who was 17 years old at the time. The idea that a minor was involved turned the tide for some Republicans who had stuck with Packwood before.

Then Packwood made it worse. While his colleagues were scattered around the country on August recess, he did an abrupt about-face and called for public hearings.

He said he was responding to the committee’s report of the new allegations. But the move was widely seen as a ploy to delay what many senators outside the Ethics Committee thought would be the final punishment--loss of his chairmanship of the Finance Committee.

Many Republicans were furious that they had gone out on a limb for Packwood by casting politically risky votes against public hearings. Among others, McConnell--who is up for reelection in 1996--met a barrage of criticism when they were home during the recess.

The Kentucky Legislature passed a resolution condemning McConnell for his defense of closed hearings. Moderate Republican James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.) saw his vote against public hearings condemned in a local newspaper as “partisanship at its saddest and seediest.” Texas editorials raked Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) over the coals for being one of two women to vote against a public hearing.

In the end, the only question Ethics Committee members cared about when they returned from recess was what form of punishment should be meted out. They dismissed the hearing request without debate. “He was interested only in further delay,” said committee member Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.)

Hours before the committee was to meet last Wednesday--its first meeting after the August recess--Dorgan called McConnell to say he would offer an expulsion resolution.

McConnell beat him to the punch. Almost immediately after the meeting began, in a secluded room on the fourth floor of the Capitol, McConnell himself proposed expulsion. There was no dissent. The rest of the short meeting was devoted to logistics.

Packwood had sealed his own fate.