Packwood Attempts Salvage Operation : Senate: Oregon Republican says many accounts in his diaries are inaccurate. Entries in that work led to his resignation on ethics complaints.

With his career and personal affairs in shambles, Sen. Bob Packwood tried Sunday to salvage some of his reputation as a responsible legislator, rejecting indications in his own diaries that he traded favors with lobbyists and tried to extract financial benefits from his Senate committee chairmanship.

Three days after the public release of passages from the diary helped force his resignation, the Oregon Republican insisted that many of the accounts in it--dictated in his own voice over 25 years--are misstated or never happened. About other incidents, he said he had no recollection. He says the diary passages were based on misunderstandings of events he held at the time.

Packwood’s comments about the diary passages illustrate his relentless determination to dispute every point of the massive ethics case compiled against him, even while abdicating in the face of it.

“I have discovered there are many inaccuracies in the diary,” Packwood said in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “Some of them simply weren’t true. I didn’t know it at the time, but they weren’t true.”

Entries from the diary, which was obtained by the Senate Ethics Committee during its two-year investigation of Packwood and released upon the completion of the case, portray Packwood as sometimes adding provisions to legislation to help favored lobbyists and then relying on their financial help to keep him in office.

In one such instance, he told of his intention to “hit up” lobbyists and business executives to hire his estranged wife, Georgie Packwood, to lessen her need for alimony.

He also talks about hiding contributions from major donors, saying of support from automobile dealers: “Of course we can’t know anything about it. . . . We’ve got to destroy any evidence we’ve ever had.”

Asked why the public shouldn’t see the Senate as a place for “back room deals,” he said:

“Because those are all taken out of context. When you look at the full panoply of diary entries, you will see in this, time and time and time again, references that say, ‘I will not allow that as a quid pro quo,’ ‘I will not do this,’ or ‘These people think they can get in here and give money and get something, they’re totally wrong--I throw them out.’ ”

Packwood had a reputation as a diligent legislative arbiter, advocate for women’s issues and tax policy expert before sexual harassment allegations emerged against him, and now is trying to protect some of that legacy.

He said it is time to move beyond the scandal. “Am I sorry? Of course--if I did the things that they say I did. Am I sorry, do I apologize? Yes. But it is time to get on and not look back.”

In denying the accuracy of some of his diary passages, he included one about a session with Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) about directing money to Packwood’s campaign. “What was said in that room may be enough to convict us all of something,” he dictated on his diary tape, for later transcription.

He said this account, suggesting illegal financing methods, was “totally wrong” and that he had misunderstood the proposal. Gramm’s spokesman, Larry Neal, said Thursday when Packwood’s account emerged, “I cannot begin to fathom why [Packwood] thought it was illegal.”