Packwood : the public and private life from acclaim to outrage /

When news of U.S. Senator from Oregon Bob Packwood's career-long history of sexual harasssment became public, people could hardly believe it. Packwood was a champion of women's rights and the first sponsor of a congressional bill allowing women the right to abortion. Yet, here he was accused by numerous women (48 eventually came forward publicly) of kissing, fondling, and groping in as boorish a manner as one could imagine. Oregon journalist Kirchmeier does a good job of tracing Packwood's life, beginning with his childhood as a shy boy who hid behind his coke-bottle glasses, through his school days when he finally began to shine, to his rise in the Senate and his desire to hold his seat "longer than Strom Thurmond." Kirchmeier also leads readers through the forest of allegations made against Packwood, with special attention to how the senator twisted his original mea culpa stance into a campaign to smear his female accusers. The book is only weak when it tries to explain why rather than how Packwood fell. Kirchmeier asserts that in reality there was no inconsistency in Packwood's career because he "never saw the feminist movement as anything more than a device to advance his own career." This coupled with his need to control people, especially women, allowed him to do just that until social mores changed enough for women to fight back. Still, it would probably take a psychiatrist to analyze just why Packwood's private life was so different from his public postures and why he found it necessary to self-destruct. (Reviewed January 1, 1995)0062585495Ilene Cooper

Prior to a 1993 Senate Ethics Committee probe into charges that Oregon Senator Robert Packwood made sexual assaults on, or uninvited advances toward, dozens of female associates, the maverick Republican won plaudits from feminists and liberals for his vigorous support of the Equal Rights Amendment, day care, pregnancy leave, gay rights, environmental legislation and solar energy. In this brisk political biography, Kirchmeier, who has written on politics for the Wall Street Journal and the Portland Oregonian, sets Packwood's rise and fall in the context of his reported binge drinking, hollow marriage, emotionally barren childhood and a Senate milieu that allowed him to elude accountability for sexual misbehavior for 25 years. Drawing on interviews with Packwood's friends, relatives and accusers but not with Packwood himself, Kirchmeier portrays a cynical, ambitious would-be president who, by this account, saw the feminist movement merely as a device to advance his own career. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A breezily written but meaty biographical sketch of Senator Bob Packwood, accused serial sexual harasser and adulterer. Former Portland Oregonian journalist Kirchmeier locates the roots of Packwood's alleged behavior towards women ``deep in his family's history.'' In Kirchmeier's depiction, his subject's alcoholic, workaholic father and a self-absorbed, unloving mother produced a physically unattractive, socially awkward son who grew up ``feeling like a misfit.'' Not until law school at New York University, the author states, did Packwood ``blossom'' academically and socially, charting his political career and earning a reputation as a ``skirt chaser.'' In Kirchmeier's view, Packwood has been an active and effective member of the Senate since 1968, when the 36-year-old, relatively unknown, liberal Republican state legislator became Oregon's junior senator. He played a leading role in shaping the sweeping 1986 tax reform bill; he worked to encourage free international trade and business deregulation at home; he took strong, controversial stands in favor of abortion rights and equal rights for women. But accusations made public in 1991 charged that at the same time Packwood drank to excess, carried on many extramarital affairs, and sexually harassed scores of women. The author gives detailed examples of his typical MO, which allegedly included unexpectedly confronting women- -friends, strangers, colleagues, and employees--in elevators, restaurants, and his Senate office (among other places), wrapping his arms around them, forcibly kissing and fondling them, then pushing for more. Although Kirchmeier claims to have conducted more than 200 interviews for his book, his scanty footnotes refer primarily to previously published newspaper and magazine articles, and he makes extensive use of journalistically dubious reconstructed dialogue. Nonetheless, overall, this is a solid and gripping account of Packwood's misadventures, a strong indictment of power misused for sexual purposes. (16 pages photos, not seen)