She made this big stink about it. I have one question—if she didn’t want me to feather her nest, why did she come into the Xerox room? Sure, she used that old excuse that she had to make copies of the Brady Bill, but if you believe that, I have a room full of radical feminists you can boff.” – Bob Packwood’s Diary
My This Week column (February 1, 1989) caused much excitement in Portland and four Congressional offices. Top of Page One, Section B. Even had a blurb above the header “CONGRESS COERCES CONSTITUENTS. Welch says turn off the tube and call your congressman… unless we all get a raise.”
Of course, I included the bastards’ phone numbers.
The call came late on a Friday night. I was already in bed, reading Thomas berger’s Being Invisible. Invisibility is a fantasy of mine older than winning the Oregon Lottery Megabucks Grand Prize. I still can’t seem to do either.
I picked up the phone. “Enhance my life,” I answered.
A voice I knew almost as well as my own didn’t exactly reply. “Metro. Three o’clock. Tomorrow.” Click. No problem. I was gonna be there anyway.
Next day. Barker Ajax sat down in the chair across from me like he was on a mission from God. He gets that way sometimes.
“You’ve got to do something. You’ve simply got to,” he said as a greeting.
“Well, hello yourself. Chill out, bro.” I hadn’t seen anybody this excited since LBJ found out somebody was actually going to marry Lynda Bird. “What’s the problem?”
“You’ve got to do something. You’re a newspaper columnist. You’ve got influence. You should speak out.”
“About what?”
“About what!?! Geez, about Congress’ pay raise, money grab, boost, malfeasance, charade, travesty that goes into effect any day now.”
“It is amazing, isn’t it. Geraldo can devote an hour of national network television to NEIGHBORS OF SERIAL KILLERS, and 125 million people can spend an entire Sunday afternoon watching a football game like they actually care who wins, but nobody seems to give a flying lube job that our leaders are gifting themselves of a FIFTY PERCENT (50%) salary increase, and they don’t even have the guts or human decency to vote publicly on it.”
“So, okay, you know what I’m talking about.” Barker seemed somewhat calmer. “They just gave themselves a $12,500 raise in 1987. Meanwhile, the minimum wage has been locked at $3.35, for over eight years, and the inflation has eaten up 25 percent of that. This hike will make our Congressional representatives’ salaries five times (5x) the average American’s. And we’re supposed to think they’re doing us a favor because they might quit taking money from lobbyists and political action committees and corporate giants as ‘honoraria.’ But only if they can extort this pay raise. Dishonoria is more like it.”
“Yeah… honoria… it’s a Latin word, means you scratch my back and I’ll cover your butt. I’ve got some more Latin for you: corruptio optimi pessima – the corruption of the best is the worst of all.
Barker had his own translation. “Sure, just because you’re at the top, that don’t make you the cream. That’s what makes me so angry. These are our leaders. They already make $89,500 a year, and they already have more perks than a junk bond dealer in a leveraged buyout.
Free medical care, free haircuts, free postage, free parking, free foreign travel, free athletic club membership, free telephone service, extra tax deductions. And you can be sure it doesn’t end there.”
“It doesn’t and it’s not free. We’re paying for it. By the way, J. Dannie Quayle’s salary will go up. You’d think he’d have to pay us for letting him be vice president. I bet his father would.”
“Quayle. Don’t get me startled,” Barker bristled. “The guy gets $268,000 in expenses, in expenses!, 75 grand for ENTERTAINMENT. A chauffeur-driven limo, use of a helicopter and a jet plane, and a house with 33 rooms.”
“What I like is we’re paying to remodel the vice presidential residence because they need ‘more bedrooms for the kids,'” I pointed out. “Three kids for 33 rooms. You’d think they could squeeze’em in somehow.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard since I found out former Secretary of State George Schultz spent $1.9 million of the taxpayers’ money on his vacations.”
“Hold it now, let’s not forget Nancy Reagan’s 240 place settings of new china at $870 a setting.” I paused to do the arithmetic. “That’s about $208,800.00.”
“I can hear her now: ‘Let them eat cake, Ronnie.’ Why didn’t she JUST SAY NO THANKS, we’ll collect Melmac.”
“How big is this raise anyhow,?” I asked.
“Over 50 percent – $45,500. A lot of these people are millionaires already. Why do they need to take more of our money? Especially when they are supposed to be cutting back on spending.”
“Granted. It is somewhere between mind-boggling thievery and unconscionable graft. It seems they’ve lost all sense of perspective. What are they thinking? Just how out of touch are they?”
Don’t ask me. The average writer in this country earns less than $5,000 a year. Before taxes, of course. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all give ourselves a raise?”
“You know what really frosts my shorts…,” Barker wasn’t really asking a question. “It’s not like those guys back in Washington, D.C., are doing such a bang-up job. The budget deficit last year was over $155 billion. That’s just one year! The annual trade deficit is about the same size. The savings and loan bailout is going to cost tens of billions. Repairing those nuclear weapons factories will cost tens of billions more. Over 50 million Americans are without adequate health care. Drugs are making inner cities uninhabitable. The legions of homeless grow daily….”
“Please,” I interrupted him. “You’re depressing me.”
“Sorry. That not my intent.” He seemed genuinely apologetic. “I’m just trying to get your attention.”
“You have it. I’ll write the column, though I’m not convinced it’ll do any good. Anything else?””Did you know over 80 percent of the public says they’re opposed to this pay boost? IS THIS A DEMOCRACY OR WHAT? By the people? For the people? Are those just words that lost their meaning?
“Ask your readers to call their congressmen and senators. Have them tell these cowardly politicians that we want a recorded vote in both Houses. That we want our alleged “representatives to take a stand. If the politicians are going to put their personal greed first, the least they can do is have the guts to stand up and be counted. The least they owe us is that.
“It does make me wonder,” I said, hoping George Bush truly meant what he said in his inaugural address about ‘the new breeze blowing…’ https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres63.html “If a new breeze is blowing, why is there the same old smell?”
It is your country. It is your money. These people are supposed to represent you. Mke those calls. Reach out and touch your congressman.
I Broke The Law. Get Over It.
Update. Thirty years later. For those of you who like me seek liberty for all and equality for all, you can locate your own Senators’ phone numbers at https://contactsenators.com/
Floridians can reach out to Little Marco and Tricky Ricky at the addresses below.
Marco Rubio
| Mailing Address: | 284 Russell Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 |
|---|---|
| Phone Number: | (202) 224-3041 |
| Email Address: | Email Form |
Rick Scott
| Mailing Address: | 716 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 |
|---|---|
| Phone Number: | (202) 224-5274 |
| Email Address: | Email Form |
I stumbled across the following piece about Packwood’s next life. Seems instructive.
Meanwhile, my buddy of many decades and I have decided only to talk about running. No more politics. We’ll probably add health as a topic to our conversations. Interrupted periodically by arguments about which one of us is the luckier man with the more wonderful wife.
Which only goes to prove my point. As that great American philosopher Janis Joplin would have us believe – “It’s all the same thing, man.”
It’s all the same thing.
Same circus, same clowns. That’s why they wear makeup.
My mother would be proud I am still out here trying to fight the good fight.
And I am not even hoarse.
Bob Packwood’s Redemption Story
How Bob Packwood and other disgraced former members of Congress found salvation as lobbyists.
By JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH for Politico
Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer to Salon and the Christian Science Monitor.
“I find people in the political arena are very understanding and forgiving,” former Oregon Senator Bob Packwood told me recently. We were talking about his life these days, his comfortable recovery from the tawdry headlines of 20 years ago that forced him from his job in Congress. Given the successful lobbying career that the former Republican lawmaker continues to enjoy at 81, there’s substantial evidence to support his contention about Washington being a land of redemption—even absolution.
There was, after all, a lot to be forgiven when Packwood left the Senate. His drawn-out downfall came after the emergence of a good many stories of sexual harassment directed at staffers and lobbyists. One woman who worked in his office said Packwood suddenly kissed her on the neck. Soon after, he followed her into a room, stood on her feet, pulled her ponytail and tried to yank down her girdle. The woman escaped but he threatened her, saying, “If not today, some other day.” She resigned.
It wasn’t just accusations of his randy behavior that ended his lawmaking career. Packwood kept a diary in which he damned himself, writing with incredulity about being rebuffed once by an employee in the copy room. “She made this big stink about it,” Packwood wrote. “I have one question—if she didn’t want me to feather her nest, why did she come into the Xerox room? Sure, she used that old excuse that she had to make copies of the Brady Bill, but if you believe that, I have a room full of radical feminists you can boff.”
After the diary was subpoenaed by the Senate Ethics Committee, it was discovered that Packwood had removed some incriminating material, including threats to his colleagues (ever the confessor, he wrote in the journal about making the edits). In the end, he said, he was a victim of “dogmatic women,” and wrote in his diary that he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “I am accused of kissing women,” Packwood wrote, “on occasion of perhaps overeagerly kissing women, and that is the charge—not drugging, not robbing, kissing.”
The committee took a different view of his profligate affections and recommended unanimously that he be expelled from the Senate for ethics violations. Packwood went ahead and announced his resignation in October of 1995, leaving Congress as a “pariah in his state,” observed the New York Times. But while the lion’s share of the negative publicity focused on the senator’s sexual appetites, his promiscuity of a different kind—with Washington’s lobbyists—was also remarkable. In one instance documented in the diary, he arranged to have a cash retainer paid to his then-wife by a lobbyist; in another entry, he pledged to a lobbyist working for Shell Oil that he’d pass a special oil tax bill to thank him for raising campaign cash. “Ron, I still hate the oil companies,” he told the gentleman, “but I’ll do you a favor.”
Indeed, Packwood was in a good position to do favors. The chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, he had spent his career serving as one of those now-extinct species called a liberal Republican, currying favor with friends on both sides of the aisle—and growing powerful with the lobbying community. A spokeswoman for Shell once acknowledged in an interview that the company hired a particular lobbyist because it believed he had “a way to get in and meet with” Packwood’s top staffers. Another lobbyist, according to Packwood’s diary, once told the senator that he could offer Packwood’s wife $37,500 for five years of part-time work, adding, “If you’re chairman of the Finance Committee I can probably double that,” Packwood then became chairman of the committee, though he had his sights set on an even better job. He confided to his diary that he dreamed of working on K Street, hoping one day to “become a lobbyist at five or six or four hundred thousand” dollars annually.
He did better. Soon after departing office amid the diary scandal, Packwood founded the Sunrise Research Corporation, a lofty-sounding one-man-lobbying shop that has routinely made as much as $1 million per year for that one man, who works on issues ranging from health care to food regulations to tax policy. “My clients have come from across the political spectrum, from the AFL-CIO to United Airlines to the Court of Ohio,” he told me, explaining that he finds a way to be useful to all comers.
By any measure, life is pretty good for Packwood these days. He spends half the year in Washington—about 80 percent of the time Congress is in session—and the balance of his days in the posh Portland suburb of Dunthorpe. As a lobbyist does, he fills the weeks he’s in D.C. trudging up to Capitol Hill to buttonhole congressional staffers or lawmakers. The work reminds him not of his own days in Congress, but of his first career. “It’s similar to my time as a lawyer,” he says, explaining how he discerns what his clients could benefit from on the Hill and then presses their interests vigorously (“in clear, Anglo-Saxon language”). His old connections and his once-powerful perch count for very little in his new line of work, Packwood would have me believe. “There really is very little legalized bribery inside or outside Congress,” he says, and his tone is even and earnest as he says it. “I find people vastly overrate the importance of money and power.”
***
While Packwood may or may not be correct, his own success as a lobbyist suggests we overestimate something else entirely: the degree to which a scandal impedes a former member of Congress. Rather than slink away from Washington—and the local notoriety of their sins—plenty of lawmakers who’ve exited office under less-than-ideal circumstances have, perhaps not surprisingly, found soft landings on K Street. For instance, Senator Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican who left office after a notorious incident with an undercover cop in a bathroom stall in 2007, promptly took up work as a lobbyist, launching a firm called New West Strategies, which has earned north of $200,000 working on behalf of Murray Energy Corporation of Ohio and the veterans group Operation Military Family. Last year, he took in more than $150,000 representing Western Pacific Timber. “When you have significant experience in Congress, it’s assumed you’ll have clients come to you automatically,” he told a reporter. “But that’s not the case, you have to hustle, and you always hustle.