American Rhapsody (30 page)

In other words, it was all my fault and I
owed
it to her to make it right and find her a job. Not just any job, because the UN job wasn't good enough. But some private-sector job that Miss Hoity-Toity Blow Job Cabinet Member considered acceptable. That, of course, meant money. A salary, probably in six figures, that mommy and her new sugar daddy approved of.
I . . . wished . . . she'd . . . just . . . fuck off and die!

I put Vernon on it. Vernon was on the board of so many companies, he could find something. Vernon was in the process of hunting a job for her when she was subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case. She really had me now. The bitch! The miserable babbling bitch! If she told the truth, it would be all over. But she'd have to lie under oath now and commit perjury to save me. She'd have to break the law for me. I was screwed, blewed, and tattooed.

I invited her down to the Oval Office again. I gave her a bunch of shit: a marble bear's head, a Rockettes blanket, a Black Dog stuffed animal, a small box of chocolates, a pair of joke sunglasses, and a pin with a New York skyline on it. I let her play with Buddy. I gave her a long and passionate kiss. I told her how skinny she looked. I clenched my jaw a couple times. I let my eyes well up. She fell for it like the big sack of blubber that she is.

A week later, she signed a false affidavit saying she had never had “a sexual relationship” with me. Two days after that, Vernon got her a job at Revlon in New York. She was happy. Her damn mommy was happy. The damn sugar daddy was happy. It was finally over. I was free of her.

And then . . . and then . . .
Tape recordings
? That prick Starr had—
tape recordings
? The world was ending! My first thought was that she'd taped me, just like Gennifer—oh my good merciful God!
The phone sex!
I could just hear myself moaning on the NBC nightly news, Brokaw scowling, more mush-mouthed than usual. But no, it was tapes of her and that toxic garbage dump who'd befriended her. Motormouth babbling on and on about God knew what.

The cigar
? No! No!
Oh, no, no!
Please God, not the cigar! It was her idea.
Her idea!
She was the one who said, “And if you want to do that sometime, we can do that, too,” looking at my cigar like a ten-dollar whore, telling me to put it there, just about
ordering me
to do it. My hand was nothing but the instrument of
her
filthy fantasies. What happened happened between her privates and my cigar.
I
had little to do with it.

There was nothing to do but trash her now. Charlie Rangel was already doing it anyway, saying, “That poor child has some serious emotional problems”; saying, “I haven't heard that she played with a full deck”; saying, “She's fantasizing.” It wouldn't be that much of a stretch, either—slice and dice one more time. Hey, this
was Fatal Attraction!
She
was
a nut and a slut! She
was
a stalker! Beverly Hills trailer park trash! Forget her damn age! She was porking that married guy up in Portland—but wait, wait, wait! Get Carville back here! Hold the nuts and sluts! Tell Begala and Blumenthal and Barney's sister to cool it! Hold the slice and dice!

There was a report on ABC that said she had a navy blue dress with my . . . Then there was another report that denied it. Even if she had a dress, was she gonna turn it over to that prick? What if she didn't turn it over? Then it was a he said/she said. No proof. Shit, I couldn't trash her if she had that dress. If I trashed her, she'd turn it over for sure. No, I had to be nice to the stupid, scheming, fat-ass, blackmailing bitch. Being nice had worked before. The piece of cake was in love with me, wasn't she? But what could I do to be nice to her? I couldn't see her or talk to her. Yes!
Yes!
I had it! It was brilliant! It was beautiful!

She'd see me on TV . . . and I'd be wearing one of the ties that she'd given me.
A private little love message . . . which the whole world would be watching and missing . . . except her. She'd never give the dress to that prick! She'd fall for it just like she fell for me. Hey, pieces of cake always fall for me. I'm the man! I'm the dude! I'm the motherfucker! I'm the mack! I'm the shit! I'm the president of the United States!

[13]

Bob Packwood's Reptile Tongue

“He's a creep,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “He's a piece of shit. I hate him.”

A
s the Lewinsky headlines gathered sexually steamy steam, those kinky miscreants interested in recent tawdry parallels considered the disgraced and banished former senator from the do-good state of Oregon . . . the sometime dinner companion of that great pro-choice feminist icon, Gloria Steinem 
 . . .
ta-dah
 . . .
Reptile Tongue, the Man with the Horny Hands, Bob Packwood!

In 1992, when Bill Clinton went to the White House, Bob Packwood, elected in 1968 on the length of the Night Creature's fingernails, was the most powerful feminist advocate, the most prominent male feminist, in America. Bob Packwood had introduced the first abortion bill in the Senate in 1970 and had always been the leading Republican advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. Bob Packwood had written groundbreaking proposals on pregnancy leave, insurance-industry reform to end discrimination against women, and child care.

Way back in 1962, Bob Packwood had told a campaign aide that “women's talents are the greatest wasted resource in the country.” About his friend Gloria Steinem, Bob Packwood said, “On women's issues, she regards me as almost a hundred percenter. She appreciates the fact that women predominate in the upper echelons of my office, and are paid accordingly.” It was true that almost all of Bob Packwood's staff was composed of women, although there were whispers that Packwood liked to hire divorced women or unhappily married women, so they'd have no relationship that competed with “the job.” High turnover was always a staff problem. Others pointed out that some of the women who worked for Bob Packwood, though uniformly attractive, weren't all that smart or political or libertarian, citing as example a conversation between Packwood chief of staff Mimi Weyforth and another aide. The aide asked Weyforth why Packwood, who wasn't Jewish, took militantly pro-Israeli positions.

“Don't you know the senator went to N.Y. Jew Law School?” Weyforth said.

The aide, insulted, told Weyforth he was Jewish.

“You mean I hired Jew and I didn't even know it?” Weyforth said.

Hurt and shocked, the aide turned away, and Weyforth said, “Weyforth is a German name; don't you ever forget that!”

There were cynical longtime Oregon political observers who, looking at Bob Packwood as the number-one feminist in America, said that Packwood's feminism was a sham—just another example of the political opportunism that got him elected to office as a longhair-bashing Nixonite. “If we're talking about people carrying signs,” Packwood had said in the sixties, “walking barefoot, bead-wearing guys, they're not my cup of tea. When I saw that crazy kid [Mark Rudd] at Columbia University sitting in the president's chair with his feet on his desk and smoking a cigar, I got mad.”

As Watergate exploded, Bob Packwood quickly abandoned the Night Creature, whose landslide had gotten him elected by three-tenths of 1 percent. Packwood lectured Nixon with words that would come back to haunt him. “Some politicians have a weakness for alcohol. For others, it's gambling. For others, it's women. Your weakness is credibility.” Packwood told Nixon he had to “disclose everything.”

The most startling example Oregon political observers gave of Bob Packwood's political opportunism was his attitude toward gay people. Speaking at a women's rights forum, Packwood was asked, “Do you support antidiscrimination legislation for gay people?” Packwood blurted, “No. I think homosexuals are disgusting.” Booed and condemned by the women who constituted his core constituency, Bob Packwood quickly agreed to cosponsor a federal gay rights law.

Packwood's fellow Republican senator from Oregon, the esteemed Mark Hatfield, Packwood's college government professor, loathed him. He refused to attend any Senate meetings to which Packwood was also invited. “Packwood is an unscrupulous son of a bitch,” the usually decorous and understated Senator Hatfield said.

A nerd who wore thick glasses in school, Bob Packwood wanted to be a mechanical engineer. He won an award as “the ugliest guy” in his fraternity and his college friends joked, “Every time he asked a girl out, she said she was doing her hair.” When he was thirty-three, Packwood married a divorcée two years older, Georgie Oberteuffer Crockett, the daughter of the founder of the National Camp Fire Girls, a longtime leading figure in the Boy Scouts of America.

Georgie liked blue skies and horses and Bob Packwood liked smoke-filled rooms and leather-boothed cocktail lounges. Shortly after she married him, Georgie said, “He was the first man I'd ever met who didn't know how to flirt and didn't even try.” They adopted two children and a year after their marriage Packwood's Camp Fire girl noted in a calendar: “Bob got drunk and wants a divorce. Well, we almost made it through one year.” Bob Packwood started calling Georgie his “albatross,” went off on a drunken binge three or four times a year, and told her, “I want a divorce. We should never have married. I want to be a bachelor.” But they stayed together.

Reporters covering Packwood's campaigns were hearing rumors. A reporter who covered a political conference noted, “Some mornings Bob came in bleary-eyed and everyone suspected he had been sleeping with some Republican babe. He was playing close to the edge for someone recruiting women for key roles in his campaign.” Packwood was often seen at a place called the Black Anvil Tavern in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area near the Idaho border. “Packwood always seemed to have five or six real good-looking women on his staff,” said a drinking partner at the Black Anvil, “and he'd figure out which one it was for the night.”

A new campaign scheduler was quickly educated by other staff members about Oregon towns and cities to keep the candidate away from. “There was Susie in Salem, Judy in Eugene, Elizabeth in Coos Bay,” making it sometimes difficult for the scheduler to mount a real statewide campaign. Georgie heard the rumors, too, and asked Packwood why he always traveled with an attractive female aide. “People would call me a homosexual if I traveled with men,” Packwood said.

Georgie knew what was going on and knew, too, that Packwood had a lot of straying colleagues in the Senate. At a luncheon for senators' wives, she looked around the room and thought it “a whole get-together of enablers.” The Camp Fire girl saw that her husband was behaving increasingly oddly. Trying to stop a Democrat-sponsored bill to control campaign spending, Packwood refused to go to the Senate floor, so that there wouldn't be a quorum to hold a vote. The majority leader, Robert Byrd, sent the sergeant at arms for him. Packwood locked his office door and blocked the inner door with heavy furniture. Deputies broke down the doors and Packwood broke his finger resisting them. They had to carry Packwood to the Senate floor.

In 1989, the Camp Fire girl became convinced that Packwood was having an affair with his chief of staff, a woman who was often seen “conferring” with the militantly feminist senator in her bikini while they enjoyed a hot tub. “Senator Packwood is fond of hot tubs and does a lot of his thinking in them,” his comely chief of staff said. The Camp Fire girl pressed ahead with her divorce, and, ultimately, Packwood didn't fight it. “I don't want a wife. I don't want a house. I just want to be a senator,” Packwood told Georgie and his two now-grown children. “But Dad,” his son said to him, “someday you're going to get defeated, and we're the best friends you have.” Best friends or not, the divorce was granted and once again Packwood was the bachelor that he wanted to be.

In 1990, Senator Bob Packwood, the darling of feminists everywhere, public symbol of the sensitive, selfless, gender-blind man of the New Age future, was the star of the show at a Senate workshop on sexual assault. The room was filled with women Senate staffers learning how to defend themselves against sexual assault. Packwood was up onstage, having been asked by the organizers to play the role of the sexual predator. He was grabbing women by the butt, squeezing their breasts, reaching between their legs. He got a rousing round of applause.

Two years later, newspapers in Washington and Oregon started writing stories about a pattern of Packwood behavior that stretched back thirty years. It was behavior that wasn't run-of-the-mill Senate philandering. It was behavior that amounted to sexual harassment, intimidation, humiliation.

It wasn't Mick Jagger sixties behavior; it was “dirty old man” behavior from the fifties: kisses and copped feels in harmony with the Sinatra songs that Packwood sang to his aides, behavior in sync with the card he sent to one of his sexually abused staffers: “Were you the girl I met under the clock at the Biltmore in 1954?” Forty-eight women eventually came forward to tell their stories, most of them former staffers or aides, who said the unstated rule in the great feminist's office was “Put out or get out.”

There was the high school summer intern at his Senate office who asked him for a college recommendation. Packwood showed up at her home. “He seemed a little heated,” she said. “He laid a juicy kiss on my lips. I could feel the tongue coming.” . . . There was the sixty-four-year-old newspaper reporter who had just interviewed him. Packwood came around the desk and forced a kiss on her lips . . . . A woman who responded to a letter from Gloria Steinem asking for volunteers to help him. Packwood “turned and pulled me toward him and sensually kissed me in a way that was very inappropriate.” . . . A woman who worked on his 1986 reelection campaign. Packwood “leered at me, pushed his body toward me, smacked his lips suggestively, and asked for my measurements. I felt like some kind of beef steak.” . . .

A visiting twenty-three-year-old woman from a politically prominent family in Oregon, who had a drink with Packwood and her family members. Sitting next to her, Packwood put his hand up her skirt . . . . A woman being considered for a campaign job. “He asked me to dance at a restaurant. He kissed me on the neck. His hands were all over my back, my sides, my buttocks. He made suggestive movements.” . . . Another senator's aide, who went to his office to deliver a package. Georgie was there. Packwood introduced the aide to the Camp Fire girl, who immediately asked the aide if she could baby-sit their kids that night. The aide, somewhat taken aback, agreed. As Packwood walked her to her car from their home, he held the baby-sitter by the shoulders and tried to shove his tongue through her closed mouth while touching her legs . . . .

A local campaign worker who drove Packwood and his chief of staff, with whom he was having an affair, to a Eugene hotel. When the chief of staff got out of the car, Packwood “quickly gave me a French kiss.” . . . A twenty-one-year-old receptionist whom Packwood asked into his inner Senate office. “I sat down, he walked over to me and pulled me out of my chair, put his arms around me, and tried to kiss me. He stuck his tongue into my mouth.” . . . A twenty-one-year-old mail clerk, also summoned into Packwood's inner office. “He locked the doors. He ran his fingers through my hair and kissed me on the lips. I could feel my skin crawl. I was paralyzed and trying to push him away.” She quit her job with Packwood and went to work for others on Capitol Hill. Six years later, she met Packwood again in the Capitol's underground corridor. Packwood asked where she was working now. “He stopped at an unmarked office and said, ‘Step in and we'll finish the conversation.' ” Packwood grabbed her by the hand, kissed her, and started pushing pillows off a sofa. “I resisted, but he had a tight grip, and I pushed him away until he stopped. I kept saying to myself, How could you be so stupid?” . . .

A twenty-eight-year-old aide who had dinner with her husband and Packwood. When her husband went to the bathroom, Packwood kissed her. Packwood went up behind her at the office the next day and kissed the back of her neck. “Don't ever do that again!” she told him. She walked into another room and he followed her. He grabbed her by her ponytail and stood on her toes. “He reached his hand up my skirt to pull my underpants down. I struggled to free my feet. I freed one and began kicking him hard in the shins. It made him stop.” Packwood told her, “Not today, but someday.” She confronted Packwood a week later and said, “What was supposed to happen next? Were we just going to lie down on the rug? Like animals in the zoo?” Packwood told her, “I guess you're the type that wants a motel.” . . .

A twenty-seven-year-old elevator operator whom Packwood grabbed by the shoulders and kissed on the lips as soon as she closed the elevator doors. “What do you want from me?” she asked, frightened. Packwood said, “Two things. First thing is, I want to make love to you. Second thing is, you have a job where you hear things, and I want to hear what you hear.” . . . A thirteen-year-old hostess at a political gathering in Oregon. Packwood grabbed her buttocks. “I wasn't even dating yet,” she said. “I was so excited about getting the job. I got to wear a black dress and black panty hose. It was the first time I'd ever gotten to wear black panty hose.”

America's foremost male feminist was politically dead pig meat. The newspaper stories led to a formal Senate investigation. Jay Leno was at work on him: “President Clinton wants to give vaccination shots to all kids. Not to be outdone today, Senator Packwood promised free breast exams to all women.” And: “Boy, did you hear what happened to Packwood today? Broke three fingers when he tried to grab the rear end of a woman who used that
Buns of Steel
workout tape.” Gloria Steinem told reporters that, yes, she and Packwood had had dinner, then added, “Please don't say we had dinner alone.”

Packwood vowed to fight the charges. He got vanity plates for his car that said
MASADA
and explained that he had selected the name to honor the heroic band of Jewish patriots who had committed suicide rather than surrender. But it was all over when he was forced to turn over to the Senate an eight-thousand-page diary detailing many of his sexual misadventures. His diary was Packwood's Watergate tapes, his “Monkey Business” photo, his stained blue dress.