by Alan Murray
Most freshman senators try to start slowly, and to concentrate on things close to home. Bill Bradley’s first bill, for example, was a plan for a new waterworks in Paterson, New Jersey. Brash Bob Packwood was different—his initial piece of legislation was a proposal to abolish the seniority system for committee chairmanships. It was an act of rebellion for a junior member of the collegial Senate, and it angered his senior colleagues. The proposal went nowhere.
Packwood always took pride in his outspokenness, reasoning that Oregon voters tolerated—indeed, appreciated—an iconoclast. During a White House meeting at the height of the Watergate scandal, Packwood looked President Nixon straight in the eye and said, “Your weakness is credibility. This has always been your short suit with the news media and the general public.”
The young senator went on to strike the first of many liberal poses that quickly branded him as a maverick in the Republican ranks. He played a key role in helping the Democrats kill President Nixon’s nominations of Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Next, he turned his attention to the powder-keg issue of abortion and sided with those who wanted abortions legalized. In 1970, three years before the landmark Supreme Court decision that gave women the legal right to have an abortion, he introduced a model law that would have both sanctioned and regulated abortions in the District of Columbia. He also introduced a bill that would have legalized abortions nationwide. Neither bill attracted a single cosponsor.
The measures earned him the everlasting enmity of anti-abortion groups across the country, which labeled him “Senator Death.” (When he became Finance Committee chairman, a political opponent expanded that to “Senator Death-and-Taxes.”) After his first decade in the Senate, he had gained a reputation as a gadfly, and he seemed forever afflicted with high staff turnover. He fancied that his views might have a rejuvenating effect on the GOP, but he seemed to be one of the few Republicans who thought so.
In 1978, Packwood began to play a more mainstream role as a member of the Commerce Committee. He wrestled with the difficulties of deregulation—in trucking, broadcasting, and passenger airlines—and found a platform to espouse his developing economic vision. “There’s no reason why we should be controlling capitalistic acts by consenting adults,” he said. In 1981, Packwood was elevated to the chairmanship of the committee when the Republicans took control of the Senate in the wake of the Reagan landslide. He also became more adept at manipulating the Senate rules to win favors for his home state. Budget Committee staffers coined a verb to describe his skill at inserting pork-barrel amendments into spending bills: Packwooding.
Even as he climbed the ladder of Senate leadership, gaining more seniority and responsibility, Packwood maintained his penchant for candor and independence. He became one of President Reagan’s most visible antagonists.
In 1981, Packwood, a longtime supporter of Israel, led the fight in the Senate against the Reagan-approved sale of advanced radar planes, or AWACs, to Saudi Arabia. It was a long, fierce, and dirty battle. After a meeting between Packwood and the president in the Oval Office, White House aides put out the word that Packwood had been rude and had bluntly warned that backing the sale would lose Jewish contributions and votes for the GOP. In the end, Packwood was defeated and the sale went through.
His problems with President Reagan worsened considerably in 1982. That year, Packwood did more than oppose the president’s legislation; he viciously attacked Reagan’s intelligence and judgment. Serving at the time as chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, the rebellious senator publicly accused President Reagan of chasing away blacks, Jews, women, and blue-collar workers from the Republican party with what he derided as Reagan’s “idealized concept of America.” He portrayed Reagan as a buffoon who told mindless anecdotes in answer to serious questions. After listening to Reagan stories, such as one about poor people buying vodka with food stamps, Packwood said he and his colleagues would “just shake our heads.”
“The Republican party has just about written off those women who work for wages in the marketplace. We are losing them in droves. You cannot write them off and the blacks off and the Hispanics off and the Jews off and assume you’re going to build a party on white Anglo-Saxon males over forty,” Packwood said. “There aren’t enough of us.”
Packwood’s tirade was too much for the president’s backers. The Oregon Republican had been remarkably successful as head of the party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee, raising money through direct mail to expand the committee’s take to $40 million in 1981-82, from a mere $2 million in 1975-76. But that success was not enough to save his job. The day after he made his comments, Packwood was forced to apologize to the president. Joseph Coors, the arch-conservative brewer, started to organize a boycott of the campaign committee.
After the 1982 elections, Packwood was voted out of the campaign committee job, at the behest of the White House, and was replaced by the more compliant Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. “Being a maverick is great,” said Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, the president’s best friend in Congress and the agent of Packwood’s undoing that year, “but it’s a luxury you can’t afford in leadership.”
Packwood was an obsessively organized man who demanded that things be done his way. He sometimes arrived in his office at six in the morning to study the loose-leaf briefing books that his staff painstakingly compiled for him each day. Each page in the briefing books was triple-punched and double-spaced as he instructed. The books themselves had to have metal hinges because, Packwood explained, they made the binders easier to handle, especially for the volume of material he had to digest as chairman.
The willful Oregonian never did anything halfway. Years before tax overhaul, when he was afflicted with cataracts and unable to read, he had tax law read to him each morning. Even after surgery improved his vision, his eyesight remained less than optimal. He had to ask the television networks to use filtered lights during Finance Committee markups, because the glare hurt his eyes. In normal office light, Packwood sometimes had trouble recognizing people who were standing across a room.
Details were important to him, and time was never wasted. When he campaigned at home, Packwood took a secretary with him in his big white van, dubbed the “White Whale,” so that thank-you notes to the previous host could be written before he reached the next stop. His driver recorded almost every campaign stop with a video camera. At the end of the day, Packwood recorded his thoughts on a tape recorder for a diary that was transcribed by a friend.
Details were also preserved in meticulous briefing books that covered each of Oregon’s thirty-six counties. Each book contained the county’s history, its federally funded projects with dollar amounts, and a record of Packwood’s own past appearances there. The county books also had long lists of names, with red dots next to business leaders whose correspondence needed to be answered quickly.
Packwood was a man of intensity and flawless precision in everything he did. At home, his music cassettes were always in alphabetical order. He kept a stopwatch on his steering wheel to time his trips. Even games for him were more than just fun. He had been known to play squash with bloodied knees. Once, his friends set him up for a practical joke by giving him the phrase motherfucker to act out in a game of charades. Packwood went at the task with vigor: He easily got the players to guess the first word by making a rocking-cradle motion with his arms. For the second word, he got right down on his stomach and made rapid, up and down motions. After a long while, Packwood’s wife, Georgie, who was not in on the joke, shouted, “Mother push-ups!”
Packwood’s favorite movie was Lawrence of Arabia, and he idolized the eccentric lead character in that film as “a man with a zealous discipline intent upon pursuing a goal that he’s already decided on.” Like anyone whose life was so orderly and rigid, Packwood sometimes acted impetuously when crossed. He berated aides mercilessly when they disagreed with him, or even when he thought they did. He did not suffer fools gladly. Even small in
fractions would chafe him: Driving in heavy traffic through downtown Portland in 1985, he repeatedly barked orders about alternative routes he insisted would speed the journey. He suspected his friends of working against him. During the tax debate, Packwood once said of his allies in the Reagan administration, “They’ll sell me out in a minute.” These tendencies inspired some congressional staffers to give him the name “Cap’n Bob,” after the paranoid Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
For all this harshness, Packwood had a soft side. Staffers he once chewed out would later become his friends; all would be forgotten. To his own staffers, he was incredibly loyal. He helped them get jobs elsewhere in the Republican administration, and when they went to work as lobbyists, he did not hesitate to tell their clients what a fine choice they had made in representation. “He wanted to be thought of as a work-oriented genius,” Diefenderfer said, but added that in many ways, Packwood was really “a Jekyll and Hyde.”
In his off-hours, Packwood was a beer-drinker and a belly-laugher. He listed his favorite food as pork chops, and he was once asked to leave a pizza parlor for laughing too loudly. In Portland, one of his favorite restaurants was a college hangout called The Cheerful Tortoise, where he knew he could get a pile of nachos and a pitcher of beer and enjoy himself without being bothered by anyone. On weekends, he drove a battered old car and walked around in tattered clothes. In preparation for his high-profile fling with tax overhaul, his wife and staff forced him to endure an overhaul of his personal appearance. The treatment included a new wardrobe—new suits, new stiffly starched shirts, and power-suspenders.
Packwood was also a very private man. He liked to sail, but alone, in one-person boats. He also liked to conceal his ambition to become president of the United States with stories—true ones—about how much he valued his privacy. “I’m not prepared to give up the last shred of privacy I have,” he told People magazine. “I want to [be able to] go to Shakey’s Pizza with my family without being recognized.”
Packwood became chairman of the Finance Committee when Bob Dole, his predecessor, was elected majority leader of the Senate in late 1984. Dole had run the committee in a strongly partisan manner, cutting the Democrats out of important tax-writing decisions. Packwood had a very different vision of how to run a committee, which was colored by his admiration for Russell Long, the panel’s top Democrat, who had chaired the committee for fifteen years in a bipartisan fashion, and who, during that time, was one of Washington’s most powerful people.
Packwood was a student of Long, and at critical junctures throughout the tax-reform debate, he relied on Long’s advice and counsel. Long had once told Packwood this basic rule: “When the Congress organizes in January, you want to know where you want to be a year from September. If you know that, you know what you want to achieve, then you can structure all your thinking and organization, planning and everything toward that end.”
On the list of things that Packwood initially hoped to achieve as Finance Committee chairman, tax reform did not rank very high. At a breakfast with President Reagan shortly after the release of Treasury I, Packwood said: “I hope you’re not going to push simplification for simplification’s sake. Simplification for the sake of simplification is to beat your brains out. To go through the whole process and wind up without a dime’s dent in the deficit just doesn’t make sense.”
When Secretary Baker was revising the Treasury plan in the spring of 1985, Packwood threatened to kill the proposal not once, but twice. The first was over the issue of health-insurance fringes. On tax day—April 15—Packwood vowed to a meeting of building trade unions that if the final Reagan plan taxed employer-provided fringes, “I will do everything I can to defeat the bill, no matter what else is in it.”
The second threat was over the potential loss of some timber tax breaks. A few days after a potential rival for his Senate seat, Democratic Representative Ron Wyden, held hearings on the president’s proposal, Packwood declared: “This isn’t tax reform. It’s the deliberate act of sabotaging an entire industry and thereby the state of Oregon.” “If the breaks were not retained,” he said, “I will do everything possible to kill the entire bill.” The next day, Packwood retracted the death threat after Secretary Baker made an appeal for moderation. The senator’s aides tried to take blame for the belligerent tone of the timber remark, but Packwood later confessed, “I wrote it myself.”
If Packwood was not a tax reformer before the House passed its tax-reform bill, his views began to change immediately afterward. First of all, he was chairman of the Finance Committee, and taxes were his arena. He had an institutional responsibility to approve a tax-reform bill, despite any personal inclinations to oppose it. Second, he was up for reelection, and he had to be extra careful to avoid doing anything that would jeopardize his chances. “It’s like the gallows focusing the mind,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Darman, describing Packwood’s change in attitude after the House sent its bill to the Senate. “There’s a different view of capital punishment when the noose is around the neck.”
President Reagan had made tax reform his chief domestic initiative for his second term, and as the Republicans’ top tax writer in the Republican-controlled Senate, Packwood could not let him down without suffering the consequences. Like Rostenkowski, Packwood had an obligation to his party not to drop the tax-reform ball. To be sure, Packwood had defied the president in the past, but he had suffered for his rebelliousness and had no interest in repeating the mistake. After the 1984 election, he had given Jim Baker a handwritten note to deliver to the president, which stated that he wanted to be a team player in Reagan’s second term, and that he was willing to help the administration in any way he could. Later, at a meeting of senators who were up for reelection, the president called Packwood aside and thanked him for the good wishes. In politics, Packwood says, “you learn there are no permanent enemies or friends, just temporary alliances. You don’t bear grudges.”
Packwood had ample reason to make amends with the president. He faced a tough primary election challenge in the spring of 1986 from Joe Lutz, a smooth-talking Baptist minister. The common wisdom in Oregon was that the primary was the best opportunity to knock off Packwood, because his support among hard-core Republicans was thin. His pro-choice position on abortion left him open to an attack from the political right wing, and Lutz was going to be a serious rival from that faction of the party.
The chairman’s strategy to beat Lutz was to avoid, at all costs, crossing the popular President Reagan, and instead, to hide behind his coattails. “Every year there is one candidate that the press says can’t be beat that’s beaten,” Packwood said, explaining his cautiousness. “I’m trying to make sure that isn’t me.” If the president wanted to push for tax reform, then Packwood, in 1986 at least, would be a reformer. He pledged his support to the president’s effort, and in return, the president praised Packwood in a television commercial made for use during the primary campaign.
In preparation for his new role as reformer, Packwood sat down and thought hard about which of the multitude of tax breaks in the existing tax system he really cared about. He tried to decide which he felt he could not vote to eliminate, even in the name of reform. He came up with only two. They were (1) protecting the tax-free status of fringe benefits and (2) saving tax breaks for the timber industry, which was a staple of the Oregon economy. If a tax-reform bill could be drafted that preserved both of those, he thought, then he could be for tax reform. Packwood, as chairman, wielded enormous authority over the fate of the tax system; yet his tax philosophy boiled down to just these two items: fringe benefits and timber.
Packwood was a zealot for the tax breaks to encourage employee fringe benefits, largely because he hated the idea of national health insurance—an opinion that endeared him to the political action committees of the insurance industry. He feared that unless private employers were given incentive through the tax code to provide health insurance for their workers, the federal government would have to step
in to provide it. As a result, he used his monthly breakfast meetings with insurance and labor lobbyists to help coordinate efforts even in the House to fight taxing fringes. On behalf of the insurance industry, he also participated in trade-show films and put his name to newspaper advertisements that promoted the preservation of tax-free fringes.
The timber issue was a matter of political survival. A lawmaker from Oregon had to support timber the way that a lawmaker from Texas had to support oil. And Packwood was never bashful about stumping for timber. In preparation for a meeting with timber representatives on tax reform in 1985, Packwood’s staff prepared a memo that suggested he emphasize four points: “(1) your continuing and unwavering support for their cause; (2) the need for unity among timber concerns; (3) the strong support among various Finance Committee members; and (4) the need to avoid overconfidence merely because they have you on their side. They need to keep up the fight in order to insure that the proposals [that hurt the timber industry] are defeated.”
Surely, Packwood thought, it would be possible to draft a reform bill that preserved fringe benefits and timber tax breaks. If he could do that, he could support the president and push hard for reform. Although once the darling of special-interest lobbyists, Bob Packwood decided he must transform himself into a proponent of the most radical overhaul of the tax code in history. It was a remarkable and unexpected reincarnation, but the circumstances that were sucking him into the anomalous role of a leader of tax reform were just too strong to resist. Packwood tried to explain his way out of the situation this way: “The only constant in history is change. I don’t write off the possibility that anything can happen. I’ve been in this business long enough that nothing surprises me.”
On the snowy Friday and Saturday of January 24 and 25, 1986, Packwood took a page from the Rostenkowski tax-reform textbook, and packed his committee into a bus for a private retreat in the woods. The Finance Committee retreat was held at a quiet inn in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. There, Packwood and his members spent twenty-four hours airing the many reasons they did not like the House bill. The crisp mountain air was filled with rhetoric about “international competitiveness” and “savings, investment, and capital formation”—all buzzwords for keeping rather than trimming back corporate tax preferences.