Bob Packwood, a moderate Republican senator from Oregon who championed women’s rights but was forced to resign in 1995 after his fellow senators threatened to expel him for making aggressive sexual advances toward more than 20 women, some of them his employees, died on Saturday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 93.
His death, while on vacation, was confirmed by his wife, Elaine Franklin, in a statement.
The case against Mr. Packwood, who had spent nearly half his life in the Senate, unfolded long before the #MeToo movement spurred society to take more seriously allegations of sexual misconduct against high-profile men. An inquiry by the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Ethics dragged on for more than three years before the committee recommended unanimously that he be expelled.
That recommendation was based in part on Mr. Packwood’s diary, in which he detailed his predatory behavior, including toward women he supervised. “Twenty-two staff members I made love to,” he boasted, “and probably 75 others I’ve had a passionate relationship with.”
Only 15 senators have been expelled in Senate history; Mr. Packwood would have been the first since the Civil War. Rather than be tarred with that ignominious distinction, he resigned.
The Packwood case presented a tortuous quandary for feminist leaders. Mr. Packwood was a socially liberal Republican, and for some women’s groups, he was an important ally.
He was an early and vocal supporter of abortion rights. He introduced a bill to legalize abortion nationally in 1970, three years before the Supreme Court did so in Roe v. Wade, and he vigorously opposed Republicans who proposed anti-abortion measures.
His efforts won him the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1979 and a “Good Guy” award from the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1985. Women’s groups raised millions of dollars for his campaigns over the years.
He was a strong proponent of family leave and gun control. He also sought to prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. He championed environmental and conservation causes.
Breaking frequently with his party, he was the first Republican senator to publicly support impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Mr. Packwood also opposed four Supreme Court nominations made by Republican presidents, including Clarence Thomas’s, which was nearly derailed by sexual harassment allegations in 1991.
Although reports of Mr. Packwood springing himself on women had been circulating for years in Oregon, they did not surface nationally until 1992. Shortly after his re-election to a fifth term, The Washington Post reported that he had made uninvited advances toward 10 women, many of whom were on his staff.
“Several said he was abrupt, grabbing them without warning, kissing them forcefully and persisting until they made clear that they were not interested or had pushed him away,” The Post reported.
Before the article was published, Mr. Packwood denied the allegations and refused to cooperate with The Post. Instead, he gave the newspaper embarrassing information about some of the women’s sexual histories to undermine their credibility. The Post delayed publication until after the election, which Mr. Packwood won narrowly.
The Ethics Committee immediately began an investigation into the charges. Days later, Mr. Packwood told reporters at a news conference that he understood that his behavior had been wrong.
“I just didn’t get it,” he said. “I do now.”
“I am here to take full responsibility for my conduct,” he added, and apologized. But he declined to specify what he was sorry for, saying, “I’m apologizing for the conduct that it was alleged that I did.”
Mr. Packwood also said he would not step down. Women in Oregon had called for his resignation after The Post story ran, and they built a coalition to try to force him from office. National women’s groups were more ambivalent, given his leadership on many of their issues.
But after the news conference, many reluctantly decided they had no choice but to pivot. Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, concluded that her group could not ignore the charges. Doing so, she said, would only raise the question: “Can we be bought? And, if so, how cheap?”
Mr. Packwood caught a break when Republicans won control of Congress in 1994. By dint of seniority, he returned to the chairmanship of the powerful Finance Committee, where he sat at the fulcrum of decision-making on critical issues like taxes, welfare and health care.
As chairman of that committee in an earlier Congress, he had been central to significant legislative achievements. His biggest accomplishment was shepherding passage of the landmark bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986, the most comprehensive restructuring of the U.S. income tax code in decades. It lowered tax rates but also eliminated numerous tax shelters, deductions and other breaks.
He had also been chairman of the Commerce Committee, where he helped craft legislation to deregulate the airline, trucking, railroad and telecommunications industries.
Returning to the majority allowed Mr. Packwood to focus on big national issues in which he was an expert, and gave him the chance to restore his standing, at least for a time.
But the Ethics Committee’s investigation continued.
As it expanded to include accusations of corruption, Mr. Packwood stonewalled it with legal challenges. In May 1995, though, the committee issued a damning bill of particulars, saying it had “substantial credible evidence” that Mr. Packwood had committed at least 18 sexual assaults between 1969 and 1990.
It also said that he had tampered with evidence by destroying parts of his diary, an incriminating document replete with scenes out of a bodice-ripper.
“If she didn’t want me to feather her nest, why did she come into the Xerox room?” he wrote at one point. “She knew I was copying stuff in there. I had my jacket off and my sleeves rolled up, revealing the well-defined musculature of my sinewy arms, which were always bulging with desire. I know what she wanted.”
The report also said he had abused his authority. The Ethics Committee found that Mr. Packwood, who was divorced from his first wife in 1991, had solicited job offers for her from lobbyists who had an interest in legislation in which he was involved. (If she had an income, his alimony payments would be reduced.)
Shortly thereafter, two more women stepped forward, including one who had been a 17-year-old intern in his office when he “laid a juicy kiss on my lips,” she told The Post. With this news, even Republican senators who had circled the wagons around Mr. Packwood began losing patience.
On Sept. 6, the Ethics Committee issued its final report and recommended unanimously that Mr. Packwood be expelled, the most severe punishment the Senate can exact.
The committee’s nearly 200-page report was backed by 10 volumes of evidence it had accumulated during the previous 33 months. Running 10,145 pages and weighing 40 pounds, the documents described in startling detail Mr. Packwood’s activities over a quarter-century.
They said, for example, that in 1969, in his Senate office in Portland, Ore., he “grabbed a staff worker, stood on her feet, grabbed her hair, forcibly pulled her head back and kissed her on the mouth, forcing his tongue into her mouth. Senator Packwood also reached under her skirt and grabbed at her undergarments.”
In releasing the report, Senator Mitch McConnell, the powerful Kentucky Republican and chairman of the Ethics Committee, said, “These were not merely stolen kisses, as Senator Packwood has claimed.”
Senator McConnell added, “There was a habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a senator.”
Mr. Packwood initially declared he would fight the charges. He went on television talk shows that evening and the next morning to say he had been treated unfairly and was guilty of nothing more than “overeager” kissing.
But by the afternoon of Sept. 7, with the full Senate preparing to expel him, Mr. Packwood took to the floor and announced his resignation. He said through tears that he was “aware of the dishonor that has befallen me in the last three years,” adding, “It is my duty to resign.”
Robert William Packwood was born in Portland on Sept. 11, 1932, the son of Gladys (Taft) Packwood and Frederick Packwood, who was a lobbyist for the timber and railroad industries.
Bob graduated from Willamette University in Salem, the state capital, with a degree in political science in 1954. He was a standout student at New York University School of Law, where he earned awards at national moot court competitions and was elected president of his class.
After graduating in 1957, he clerked for Chief Justice Harold J. Warner of the Oregon Supreme Court and in 1958 went into private practice in Portland. Immersing himself in local Republican politics, he was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1962. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968 and narrowly defeated Wayne Morse, the four-term incumbent, a Democrat. When he joined the Senate, at 36, Mr. Packwood was its youngest member.
He married Georgie Ann Oberteuffer in 1964. They divorced in 1991, and she died in 2025. In 1998 he married Elaine Franklin, a former chief of his Senate staff. She survives him, as do two children from his first marriage, William H. Packwood and Shyla Middleton; two stepsons, Simon and Jonathan; and three grandchildren.
Although Mr. Packwood had once described lobbyists as assassins, after he left the Senate he became a lobbyist himself. His firm, Sunrise Research Corporation, founded in 1998, represented FedEx, Marriott and Northwest Airlines, among other companies, on tax and trade matters.
In 2015, when he was 82, he was invited by Republican senators to testify on Capitol Hill about the 1986 overhaul of the tax code. Reporters questioned why someone who had left in disgrace should be allowed to return.
“I believe in redemption,” Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chaired the Finance Committee, told Politico. “I believe that you don’t judge people for mistakes made in the past; you judge them for what they are today. And frankly, he did a terrific job of working on tax reform.”
Adam Clymer, a former Times reporter and editor who died in 2018, contributed reporting.
