Bob Packwood spent almost 27 years in the U.S. Senate, helped rewrite the entire American tax code, and pushed to legalize abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. None of that is the first thing people think of when they hear his name.
Packwood died June 6, 2026, at age 93, in a care facility in southern California where he and his wife rented a vacation home. His family said he died of natural causes, 31 years after his own colleagues voted to throw him out of the Senate. His wife, Elaine Franklin, called him a man who “touched many lives” in a short statement. The people who worked for him remember something very different.
From Portland Lawyer to Senate Power Broker
Packwood came up fast and never slowed down. He was born in Portland in 1932, went to Willamette University (where one of his professors was a future senator, Mark Hatfield), then earned his law degree at NYU. By 1960 he was the youngest big-city party chairman in the country. By 1962 he was the youngest member of the Oregon Legislature.
Then came the win that put him on the map. In 1968, at just 36, he beat Democratic incumbent Wayne Morse, an Oregon legend who had held the seat for 23 years. The margin was about 3,300 votes after a recount in which more than 100,000 ballots got challenged by both sides. He arrived in Washington as the youngest senator in the chamber and quickly turned into a rising GOP star. By 1980 he was running the committee in charge of getting Republicans elected to the Senate. He was, in the words of one paper, a blunt, independent maverick who loved rocking the boat.
The Newspaper Story That Changed Everything
In November 1992, just two weeks after voters handed him a fifth term, The Washington Post dropped a story that ended him. Former female staffers and others came forward describing a pattern that went back decades. The paper reported that several women 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.”
One of the most disturbing accounts came from Julie Williamson, who said Packwood found her working alone in his Portland office back in 1969. She said he kissed the back of her neck, backed her into a corner, grabbed her ponytail with one hand and clawed at her girdle with the other. Williamson quit two weeks later. When she asked if he seriously expected her to give in on the office rug, his answer became one of the most quoted lines of the whole scandal: “I suppose you’re one of the ones who want a hotel room.” Eventually more than two dozen women came forward.
The Diaries He Tried to Erase
For years, Packwood stalled. He kept Senate investigators at arm’s length while still running one of the most powerful jobs in Washington as chair of the Senate Finance Committee. His undoing turned out to be his own handwriting.
Packwood kept a detailed personal diary, and the Ethics Committee wanted to see it. He handed over 5,000 pages, then refused when the committee demanded another 3,200. The problem? Investigators discovered he had edited the diary, scrubbing out what were allegedly references to sexual encounters and the abuse claims against him. The committee said he withheld, altered, and destroyed evidence, calling it “a crime against the Senate.” He also made what some colleagues took as a threat to expose dirt on other members of Congress if they pushed too hard. It did not work.
The 94-6 Vote That Sealed It
The fight over those diaries got ugly and public. In 1993, the Senate held two full days of extraordinary debate over whether Packwood had to comply with a subpoena for his journals. When it came time to vote, his colleagues sided against him in a landslide. The Senate voted 94 to 6 to enforce the subpoena.
Packwood didn’t quit there. He dragged the case into the federal courts and lost at every level. The fight ended when Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused his request to have the U.S. Supreme Court step in. With nowhere left to go, the man who had survived recounts, primaries, and decades of political knife fights finally ran out of road.
Expelled, and He Never Really Said Sorry
On September 7, 1995, all six members of the Select Committee on Ethics voted unanimously to expel him. Their nearly 200-page report found he had committed at least 18 separate instances of sexual misconduct between 1969 and 1990, that he obstructed the investigation, and that he had tried to score jobs for his then-wife from lobbyists with business before his committee. Most of the women, the committee noted, worked for him or depended on his power.
Packwood resigned hours later. On the floor he said, “It is my duty to resign. It is the honorable thing to do for this country, for this Senate. I leave this institution not with malice, but with love.” Years later, in a 2013 interview, he offered an explanation that landed as anything but an apology: “In the majority of the cases, I could not remember the woman, could not remember the incident.” One accuser, Lauri Hennessey, who now teaches at the University of Washington, put it plainly: “He never apologized for all the harm he caused when it first happened, and what he did to shut everyone up.”
The Tax Bill He Was Proudest Of
Here’s the strange part. Strip away the scandal, and Packwood was one of the most effective dealmakers the Senate had. His crowning achievement was the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the biggest overhaul of the tax code in a generation. The hallway outside his committee got nicknamed “Gucci Gulch” because of all the expensive lobbyists crowding in to protect their clients’ loopholes.
The bill nearly died, then got revived over beers at an Irish bar near the Capitol. Packwood had been asking witnesses at what rate deductions stopped mattering, figured the answer was around 25 percent, and told his aide to build a plan around it. The plan cleared his committee unanimously on May 3. The full Senate passed it 97 to 3 that June. President Reagan signed it into law. The top rate dropped, a pile of deductions vanished, and the system got simpler. It’s the kind of bipartisan win that almost never happens anymore.
The Maverick Streak and Life After
Packwood broke with his party plenty. After the Watergate tapes came out in 1974, he called a Los Angeles Times bureau chief to announce he’d be the first Senate Republican to call for Nixon’s impeachment. He was the first senator to introduce a bill legalizing abortion back in 1970, three years before Roe, and couldn’t even find a co-sponsor. He fought the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He also helped stop a dam on the Snake River and create the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.
After leaving office, he cashed in. He launched a lobbying shop called Sunrise Research Corp in 1997, and by 1999 it was grossing $1.5 million a year. For several comfortable years he pulled in $240,000 annually lobbying for a single company. He eventually sold his big Dunthorpe house and downsized into a penthouse in Lake Oswego.
How He’ll Be Remembered
The man who replaced him, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, summed up the split decision better than anyone. Wyden said Packwood deserved real credit for his record on abortion rights and tax reform, but “his horrible history as documented in his own diaries will forever overshadow that public record.” Christine Drazan, an Oregon Republican, called him “a consequential figure whose influence shaped generations of political leaders.”
Both things are true, and that’s the uncomfortable thing about Bob Packwood. He was a champion of compromise with a personal life that compromised everything else. He wrote a tax law that touched every American household and helped create a chunk of protected wilderness in his home state. He also became, well before the MeToo era, the textbook example of private behavior burying a public legacy. He spent his final decades insisting he didn’t want to be remembered for one controversy. In the end, that’s exactly what happened.