Bob Packwood's Harem Boy

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Nineteen seventy-three was the second and best of the Watergate summers. Packwood was still a callow, genial first termer -- a far cry from the decrepit, petulant urchin of recent C-SPAN fame. As for my internship, I don't have any flagrante delicto episodes to recount. Nor do I recall which woman in the office was then carrying herself with the special St. Elmo's fire attached to being Packwood's favorite of the moment, although I'm pretty sure there was one. Nonetheless, I was vividly if nonspecifically aware that at some level I was going about my risibly inconsequential duties in a harem.

There weren't any bimbos in sight. The women who worked for Packwood were brainy, and most of them were high-level staffers, not secretaries; in fact, I can only remember two or three male employees in the whole office. That most of the women were also really terrific -- looking was just lagniappe, and did I find anything objectionable in that? Get real! I was 17, and I thought it was grand.

Back then, I didn't have a clue that I was observing the Indian summer of a style, and neither, all too evidently, did Packwood. In the outside world, the revolution in sexual politics was already well along; 'male chauvinist pig' was such a routine term of opprobrium that it was usually shortened to MCP. But in the phallocentric Brigadoon that was Washington then, it was still commonly understood that the price extracted from personable, attractive young women for their interesting jobs in the corridors of power was to suffer being put on exhibit as office trophies, not to mention put on the spot anytime Senator Blow or Congressman Hard got that lubricious glint in his eye.

Beginning three years ago, when the Washington Post -- which had obligingly sat on the story until chum Packwood was safely reelected -- printed the first allegations of his sexual misconduct, his defenders portrayed him as a scapegoat for changing sexual mores. That's not an unreasonable argument, but neither is this: Even a quarter -- century ago, for a senator to hit on a 17-year-old female intern -- to cite only the charge that was the final straw for many, and that the Ethics Committee believed -- was unacceptable. Besides, that incident is supposed to have occurred in 1983; if Packwood hadn't heard by then that sexual mores were changing, it could only have been because he was too fucking dick-brained to take notice.

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