Packwood Releases Excerpts From Diaries Selected Entries Detail His Dinners, Reveal Little Worth Keeping Secret
“Had an elegantly catered dinner. Gazpacho, delicious gazpacho. Rice. Prawns, unfortunately, although they weren’t bad. Good asparagus, and a great salad. We headed home about 9:30 p.m.”
A handful of excerpts from Sen. Bob Packwood’s diaries reveals a man who cares a lot about detail, from culinary moments to critiques of his political speeches.
The Oregon Republican fought all the way to the Supreme Court to try to keep his diaries from becoming public, his lawyers warning ominously that Packwood musings might be embarrassing to fellow senators.
There’s nothing like that in the few carefully selected excerpts that were shown to The Associated Press in an effort to bolster Packwood’s defense against allegations of sexual misconduct under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. But the diary entries give an indication of the kinds of things he was recording during his 27-year Senate career.
The dinner menu with the prawns and gazpacho was from an entry on Tuesday, April 8, 1980.
On Aug. 12 of that year, he wrote of watching “Ted Kennedy’s eloquent, marvelous speech to the Democratic Convention.
“That is the Ted Kennedy I have known and seen before. Georgie (Packwood’s thenwife) got to watch it with me,” Packwood wrote.
On other occasions, he wrote about drinking beer with labor leaders, drinking wine in his campaign van, speeches he felt he gave poorly and the appearances of his campaign workers, including one woman he said “looks a little shaggy.”
The excerpts include a few general references to one of Packwood’s accusers - Gena Hutton - in an effort to show she gave no indication of having been offended after a February 1980 incident in which she says he kissed her and invited her to his motel room.
From Wednesday, Feb. 13, 1980:
“Closed off the afternoon some miscellaneous radio stations and between them singing in the van to our song sheets and the sing-along music. Gena, just laughing and thumping on the table, keeping time to the music. As she left us about 3:30 p.m. or 4 p.m., it would be maudlin to say we all had a tear in our eye, but she gave us each a kiss and there was almost a tear in her eye.
“She and Mimi hugged and you could just tell that we had found somebody and met somebody who fit. She’s a very loving woman, a giving woman and a smart woman. She owns six houses and a couple of apartments and she’s put it all together since she got divorced three years ago. She is sufficiently independent that she really doesn’t have to work too hard for a living and absolutely loves the campaign.”
The excerpts shown the AP include no embarrassing information about congressional colleagues.