Let me tell you what Bob Packwood did.
The former senator from Oregon, dead at ninety-three, spent twenty-seven years in the Senate building a reputation as the Republican who defended abortion rights, who voted across party lines, who called himself nobody’s lackey. More than two dozen women—former employees and acquaintances—accused him of unwanted sexual advances. The Senate ethics committee investigated. His own diaries, which he kept obsessively, documented the pattern. He resigned in 1995 rather than face expulsion, then walked into a lucrative lobbying career in Washington and told a reporter in 2002 that he had gotten past it. “People have told me it must have been tough on me, or it seems unfair,” he said. “But you cannot go through the rest of life and say look what happened.”
The family sent the word out without details. They did not need to send details. The Senate ethics committee sent the details in 1995, when the investigation revealed what more than two dozen former employees and acquaintances had known quietly: the man was a predator. He resigned to save the chamber’s reputation, but he kept his own reputation long enough to build a lucrative lobbying business in Washington. He said at the end that he did not want to be remembered for what he did. His victims have no such option.
Senator Ron Wyden, who replaced Packwood in 1996, refused the temptation to soften the accounting. “His horrible history as documented in his own diaries will forever overshadow that public record,” Wyden said. “Simply put, historians’ first line about Bob Packwood must include those women who he abused and assaulted for years and years.”
Wyden is right, and not only about the first line. Packwood’s death notice is a test of whether the obituary genre can be pried open wide enough to hold the women it has always ejected. The genre’s reflex is balance: his record on abortion and tax reform on one side, the allegations on the other, a life assessed in the round. But when a man’s private conduct consists of more than two dozen credible accusations documented in his own hand, balance is not a virtue; balance is a lie the genre tells to protect men like Packwood from the full weight of what they did.
There is a prophetic register for exactly this kind of man. The Hebrew prophets did not spare us their vocabulary when religious and political leaders used public virtue to cover private predation. Isaiah asked what the point was of our multitudinous sacrifices when the hands of the leaders were full of blood. He told us to seek justice, to rescue the oppressed, to defend the orphan, and to plead for the widow. The diaries record unwanted advances, sexual assaults, and the abuse of women who worked in the rooms he controlled. The text speaks of a man who used his power to violate the very people he swore to protect. The tradition names what this is. It is wickedness masked as public service.
Matthew 23 names the type—the cup polished outside, extortion inside—and the type fits. A public record of abortion-rights advocacy does not cancel a private record of sexual predation. The public record is real; the women’s accounts are real; both are his life. The question is which one the obituary leads with, and the answer determines whether the obituary is an act of witness or an act of the whitewashing the Gospels name as the Pharisees’ defining sin.
Packwood’s career of legislative dealmaking earned him the adjectives the Associated Press gathered in 1992: blunt, independent, outspoken, maverick, boat-rocker, loose cannon, political survivor. “I try to reach conclusions independently and then I’m willing to fight for those conclusions,” he said, and the 1986 tax reform he helped pass was real legislation that shaped the country. All of this belongs in the record.
But the twenty-seven-year Senate career and the two dozen accusers and the diaries are not separate ledgers. They are the same life. When Packwood told the Salem Statesman Journal he had “gotten past” the scandal—“you cannot go through the rest of life and say look what happened”—he was describing the mechanism by which powerful men forgive themselves. The women do not get to get past it. The abuse does not sunset. The ledger the obituary-writer keeps is not the ledger the abused keep, and the obituary that treats Packwood’s “gotten past it” as closure is an obituary that has chosen whose accounting matters.
We who claim to uphold the sanctity of life have too often been the people who polished those stones. We have looked at the predator in our own coalition and told ourselves that the policy victory he helped secure was worth the cost of the women he destroyed. We in the church must confess this: when the predator served our political ends, we protected him. The failure is not confined to one party or one era. From the Capitol to the sanctuary, we have repeatedly excused the abuse of women when it comes wrapped in a flag we recognize. The symmetry is exact and the shame is shared.
The country is currently watching a Maine Senate race in which the Republican candidate, Graham Platner, faces scrutiny over past texts and an abuse accusation—the same institutional machinery that shielded Packwood for years now fracturing under a candidate who cannot control the narrative the way Packwood’s generation could. The pattern is durable. A man builds a public career on positions that win him the right adjectives. Women come forward. The institution investigates. The man resigns, or doesn’t, and the adjectives fight the accusations for control of the first paragraph of the obituary. The adjectives usually win because the genre was built by the same institutions the men ran.
Dorothy Day, whose Catholic Worker columns never softened the naming of harm, responded to Hiroshima not with strategic calculus but with the dead—the body count the official statements omitted. That is the posture the obituary that serves power refuses. Packwood’s body count is not a number but a list of women’s names, and the obituary that wants to lead with his abortion-rights record is an obituary that wants those names to stay buried in the diaries he never wanted the public to read.
The women are the center of this story, not the politician who stole their dignity. Pope Francis told the church at Lampedusa that we have lost the sense of fraternal responsibility, that we pass by the broken bodies of our neighbors and call it politics. When the powerful take what does not belong to them, they tell themselves the story that the taking is a favor. The culture of well-being makes us blind to the crying of the abused.
The door of return is open to every person, living and dead—this is the pastoral side of the register, and it is not nullified by the prophetic naming. Packwood was a person. His legislative achievements were real. The women he harmed were persons. Their accounts are real. A life can be held in full without the genre’s reflex of balance softening what the women described. The obituary that cannot hold both is an obituary that has chosen the man.
But the door of return does not open for a man who refuses to name what he did. The country can repent. We can build an order where the dignity of the woman in the office is as sacred as the child in the womb, where the public servant is measured by the mercy he shows the powerless behind closed doors, and where the diaries are not needed to tell us the truth.
Packwood died on Saturday. His family’s statement did not include additional details. The obituaries are being written now. Let them begin with the women.