Investigating Abuses of Power

RPPI Fellow Florence Graves works to change public policy

By Alec Solomita

Special to the Gazette

"In graduate school," Florence George Graves recalls, "I wrote and published a semi-investigative political piece revealing that the budget of the city of Tucson's public relations department had increased tenfold in 10 years without the public noticing. I still remember the title," she adds with her easy laugh, " 'Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick.' The city's next budget cut the office in half."

Over the ensuing years, Graves has continued to produce incisive investigative journalism that gets results. Presently in her second year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute (RPPI), Graves is best-known these days for breaking the 1992 Washington Post story that detailed a series of sexual misconduct charges against then-Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, a story which led, eventually, to a probe by the Senate Ethics Committee and, ultimately, to the senator's resignation.

The story behind the story reveals in Graves a commitment and tenacity one can't discern from the headlines alone. In a recent interview in the comfortable parlor of RPPI's Brattle Street headquarters, Graves talked about the experience.

Breaking the Packwood Story

In the wake of Anita Hill's role in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Graves began, in the spring of 1992, her own investigation into the problem of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. "It was such an obvious follow-up story that I kept on expecting a major news organization to start looking into the problem," said Graves, "and finally, when I saw it wasn't happening, I decided to look into it myself."

At first, the investigation was general but soon Graves noticed that one senator's name came up "very frequently." Within a few weeks, Graves learned of two specific charges of serious sexual misconduct by Sen. Packwood, one which took place in 1969 and one in 1990. As she pointed out in a recent interview with her journalistic alma mater, Common Cause magazine, "it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that there might be a pattern of improper conduct."

Graves approached Vanity Fair magazine with her fledgling story and, although they initially made a deal, a contract dispute left Graves without funding or sponsorship. Rather than drop the story, however, Graves decided to continue the investigation on her own. From her home in Massachusetts, Graves got on the telephone and spent months pursuing leads and trying to persuade reluctant witnesses to come forward. When she approached The Washington Post with the evidence she'd compiled, the newspaper teamed her up with investigative reporter Charles Shepard. Their front page story, detailing the allegations of 10 women describing Packwood's sexual misconduct, took the capital by storm when it came out in the fall of 1992.

And the rest, as they say, is history: last September, after taking the depositions of almost a score of women, and after discovering a series of activities ranging from sexual misconduct to campaign finance abuses to tampering with evidence, the Senate Ethics Committee voted 6-0 to recommend Packwood's expulsion from the Senate. Packwood resigned soon after.

A Tradition of Muckraking

Graves's own history prepared her well for her work on the Packwood story. Raised in Texas, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was editorial page editor of The Daily Texan. After receiving her master's degree in journalism from the University of Arizona, Graves moved to Washington, D.C., in the late '70s and became the founding editor of Common Cause magazine. The publication was not simply a house organ for the nonpartisan public interest group. Despite a shoestring budget and small staff, Graves and her colleagues created a highly effective investigative journal that covered issues such as campaign finance reform, military spending, and ethical abuses of power. Some of the magazine's stories about fraud and waste among defense contractors led to hearings in Congress and the military, hearings which, in several cases, led eventually to policy changes.

During Graves's tenure as editor, between 1980 and 1987, Common Cause won a number of prestigious awards for reporting and editing, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Public vs. Private

In her second year as an RPPI fellow, Graves is currently conducting research for a book on the imbalance of power between the sexes in Washington politics and media. The book, says Graves, "bounces off of the Packwood story to talk about the larger issues of abuse of power the story raises. I am exploring the intersection of sex, gender, and power in Washington."

As both a Kennedy School Research Fellow at the Institute of Politics (in 1994) and an RPPI Fellow, Graves has been developing the larger themes around which to organize her discussion of these urgently timely issues.

"The [RPPI] Fellowship is a wonderful, intellectually stimulating opportunity for me. I've been spending a lot of time putting together the intellectual framework for my book and there are tremendous resources here, not just libraries but people -- professors, Radcliffe colleagues, visiting fellows and scholars, and students," said Graves.

"In fact, it was while auditing a moral reasoning class a couple of years back taught by Professor of Government Seyla Benhabib about distinctions between the public and private spheres that my thinking on the framework of my book crystallized. Our concepts about what is properly 'public' and 'private' have a profound influence on many of our most deeply imbedded preconceptions. And that, in turn, has a profound influence on public policy. This is something academics may know, but it is not something most journalists, politicians, and average Americans think about.

"What enabled Packwood to get away with repeated instances of sexual misconduct for almost three decades? Why didn't the journalists who had heard rumors about his behavior see a story there? Because they automatically relegated his behavior to the private sphere, even though he was misusing his very public status as a United States senator and even though much of his behavior took place in the workplace.

"Packwood said at one point, 'I'm accused of kissing ... that's all -- kissing women,' which is ridiculous because he made far more serious sexual advances than simply kissing women. And there are women who left his office and moved on to lower-paying jobs rather than put up with his 'kissing,' " said Graves, adding, "these sorts of abuses of power are all too common and all too often have very serious personal and economic consequences."

The Danger of Speaking Out

According to a survey of women working on Capitol Hill that was conducted by The Washington Post not long after the Packwood story first broke, one in three women said she had been harassed by someone in power, and one in nine reported being harassed by a member of Congress. Given these numbers, it is, on the surface, nothing short of astonishing that the Packwood case appears to be the first time in history that more than one woman has made public allegations of sexual misconduct against a senator.

But not so astonishing, explains Graves, if you understand both the psychological and economic dynamics at work. As she told Common Cause Magazine, Graves consulted two psychologists -- Judith Jordan '68, PhD '73, assistant professor of psychology at the Medical School, and Irene Stiver, a lecturer in the same department -- while she was interviewing women about Sen. Packwood. "One of them, Irene Stiver, explained that in our culture women are socialized when they're young girls not to talk openly about any form of abuse involving sex, whether it's harassment, rape, incest, or battering," said Graves.

No less inhibiting to victims of harassment who would like to go "on the record" with their stories are economic considerations. Said Graves, "They worry about their jobs, their spouses' jobs, their future jobs."

Current Controversy

Recently, Graves herself was a target of criticism in an article in The New York Review of Books by Julia Reed, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine. Reed questioned Graves's methods as well as, somewhat obliquely, her motives.

Characterizing Graves's investigation as a "crusade" and the women who spoke out about Packwood as "convert[s]," Reed took Graves to task for her persistence in "track[ing] down and rounding up" these women. In addition, Reed suggested that Graves assisted her informants in constructing misleading versions of relatively innocent encounters.

In response, Graves noted, "Ms. Reed doesn't seem to understand how investigative reporters, who are seeking the truth, operate. Repeatedly calling sources and searching public records are standard tools of the trade. It is true that initially most of the women were reluctant to talk for the record about Sen. Packwood, primarily because they feared that he would try unfairly to discredit them or harm their families in some way.

"If, in fact, the women who accused Senator Packwood of inappropriate sexual advances had been exaggerating, the three-year probe by investigators and hard-nosed attorneys from the Senate Ethics Committee would have figured that out. In fact, the Committee concluded that each woman's account was true. In most cases, the women had corroborators who gave sworn statements to support their accounts."

A Shift in Consciousness

When asked if the Packwood case was going to have a real effect on future behavior, Graves was cautiously optimistic. "The case is a paradox. It's a victory in one sense, a watershed event in that women were taken seriously and dealt with respectfully by the Senate Ethics Committee and others. In fact, it was the first time in history that the Senate Ethics Committee had ever considered this type of case. On the other hand, this case highlights the extent to which things have not changed -- it is the exception rather than the rule.

"The results of a survey by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board have just come out. Of the 8,000 workers interviewed, 44 percent of the women and 19 percent of the men who responded reported unwanted sexual attention. Sadly, the percentages were consistent with percentages in surveys of 1980 and '87," Graves said.

"The only true solution is a change in consciousness. A society changes when you change people's ideas about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. The social movements of the '60s showed that. By exposing problems, you help create a new consciousness. Without a change in consciousness, legislation alone is not enough."