THE DIARY: WHAT DID GRAMM SAY?

By Suneel Ratan/Washington

Like other Washington diarists, Bob Packwood no doubt wishes he had kept his thoughts to himself. And at the end of last week, so did his Senate Republican colleague Phil Gramm of Texas. A March 1992 entry by the Oregon Senator puts himself, Gramm--then head of the G.O.P. committee that finances Senate candidates--and two of their aides in a brief discussion about funneling an illegally large amount of national-party money to Packwood's re-election campaign. "And what was said in that room would be enough to convict us all of something," Packwood wrote to himself. "[Gramm] says, now, of course you know there can't be any legal connection between this money and Senator Packwood, but we know that it will be used for his benefit. [The Gramm aide] said, oh, yes. God, there's [Packwood chief of staff Elaine Franklin] and I sitting there. I think that's a felony, I'm not sure. This is an area of the law I don't want to know."

Upon releasing the text of Packwood's diaries last week, Ethics Committee chairman Mitch McConnell and vice chairman Richard Bryan fired off a letter to Gramm asking him to explain the passage. Gramm replied that, yes, the National Republican Senate Committee did give the Oregon Republican Party $96,500 shortly after the Gramm-Packwood meeting took place. But Gramm insisted that the money was not used to support Packwood, to whom the N.R.S.C. could give only $17,500, but for legal party-building activities such as voter registration and getting out the vote. Moreover, he said he did not say what was imputed to him by the entry. The Ethics Committee will now determine whether Gramm should be disciplined.

Packwood says the diary entry was wrong, that if Gramm said what was on the transcript, it was in jest. Still, in 1993 Packwood seemed quite serious when he erased the passage from the audiotape into which he had dictated it. In its place, he said, "There was the usual argument--I suppose a more polite word for it would be discussion--of how much money the national committee or senatorial committee was going to give the state party." How did the actual words come to light? Packwood kept a copy of the original, which he never altered.

--By Suneel Ratan/Washington