Kassebaum Calls on Packwood to Step Down : Congress: Kansas lawmaker says ethics probe has hurt Oregon Republican’s effectiveness in Senate. She is the first to break GOP ranks on issue.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) on Friday became the first Republican to call for the resignation of Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), the target of a Senate Ethics Committee inquiry that has now expanded to include charges that he altered parts of his tape-recorded diaries as investigators prepared to subpoena his memoirs.

“I think the time has come that Sen. Packwood should resign,” Kassebaum said in a statement issued at her Wichita, Kan., office. “I guess I feel that he’s reached a point where this is so all-consuming now, and certainly questionable, that I just don’t feel that he can effectively serve Oregon in the Senate.”

Kassebaum’s position marks the first break in Republican ranks over Packwood, and she becomes the second of the Senate’s seven female members, after Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), to call on him to step down.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has also expressed a negative view of Packwood, although she has stopped short of suggesting that he quit.

“It’s clear that Mr. Packwood is losing credibility more and more as this goes on, and I’m hopeful that the Ethics Committee can bring this to a speedy conclusion,” Feinstein said in a statement issued in California.

Kassebaum, a former member of the ethics panel, said Packwood agreed to cooperate with the committee when he admitted a year ago that he had engaged in behavior toward women that was, in his words, “just plain wrong.”

But since that time, she said, he has refused to provide information sought by the bipartisan panel and has demanded that the full Senate vote on the issue. It did, voting 94 to 6 to enforce the Ethics Committee subpoena.

“Sen. Packwood is effectively at war with the Ethics Committee,” Kassebaum said.

The controversy over his diaries has added to Packwood’s problems, which began with allegations that he made improper sexual advances to more than two dozen women over the last two decades and tried to intimidate some of them into silence.

The ethics panel is also looking into charges that he misused his Senate staff to discredit his accusers.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) have already called on Packwood to resign. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), however, has said that it is up to Packwood to make that decision.

“He hasn’t been found guilty of anything,” Dole told reporters Thursday. “He still has the same rights as any other American.”

Packwood, who was reported to be on the verge of resigning last month, decided to remain in the Senate after the Justice Department joined the Ethics Committee in subpoenaing his diaries covering most of the last five years.

While he is fighting the Senate subpoena in federal court, Packwood has come under new fire for allegedly altering the taped diary entries and providing altered transcripts of what he originally had dictated.

His former Senate secretary has testified that he began making hasty revisions in his memoirs last October, shortly before the diaries were subpoenaed by the Ethics Committee. In addition, the committee has charged that Packwood improperly used Senate and campaign funds to pay the secretary for transcribing the tapes, which he claims are private records.

A ruling is expected in January on whether Packwood must turn over his diaries to Senate investigators so they can continue their inquiry.