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Paula Fickes Hawkins

Senator, 1981–1987, Republican from Florida

Paula Fickes Hawkins Image courtesy of the U.S. Senate Historical Office

An aggressive and outspoken Republican, Paula Hawkins sailed into office in a Republican sweep led by victorious presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980. A staunch defender of her ever-changing Florida constituency, she also created a public dialogue on the subject of missing, exploited, and abused children. Hawkins’s vigorous work to pass the 1982 Missing Children’s Act helped bring to light a long-ignored national scourge.

Paula Fickes was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on January 24, 1927, the oldest of three children raised by Paul, a chief warrant officer in the Navy, and Leone (Staley) Fickes. In 1934, the family settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where Paul Fickes took a teaching job at Georgia Tech. The Fickes eventually separated, and Leone Fickes moved with her children to Logan, Utah. Paula Fickes graduated from Cache High School in Richmond, Utah, in 1944. She attended Utah State University before taking a job as a secretary for the university’s director of athletics. Paula Fickes married Walter Eugene Hawkins on September 5, 1947. The couple settled in Atlanta, where Walter studied electrical engineering; he later owned a successful electronics business. The Hawkins raised three children: Genean, Kevin, and Kelly Ann. The family moved to Florida in 1955 where Paula Hawkins first entered public affairs as a community activist and volunteer for the local Republican Party organization. In 1966, she helped orchestrate Republican Edward Gurney’s successful campaign in the GOP primary and general election for a House seat. Two years later, Hawkins co-chaired the Richard Nixon presidential campaign in Florida. Hawkins’s work as a GOP regular provided her the base from which to launch a political career, winning election to the Florida public service commission from 1972 to 1979. In 1974, she entered the primary race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Gurney, then a freshman incumbent under investigation for campaign finance improprieties.1 Hawkins, however, failed to secure the GOP nomination. In 1978, Hawkins also lost a campaign for lieutenant governor of Florida.

In 1980, encouraged by the Republican National Committee chairman, Hawkins entered the race for the seat of incumbent Democrat Senator Richard B. Stone. She won a plurality against five other contenders in the GOP primary but fell short of the necessary majority by just a few points. In the run-off primary she overwhelmed the runner-up, former U.S. Representative Lou Frey, Jr., with 62 percent of the vote.2 In the general election, she faced popular former U.S. Representative Bill Gunter, who had edged Senator Stone in the Democratic primary. The election seemed to hinge less on substantive issues than on the candidates’ personalities, with Hawkins depicted, partly on her own volition, as being aggressive and forceful. “[Voters] don’t want specifics,” Hawkins said. “People are looking for somebody that will shake it up… That’s all they want. They want a fighter.”3 Observers agreed that Hawkins benefited from the long coattails of GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who won Florida with 56 percent of the vote on his way to victory. Hawkins won, too, but by a narrower margin, just 52 percent.4 She was part of a Republican tide in the Senate, as 14 new GOP Senators were elected to the upper chamber, shifting control away from the Democrats for the first time in nearly three decades.

When Senator Stone resigned from office on December 31, 1980, Hawkins was appointed to fill his seat on January 1, 1981, thus giving her a minor seniority advantage over the rest of the Senate freshmen who were sworn in two days later. Senator Hawkins was assigned to three committees when the 97th Congress (1981–1983) convened: Labor and Human Resources; Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; and Joint Economic. In the 98th Congress (1983–1985), she received additional appointments to the Foreign Relations Committee and the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Hawkins also served on the Special Committee on Aging.

Hawkins immediately began cultivating her image as a scrapper. Her outspoken manner, however, was not always well-received by more staid Senate colleagues. After a year in office, Hawkins altered her approach, hoping that constituents would judge her legislative achievements rather than her aggressive style. “I guess I have my dog in too many fights,” she confided to the New York Times in late 1981.5 Hawkins lobbied hard for federal aid to help the state defray the costs of caring for, housing, and processing thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees in Florida. She warned that otherwise, “We just might have to dig a ditch at our northern border, erect a sign, ‘Yankees, Keep Out,’ and apply for foreign aid ourselves. Florida is under siege, and it’s no fault of our own.” In particular, Hawkins expressed concern about the effects of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which resulted when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro temporarily lifted emigration restrictions. It was later revealed that Castro emptied some of his nation’s jails, setting hardened criminals aboard the “freedom flotilla” to Florida; 23,000 of the immigrants had conviction records. State authorities were extremely taxed handling the flood of refugees. Hawkins described the boatlift people in sweeping terms; they were, she told one newspaper, “terrorists.” Her solution to the problem: “Send them home.”6

As chair of the Investigation and Oversight Subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Hawkins initiated a year-long probe of the rising numbers of children reported missing by their families. She worked closely with a Florida couple, John and Reve Walsh, whose son, Adam, was abducted from a Florida shopping mall and was later found decapitated, a horrific episode that riveted national attention. The Walsh family had found that a number of bureaucratic road blocks hindered the search for their son and were determined to create a missing children’s agency to facilitate searches. Paula Hawkins was a key ally in that effort. Her work led to the passage of the Missing Children’s Act of 1982, a measure that established a national center for information about missing children. Prior to this legislation, parents had been required to wait 48 hours before the federal officials could become involved in the search for a missing child. Hawkins’s bill abolished that waiting period. It also gave parents access to a Federal Bureau of Investigation database, the National Crime Information Center, where they could list their child and perform searches through records of existing reports.7 By clearing away the red tape, Hawkins’s bill helped locate more than 2,000 children in the first year of its existence.

In 1984, at the Third National Conference on Sexual Victimization of Children, Hawkins stunned the audience by revealing that she was sexually molested as a kindergartener by a trusted elderly neighbor. When the case went to court, however, the judge discounted her and other neighborhood children’s testimony. The molester was set free. “I like to win,” Hawkins recalled, “and it’s bothered me all this time that the ‘nice old man’ got off and went on abusing children for the rest of his life. The embarrassment and humiliation of being called a liar will stay with me the rest of mine.” For Hawkins, the effect of “going public” with this well-kept secret was personally therapeutic and rewarding in the sense that it encouraged others to do so as well. “Almost immediately, many other child abuse victims felt free to discuss their own difficult experiences,” she recalled in her autobiography. “After all, if a U.S. Senator had opened up, why shouldn’t they?”8

Hawkins’s 1986 re-election campaign was judged to be a referendum not only on Hawkins’s first term in office but the Reagan presidency as well. With 22 GOP seats up for election, the Republican majority in the Senate was at stake. Early on, GOP officials deemed Hawkins’s contest a key electoral battle and began putting money and resources into it. She faced the most popular politician in the state: two-term Governor Bob Graham, whose approval ratings topped 80 percent. At one point Hawkins trailed by as much as 22 percent in some of the polls, but political observers refused to count her out. “Paula’s like a teabag,” one Florida GOP official observed. “You have to put her in hot water to see how strong she is.”9 Nevertheless, her campaign was plagued by her ill health and poor luck. In May 1985, news reports revealed that Hawkins’s estranged brother had been indicted on child abuse charges.10 Hawkins maintained that the timing of that news release was a ploy to hurt her campaign. In early 1986, suffering pain from an old back injury, Hawkins checked herself into Duke University Hospital and was temporarily sidelined by a surgical procedure.11 Lost weeks of campaigning hurt Hawkins in a state where voter turnover—by one estimate nearly one-third of the registered voters in 1986 had not been residents in 1980—was a perennial concern for politicians.12 She also had the difficult task of campaigning against a Democratic opponent who supported such Republican positions as Strategic Defense Initiative, aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, and the death penalty.13 Hawkins lost to Governor Graham by nearly 180,000 votes, or a 55 percent to 45 percent margin, as Democrats regained control of the Senate.14

After completing her term in the Senate, Hawkins returned to her home in Winter Park, Florida. She served for seven years as a representative for the United States on the Organization of American States Inter-American Drug Abuse Commission. In 1997, she retired from politics and joined the board of directors of a large drug and cosmetic company. Hawkins also served as president of a management consulting company she founded in 1988.  On December 4, 2009, Hawkins died in Orlando, Florida.

Further Reading

“Hawkins, Paula Fickes” Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, 1774–Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=H000374.

Hawkins, Paula. Children at Risk, My Fight Against Child Abuse: A Personal Story and a Public Plea (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986).

Manuscript Collections

University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC). Oral History: 1974, 27 pages. Subjects discussed include Watergate Affair, women in politics, U.S. and Florida politics, and the Florida Republican Party.

Winter Park Public Library (Winter Park, FL). Papers: 1969–1986, 294 cubic feet. The main emphasis of the collection is the service of Paula Hawkins in the United States Senate. Included is correspondence from various political figures (state and national), records of her legislative activities and materials from her various senatorial campaigns. The majority of the materials were generated by Hawkins (from her conduct of official and public duties and business) and can provide the researcher with both a survey of Florida’s political environment in the 1970s and 1980s, and a profile of Senator Hawkins as a politician. On a broader scale, the collection provides a look into the activities and issues that were of interest to the Florida congressional delegation during her term in the Senate (1981–1987). Issues include the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, immigration, the citrus industry/agriculture, foreign trade, and illegal drugs.

Footnotes

  1. Robin D. Meszoly, “Women in Politics: Good, Bad News,” 14 April 1974, Washington Post: A9.
  2. Judith Miller, “Senator Beaten In Florida Race for Nomination,” 8 October 1980, New York Times: B8.
  3. Current Biography, 1985 (New York: H.W. Wilson and Company, 1985): 174.
  4. “Election Statistics, 1920 to Present,” http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/electionInfo/index.aspx.
  5. Phil Gailey, “For Senator Hawkins, A Debatable First Year,” 15 December 1981, New York Times: B18.
  6. Art Harris, “Boatlift Bloat Sends Angry Florida Officials Into Tropical Politics,” 22 December 1981, Washington Post: A2.
  7. See especially, Paula Hawkins, Children at Risk: My Fight Against Child Abuse—A Personal Story and a Public Plea (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986): 39–45; see also Congressional Record, Senate, 97th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 February 1982): 2322–2325.
  8. Hawkins, Children at Risk: 7; Sandy Rovner, “Children of Abuse: Sen. Paula Hawkins Says She Was Molested at Age 5,” 27 April 1984, Washington Post: B1; Marjorie Hunter, “The Effects of Going Public on Sexual Abuse,” 5 May 1984, New York Times: 11; Nadine Brozan, “A Senator Recounts Her Own Experience as an Abused Child,” 27 April 1984, New York Times: A1.
  9. John Dillin, “Florida Contest Typifies Fight for US Senate Control: Reagan Has Big Stake in Such Races as Graham vs. Hawkins,” 8 September 1986, Christian Science Monitor: 3.
  10. Bill Peterson, “Paula Hawkins, Fighter: Senator’s Reelection Bid Crucial for GOP,” 2 September 1985, Washington Post: A1; “Sen. Hawkins’ Brother in Jail,” 27 May 1985, Washington Post: C3; Fred Grimm, “Paula Hawkins and the Family Tragedy,” 2 June 1985, Washington Post: H1.
  11. Jon Nordheimer, “Hawkins Interrupting Senate Race for Operation,” 7 April 1986, New York Times: A23; Bill Peterson, “Hawkin’s Health Is Biggest Campaign Issue,” 16 February 1986, Washington Post: A3; Bill Peterson, “Hawkins Changes Publicity Strategy,” 7 April 1986, Washington Post: A7.
  12. Jon Nordheimer, “Florida Lawmakers Face Growth Issues,” 3 April 1985, New York Times: A16.
  13. Ellen Hume, “Sen. Paula Hawkins Struggles in Reelection Bid to Overcome Challenge from Popular Governor,” 20 October 1986, Wall Street Journal: 56.
  14. Maureen Dowd, “Ads Are the Issue in Florida In Hawkins-Graham Race,” 29 October 1986, New York Times: A23; Jon Nordheimer, “G.O.P. Elects Governor; Graham Beats Hawkins,” 5 November 1986, New York Times: A27; see also, “Election Statistics, 1920 to Present,” http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/electionInfo/index.aspx.