Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins was a Republican United States Senator from Florida, elected in 1980, who served a single term. She was the first woman elected to the Senate from Florida and the first woman elected to a full Senate term without having been preceded in politics by a husband or father.¹

Early Life and Florida Politics

She was born Paula Fickes in Salt Lake City on January 24, 1927, to Paul Burt Fickes and Mary Leoan Staley, the oldest of four children. Her father was in the Navy, and the family lived in Long Beach, Hawaii, Jacksonville and Atlanta, where she met Walter Eugene Hawkins at Sunday school. They married in Logan, Utah, while she was a student at Utah State University, and moved to Winter Park in 1954. They were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.²

Her political work began with a campaign for sewers in the town of Maitland. She was the Republican National Committeewoman for Florida from 1968 to 1986 and a delegate to five Republican National Conventions. In 1972 she was elected to the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulated electricity, water, telephone and transportation monopolies, and in 1976 she became the first Republican reelected to office in the state.²

Senate

Hawkins was elected in the Reagan landslide of 1980. She described herself as "feminine" as distinct from "feminist," and her opposition to abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment drew pickets from the National Organization for Women.¹ Her family's notice credits her with legislation that established the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Radio Marti, and with measures against the importation and trafficking of illegal drugs.²

BCCI

Abdur Sakhia, the former regional manager of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in the United States, testified before the subcommittee of Senator John Kerry that in the autumn of 1984 he met Justice Department officials in Hawkins's Senate office to discuss allegations of BCCI's involvement in drug money laundering. According to Sakhia, BCCI's president, Agha Hasan Abedi, told him to meet Hawkins after she told President Zia of Pakistan, on a trip to that country, that she was concerned about drug money laundering by a Pakistani bank in the Cayman Islands, which she later identified as BCCI. Sakhia testified that the Justice Department told him BCCI was not under investigation, and that he later learned that the State Department had given the same message to the Pakistani government.³

The Senate report stated that the subcommittee "has been unable to determine the source for Senator Hawkin's [sic] information," and that as a Senate subcommittee chairman she "would have had access to classified material from both the DEA and the CIA." The report gave her post as chairman of the "Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations," the name of the subcommittee before which Sakhia testified.³

Describing BCCI's cultivation of Florida politicians around the opening of its Miami office, Sakhia told the subcommittee: "Paula Hawkins came to the bank several times separately," in a passage that also named Governor Bob Graham and Jeb Bush, who attended the opening, Representative Dante Fascell, who came to Sakhia's house, and Reubin Askew, who "came to the bank several times and had been to my house."⁴

Death

Hawkins died in Orlando on December 4, 2009, at 82, of complications of a fall after several years of health problems, including a stroke. She was buried in Palm Cemetery in Winter Park.¹²