by George Crile
It’s not legal for active-duty servicemen to campaign for public office, but Wilson decided to disregard that detail. He took thirty days’ leave from the navy and entered his name in the race for Texas state representative. Tall and skinny, always dressed in a suit, Wilson ran his campaign in East Texas the way the Kennedys had made famous in Massachusetts. His mother, his sister, and all their friends went door to door selling the idea of Charlie as a fresh, new idea in Texas politics. He won and managed to complete his Pentagon tour without anyone noticing his entry into the political arena. In 1961, at twenty-seven, he was sworn in to office in Austin, Texas, the same month his political role model became the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
For the next twelve years Wilson made his reputation in Texas as the “liberal from Lufkin,” viewed with suspicion by business interests. He battled for the regulation of utilities and fought for Medicaid, tax exemptions for the elderly, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a minimum-wage bill.* Historically, the Second District congressional seat had been a hard place for a liberal Democrat to seek office. It was an ultra-right-wing political franchise, made famous by Martin Dies, a red-baiting inquisitor who had unapologetically forced child actress Shirley Temple to testify about her supposed knowledge of Communists in Hollywood. But fortune knocked when Dies’s successor, the incumbent congressman John Dowdy, was caught taking a bribe. Wilson immediately threw himself into the special election, in spite of a recent arrest for drunk driving and its attendant highly embarrassing mug shot. By that time he had become something of a legend in Austin as a hell-raiser, and his opponent capitalized on this, papering the district with blowups of the mug shot of the unmistakably inebriated Wilson and the question “Do you want this man to represent you in the U.S. Congress?”
In spite of this, Charlie won, demonstrating the intuitive understanding of and bond with his Bible Belt constituents that would allow him to hold onto their support through the many scandals that lay ahead. Unlike other politicians, Wilson never tried to hide his failings from his constituents. In fact, he seemed almost to turn his innocent sins to his advantage. Time and again it seemed that the voters of the Second Congressional District would forgive him almost anything if he was honest with them. What they hated was hypocrisy, and whatever his shortcomings, Wilson was no hypocrite. There was, perhaps, one other reason why the dour, supposedly puritanical voters chose to make Charlie Wilson their representative: the Second District can be a deadly boring place except when Charlie was there. People couldn’t help but like and forgive this boyish politician who always made them feel good whenever he entered a room.
During the 1960s and ’70s, as he built his political base in East Texas, Wilson could never shake the feeling that he had cheated his country by not giving the twenty years of military service expected of Annapolis men. He had been too young to serve in World War II, he had been at the Naval Academy during Korea, and when it came time for Vietnam he found himself as a freshman congressman reluctantly voting against the war. As he saw it, America’s South Vietnamese allies just weren’t willing to fight, and for Charlie Wilson, that meant they weren’t worth backing. In those days it was very much in the mainstream for a young liberal Democrat to vote against the war. But it always made him feel a bit like a traitor.
Wilson’s first serious entry into the arena of U.S. foreign affairs came in his first year in office in 1973, when he discovered the cause of Israel. U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state, national security advisers, and CIA directors would invariably be puzzled by what prompted Wilson to take up the curious causes he chose to champion. Often they would suspect the basest motives—outright payoffs or some other ulterior temptation. The real explanation begins with his mother, Wilmuth.
Wilmuth Wilson was a woman of conviction. In Trinity, Texas, a conservative southern community, she was the town liberal and a force to be reckoned with. A mainstay of the Democratic Party and a pillar of her church, she stood out as a fearless defender of the rights of Trinity’s black citizens. “I suspect ours was the only house in town where the word nigger wasn’t used,” Charlie remembers. She openly befriended blacks, and throughout the Depression, when hoboes and tramps would come to the back door to see if they could sharpen knives in exchange for a meal, Wilmuth would always send Charlie to talk with them, telling him that they were good people just down on their luck. “Always,” she told her young son and his kid sister, Sharon (who would go on to become chairman of the board of Planned Parenthood), “always stand up for the underdog. If you’re ever in doubt, back the underdog.”
As corny as it may sound, the lesson took. It certainly helps to explain why, two years before he was elected to Congress, Charlie Wilson was the only person in Lufkin, Texas, who subscribed to the Jerusalem Post. He made this unusual move immediately after reading Exodus, Leon Uris’s novel about the founding of the modern state of Israel. It was the ultimate story about worthy underdogs, the kind Wilmuth had taught him to honor.
Wilson had been in Congress only a few months and had just won a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee when Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the combined forces of the Arab League launched a surprise attack on Israel during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. For a few days, as Wilson followed every news account, he thought the Arab forces might actually overrun the Jewish state. At one point he became so concerned that he put in a call to the Israeli embassy, asking the switchboard operator to connect him with someone who could brief him about the war.
In Washington during those days, the Israeli embassy was a center of remarkably effective intrigue. Its mission was to support the survival of Israel by ensuring the billions in economic and military assistance that the United States gives each year. Jewish congressmen and senators were natural allies and visited regularly. So, too, were elected officials with many Jewish constituents. What made the call from Charlie Wilson to the embassy’s congressional liaison officer, Zvi Rafiah, so unusual was that Wilson is not Jewish and had virtually no Jews in his district.
Rafiah is a very short, very smart Israeli who Wilson always believed was a highly placed Mossad agent. He was used to dealing with all sorts of people, but he says he has never encountered anyone like Wilson. To begin with, Rafiah was not accustomed to having congressmen or senators come to him; they always summoned him, and he would appear at their offices armed with charts, maps, slides, military attachés, and ministers.
Wilson’s arrival an hour after his call startled Rafiah. He was wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson and from the perspective of the five-foot-six Rafiah, the congressman looked like a giant. But what surprised the Israeli most was Wilson’s impressive command of military history and his keen understanding of weapons and tactics. Rafiah quickly realized that Wilson had developed a powerful identification with the Israeli cause, and when the congressman said he wanted to go to Israel immediately, Rafiah was quick to accommodate.
Three days later Wilson was driving in a jeep in the Sinai with fellow representative Ed Koch. The Israeli army was taking them to the front of the Yom Kippur War, sweeping them past still burning Soviet tanks. He was ecstatic to be in the presence of these heroic warriors. It was the beginning of a ten-year love affair with everything to do with Israel. “I bought the whole thing—the beleaguered democracy surrounded by Soviet-armed barbarians—survivors of Nazi concentration camps—David versus Goliath.”
Wilson would go on to become one of Israel’s most important congressional champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents. Years later Zvi Rafiah would muse on this curiosity: “I visited his district once, and I was very impressed with the oil pumps and the big fat cows lying in the shade. Every time I describe a rich country, I describe this scene in Lufkin—the cows in the shade of the oil pumps. But believe me, there are no Jews in Lufkin.”
There was perhaps another ingredient beyond his mother’s exhortations that went into Wilson’s embrace of Israel. His future co-conspirator in Afghanistan, the CIA’s Gust Avrakotos, s
uggests that Charlie had a kind of James Bond syndrome: “As I saw it, the tie that bound us together was chasing pussy and killing Communists.” Avrakotos’ blunt language tends to turn people off, but the CIA man has a raw genius for understanding what makes Wilson tick. And his point is that, along with a worthy underdog to champion, two other ingredients were necessary to fully mobilize Charlie Wilson: a Communist bully to put down and a beautiful woman by his side.
In Israel it began with a raven-haired captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. She was the congressman’s official guide to the war zone, and Wilson’s infatuation began on that first trip into the desert to see the burning Russian tanks. Ed Koch still remembers his horror when the beautiful captain’s commanding officer, offended by her growing fascination with the goy in the cowboy hat, ordered her not to return the next day. Koch saw Wilson as a potentially invaluable asset to Israel: a non-Jew on the Foreign Affairs Committee who was more passionate about Israel than any of its Jewish members. “He was unique,” Koch recalls. “An oil man who was pro-Israel.” Koch quickly took the commander aside. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “The woman is twenty-one. Let her take care of herself.” Captain Lilatoff remained at her post.
Wilson admits that he was infatuated with the beautiful officer whose husband was off fighting in Egypt. But he says the relationship remained purely platonic, mainly because a few days later, in the lobby of his hotel, he was introduced to Israel’s leading movie star, Gila Almagor. “I remember thinking, This is a hell of a place. You get Russian tanks burning on the desert, beautiful captains, and movie stars.” To Wilson, Israel was filled with nothing but glorious underdogs who didn’t want or need Americans to fight their wars for them. All they were asking for was U.S. military supplies and economic assistance, to counter the Arabs who wanted nothing less than to use their Soviet arsenals to annihilate Israel.
By the time he got back to Washington, Wilson had become, in his own words, “an Israeli commando” in the U.S. Congress. And quite to his surprise and delight, a remarkable thing happened: The Jews of Houston and Dallas discovered the congressman from Lufkin. Without any solicitation, contributions began rolling in from all over the country. “The AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] people loved me because here I was, a cowboy from Texas, hysterical about their cause,” remembers Wilson. The congressman soon found himself giving the major United Jewish Appeal speech of the year in Washington and addressing Young Jewish Leadership conferences all over the country.
This friendship with Israel grew so intimate that, years later, when Wilson determined that the CIA wasn’t willing to provide Afghan rebels with an effective mule-portable anti-aircraft gun, he secretly asked the Israelis to design one. They came through, as they always did. And when Wilson was engulfed in a drug scandal that jeopardized his 1984 reelection campaign, Ed Koch mobilized supporters in New York and Jewish backers of Israel from all across the country to pony up $100,000 in campaign contributions and save the day. It was also the Jews in Congress who would rally to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee, where he could help make sure the annual $3 billion a year in aid continued to flow. Getting the Appropriations assignment as a junior congressman was an amazing political maneuver because his own Texas delegation opposed it; they backed a Texan with more seniority. The only other congressman to ever defy his own delegation and seek an Appropriations seat was Lyndon Johnson; but LBJ failed. It was Wilson’s Jewish friends who made it possible.
From his new position on Appropriations, Wilson began to learn how Israel and other special interests use their power. He discovered that the authorizing committees, like Foreign Affairs, were little more than debating societies. He now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year. He watched and saw how one man, if he’s on the right subcommittee and knows how to play the system, can move the entire nation to fund a program or cause of his choice.
By the late 1970s, Wilson was starting to feel his power. He had become part of a small tribe of Democrats alarmed by what they perceived to be a policy of appeasement by their own party. The Israelis had been whispering in Wilson’s ear ever since Jimmy Carter came into office that the United States was getting soft, looking the other way as the Communists advanced everywhere unchecked. But Wilson’s concerns were independent of the Israelis’. He genuinely believed that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. And he was unnerved when he saw the pictures of President Carter embracing Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and kissing him on both cheeks at the arms-control talks. To him it was an ominous replay of that critical moment before World War II when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, pursuing his policy of appeasement, emerged from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time.”
Timing is everything, and it was just at this moment, with these dark thoughts racing in Wilson’s head, that Congressman Jack Murphy appeared in Charlie’s office to make an appeal. Murphy was the kind of Democrat Wilson could relate to, a West Point graduate and decorated Korean War veteran. They were drinking friends, but Murphy had not come to socialize. The two considered themselves part of a lonely group of Democrats holding the line against the Soviets. And Murphy was preaching to the converted when he savaged the president for appeasing the Communists. Now, he said, Carter was about to betray America’s oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America. It was unconscionable to stand by and let it happen, and Wilson was the only man in Congress with the power and the balls to stop it.
Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza was a particularly unattractive dictator, with thick black-rimmed glasses, weighty jowls, and a disturbing leer when he smiled. But over a bottle of Scotch in Wilson’s private office, Murphy told a heartwarming story about how he had gotten to know Tacho as a schoolboy at LaSalle Military Academy in New York, and later as his roommate at West Point. Somoza had created a little U.S.A. in Nicaragua, Murphy explained; the U.S. Army had trained his entire army officer corps, and his son was a Harvard man.
More important, he reminded Wilson, the dictator had turned his country over to the CIA in 1954, when it had needed help to overthrow the Guatemalan government, and Tacho had played a critical role in the Bay of Pigs as well. His only crime, Murphy said, was that he always supported the United States, and now Jimmy Carter wanted to destroy him because the hand wringers at the State Department claimed he was violating human rights. At that very moment, Murphy announced to dramatize his point, the Cuban—and Soviet-armed—Sandinista guerrillas were attacking the cities of Nicaragua. If Wilson didn’t use his leverage on the Appropriations Committee to try to protect Tacho, Carter would get away with cutting off all Somoza’s military and economic aid, at a moment when it might just do him in.
The zeal with which Wilson took up the challenge caught everyone, particularly the Carter White House and the State Department, utterly by surprise. By the time Charlie intervened, saving Somoza seemed to be a lost cause. The Appropriations Subcommittee had already sent the bill that cut Somoza’s funding to the House floor. The unwritten rules of the Appropriations Committee dictate that members don’t challenge the overall subcommittee bills once they have been reported out. But in a stunning political maneuver, Wilson took the Nicaraguan-aid issue to the floor, where he threatened to scuttle the president’s entire foreign-aid bill if Somoza’s money was not restored. He told his colleagues that Somoza had done “an enormous amount of dirty work for the U.S., that he was virtually an arm of U.S. intelligence.” It was hardly a popular cause. The columnist Jack Anderson had just labeled Somoza the greediest dictator in the world, to which Wilson responded, “No one is perfect, no one is pure.” Miraculously, Wilson won the first round. To the disgust of liberals, the media, and the administration, Somoza’s entire $3.1 million aid package was restored. A jubilant Representative Murphy insisted that Wilson accompany him to Managua over the July 4 recess to meet Tacho.
One of Wilson’s more endearing features is an ability to understand
how ridiculous he often looks to those witnessing his antics. Many years later he would recall with humor the lavish dinner party Somoza threw for him. “Everyone was looking at me with enormous respect,” Wilson recalled, “as if I were Simón Bolívar. Tacho gave this great toast in which he credited me with being the only thing preserving freedom in the hemisphere. The entire oligarchy of Managua was there applauding. I will admit, it was kind of heady.”
After the toasts, Somoza invited Wilson into his private underground office in the bunker. “It was kind of Hitlerian,” Wilson recalls. Somoza would later spend his final days in Nicaragua in that bunker, vainly directing his army to bomb the cities of his country as the Sandinistas closed in on him. But that night Somoza, flushed with the victory in Congress, was brimming over with bravado.
The dictator was seated in front of a giant West Point flag. “I want you to know that dealing with Tacho Somoza is not a one-way street,” he said, leering as he took a thick wad of greenbacks out of his desk drawer. He mumbled something about campaign contributions.
“I almost shit,” Wilson remembers. “I said, ‘Well, not now. I don’t need any money now. Maybe in the future.’” The congressman says he was not about to take the money, but he couldn’t quite get himself to turn it down completely. “It just looked so tempting,” he says, remembering Somoza mentioning the figure of $50,000. “In those days that was a good bit of change, but I didn’t take the fucking money.”
Wilson says the rejection made for an awkward moment. In spite of this, the dictator managed to win him over. Wilson liked the West Point flag in the bunker, the dictator’s easy American slang, his friendship with General Alexander Haig, and his bravado. Beyond that, they shared a common bond over Israel. Wilson’s Israeli friends had spoken glowingly about Tacho’s father, who had opened up Nicaragua for European Jews before World War II and voted for Israel’s entry into the United Nations. “He was a soul brother to the Israelis,” Wilson explains, someone they owed and supported to the very end. (There was even a shipload of Israeli weapons on its way when Somoza fell.) And Wilson was particularly swayed by the Israelis’ insistence that Jimmy Carter’s human-rights policy was shortsighted and that Tacho was by far less evil than anything that might follow.