by George Crile
To most members, the payoff for winning an assignment to Appropriations comes from the fact that there is no better place in all of Congress to find pork. The man from Lufkin never shied from using his influence to get jobs for his constituents or contracts for local industry. He took enormous pride in reviving the fortunes of his poverty-stricken district. But just milking the system for all it was worth was not what had drawn Charlie Wilson to Congress. He had a grander vision. His passion, since boyhood, was foreign affairs, and from the moment he got on Appropriations he set out to position himself on the two subcommittees that dole out all money connected to national security.
His Jewish friends had helped get him onto the committee; once there, Charlie learned from these master politicians how to influence budgets and policies. When he won a seat on the Foreign Operations subcommittee, which allocates all U.S. military and economic assistance, he was suddenly positioned to champion Israel’s annual $3 billion foreign-aid package. And since this subcommittee rules on the State Department’s expenditures abroad, overnight he became one of twelve congressmen the State Department could no longer afford to alienate. In fact, these twelve legislators are treated as patrons who must be curried and pampered by ambassadors and even secretaries of state.
In 1980, just after being reelected for a fourth term and only a few weeks before his Las Vegas weekend, Wilson struck again, maneuvering himself onto the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Now the Pentagon and the CIA were added to the list of federal bureaucracies that could no longer treat Charlie Wilson as a mere mortal.
The twin assignments were his tickets to play in the arena of world power. He was given the highest security clearance and an extra staffer and ushered into the soundproof hearing room under the Capitol dome, where he was shown his permanent seat—one of twelve large black leather chairs grouped around a horseshoe-shaped table. The room is closed off to the public as well as other members. Very little is ever written about what goes on when the twelve members meet in this chamber. But each year they preside over a kind of secret court, where huge deals are cut and important policies made or broken. Since hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake—and since only so many programs can be fully funded—enormous pressures and inducements are brought to bear upon these twelve men.
It’s a big government, and everyone has a favorite weapons system or spy satellite, an embassy to be refurbished, a rescue mission to be funded, and assets to be traded. The White House, the defense contractors, the military services, fellow congressmen—all maneuver around and encircle the appropriators, seeking their support. Each year, in effect, the lobbyists create their own power list, a ranking indicated by the dollar amounts they dole out to congressmen in campaign contributions. Charlie Wilson was always at the very top of this list, usually occupying the second spot, right below his intimate friend John Murtha, chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.
“Anybody with any brain can figure out that if they can get on the Defense subcommittee, that’s where they ought to be—because that’s where the money is,” Wilson laughs. “Once I got on Defense, I went from being the skunk to being the prettiest girl at the party.” To the future Speaker, Jim Wright, Charlie Wilson was now critical for getting more contracts for the F-16s being built in Dallas–Fort Worth. For Texas Democrat Martin Frost it was the B-2 bomber. Wilson made it easy for his colleagues to come to him, always gracious, almost always helpful.
He was quickly accumulating powerful allies and IOUs. He was also playing a far more interesting and effective insider’s game, in areas of the House that were not visible to outsiders. “You’ve got to look at the House like a college class where fraternities are everything,” explains Denis Neill, a Washington lobbyist who is one of Wilson’s oldest friends and allies. “If you’re not in the right fraternities you’re not in the game, and no one is in so many different important fraternities as Charlie Wilson.”
At the time, Neill was one of the capital’s greatest manipulators of Congress in the foreign-affairs arena. His firm, Neill and Company, represented clients like Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Jordan. His job was to get them U.S. money, weapons systems, and good press; to do damage control; and provide influence in the corridors of power. One way he did it was by making campaign contributions and giving favors to congressmen on the committees that control foreign aid. He didn’t waste his time or money on members who don’t count, and in the foreign affairs world, he considered Wilson one of the two or three who were indispensable. When Neill starts ticking off Wilson’s memberships, it quickly becomes apparent how his network of congressional fraternities later allowed him to speak for the entire House when he and Avrakotos set out to radically escalate the CIA’s Afghan war.
“The way things normally work, if you’re not Jewish you don’t get into the Jewish caucus,” Neill says. “But Charlie did. And if you’re not black you don’t get into the black caucus. But Charlie plays poker with the black caucus. They had a game, and he’s the only white guy in it.”
Part of the explanation here is that the House, like any other human institution, is moved by friendships, and no matter what people might think about Wilson’s antics, they tend to like him and enjoy his company. His friendship with the insular black fraternity began with Barbara Jordan, the charismatic congresswoman who electrified the nation in 1973 with her stirring remarks during the Nixon impeachment proceedings. The two had served six years together in the Texas state senate before coming to Washington.
Former Speaker Jim Wright remembers how everyone initially came to know who Wilson was because he always sat next to Jordan on the House floor—this tall, good-looking cowboy and his constant companion, the dour, heavyset, scowling black woman. “I was her best friend for the whole six years she was here,” Wilson recalls fondly. And for the mostly male black fraternity that played poker together—a group with a different set of priorities than Barbara Jordan—something about Wilson’s lack of piety and his bad-boy aura appealed to them.
Wilson’s archconservative friend Republican representative Henry Hyde identifies it as the Adam Clayton Powell factor. “Adam Clayton Powell’s people loved him because he was always sticking it to the man, and Charlie is down there creating his own ground rules and in a weird way he’s kind of a white man’s Adam Clayton Powell. There is a kind of nonconformist relish about him. He leads the sort of life that many congressmen envy but wouldn’t dare emulate.” When Louis Stokes, the low-key black chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was arrested for drunk driving, Wilson turned it into a raucous act of friendship with one comment: “Mr. Chairman, I want you to know that I deplore the racist attack that the police of the District of Columbia just made on you with that totally fabricated charge.”
Wilson even managed to sneak his way onto what could be considered the women’s-rights fraternity. One might assume, given his well-earned reputation as a philandering chauvinist, this would have been impossible; however, he was one of the champions of the Equal Rights Amendment, having cosponsored and passed the ERA with Barbara Jordan back when they were in the Texas legislature.
And his credentials went beyond that. Even though his Bible Belt constituents were militantly pro-life, he always voted for a woman’s right to choose. He took this politically risky position because of his kid sister, Sharon, who had risen in Planned Parenthood to become the chairperson of its national board. He would have loved to tell his ardently pro-life constituents that he would vote their conscience just as he always voted with them on opposing any kind of gun control. On that issue he always said that his constituents would permit him any failing, but the “one thing they would never tolerate was any vote to water down the right of an American citizen to bear arms.”
Failing to rail against the murder of the unborn was almost as dangerous, but Sharon insisted that her big brother not embarrass her by doing the wrong thing. There was almost nothing Charlie Wilson wouldn’t do for his little sister. And so at the Lions Club luncheons, a
t the Rotary and the church groups, he would simply say, “I know this is one of those things that we’re just not going to agree on, but I’m voting for choice.” Somehow his pro-life constituents let him get away with it, and in the House that translated into another base of support for the unconventional congressman.
By 1980 Wilson had established positions in a remarkably diverse network of congressional power centers: not just with Appropriations and his own Texas fraternity but also with the Jewish caucus, the black caucus, the hawks, and the women. Wilson was operating now completely outside the normal experience of American political life. Oddly, his pleasure seeking that year even served to propel him into perhaps the most powerful House fraternity—that of Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill. Only a true insider could have appreciated the significance of O’Neill’s simultaneous appointments of Wilson that year to the House Ethics Committee and the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And certainly almost no one could understand what possessed Tip O’Neill to make such a strange choice for the ethics panel.
From today’s perspective, the image of this philandering hedonist climbing out of his Las Vegas hot tub to render judgments on the conduct of his colleagues seems almost perverse. Even without knowing about the Fantasy Suite, a genuinely puzzled reporter had asked Wilson why he, of all people, had been selected for this sober assignment. Without missing a beat, Wilson had cheerfully replied, “It’s because I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.”
It was an outrageous statement. The Ethics committee is supposed to serve as the conscience of the House and to rule on the conduct of its members. Any Speaker should have been furious at Wilson for this needless provocation, particularly at a time when the House was caught up in its worst scandal in years—the ABSCAM sting operation. An FBI undercover agent disguised as an Arab sheikh had managed to lure six congressmen and a senator into a Washington town house, where the bureau’s hidden cameras captured them, one after another, taking $50,000 bribes.
“I have larceny in my blood,” exclaimed one of the congressmen, as he thrust the bribe money into a brown paper bag. Another is seen stuffing the cash into his bulging pockets and asking the pretend Arab, “Does it show?” When the tapes were aired, millions of Americans were left with the impression that Congress, and the House in particular, had degenerated into little more than a den of thieves. It was a particularly bad moment for O’Neill, since nearly all of the ABSCAM bribe takers were Democrats.
That fall, when the Republicans captured the Senate and Ronald Reagan the White House, Tip O’Neill emerged as the unrivaled center of Democratic power in the country. He recognized that the ABSCAM investigation was taking its toll, that something would have to be done to restore public confidence. But the real crisis, as he saw it, was the immediate threat posed to those in his inner circle, who he relied on to help him run the House.
A special prosecutor, Barry Prettyman, had just persuaded the House to expel one of the ABSCAM defendants, a veteran lawmaker, who was still appealing his conviction. Never before had the House expelled one of its own members. With the zealous prosecutor at the helm, the committee was expanding its inquiry beyond the six members who had been indicted and was rumored to be offering deals in exchange for testimony that would take the scandal into the Speaker’s office. What finally caused O’Neill to draw a line in the sand was the prosecutor’s move against his intimate friend and key political lieutenant Representative John Murtha.
The Speaker immediately summoned Charlie Wilson into his office to make an offer he knew Wilson would ultimately find impossible to refuse. “I want you to go on the Ethics Committee,” O’Neill said.
Wilson wasn’t altogether sure if O’Neill was serious: “Tip, that’s crazy. I’m not on the side of the Ethics Committee and everyone knows it. They’d laugh us off the floor if you put me on that committee.”
The truth is the Speaker was operating in this instance much like a spy chief. He didn’t specifically tell Wilson that he wanted him to go rescue Murtha; he didn’t need to. O’Neill knew that all he had to do was get Wilson on the Ethics Committee, and the rest would take care of itself.
“Chally,” the Massachusetts congressman continued with a twinkle in his eye, “do you remember that appointment you’ve been asking about for the Kennedy Center Board?”
There was nothing Wilson craved more than a seat on the board of the Kennedy Center, and O’Neill knew it. To a married legislator, a lifetime appointment to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts might not mean much, but for a divorced congressman going through a midlife crisis, with so many beautiful women to romance and not enough money to properly entertain them, it meant just about everything. Wilson still has a childlike enthusiasm in his voice when he explains why he lusted for that appointment: “It’s the best perk in town. It means that I get the box right next to the president’s box for the ballet when I want it. I get to go to all the cast parties, meet all the movie stars, and I get an extra invitation to the White House every season.”
Most important for Wilson, it meant that with no money down, he could dress up and play out his Good-Time Charlie role with a beautiful new girl on his arm as many as forty or fifty evenings a year if he liked, since he’d have free tickets to most of the shows. It was like a safety net for this broke romantic, knowing that on any given night he would always be able to give one of his girlfriends an evening of true glamour. For months Wilson had been pleading and lobbying the formidable House Speaker to grant him this appointment. But the tough old Irish pol hadn’t come to rule the House by giving valuable perks away for free. And so Wilson’s appeals had fallen on deaf ears—until now.
“Well, it’s a package deal, Chally.”
O’Neill understood that Wilson’s identity as a noisy braggart was perfect cover for the covert operation he had in mind. “The word on Charlie was that he didn’t talk,” recalled O’Neill’s former whip, Tony Coelho. “From time to time the Speaker needed to mount irregular operations, and Wilson was one of those irregulars Tip could count on.”
Wilson accepted the Speaker’s deal. Delighted at his lifetime appointment to the Kennedy Center board, he was a happy warrior as he raced to the rescue of his imperiled friend John Murtha.
He had his work cut out for him. Watching Representative Murtha on the ABSCAM tapes is not an experience designed to make a citizen feel better about Congress. A member of the Ethics Committee at the time, he did refuse the bribe, but he did not exactly close the door on a future negotiation: “You know, you made an offer. It might be that I might change my mind someday.”
Others might have felt that Murtha had disgraced the institution and deserved to be prosecuted and thrown out of Congress, but Wilson genuinely did not. To begin with, he admired Murtha. The two were on Defense Appropriations together; they were both fierce anti-Communists; and Murtha was a decorated Korean War veteran who had volunteered for two combat tours with the marines in Vietnam, which meant he started off as a hero in Wilson’s eyes. As Charlie framed the controversy, his friend had actually done nothing wrong. He hadn’t taken the bribe from the FBI’s “sheikh”; his only sin had been to say he’d think about it. And if the Ethics Committee members were even thinking of lynching a patriot like Murtha simply because he had lust in his heart, then it was time that the entire committee be put to a very public morals test of its own.
Wilson arrived on the Ethics Committee just as O’Neill had hoped—like a wrecker. He told a Washington Post reporter that the committee was on a partisan witch-hunt and that what was really on trial was not John Murtha but the integrity of the House of Representatives. He was clearly spoiling for a fight, daring someone to take him on.
That was not the way things are supposed to work on the Ethics Committee. The members were supposed to sit around in a sober manner, quietly review the evidence, and make their rulings. It was a horrible thought to have to go head-to-head with Charlie Wilson, a man who seem
ed to revel in his reputation as a rule-breaking, skirt-chasing sinner. Ordinarily a special prosecutor in Prettyman’s position could count on having enormous leverage over members of the committee. All it took to damage a normal representative’s reputation was a leak to the press indicating that the member was trying to derail an investigation. But it was clear from his opening statement that Wilson would have liked nothing more than to battle it out in the press “on behalf of an innocent man who happens to be a war hero.”
Prior to Wilson’s intervention, the committee had given the special prosecutor something of a free hand; but shortly after Charlie’s arrival the rules of the game changed completely and before Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation. “This matter is closed,” proclaimed the newly appointed Ethics Committee chairman Louis Stokes, another of the Speaker’s reliables.
Prettyman was stunned. But bound by an oath of secrecy, there was nothing he could do other than resign in protest. Meanwhile, a teary Murtha had confided to a colleague that Wilson’s effort had saved his life.
The Murtha rescue operation was one of those small, unrecorded incidents with far-reaching consequences. For O’Neill, the intervention ended the threat to his hold on the House and unleashed him to become Ronald Reagan’s liberal tormentor. Wilson would laugh off the incident as if it had been an entertainment: “It was the best deal I ever made. I only had to be on Ethics for a year, and I get to stay on the Kennedy Center for life.” But he understood that something far deeper had taken place. Relationships had been cemented that would be crucial to Wilson’s Afghan campaign.
Murtha would rise to become chairman of the awesomely powerful Defense Subcommittee that Wilson would turn to later when the CIA tried to resist his efforts to up the ante in Afghanistan. Whenever angry Agency officials tried to complain about this dangerous meddling, Murtha would always make it clear that when it came to Afghanistan, the subcommittee deferred to Charlie. “The thing about Murtha,” says a respectful Wilson, “is that he always remembers.” And looming over both of them would be the expansive Irishman with the big cigar, providing a special waiver for Peck’s bad boy, “Chally,” to cross over the line to work with the CIA. This was how things worked in Tip O’Neill’s House.