Charlie Wilson's War (26 page)

Officially, Joanne was only Zia’s honorary consul in Houston, but she had such astonishing sway over the Muslim dictator that in a moment of abject weakness that had horrified the entire Pakistan Foreign Office, he had committed to making this blond American woman his roving ambassador at large, and had further agreed to provide her with a turbaned Pashtun tribesman to serve as her footman in Washington.

At last, everything seemed to be falling in place for the embattled congressman. He had beaten the rap, he had won the heart of the “Queen of Texas,” and now he had three weeks to give to the jihad.

From his office on the Hill, he called Joanne in Houston. They exchanged little endearments of unending love and agreed to meet the next day in Paris, where they would begin their mission to convert Doc Long.

W
hen Wilson had bought his secondhand Lincoln Continental from Liz Wickersham’s father in Orange, he’d joked that its hood was as vast as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He had named it “the Nimitz,” after the greatest of Texas admirals, Chester W. Nimitz, who had fought his fleet across the Pacific to bring down the Japanese empire.

Wilson’s always delighted in the feeling that came over him whenever he took its wheel. On August 11, 1983, the night before his long journey to the front, he was feeling particularly heroic as he swung onto the Key Bridge and began to accelerate. He had just finished a romantic dinner with Trish Wilson, a warmhearted and good-looking blonde he had dated off and on for years. He was scheduled to meet Joanne the following day in Paris. But Paris was an ocean away and it had always been hard for the congressman to deny himself such simple pleasures as an evening with an old friend. They had gone to the Trieste Restaurant, and Charlie had gotten himself a little drunk. He could never resist Manhattans on such occasions—the glasses were so elegant—and with Trish staring admiringly into his eyes, he’d outlined the dangerous mission upon which he was about to embark. It had made him feel like a heroic character in a movie, perhaps an RAF pilot in a London bar the night before a big raid. By the fifth round, Trish had agreed to spend the night with him, and after his eighth Manhattan, he had set off in the Nimitz while Trish drove back to her apartment for a change of clothes. They were to meet at his place in half an hour.

It was raining as the congressman roared across Key Bridge. And then—bang! A twenty-two-year-old motorist who had just moved to Washington from Minnesota found his brand-new Mazda hurtling sixty feet before slamming into a guardrail that saved him from plunging into the Potomac.

Mr. and Mrs. Steven Standiford, who later provided eyewitness accounts of the rear-end bashing, said they had been concerned when they’d noticed the big blue car weaving from lane to lane in front of them. They’d watched horrified, as the Lincoln smashed the little Mazda, then lurched back from the wreckage. The hood of the Nimitz was crunched straight into the air, and its driver seemed to be craning his neck anxiously out the window to take in the scene. With a sweeping maneuver, the Lincoln then sped away into Virginia, but not before Mr. and Mrs. Standiford had noted the car’s unusual license plate: Texas 2.

Behind the wheel of the Nimitz, Wilson was now thinking clearly. It was dangerous to drive any further; the mangled hood blocked his vision. The only way for him to see the road was to stick his head out the window. But it was just two more minutes to the Iwo Jima statue and his apartment building. And once in the Wesley’s underground garage, he would be safe. He was moving quickly now, scurrying from the car, hitting the elevator’s ninth-floor button, then flinging his front door open and, just as quickly, locking it from inside.

Years later, he reconstructed this moment: “I was drunker than shit. I had hit this car and knocked it forever. I knew that if the cops came I was dead meat. So, after determining that the driver was not hurt, I just drove home and locked myself in my apartment. The police must have the world’s fastest computer in northern Virginia, because they found my car and were banging on my door in thirty minutes.”

On the other side of that door, Charlie Wilson cowered in silence. The hammering and the loud, demanding voices wouldn’t stop. Finally he crept to the phone to whisper instructions to Trish not to come: “The police are after me. They’re in the building.”

Wilson’s administrative assistant, Charles Simpson, was jolted awake by the phone call: “Simpson, I’ve really screwed up this time. Here’s what you’ve got to do.” By this time Wilson had already called his lawyer, who’d advised him that the police might well attempt an arrest, but that he would be safe as long as he drove directly to Congress. Federal law prohibits local authorities from arresting a national legislator on his way to or from Congress. But Wilson didn’t want to go to Congress. He had to get to Doc Long’s plane, which was waiting for him at Andrews Air Force Base. There was every reason to believe that the frustrated Virginia police might attempt an arrest once he left the Wesley. But again Wilson’s good luck held.

The Key Bridge, it turned out, falls under the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia, not Virginia, so the Arlington police banging at the door had been outside their authority. Simpson would always say that his boss’s finest moments were when he was backed into a corner. With the authorities closing in, Wilson proceeded to make his own luck. His main threat now was from the D.C. police, yet until recently he had been chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the District of Columbia.
*
He had always been very generous with the federal city, particularly with the police force, whose budget he had always protected. And just before the sun came up he put in a call to one of the friends he had made in the police department.

Wilson explained his problem: an air force jet was scheduled to take him out of the country on government business in a matter of hours. “I may have told him that it was a mission that had to do with saving the world from Communist aggression in Afghanistan,” Wilson recalled with some humor years later, “and that there might well be substantial raises in store for the District police.” The bottom line was this: could he leave the country? “No problem, Mr. Chairman. Just check in with us on your return.”

Wilson still had to cope with the likelihood that the Virginia police might attempt an arrest. But the Pentagon solved that problem for him. As is its custom when providing flights for members of Congress, they dispatched an escort officer and car to pick Wilson up at his apartment to make sure he arrived safely at the plane. The congressman tried to look calm as the officer opened the door to the car, but he hadn’t slept and he was agitated. He couldn’t help but glance around nervously as they glided through Arlington, past the scene of the crime, back into the District, and finally to the safety of Andrews.

On board Wilson asked for a bullshot, as his hangover was fierce. For a moment, looking down on the capital, it all seemed peaceful. Then the cables started coming into the cockpit.

Back in the office, the Angels were frantically trying to reach Charlie to warn him that cameras and questions were likely to be waiting at Orly. With each news bulletin detailing the congressional hit-and-run, a new cable from Washington arrived and was sent back to the unhappy congressman.

The plane was filled with Wilson’s Appropriations colleagues and their wives, and soon Charlie had confided the whole sorry story to Doc Long. Another, more conventional chairman might have thought Wilson was compromising the delegation or perhaps besmirching the reputation of the entire U.S. House of Representatives. “Doc kind of looked at me as if I was Peck’s bad boy,” Wilson says, referring to the old Jackie Coogan silent film. “He was very tolerant. I’ve gotten by on that many a time in my life.”

But Wilson’s loyal administrative assistant, Charlie Simpson, felt that he couldn’t put up with it anymore. The only reason Simpson had quit his job as a tenured professor of history at Sam Houston University was because he’d believed that Charlie was one of those politicians who come along only once in a decade. When they had flown into Washington together in 1972, Simpson remembers, Wilson had asked the taxi driver to pull over at the Lincoln Memorial. “I have to learn how to be a congressman and you need to learn how to be an AA [administrative assistant],” Wilson had told Simpson. “And this is the first thing we have to do.” The cab waited as the two men climbed to the top of the white marble steps. “Charlie read every word written on the walls,” Simpson recalls. “And as we were leaving, there were almost tears in his eyes.” The experience left the AA believing that perhaps the two of them shared a special destiny.

Over the years, Simpson had learned to cope with Charlie’s women, his drinking, his dictators, his outlaw friends, his short attention span, his overall irresponsibility—and even the drug business. But when Wilson had called that morning to say he had just rammed a motorist and run away, something in Simpson had snapped.

“There’s a young man with a Mazda RX-7,” Wilson had told Simpson. “If he calls you, get his car repaired.” Simpson remembers his rueful response: “Okay, I’ll take care of it. You go along.” Somehow he managed to put out the fires that Wilson had left raging behind, explaining with a straight face to the press why the congressman had left the scene of the accident: “He thought he’d hit a bridge railing and came on home.”

Simpson then contacted the aggrieved motorist and offered to have his car fixed. It had been a nasty accident. The repair bill was $3,800, but Simpson handled the victim so well that he never even discussed litigation. “The kid was new in town, been here two months. He just didn’t know when he had us by the balls.”

It all worked out fine, but for the first time Simpson felt dirty. “From that day on, I didn’t give a shit what Wilson wanted,” Simpson said. He would never look at Wilson with the same blinders that had served them both so well over the last decade. Now he saw only an irresponsible, overgrown boy. A year later, when the senior senator from Texas, Lloyd Bentsen, offered to make Simpson his administrative assistant, he sought Wilson’s blessing and, upon receiving it, accepted.

On board the air force plane the morning after the wreck, Wilson felt about as low as a snake’s belly. For the first time, he too wondered if he had any legitimacy left. The Afghan cause had sustained his self-respect throughout the worst of the drug days, but now he didn’t know if he could even go through with this campaign to win over Doc Long.

Luckily, Joanne Herring was waiting for him in Paris—ready to breathe pure inspiration back into the deflated and badly hungover congressman. Right away he told her that his career might be over, that the hit-and-run on top of the dope charges might well be the last straw. He was offering to let her off the hook.

But nothing that Charlie did that year seemed to shake her—not the drugs, not the stories of Liz and the hot tub, not even the belly dancer in Pakistan pretending to be the congressman’s secretary. The hit-and-run on the Key Bridge she treated as little more than a speeding violation. Perhaps the best explanation as to why she was so forgiving is that Joanne Herring, that summer, was very much in the throes of her born-again revelations.

Just the year before she had found Christ. And like all born-agains, the Tempter was a very familiar figure to her. As she saw it, the Devil was throwing roadblocks in her man’s way—trying to derail him because Charlie was headed into a mighty battle with the forces of evil. Herring was a product of Texas oil and the John Birch Society and, most recently, a disciple of the Count de Marenches’s vision of a global Communist conspiracy in which even well-known capitalists were agents. All of this somehow coalesced for her into a clear vision once she was born again. She now saw an apocalyptic struggle in which she and Charlie had become instruments of Jesus.

She told the self-flagellating Wilson that there was no time for moping, that he was wonderful, and that they had God’s battle to fight. It was to begin that very night at the home of the Viscomtesse de Grèves, “the most beautiful woman in Paris.” It had been no small matter persuading this French patrician to host a dinner for a group of unknown American politicians, and Charlie had to play his part.

Joanne had long since evolved a theory about the way she, as a Texas socialite, could influence the course of world events. It had to do with grand dinners and glitz and fun and how you bring people together. For her, a dinner party was not entertainment alone but deadly serious business. It all came down to the mixture: business with pleasure, high society with the people who actually make the world work, moving them around from course to course, matching them with partners they would never otherwise encounter, always maneuvering to bring together the ones who could change the world according to her designs.

Doc Long was hardly the sort of person you’d expect to be the guest of honor at an aristocratic gathering in Paris, but the viscomtess had been sympathetic to Joanne’s seduction plan and had summoned “le tout Paris.” As Joanne articulates it today, the strategy was very simple: “What we wanted to do is make Doc Long have so much fun that when he got to Zia, the ground would be prepared, just like it had been for Charlie when he first went to Pakistan.”

She saw the evening as a perfect first step and was fast on her way to becoming each of the congressmen’s new best friends. The pictures from this interlude in Paris show Joanne dressed in fanciful pink Little Miss Muffet outfits, sexy affairs with a parasol and a very short skirt. In each of these photos she is the center of a sea of smiles: Doc Long is grinning from ear to ear, and Mrs. Long is smiling too. “It’s always a big mistake to ignore the wives,” Joanne explains, and on this trip she concentrated much of her attention on making sure all of them were on board.

The delegation next stopped off briefly in Syria, then went on to Israel, where the chairman was treated with great respect. Nobody needed to tell the Israelis to make an effort with this man who, along with his planeload of appropriators, sent large amounts of U.S. aid each year for every man, woman, and child in the country.

Charlie, meanwhile, went off on his own to visit his old Israeli friend Zvi Rafiah, and Rafiah’s boss, Michael Shore, the chairman of IMI. As always, the Russian gunships were foremost on Wilson’s mind, and he was eager to find out where things stood with the Charlie Horse, the anti-aircraft gun IMI had agreed to design for the Afghans.
*

After briefing Wilson, the two Israelis brought up a personal matter: they were worried that their friend might lose the upcoming election because of the scandals surrounding him. They wanted him to know that Israel needed Wilson in Congress and that since they couldn’t contribute to his campaign directly, they would make sure their friends in America did. They then gave him a captured PLO Kalashnikov, which Charlie proudly carried onto the air force plane with utter disregard for the rigid rules prohibiting such illegal arms shipments. “Doc got a kick out of me having it on the plane,” Wilson recalls. “He also liked the fact that the Israelis liked me so much.”