Charlie Wilson's War (35 page)

T
here are thirty-three churches in Trinity, Texas, population 2,648. The Second Congressional District, which Charlie Wilson represented in 1984, lies in the very heart of the Bible Belt, as attested to by the
JESUS IS THE LORD OF LUFKIN
billboard. Just down the road are the huge Pentecostal summer revival camps. A kind of fundamentalism flourishes in the religious practices of its citizens, not all that dissimilar from the intensity of feeling the Afghans have for their god. Religion is a way of life in East Texas, and at the heart of that experience is a belief in the presence of Satan.

Almost everyone in Wilson’s district is an authority on sin. In a curious way, the God-fearing people of East Texas are far more familiar with sin than people in more sophisticated parts of the country, even those without religion. The ministers here rail constantly against the Devil’s handiwork. They talk about the temptations, always present, that every man and woman succumb to at some point in their lives. The ministers look out over a flock of sinners and preach the need, indeed the responsibility, for all to come to the altar and cast Satan out. Many find Jesus again and again.

It is in this rhythm of sin and redemption that the key to Charlie Wilson’s political survival can be found. Charlie was in a curious way the Second Congressional District’s designated sinner, a highly visible presence whom they could live through vicariously. And because he was forever getting caught and forever coming home and owning up to his backsliding, entreating forgiveness, the generous-hearted faithful regularly took him back into their hearts.

Beyond this, Wilson had also been a remarkably effective and accessible congressman. That spring, as the primary campaign got under way, he was on the road every day, zigzagging about his New Jersey–sized district in an elaborate mobile office, complete with three workstations to receive constitutents seeking help in dealing with the government. Since 1980, this ingenious motorized command post had doubled Charlie’s effectiveness, permitting him to increase his constituent services while chalking up an enormous amount of campaigning at government expense.

Ordinarily a congressman will buy or rent a branch office in addition to his or her main office in the district’s largest city. Instead, Charlie had used his government allowance to buy this $70,000 custom-made van, which served to project his presence everywhere at once. Throughout the year, notices would go out announcing the arrival the following week of Congressman Charles Wilson. Charlie himself would rarely appear, but the van, filled with competent staffers and volunteers, would zoom up to the designated neighborhood and help constituents with Social Security, Medicare, veterans issues, or any other problems they had getting the federal government to work for them.

The people Wilson did the most for, the very poor, rarely voted. But ever since his father had avoided the stigma of unemployment through FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Charlie had been a true believer in the positive role of government. The district boasted a vast civic center and a veterans’ hospital, solely due to him. And everywhere, from the shipyards in Orange to Lufkin Industries, constituents were working thanks to Charlie’s way with defense contractors.

A surprising number of people in the Second Congressional District adored him, particularly its senior citizens. Every fall Charlie hosted a dominoes tournament in the Lufkin Civic Center that set his campaign back $25,000, because every player got a set of dominoes with
VOTE FOR CHARLES WILSON
engraved on the back. More than a thousand gray-haired people showed up each year, and Charlie was there to bestow on the lucky winner a trip to Washington for the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Lufkin’s black citizens voted for him almost en masse. Reverend Nordstron, their spiritual leader, would explain that Charlie was a courageous champion of their interests but that he and other black leaders would never allow him to stick his neck out too far. In this district, where pockets still held that the Klan was king, the black vote belonged to Charlie. Despite this goodwill, as the 1984 primary unfolded, it became clear that there was only one thing that could save Charlie Wilson: money—enormous quantities of campaign contributions.

The four candidates who had filed against him were convinced that Wilson had finally crossed the line. The business about the hot tub was bad enough. But even those who forgave the drug investigation had a hard time explaining the hit-and-run incident; it just made Wilson look like a bad person.

It is said that even if a yellow dog ran for Congress in East Texas, as long as the dog was a Democrat he could win. The only race that counted was the primary, and Wilson knew that the only antidote to his scandal-stained image was television and radio. He had to overwhelm his rivals with carefully packaged campaign ads, a strategy that doesn’t come cheap.

In moments of need, politicians turn to those who owe them favors, and no group was more beholden to him than the defense contractors. Wilson had a reputation for never having met a weapons system he didn’t like, and they anted up $100,000 for their benefactor. They were not alone. All the special interests beholden to Wilson came through that year, and he ended up taking in the second largest amount of PAC money in Congress. But it was the friends of Israel who rallied most impressively. Ed Koch organized a fund-raiser in New York and made an emotional pitch for generosity: “This is a man who has less than ten Jewish constituents, but he helps Israel because he believes in it.” By Election Day, Wilson’s Jewish friends had come up with another $100,000 for his campaign.

Unquestionably the greatest individual stalwart turned out to be the ever loyal Joanne Herring, who set about corralling all of her rich, archconservative friends and business contacts. Her efforts were typically spiced with glamorous enticements, including a weekend retreat at a friend’s exotic wild-game ranch. She would reflect afterward, “It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I told my friends that the things they had heard about Charlie weren’t true, that he was so bright and that he was doing something that would change the world. And then he arrived for dinner and fell asleep right at the table. It was terrible,” she recalled with an all-forgiving laugh. “The heads of everything were there and Charlie couldn’t even answer questions. But some of them gave money anyway. They did it for me.”

After this incident, Joanne and Charlie Fawcett decided they had to rescue Charlie from the bottle. Together they composed an anonymous note “from a true admirer who only wants to see you realize your destiny.” “Alcohol is going to ruin you,” it warned. “For your own good and for the country, you must stop.” Together they took this anonymous communiqué and slipped it into Charlie’s mailbox—a touching gesture that didn’t seem to have any impact at all.

In spite of her concerns, Joanne stood by her man and single-handedly raised close to $50,000. In all, the congressman pulled in an amazing $600,000—an astounding sum for a primary campaign in a depressed rural district where the local contributions totaled a mere $20,000.

His war chest notwithstanding, Wilson was running scared. His chief opponent, Jerry Johnson, was precisely the kind of candidate one would expect the voters of the Bible Belt to support. A fifty-year-old rancher and family man, he was a deacon and Sunday school teacher at a Baptist church. “Unlike the incumbent,” his political ads promised, “I won’t go into the Washington real estate and nightclub business and forget where I come from and who I’m working for. He’s forgotten that we didn’t elect him to sightsee the Khyber Pass and sit with Moslem refugees.”

The other opponents, like Lloyd Dickens, echoed the same theme of ridding the district of an embarrassment: “Charlie Wilson has shown that he is against the concept of the American family, from his Playboy lifestyle to his pro-abortion stand.”

As Election Day approached, the polls weren’t improving, but somehow Wilson seemed to pull himself together. Something seemed to be energizing him. It was a dream—a recurring dream that began coming to him almost nightly. It always began the same way, in an Afghan village where four or five Hind gunships are sweeping in low. A young Afghan boy and a couple of men in baggy pants are firing frantically with their rifles and pistols, but their bullets bounce off the armored bellies. And then, as in a movie close-up, the pilot’s Slavic face comes menacingly into focus, leering as he opens fire with his guns, mowing down the villagers.

It was a nightmare, but to Charlie Wilson it always seemed real—as if he were there in that village night after night, watching those brave men being murdered in cold blood. Instead of feeling haunted, somehow he almost welcomed its nightly arrival. It seemed to cleanse him and leave him feeling that there was a reason why he should win this election.

The slaughter in Afghanistan was at its peak that spring. With the knowledge that his own government was not willing to give the Afghans a weapon that could protect or at least avenge them, Wilson would wake from the dream energized, thinking, “What am I going to do to those fuckers tomorrow?” And by “those fuckers,” he didn’t mean the Soviet pilots. He meant the polished bureaucrats in Washington.

He began calling Langley from his mobile campaign office the day after the dream first came to him in Texas. “You just don’t give a fuck about the Afghans, do you?” he found himself shouting in frustration at Chuck Cogan. When the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon, tried to argue once again that an escalation would be dangerous to Pakistan, Wilson cut him off: “As long as Zia’s not afraid, that’s not your concern, John.”

When Wilson demanded a timetable for the Oerlikons, McMahon would only say, “Keep your britches on, we’re working on it.” When Wilson got through to Casey, the director would fob him off with sympathetic words: “I hear you, I hear you. Get back to me in a few days if nothing happens.”

Once when Wilson was particularly incensed, he reached a surly General Stillwell at the Pentagon, who told him that the Oerlikons were the wrong weapon and that the CIA shouldn’t even be running the war if it was going to get that big. Wilson’s response caught the powerful general by surprise. “If I remember correctly,” Stillwell recalled years later, “the congressman said something like he was going to put my pelt on his wall if I kept up my opposition.”

The reason the CIA and their allies in the Pentagon and elsewhere were prepared to risk Wilson’s fury was because they were counting on the voters of the Second Congressional District to rid them of this meddlesome politician. Given the accumulated scandals, it seemed inconceivable that his constituents would return such a persistent sinner to office.

But in the final days of the Wilson campaign, something noticeable began to happen. It had to do with an atmosphere around him. Anyone who studies television knows that it is less important what a person says on TV than how he projects himself. Afghanistan wasn’t an issue in the campaign, but something about the way Charlie felt about the cause of Afghanistan and his mission there burned so brightly inside him that it made him look as if he had been “born again.” He may not have found God, but Charlie Wilson’s constituents could see that his needle was once again pointing north.

On primary night everyone who counted in Charlie’s life gathered at his house on Crooked Creek—his mother and sister, staffers and friends. Charles Fawcett and Joanne added a touch of glamour by driving in from River Oaks in an exotic recreational vehicle that had been a gift to Fawcett from the king of Morocco. The house was full of friends, but there was, among them all, a sense that this might be Charlie’s Waterloo, particularly when disastrous early returns from Nacogdoches came in: Jerry Johnson, the Sunday school teacher, had swept the county.

A concerned Charlie Fawcett took Wilson aside to try to cheer him up: “That doesn’t mean a thing, Charlie—you can be far more effective for the mujahideen out of Congress than in.” Wilson was horrified by this well-meaning pep talk. The fact was that he would be utterly useless to the mujahideen if he lost. In fact, he didn’t really know what value he could be to anyone.

Arthur Temple, the timber baron who had been Charlie’s political patron since he’d first gone into politics, sat Buddha-like and disapproving as he watched the election reports. Temple was a kind of surrogate father to Charlie, an influential businessman and progressive reformer who had once believed that Charlie could go all the way to the top. Even Charlie’s mother looked concerned. She had been by his side ever since he first ran for office, campaigning at teas and going door-to-door like the Kennedy women. What was there to say to her now except that he had brought this ruin down upon himself? Finding it too trying to put on a brave face, Charlie asked Joanne to come with him into the bedroom. “He told me things didn’t look good,” she remembered. “I just told him he was wonderful. He was a real hero to me.”

When all seemed lost, the tide began slowly to turn. By the end of the night, the tally stood at 55 percent for Wilson, 45 percent divided between the four others. Miraculously, at his lowest moment, Charlie had found his moorings. He hadn’t told his born-again constituents that he wanted their vote so that he could save the Afghans or even because he wanted to do in the Evil Empire. He hadn’t had to. Whatever it was about him, they liked what they saw. He was there to stay, with all his seniority and unsettling allies. And when he returned to the capital two days later, all his pent-up energy was turned on Langley.

At this very moment, Gust Avrakotos’s fortunes were also shifting. He had managed to win himself a powerful new patron. Ed Juchniewicz (pronounced Gin-oh-witz) was Clair George’s number two man, the associate deputy director for Operations. Like Gust, Juchniewicz was not part of the Agency’s old-boy elite. He was a second-generation American whose father had been born in Poland. A former marine, he had spent most of his first twenty years at the CIA in the Soviet division. Juchniewicz was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist hater, and by 1984 he was the second most important man in the Clandestine Services. Day in, day out, his primary responsibility was selecting officers for the division’s key assignments, but when Clair George was out of town he served as deputy director for Operations. He could be a powerful friend, and his thinking ran very differently from that of Chuck Cogan and the rest of the seventh floor.