Into the Wild 
Into the Wild 
The Rehabilitation of Charlie Wilson
From booze-guzzling, skirt-chasing, check-kiting Congressman to American hero in—you guessed it—twelve steps.
tsumbra says: ’Good time Charlie’ will be missed. As a fun-loving east Texan partying in west Texas, he would have enjoyed this! "Lusting for Pinkie’s" http://www.voicesnet.org/displayonepoem.aspx?poemid=156108 (February 11th, 2010 at 10:12am)
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Step Two: Bring That Empire Down With Style
When his colleagues in the Texas Legislature remember the six-foot-four, rail-thin son of an accountant from the small town of Trinity, they talk first about his attire: Buckled dress shoes. Painfully loud ties. Pants that fit so tight it was figured he had to grease his heels to pull them on. Speculation at the time was that there must have been a filling station somewhere between Austin and Lufkin where Charlie would change clothes when he drove back to the district.
He made no such effort to reign himself in for the Afghanistan operation. Whenever he flew to Asia to work on the war, be it to check on the muj or lobby their neighbors, he always took one of his girlfriends, women his staff knew as “the rotation.”
And never once did conventional wisdom or common sense get in his way. In an early drive to find a shoulder-fired missile for the Muslim-by-definition muj, Charlie solicited, and received, a design from Israel. When the Soviets targeted and killed great numbers of mules and camels needed to caravan weapons to the field, Charlie flew in Tennessee mules. When the CIA refused to provide field radios for fear that muj transmissions would be picked up by the Russians, Charlie’s administrative assistant, Charlie Schnabel, bought $12,000 worth of walkie-talkies at a Virginia Radio Shack and took those to the war. And when the medical needs of the wounded muj proved too great for Afghan medicine, Charlie brought them to America for treatment. On one occasion, two muj from rival tribes who were recovering in the same facility went at each other with knives. “After a couple of these bad situations, we tried to put just one in each hospital,” says Charlie.
Step Three: Build Up Enough Stories About Your Bad Behavior That You Can Stop Behaving Badly
Charlie came of age as a public servant in Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes’s Texas Senate. It was a different time, one wistfully recalled as a rocking and rolling period in Texas political history, with parties that lasted whole weekends and senators making drunken speeches on the chamber floor. Barnes says Charlie was no worse than the rest, but he does remember driving to an Austin Chamber of Commerce breakfast at about six-thirty one morning and finding Charlie sitting on the curb near the Capitol, still dressed in the green suit he’d worn the day before. Charlie said he’d been locked out of his nearby apartment after coming home too late from a night on the town.
There was no appreciable change in Charlie when he went to D.C. One of the reasons his Afghan maneuvering stayed out of the news was that his partying played so well in the headlines. There were the cocaine charges, of which he was ultimately cleared in 1983. And then there was a famous drunk-driving episode when, on the way home for the “hot” part of a hot date, he smashed his Lincoln into a Mazda on D.C.’s Key Bridge. He sped home from the scene to escape the cops and get some sleep before catching an early-morning flight to Peshawar with members of the Appropriations Committee. He later paid a $25 fine for a misdemeanor charge of causing an accident.
His friends and staff eventually began to worry. Longtime running buddy Larry L. King, the author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, persuaded Charlie to attend some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings after King quit drinking in the early eighties. Charlie’s only comment on the experience now is “There were some good-looking chicks there, but I never had a serious romance with one.” In 1985 he collapsed at an air show in Paris and was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a fatty heart. If it was not the result of a lifetime of boozing, it was certainly a cue to stop, and a series of doctors told him that if he drank again he’d die. He stayed sober for a year and a half, until a New Year’s Eve glass of champagne sent him back down the hill.
Finally, in 1998, Charlie changed his mind and quit for good. He’s not entirely insightful when he reflects on it. “I had quit before, for nine months, eighteen months, a week and a half,” he says. “But this time I just made up my mind. Now I’ve managed, without going to drunk school, to stay off whiskey. I’ve never said I’ll never drink again, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have a drink tonight.” It may just be that after fifty years of thoroughly enjoyable hard-drinking escapades, he is finally content with just telling the stories.
Step Four: Remind the World How Bad You Were to Reinforce How Good You Have Become
“Lyndon Johnson’s Secret Service guys were just assholes,” says Charlie, “and when they showed up in Austin, they would literally shoulder your ass off the damn sidewalk when they walked by. Well, one night my first wife and I were going to a wedding rehearsal dinner at the Driskill, and it was raining like hell. But just as we pulled up, somebody pulled out of a parking space right out in front of the hotel, right under the awning. So we parked the car and went in and partied. And when we stumbled out later, one of these Secret Service agents had double-parked his Buick so it was impossible to get my car out. And he’d taken his keys upstairs and gone to bed.
“Well, as Allah would have it, I had been having trouble with the lock on my Buick, so I had been to the dealership that day and gotten a whole ring of General Motors keys to try out on my car. When I took out the keys, my wife said, ‘You’re not going to do that, are you?’ and I said, ‘Yep, I sure am.’ So here I am, in a tuxedo, in the rain, and on the fifth key I try, that f—ing Secret Service car opens. I said, ‘I can’t let this go by,’ and I took the car about eight or nine blocks and found an alley and hid it. Then I rubbed all my fingerprints off—not the last time I’d do that—and ran back, just drenched, to the Driskill. They didn’t find that car for something like ten days.”
Step Five: Stick Close by the People Who Always Stuck Close by You
Early last November, Charlie signed copies of Charlie Wilson’s War at the new history center in Diboll. To the piped-in strains of Sousa marches, nearly a thousand visitors filed in past a local ROTC color guard to swarm a table where Charlie, wearing his elder statesman’s gray suit and a big, honest grin, shook hands and autographed books. The only thing audible over the din of the crowd and the Sousa was Charlie’s booming laugh.
When Charlie was in Congress, his staff was repeatedly cited as the number one provider of constituent services, helping the “home folks,” as Charlie still calls them, get the IRS out of their hair and their social security and veteran’s benefits into the bank. The key was his rolling office. The district was large enough to receive funding for two satellite offices, but Charlie spent that money on a tour bus, which he would take twice a year to every community in the Piney Woods. One opponent for Charlie’s congressional seat tried to convince voters that it was a federally funded party van. East Texans who waited in long lines in Kroger parking lots to board the bus and tell Charlie their problems knew better.
Longtime district office director Shawn Davis, who was at the book signing, recounted how much Charlie enjoyed making the home folks feel like somebody. Like the times he escorted visiting defense contractors to a tiny machine shop outside Orange. Or the line item Charlie finagled into a transportation bill that appropriated funds for three American airports: New York, LaGuardia; Chicago, O’Hare; and Center, Texas, Municipal.
“When the day was done,” says Charlie, “the working people knew I was on their side, and the blacks knew I was on their side. And it’s hard to explain, but there is a tolerance for human frailty that doesn’t exist outside of East Texas.” Once, a Houston TV station sent a news crew to Lufkin during the cocaine investigation. An old farmer in overalls was interviewed sitting on the tailgate of his pickup. When the reporter asked what he thought about his congressman possibly using cocaine, the farmer lifted his gimme cap, scratched his head, and said, “I remember when a fifth of scotch would do it for Charlie.”
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