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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At the end of the book signing, Charlie opted against the formality of a microphone when he rose to address his people. He opened with a reviewer’s summation of the book’s protagonist: “‘Rarely can the prefix “the Honourable” have been less appropriate. The man’—he means me—‘was a drunken, shiftless, ignorant, lying, drug-taking, zipper-flipping, corrupt, power-crazed cretin.’” Charlie flashed the special get-a-load-of-that smile he saves for the unpersuaded and announced, “That was written by some Australian ‘prevert.’” The crowd laughed, and Charlie grew serious. “The good Lord blessed me with the world’s most tolerant and forgiving constituency, and I want to thank you for that,” he said. “Despite every embarrassment, you trooped to the polls and gave me your votes year after year.”
“We gave you those votes because you gave us such wonderful service!” said a woman in the crowd.
“Well, I hope you know I tried my best to earn them.”
Step Six: Tell the Stories That Tie You to Your People
“When I first ran for the Texas House, in 1960,” says Charlie, “the big issue was dogs. Poor folks wanted to be able to hunt deer with dogs. There was a subculture in East Texas called the ‘dog men,’ working people who barely made ends meet but would still feed eight or ten dogs and turn ’em loose to chase down deer. Now, the state law was that you couldn’t chase a deer with a dog. That was the law. But at some point a very clever Piney Woods populist had stuck in the law ‘except for wounded deer.’ So a dog man would simply shoot a gun in the air and let his dogs go, and if he got caught by the game warden, he’d just say, ‘Ah, hell, I thought I’d hit him.’ But the people with property did not want those damn dogs chasing deer on their land. So that issue separated the haves from the have-nots.
“Of course, I had been gone in the Navy, and I didn’t understand anything when I got back, with just a month before the primary. I thought we were going to talk about taxes and appropriations, the big things. But about two weeks into it this rumor got started that I was against the dogs, and it was hurting me bad. So we had a rally at the football stadium in Huntington. It was just overflowing, probably two or three thousand people there, and I needed to convince each of them that I was for the dog. When it came my time to speak, I was led up to the stand by nine beautiful, howling, black-and-tan hound dogs. The crowd went f—ing crazy. It was probably nine or ten minutes before I could do my oration. I forget where we’d borrowed the dogs, but of course, I claimed they belonged to my daddy. From that moment on I was king of the dog men, and I had dogs with me every state campaign I ran.”
Step Seven: Find the Right Woman
Charlie had been known as a ladies’ man in Austin when, as a philandering state legislator, he would step over the rail on the Senate floor without breaking stride to talk to a pretty girl. That image flowered in 1981, when he moved into a bachelor pad–town house with a God’s-eye view of D.C. There he famously maintained a hot tub in the bedroom and dangled handcuffs from the bedpost. All the members of the rotation passed through, women he gave nicknames like Snowflake, Sweetums, Tornado, and Firecracker. One girlfriend, who features prominently in Charlie’s mythology, was variously identified by envious male friends of his as Miss Venezuela, Miss Brazil, Miss USA, Miss World, and Miss Nude Honduras. (For the record, she was Miss USA.)
The only relevant nickname and title now belong to the same woman: Babs, or as her postman knows her, Mrs. Wilson. In 1999 Charlie settled down. He first met Barbara Alberstadt in the late seventies, when she was a glowing ballerina with a white satin rose in her brunette chignon; she had been enlisted to choreograph a Democratic party fundraiser that Charlie was emceeing. For his part, Charlie was finally getting a divorce from his first wife, Jerry, a sweet, smart Texas blonde nicknamed Goose and eternally identified as “long-suffering.” He was predictably intrigued by the young ballerina. Friends warned Barbara that Charlie was trouble; she found him thoughtful, and they dated for three years. When she gave what he calls a “play me or trade me” marriage ultimatum, he told her he just wasn’t ready. And he wasn’t. But seventeen years later they met up again. It was a month after Charlie had quit drinking, and nine months later they were married.
“I don’t have any doubt that without Barbara, who just doesn’t like the taste of alcohol, I couldn’t have sustained sobriety,” says Charlie. They are together almost constantly, in the mornings when he makes phone calls from the house before going to lobby old colleagues on the Hill and on the occasional trips back to Texas to sign books and give speeches. “I let her get away once, and I regretted it from the moment she walked out of the room,” says Charlie. “Not everybody gets two bites at the apple.” On special nights she greets him at the door of that same D.C. town house in her commando outfit: a black turtleneck, Army-issued camouflage cargo pants (that she swears haven’t been altered), dainty, high-heeled Army-style boots, and a white satin rose in her hair. “Charlie likes to joke that he got his marriage license and his Medicare card all in the same year,” says Barbara. “Neither of us has ever been happier.”
Step Eight: Get Rich
In late March, at the Dulles Airport Marriott, Charlie met with a Texas company seeking favor on the Hill. He walked into the meeting the same way he has a thousand others: the John Wayne swagger, a pretty blond staffer at his side (on this occasion an international affairs expert named Jennie Quick), and a loud “Good afternoon,” delivered in the back-of-the-throat drawl of pure Texas power. The only real difference between Charlie now and twenty years ago is some overdue gray hair, a slight paunch (which he attributes to a recent bout with pneumonia and vows to be rid of soon), and the fact that he is officially, proudly on the take.
Charlie has a new rotation these days: a dozen or so lobbying clients, mostly with ties to the defense industry. His Marriott meeting was with Robert Jensen, the CEO of Kenyon International Emergency Services, a subsidiary of Texas funeral home giant SCI specializing in mass fatalities. Jensen was once an Army mortuary officer, and he built Kenyon into a sort of worldwide undertaker for catastrophic events. The company had hired Charlie to help secure the mass grave excavation contract in Iraq.
Charlie started lobbying after he left Congress, and since opening his own firm, in 2001, he has taken in about $1.1 million a year. Half of that pays for his two-woman staff and rent on his elegant Market Square office on Pennsylvania Avenue. The other half is Charlie’s.
His biggest client is Pakistan, which has paid him $30,000 a month since 1997. Charlie has been a true believer of Pakistan’s since its intelligence agency served as a middleman in arming the muj, and he contends that with closer ties, the U.S. could have prevented, or at least better monitored, the problems that developed there in the nineties: its transformation into a breeding ground for terrorists, 1998’s nuclear bomb test, and the recently disclosed sales of nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. He counts the State Department’s March announcement that Pakistan will be granted major non-NATO ally status, something he worked hard on for years, as a significant step in that direction.
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