Les AuCoin Blog

U.S. Rep. Charlie WilsonUnless you’ve been lost in Oregon’s Alvord Desert, you know that Tom Hanks’ new flick, Charlie Wilson’s War, is based on the wildest sumbitch ever to serve in the modern Congress and how the lewd, womanizing, Scotch-swilling swashbuckler from Lufkin, Texas, just about single-handedly got Congress to give the Mujahdeen modern weapons that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan in 1989, thus helping bring down the Soviet empire.

At the Khyber Pass with the ResistanceBut the truth is far more extraordinary—and the upshot in Afghanistan far less successful—than the 97-minute confection created by Director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and their heavyweight cast: Hanks (who plays Wilson), Julia Roberts (a Houston socialite/Soviet hater), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (a rogue CIA field man and Wilson co-conspirator who said what brought them together was “chasing pussy and killing Communists”).

The movie’s omissions turn it into a romantic adventure sprinkled with comedy, combat, and just enough fact to be believable. But it’s worth a ticket if only to see Hoffman, who deserves his second Oscar in as many years for his portrayal of Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent—a performance that makes Hanks scramble to remain the biggest man on the screen.

The Movie’s Missed Opportunity

My problem, and I expected it, is that, working with a compelling true story, the movie blew an opportunity to delve into the yin and yang of good and evil inherent in both realpolitik and the mortals who inhabit it, let alone explore the tendency for seeds of failure to exist in “victory.” (After our Mujahdeen “friends” defeated the Soviet Army, many of them gave our arms to or became Osama bin Laden’s ally and protector, the Taliban, with which the U.S. would be at war in 12 years.) Alas, paradox has never been a strong aspect of the Western mind, let alone the American mind. And Hollywood’s mind? Don’t get me started.

The real “Good Time Charlie” Wilson sat two chairs up from me on the House Defense Appropriations Committee for more than a decade. From that perch, I saw and (to an extent) helped him engineer what became the largest covert program in U.S. history—$1 billion—despite the initial timidity of the CIA and odd diffidence of the Reagan White House. And it was done entirely within the clandestine budget, with no publicly recorded vote ever taken.

I came to know and like the complex public and private Charlie Wilson, a man who was at once more disturbing and charming than either his movie incarnation or the figure described in the book that inspired the film (George Crile, Grove Press, 2003, ISBN 0802141242, 560 pp).

A long-legged, ramrod-straight Naval Academy graduate with a square jaw, wicked wit and booming basso profondo laugh, Charlie entertained elegantly in his Arlington, Virginia, condo overlooking the Iwo Jima Memorial, the Potomac River and the Capitol Mall beyond—affairs that I suspected but couldn’t prove were funded by his friends in the defense lobby.

That he had so many such friends, and carried their mail so brazenly, was one of Charlie’s many deep flaws. I recall him in committee, losing a debate on a dubious weapons system that even Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger didn’t want (and that’s saying something). Wilson held up the vote long enough to duck into the telephone booth and emerge with fresh talking points from the arms maker. I don’t remember if he won or lost; the point is that Wilson was butt-naked complicit with the defense lobby and didn’t give a damn.

The Better Angel of His Nature

Yet Charlie was a social and economic liberal who defied his Bible-thumping conservative district and its history of racial bigotry. He was a strong supporter of civil rights, minimum wage increases, Medicaid, and anti-poverty programs.

On women’s issues, Charlie was a dependable “yes” vote. He supported abortion rights, parental leave and the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet the hedonist in him collected women like a boy might collect marbles. His office staff was exclusively female, drop-dead beautiful and full bosomed. Everybody called them “Charlie’s Angels.”

In the movie, a visiting constituent glances at those aides and asks Hanks (Wilson) why he hired gorgeous women. Hanks’ reply is one I heard Charlie use in real life more than once: “You can always teach ‘em to type, but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits.”

Aside from constituent service, stellar votes on social and economic issues, Charlie’s individual legislative efforts were unremarkable for many years. However, in the late 1970s he engaged in an act of foreign policy hubris that, seen now, foretold his Afghanistan adventure.

With Somoza Until the Dictator Made a Bad Move

Ever the Annapolis man, Charlie admired the Central American dictator, Anastasio Somoza, a West Point graduate, and threatened to wreak the Carter Administration’s Panama Canal treaty if Carter didn’t resume support for Somoza. Wilson’s ardor was unaffected by the Nicaraguan leader’s unsuccessful offer of a large cash bribe at their first meeting. Later Charlie arranged a meeting between Somoza and a high-ranking CIA official in a bid to save the dictator. But when Somoza fondled Tina Simons, Wilson’s girlfriend at the time, Charlie dropped him like a dead armadillo. (Fascism was one thing; a man’s woman was another!)

I’ve always believed that Charlie’s single-minded support for the subjugated Afghans came in equal measure from a zest for danger, revulsion at Communism and empathy for a people who told him of daughters raped, children mutilated, sons and fathers decapitated, and pregnant women bayoneted in the stomach. Yet he always said they would fight the Russians with stones if necessary.

Wilson traveled frequently to the region as modern arms began to arrive and Afghans brought down Soviet helicopter warships and fixed wing aircraft with increasing skill. Inevitably, he would bring along a personal cache of booze and a beautiful woman on his arm. Sex, war, and alcohol were the trifecta in the hierarchy of Wilson’s tastes.

Wilson’s Outlandish Revenge

Charlie stormed home from one such trip with blood in his eye. A U.S. Air Force colonel had banned his female companion from flying out of Pakistan with him on a government plane. Wilson and the officer almost came to blows before Charlie placed one call to the presidential palace in Islamabad. Soon General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s personal jet arrived, picked up Wilson and his date and roared off, leaving the American colonel slack-jawed on the tarmac.

Charlie would get his revenge in the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He passed an amendment (over my objection) to remove the officer’s plane. And just to make sure the colonel and his superiors got the message, Wilson’s measure reassigned the jet to the Texas Air National Guard.

In the larger sense, though, the Afghan issue brought out brilliant legislative skills few knew Charlie possessed. There’s a scene in the movie—true to fact—in which he promises Midwest congressmen, in return for their support, to deliver the Black Caucus votes for the Farm Bill, a political act as unnatural as the physical act Charlie told the Air Force colonel to perform on himself.

Wilson, 74, has moved back to Lufkin, Texas, his boyhood home, and finally married. Last fall he had a heart transplant when a congenital disease that had haunted him throughout his coke consumption, carousing and contretemps left him on death’s doorstep.

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote, It Can’t Happen Here, the seminal novel about how totalitarians take over the U.S.

It’s seventy two years later, and it’s happening. Has been, for several years. The latest move by our neo-con masters is to starve us of information we need to remain citizens, the better to make us serfs.

On December 18, the FCC relaxed the rules on media ownership, making it easier for conglomerates to buy up news outlets. It was another turn of the vise on the free flow of information.

Fascism is just another word for corporatism.

Keep that in mind as you watch this disturbing video about the FCC outrage and what it means to each of us, courtesy of Bill Moyers Journal (PBS). The story shows that FCC Chair Kevin Martin, a neo-con Bush appointee, had made up his mind and created a 3-2 majority for the new media consolidation rule even before the sham public hearings had been concluded.

El Duce didn’t listen to public opinion either.

(Please see Update/Correction at the end of this piece)

I’m supporting Steve Novick for the U.S. Senate and, after you’ve read this, I hope you will join me by making a financial contribution to him in any amount you can afford. Trust me when I say: Steve’s strengths are exactly what’s needed to defeat Gordon Smith next year.

Steve may be a dark horse—he may be up against a primary challenger favored by the chairman of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee (DSCC)—but he’s a fearless truth-teller who’s just as opposed to George Bush’s coup d’état in slow motion as he is the timidity of Senate Democrats who are rolling over for the Buckaroo-in-Chief.

Those Democrats include that same chairman of the DSCC who helped give Bush enough votes to confirm a new attorney general who refuses to say water boarding is torture.

Steve Novick is as mentally tough and quick-witted as he is bright—a debater who’ll strip Smith of the patina of political moderation so painstakingly prepared over the years. A University of Oregon graduate at the age of 18, a Harvard-educated U.S. Justice Department lawyer who made his name suing polluters—nailing corporations who poisoned Love Canal—Steve has a razor-sharp mind and is faster on his feet that any candidate I’ve seen in years.

Your contribution—today—of $35, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford—will be a direct blow to the Republican Party and its man in the White House who, sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, treats the law as a set of suggestions for his consideration.

Read the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former U.S. Attorney: In his assertion of power, Bush is essentially saying: “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them. I get to determine what my own powers are. The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”

Senator Whitehouse is describing despotism! Our country is literally being hijacked by a Republican Party that would destroy our freedoms to “save” them.

In the fight against this galloping psychosis, I believe Steve Novick to be the shrewder, tougher, better fighter of the two Democrats running for the Senate.

(This is no attack on Jeff Merkley, whom I could support at another time, in a normal era.)

But now is the time to put a tiger in the Senate. We had one once. Wayne Morse risked scorn, and probably sacrificed his seat, to defend the Constitution he loved and oppose the war he hated. We had another in Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who braved ridicule for the same beliefs.

Steve Novick will be that kind of Senator.

Steve condemns the cynical Republican resolution in the 2003 session of the Oregon Legislature that simultaneously praised “President George Bush’s courage” in launching a first strike war against Iraq and supported “our troops.” It’s the kind of tactic the neo-conservative revolution has depended on—snookering enough Democratic support to inoculate Bush and his allies from effective political criticism. Steve Novick would have opposed that resolution; Jeff Merkley voted for it.

Jeff is a good man and does not support Bush or the war any more than Steve does. But Jeff took the GOP’s bait when he could have voted “No.”

Or, better, as House Minority Leader, Jeff could have out-maneuvered Republicans by engineering a Democratic Minority Report supporting the troops without glorifying Bush. Minority Reports are voted on before the bills to which they are attached; thus, it would have separated the issues, allowed Democrats to support the troops, and then oppose Bush on the war. It didn’t happen. This reveals a key difference between the Democratic candidates as we look for someone to effectively fight the neo-conservative putsch that threatens us.

Fortunately, Steve’s strengths are exactly what’s needed to defeat Gordon Smith, a very talented traditional politician.

In a debate between Steve Novick and Smith, Gordon won’t know what hit him.

Because the truth about Gordon Smith is this: despite a moderate vote here and there (which he often contradicts later), he is an enabler of the Republican hijacking of this country.

I’ve thought about this race for months. With alarm, I’ve watched the rising despotism of the Republicans for years. I truly believe we need Steve Novick in the Senate at this most dangerous of times. Please consider making a donation—today—by clicking on this link.

You’ll be glad you did.