hard-drinking, coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, lightweight liberal lawmaker

[Nevernose]

And just maybe a true American hero.

"Charlie Wilson's War." The movie will be out soon. I was wondering if anyone had read the book? This is the Democratic congressman who forced Reagan to fight the Soviets in Afghnanistan.

From Texas Monthly:
"A lot of terms were used to describe seventy-one-year-old former U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson when he represented deep East Texas on Capitol Hill from 1973 to 1996, and “hero” was not typically among them. “Hopeless alcoholic” was. So too was “pussy hound.” And the occasional, less colorful term, like “self-serving” or “vindictive.” He was reputed to be a hard-drinking, coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, lightweight lawmaker, a water carrier for the timber industry, and worst of all, a pork barrel liberal. As he’ll cheerfully point out, not all those descriptions were intended as compliments. Though folks back home always loved him, up in D.C. there were plenty of people who considered him a joke, more notable for the good-looking women he squired around the world on the federal dime than any law he ever authored or sponsored.

When he retired, eight years ago, mention of Good Time Charlie Wilson in the history books looked to be relegated to a humorous (hopefully) footnote, his most significant achievement being that those same “personal qualities,” to use the term loosely, that inspired investigations by the House Ethics Committee at least three known times—for cocaine use in 1983, writing hot checks to the House bank in 1992, and making illegal personal loans from his campaign account in 1995—were practically celebrated behind the Pine Curtain, where, beginning in 1960, he was elected to public office eighteen times—three to the Texas House, three to the Texas Senate, and twelve to the Congress. That, plus the fact that he gave utterance to the most stupefying, yet somehow non-suicidal, political quote this side of former Louisiana governor Edwin “Fast Eddie” Edwards’s famous “live boy, dead girl” crack. In a 1988 Ms. Magazine piece by Molly Ivins, he provided the following justification for the hiring practices that had earned his secretarial staff the nickname Charlie’s Angels: ]b\“You can teach ’em to type, but you can’t teach ’em how to grow tits.”

And that easily could have been the final word on his legacy. But last May, 60 Minutes producer George Crile published a book called Charlie Wilson’s War. It told a story not widely known beyond retired CIA spooks and cold war scholars, of how a lone congressman in the eighties had channeled more than $3 billion to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Red Army and how that aid had ended the cold war. Charlie Wilson’s War debuted in the ninth spot on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list, and its unlikely hero became the star of C-SPAN specials and book fairs. A Hollywood movie company bought the rights to his life story. Suddenly Charlie Wilson, Party Boy, became Charlie Wilson, Patriot. When former U.S. Speaker Jim Wright, whose own career had ended in a scandal that was perfectly boring compared with the stuff Charlie had pulled, got his first look at Crile’s book, he said to a friend, “There’s not even a post office named for me back in Fort Worth, and Charlie Wilson got a whole damn war?”

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."

...snip...

I urge you to read the entire fascinating article at http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/2004-06-01/feature2.php

[Radical Activist]

1. Does the movie or book mention Bin-Laden

and the role the US played in supporting the Taliban, I wonder?

[Nevernose]

3. Texas Monthly is a liberal leaning magazine

They publish a monthly column by Kinky Friedman, the latest installment of which was called "Let Saigons be Bygones." One of the greatest song titles of all time.

I wonder about the movie, too, as well as the book (it was number nine on the NYT bestseller list, and on my Amazon wishlist).

If you don't have the time to read the article tonight, on a Saturday night, bookmark it. It's worth the read. I can almost guarantee that your estimation of the man will go up. If this isn't the quintessential "American" story, then I don't know what is.

Another tidbit from the article:
"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."

[salib]

2. B.S.

hey, it's chimpy on the the other side of the fence. B.S., and not worth another thought.

[Nevernose]

4. I'm kind of dense sometimes. Please be more specific.

Dis you click the link or read the article?

[My Pet Goat]

5. Hmmm....sounds like a potential wingnut in the making

E.g., Rush, Horowitz, Savage, Miller, *, etc...

[comsymp]

6. FWIW, Molly Ivins and Ann Richards love him

In fact, MI pointed out in response to the flap about "you can teach 'em to type but you can't teach 'em to grow tits" that he had one of the best staffs in DC, along with one of the best casework records... apparently, he was a Kennedy Dem- Cold Warrior, hopelessly retro about the "Commies", but a good Dem, with a good, progressive voting record, IIRC.