Charlie Wilson's War (12 page)

Wilson, now fully under Herring’s sway, quickly accepted her invitation to River Oaks to meet the man who she said would explain it all. “You will adore this man,” she told Wilson. “There have been eighteen books written about him. He has been decorated by every country in the world. To give you an idea, he was the first man in the Belgian Congo after the bloodbath, he married eleven Jewish girls to get them out of Nazi Germany and said he didn’t have one honeymoon. Every time there has been a disaster in the world, Charles Fawcett was there. You will never meet anybody like him.”

For those who don’t know her, there are times when Joanne Herring sounds quite detached from reality. But the stories she told about Fawcett turn out to be largely true, including her account of how he had recently lured her into Afghanistan. She explained that six months earlier, she had been at home in River Oaks when a message from Afghanistan came in “via the underground.” It was from her friend Charles Fawcett, a note scribbled with crayons on the back of a child’s notebook: “Come immediately. Bring film equipment. The world doesn’t know what’s going on here.”

It was hard for the congressman not to be impressed as he listened to Joanne describe how she had left immediately for Islamabad and then crossed into the war zone with Fawcett. “All this had to be very secretive,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Zia sent his planes and helicopters with us to the border. He even sent troops to areas where they were not supposed to go. You see, the least little thing could have created a Russian invasion. Zia kept telling me that the Russians wanted nothing more than for his troops to cross over so that they could justify an invasion.

“They dressed me like a man. I had a bodyguard who was seven feet tall with a handlebar mustache and an Enfield rifle.” At one point, Joanne told Wilson, this giant moved her about in a barrel to hide her. “It was so cold that all the men gave me their blankets. But it was like sleeping under a dead hippo. I was so cold, it was horrible, but it was the most exciting thing in my life.”

As she told this story to Wilson, she played on themes she knew would move his Texas spirit. She described how these primitive tribesmen would bow to Mecca in prayer five times a day. She emphasized how few weapons they had and described how the Afghans treated their guns like library books—as soon as one warrior crossed the border, he would turn in his gun, handing it over to another man going off to face death. “It was so humbling,” she went on. “Nothing ever affected me like seeing those twenty thousand men raising their guns and shouting to fight to the last drop of their blood.”

When Joanne introduced Wilson to Fawcett, she was operating on the powerful conviction that they had two things in common: an impulse to stand up for the underdog, mixed with a thirst for glamour and adventure.

Charles Fernley Fawcett is an immensely likable man and, as Joanne had hoped, he immediately charmed Wilson with tales of nonstop swash-buckling, adventure, and good deeds. As Wilson learned, Fawcett had begun life as an orphan of sorts, watched over very loosely by an uncle from the well-heeled Fernley-Fawcett family of South Carolina. By fifteen, Fawcett says, he had commenced an affair with his best friend’s mother; “a wonderful woman,” he recalled warmly. “If that’s child molestation, I would wish this curse on every young boy.” But this mother of his dreams cut off the relationship, and at sixteen the handsome, powerful young man, already an all-state football player, escaped on a tramp steamer bound for the great flesh-pots of the world.

The young Fawcett was one of those gifted all-purpose talents. He had a commanding voice; a strong, beautiful body, which he bared for sculptors; an artistic talent, which made him a gifted sketcher; and a musical ear, which allowed him to play the trumpet well enough to go back-stage one night and get a few tips from Louis Armstrong: “What you do, my boy, is you pick up the trumpet thusly, and you put it to your lips thusly, and then you blow, boy, blow.”

One day, after watching a professional wrestling match, he went backstage and asked the wrestler to show him some moves. For the next year he traveled through the back-alley theaters of Eastern Europe playing the role of the honest American boy heroically fighting underhanded opponents. “It got to the point that I didn’t care that the villain always pinned me,” Fawcett remembers, “because I was clean, and the others were dirty and the audience was always for me. So much so that they sometimes would storm the ring trying to get the other guy.”

Fawcett still has scrapbooks, news clippings, and book entries that document an otherwise unbelievable life: an ambulance driver in France at the outbreak of World War II; an RAF pilot during the Battle of Britain, scrambling to his Hurricane to take on Messerschmitts over London; and even a tour as a member of the French Foreign Legion. At the end of the war, Fawcett came down with tuberculosis and was discharged from the legion. He was reduced to playing “Taps” at funerals and digging up graves to identify Nazi victims until an old friend rescued him with an offer of a bit part in a movie. Over the next two decades Fawcett reinvented himself as an actor, appearing in over a hundred B-grade movies, many of them in Italy. He was a star of sorts, but always cast in the role of the villain. He performed his own stunts, leaping out of buildings, brawling with Buster Crabbe, and riding horses off cliffs. He may have been a second-tier player during the day, but at night, in the words of the gossip columnists, he was “the king of Rome” and “the mayor of the Via Veneto.” Warren Beatty remembers him as the centerpiece of the Dolce Vita of the city, loved and adored by everyone.

It was there that Fawcett met Baron Ricky di Portanova, who would later marry Joanne’s childhood friend Buckets. At that time, di Portanova didn’t advertise his title; he was penniless and relied on his deep voice to scratch out a living dubbing films into English. He and Fawcett shared a tiny apartment off the Via Veneto. Whoever had a woman for the night got the bed. The toilet was down the hall.

Had it not been for Joanne Herring, di Portanova might have remained impoverished. His mother was a Cullen but she was mentally impaired and had virtually no contact with her family or its fortune. Joanne convinced di Portanova to return to the United States and sue for his share of the family fortune. When the suit was finally settled, di Portanova received, under dictates of the Texas Trust Act, a reported million dollars a month in income. His life was transformed. Overnight, he became a centerpiece of Houston’s high society, the exotic, international jet-setter, Baron di Portanova, so flam-boyantly rich and extravagant that he tried to buy the famous “21” Club restaurant in New York as a birthday present for Buckets.

Like many men who come into fortunes late in life, the baron romanticized his penniless days in Rome with his old friends. And twenty years later, alarmed when he discovered that Fawcett was in bad health and had run out of money, he insisted that his old roommate come immediately to Houston to supervise the construction of his mansion’s vast new swimming-pool wing. Fawcett accepted the plane ticket and the appointments with Houston’s best doctors, and moved in with the baron and the baroness, quickly becoming a prominent, much-loved extra man in Houston’s roaring ’70s society. But somehow he didn’t feel right about living in this lap of luxury. To begin with, all was not well in the baron’s house.

The year before, di Portanova’s loyal valet had been mysteriously shot and killed while carrying a platter of cold partridges in to lunch. The baron insisted that he, not the valet, had been the real target. No evidence ever surfaced to warrant such thoughts but di Portanova’s paranoia was now so intense that his household was rife with rumors of rival kinsmen plotting against him. When the entire swimming-pool wing burned to the ground, once again the baron suspected foul play. It was all too much for Fawcett, who found himself irrationally guilt stricken, convinced that somehow he could have prevented the disaster.

In truth, the old adventurer had grown restless in the baron’s house—too long without a cause and feeling decadent. So when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the sixty-year-old Fawcett announced to his devoted friend, Joanne Herring, that he intended to leave Houston for the mountains of Afghanistan to pass on to the Afghan resistance tactics he had learned in the Foreign Legion.

No amount of cajoling from the baron and baroness could change Fawcett’s mind, so they gave in and threw him an elegant going-away dinner in the wine cellar of Houston’s finest restaurant. Joanne Herring saw him off at the airport the next morning, and six months later, after receiving his scribbled note, she was in Afghanistan with a camera crew to help Fawcett rally the conscience of the world.

Wilson was entranced by Fawcett, whom he considered a Renaissance romantic. “He loves beauty, he loves war, and he loves killing bad guys,” Wilson remembered. As far as Wilson was concerned, Fawcett was a hero, an American who “had killed fascists in Spain, shot down Messerschmitts over London, and had been in the Hindu Kush shooting Russians. How could I say no to a guy like that?”

But it was not so easy to be flattering about Fawcett’s film. He had chosen Joanne to serve as his blond interviewer and persuaded Orson Welles, an old friend from the Via Veneto, to be the narrator. The baron threw himself into promoting the effort with a lavish black-tie dinner for the Houston premiere. The setting he chose was the newly reconstructed wing of his mansion, built around a giant Grecian swimming pool with oversized chandeliers.

As the lights went down, a lone mujahid warrior was seen on the back of a rearing stallion. An Afghan with a great white beard, bearing a startling resemblance to Fawcett, ran up to the mounted horseman and asked, “Commander, where are you going?” In the background, music straight out of an Errol Flynn adventure rose up. “I’m going to fight the Russians,” the mujahid warrior growled. “But, Commander, how can you fight the infidel without weapons?” Onto the screen flashed the film’s title: “Courage Is Our Weapon.”

Joanne Herring watched with mixed reactions. “Fawcett just couldn’t bear to cut any of it,” she says. She acknowledges that the film is something less than sophisticated, particularly during her interviewing segments. “Here the Afghans were, telling me how the Russians had stuck a bayonet into a pregnant woman’s stomach, and I’m trying to understand their language, and smiling, always smiling, because I’m trying to encourage them to speak English.”

When the lights came on after the two-hour documentary, the baron tapped his champagne glass and stood to offer a toast. “Theeees,” he said, gesturing to his lavish swimming-pool annex with the great chandeliers, “theees is not reality.” Pointing theatrically to the projector, Fawcett, and Herring, he continued: “Theees movie, theees eeez reality.”

Wilson was delighted to be included in the baron’s social circle. “I’d never met any of those people before,” recalls Wilson. “It’s the kind of fantasy world that every Texan has always heard about and found exciting.” But Wilson, the great anti-Communist, had to cope with the fact that Fawcett and Joanne had gone into the war zone. They had actually taken risks to do something about the Communists. He didn’t quite know what to say when Joanne insisted that the CIA was playing a fake game in Afghanistan, that the U.S. consul she had met at the frontier was a kind of apologist for the Russians, and that brave men were dying because of congressional neglect. It didn’t matter that he had made a telephone call to double the covert-aid budget for the mujahideen. A few million dollars more was a meaningless gesture, she said. Joanne Herring wanted Wilson to become the mujahideen’s true champion. Wilson’s manhood, she implied softly, was on the line.

N
o one questions the modern politician’s reliance on spin doctors, press secretaries, and image makers. It’s such a common practice that it can be stated as a virtual law of political physics that under normal circumstances, politicians will always emphasize the positive and never deliberately create a negative public image for themselves.

What always set Charlie Wilson apart was his impulse to do just the opposite: invariably, he promoted his vices and hid his virtues. As late as 1996 the
New York Times
would all but dismiss him in an editorial as “the biggest party animal in Congress.” If Wilson made it hard for the
Times
to recognize the power and influence he wielded in 1996, it was nothing compared to the public face he projected during the early 1980s, when he seemed to be little more than a public joke. He almost never spoke on the House floor. He wasn’t associated with any legislative initiatives. In this regard, his cover was nearly perfect.

But what every professional in the House of Representatives knew was that simultaneously another very different Charlie Wilson was at work. He was, in effect, running a tunnel right into the most powerful places in Washington. If there was such a thing as an underground ladder in Congress, then Wilson was climbing it speedily, so much so that
Washington Post
columnist Jack Anderson included the Texan in his list of the capital’s ten most effective back-room operators. Wilson was a genius at the inside game of maneuvering in the Balkanized world where power is distributed in blocks and where deals are made when you have something to trade. And ironically, because Wilson was such a political pro, his outrageous lifestyle seemed to actually enhance his position. For one thing, from the very beginning,
everyone
in the House knew who Charlie Wilson was. He was impossible to miss: too tall, too handsome, too loud, with too many striking female staffers by his side.

He’d first broken from the pack and become a part of the legend of his party in 1976, when he’d defied his own Texas delegation and maneuvered his way onto the all-powerful Appropriations Committee. That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent. The committee’s power is so great that its twelve subcommittee chairmen are known collectively as the “College of Cardinals.” The full committee holds the purse strings of the entire federal government, but it’s such an immense job that responsibility for the various branches of government are broken down and delegated to individual subcommittees. In the end, that means that a lone appropriator who stays on a subcommittee long enough and knows what he wants can amass extraordinary individual power over agencies and the policies they pursue.

To most members, the payoff for winning an assignment to Appropriations comes from the fact that there is no better place in all of Congress to find pork. The man from Lufkin never shied from using his influence to get jobs for his constituents or contracts for local industry. He took enormous pride in reviving the fortunes of his poverty-stricken district. But just milking the system for all it was worth was not what had drawn Charlie Wilson to Congress. He had a grander vision. His passion, since boyhood, was foreign affairs, and from the moment he got on Appropriations he set out to position himself on the two subcommittees that dole out all money connected to national security.

His Jewish friends had helped get him onto the committee; once there, Charlie learned from these master politicians how to influence budgets and policies. When he won a seat on the Foreign Operations subcommittee, which allocates all U.S. military and economic assistance, he was suddenly positioned to champion Israel’s annual $3 billion foreign-aid package. And since this subcommittee rules on the State Department’s expenditures abroad, overnight he became one of twelve congressmen the State Department could no longer afford to alienate. In fact, these twelve legislators are treated as patrons who must be curried and pampered by ambassadors and even secretaries of state.

In 1980, just after being reelected for a fourth term and only a few weeks before his Las Vegas weekend, Wilson struck again, maneuvering himself onto the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Now the Pentagon and the CIA were added to the list of federal bureaucracies that could no longer treat Charlie Wilson as a mere mortal.

The twin assignments were his tickets to play in the arena of world power. He was given the highest security clearance and an extra staffer and ushered into the soundproof hearing room under the Capitol dome, where he was shown his permanent seat—one of twelve large black leather chairs grouped around a horseshoe-shaped table. The room is closed off to the public as well as other members. Very little is ever written about what goes on when the twelve members meet in this chamber. But each year they preside over a kind of secret court, where huge deals are cut and important policies made or broken. Since hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake—and since only so many programs can be fully funded—enormous pressures and inducements are brought to bear upon these twelve men.

It’s a big government, and everyone has a favorite weapons system or spy satellite, an embassy to be refurbished, a rescue mission to be funded, and assets to be traded. The White House, the defense contractors, the military services, fellow congressmen—all maneuver around and encircle the appropriators, seeking their support. Each year, in effect, the lobbyists create their own power list, a ranking indicated by the dollar amounts they dole out to congressmen in campaign contributions. Charlie Wilson was always at the very top of this list, usually occupying the second spot, right below his intimate friend John Murtha, chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

“Anybody with any brain can figure out that if they can get on the Defense subcommittee, that’s where they ought to be—because that’s where the money is,” Wilson laughs. “Once I got on Defense, I went from being the skunk to being the prettiest girl at the party.” To the future Speaker, Jim Wright, Charlie Wilson was now critical for getting more contracts for the F-16s being built in Dallas–Fort Worth. For Texas Democrat Martin Frost it was the B-2 bomber. Wilson made it easy for his colleagues to come to him, always gracious, almost always helpful.

He was quickly accumulating powerful allies and IOUs. He was also playing a far more interesting and effective insider’s game, in areas of the House that were not visible to outsiders. “You’ve got to look at the House like a college class where fraternities are everything,” explains Denis Neill, a Washington lobbyist who is one of Wilson’s oldest friends and allies. “If you’re not in the right fraternities you’re not in the game, and no one is in so many different important fraternities as Charlie Wilson.”

At the time, Neill was one of the capital’s greatest manipulators of Congress in the foreign-affairs arena. His firm, Neill and Company, represented clients like Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Jordan. His job was to get them U.S. money, weapons systems, and good press; to do damage control; and provide influence in the corridors of power. One way he did it was by making campaign contributions and giving favors to congressmen on the committees that control foreign aid. He didn’t waste his time or money on members who don’t count, and in the foreign affairs world, he considered Wilson one of the two or three who were indispensable. When Neill starts ticking off Wilson’s memberships, it quickly becomes apparent how his network of congressional fraternities later allowed him to speak for the entire House when he and Avrakotos set out to radically escalate the CIA’s Afghan war.

“The way things normally work, if you’re not Jewish you don’t get into the Jewish caucus,” Neill says. “But Charlie did. And if you’re not black you don’t get into the black caucus. But Charlie plays poker with the black caucus. They had a game, and he’s the only white guy in it.”

Part of the explanation here is that the House, like any other human institution, is moved by friendships, and no matter what people might think about Wilson’s antics, they tend to like him and enjoy his company. His friendship with the insular black fraternity began with Barbara Jordan, the charismatic congresswoman who electrified the nation in 1973 with her stirring remarks during the Nixon impeachment proceedings. The two had served six years together in the Texas state senate before coming to Washington.

Former Speaker Jim Wright remembers how everyone initially came to know who Wilson was because he always sat next to Jordan on the House floor—this tall, good-looking cowboy and his constant companion, the dour, heavyset, scowling black woman. “I was her best friend for the whole six years she was here,” Wilson recalls fondly. And for the mostly male black fraternity that played poker together—a group with a different set of priorities than Barbara Jordan—something about Wilson’s lack of piety and his bad-boy aura appealed to them.

Wilson’s archconservative friend Republican representative Henry Hyde identifies it as the Adam Clayton Powell factor. “Adam Clayton Powell’s people loved him because he was always sticking it to the man, and Charlie is down there creating his own ground rules and in a weird way he’s kind of a white man’s Adam Clayton Powell. There is a kind of nonconformist relish about him. He leads the sort of life that many congressmen envy but wouldn’t dare emulate.” When Louis Stokes, the low-key black chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was arrested for drunk driving, Wilson turned it into a raucous act of friendship with one comment: “Mr. Chairman, I want you to know that I deplore the racist attack that the police of the District of Columbia just made on you with that totally fabricated charge.”

Wilson even managed to sneak his way onto what could be considered the women’s-rights fraternity. One might assume, given his well-earned reputation as a philandering chauvinist, this would have been impossible; however, he was one of the champions of the Equal Rights Amendment, having cosponsored and passed the ERA with Barbara Jordan back when they were in the Texas legislature.

And his credentials went beyond that. Even though his Bible Belt constituents were militantly pro-life, he always voted for a woman’s right to choose. He took this politically risky position because of his kid sister, Sharon, who had risen in Planned Parenthood to become the chairperson of its national board. He would have loved to tell his ardently pro-life constituents that he would vote
their conscience
just as he always voted with them on opposing any kind of gun control. On that issue he always said that his constituents would permit him any failing, but the “one thing they would never tolerate was any vote to water down the right of an American citizen to bear arms.”

Failing to rail against the murder of the unborn was almost as dangerous, but Sharon insisted that her big brother not embarrass her by doing the wrong thing. There was almost nothing Charlie Wilson wouldn’t do for his little sister. And so at the Lions Club luncheons, at the Rotary and the church groups, he would simply say, “I know this is one of those things that we’re just not going to agree on, but I’m voting for choice.” Somehow his pro-life constituents let him get away with it, and in the House that translated into another base of support for the unconventional congressman.

By 1980 Wilson had established positions in a remarkably diverse network of congressional power centers: not just with Appropriations and his own Texas fraternity but also with the Jewish caucus, the black caucus, the hawks, and the women. Wilson was operating now completely outside the normal experience of American political life. Oddly, his pleasure seeking that year even served to propel him into perhaps the most powerful House fraternity—that of Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill. Only a true insider could have appreciated the significance of O’Neill’s simultaneous appointments of Wilson that year to the House Ethics Committee and the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And certainly almost no one could understand what possessed Tip O’Neill to make such a strange choice for the ethics panel.

From today’s perspective, the image of this philandering hedonist climbing out of his Las Vegas hot tub to render judgments on the conduct of his colleagues seems almost perverse. Even without knowing about the Fantasy Suite, a genuinely puzzled reporter had asked Wilson why he, of all people, had been selected for this sober assignment. Without missing a beat, Wilson had cheerfully replied, “It’s because I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.”

It was an outrageous statement. The Ethics committee is supposed to serve as the conscience of the House and to rule on the conduct of its members. Any Speaker should have been furious at Wilson for this needless provocation, particularly at a time when the House was caught up in its worst scandal in years—the ABSCAM sting operation. An FBI undercover agent disguised as an Arab sheikh had managed to lure six congressmen and a senator into a Washington town house, where the bureau’s hidden cameras captured them, one after another, taking $50,000 bribes.

“I have larceny in my blood,” exclaimed one of the congressmen, as he thrust the bribe money into a brown paper bag. Another is seen stuffing the cash into his bulging pockets and asking the pretend Arab, “Does it show?” When the tapes were aired, millions of Americans were left with the impression that Congress, and the House in particular, had degenerated into little more than a den of thieves. It was a particularly bad moment for O’Neill, since nearly all of the ABSCAM bribe takers were Democrats.

That fall, when the Republicans captured the Senate and Ronald Reagan the White House, Tip O’Neill emerged as the unrivaled center of Democratic power in the country. He recognized that the ABSCAM investigation was taking its toll, that something would have to be done to restore public confidence. But the real crisis, as he saw it, was the immediate threat posed to those in his inner circle, who he relied on to help him run the House.