Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile Read Free Book Online Page B

bring down this evil power. And all of his idealism and patriotic passions, which had been building since childhood, suddenly found an inspirational outlet when John Kennedy launched his campaign for the presidency.
    Kennedy appealed to every aspect of the young naval officer’s imagination: a war hero, he was a dashing, handsome idealist rallying the country to greatness and making it all look like fun. After work each day, hours spent studying the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile threat, Wilson would rush from the Pentagon to the Kennedy campaign headquarters, where he volunteered. Like so many others of his generation, Wilson became caught up in the aura of romance that Kennedy lent to public service.
    It’s not legal for active-duty servicemen to campaign for public office, but Wilson decided to disregard that detail. He took thirty days’ leave from the navy and entered his name in the race for Texas state representative. Tall and skinny, always dressed in a suit, Wilson ran his campaign in East Texas the way the Kennedys had made famous in Massachusetts. His mother, his sister, and all their friends went door to door selling the idea of Charlie as a fresh, new idea in Texas politics. He won and managed to complete his Pentagon tour without anyone noticing his entry into the political arena. In 1961, at twenty-seven, he was sworn in to office in Austin, Texas, the same month his political role model became the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
    For the next twelve years Wilson made his reputation in Texas as the “liberal from Lufkin,” viewed with suspicion by business interests. He battled for the regulation of utilities and fought for Medicaid, tax exemptions for the elderly, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a minimum-wage bill. * Historically, the Second District congressional seat had been a hard place for a liberal Democrat to seek office. It was an ultra-right-wing political franchise, made famous by Martin Dies, a red-baiting inquisitor who had unapologetically forced child actress Shirley Temple to testify about her supposed knowledge of Communists in Hollywood. But fortune knocked when Dies’s successor, the incumbent congressman John Dowdy, was caught taking a bribe. Wilson immediately threw himself into the special election, in spite of a recent arrest for drunk driving and its attendant highly embarrassing mug shot. By that time he had become something of a legend in Austin as a hell-raiser, and his opponent capitalized on this, papering the district with blowups of the mug shot of the unmistakably inebriated Wilson and the question “Do you want this man to represent you in the U.S. Congress?”
    In spite of this, Charlie won, demonstrating the intuitive understanding of and bond with his Bible Belt constituents that would allow him to hold onto their support through the many scandals that lay ahead. Unlike other politicians, Wilson never tried to hide his failings from his constituents. In fact, he seemed almost to turn his innocent sins to his advantage. Time and again it seemed that the voters of the Second Congressional District would forgive him almost anything if he was honest with them. What they hated was hypocrisy, and whatever his shortcomings, Wilson was no hypocrite. There was, perhaps, one other reason why the dour, supposedly puritanical voters chose to make Charlie Wilson their representative: the Second District can be a deadly boring place except when Charlie was there. People couldn’t help but like and forgive this boyish politician who always made them feel good whenever he entered a room.
    During the 1960s and ’70s, as he built his political base in East Texas, Wilson could never shake the feeling that he had cheated his country by not giving the twenty years of military service expected of Annapolis men. He had been too young to serve in World War II, he had been at the Naval Academy during Korea, and when it came time for Vietnam he found himself as a