The six-foot-four congressman, Charlie Wilson, once known as ‘the biggest playboy in Congress’ sits down to put his signature in the book many want signed by the great legend himself at the end of the talk
TO PREFIX ‘the Honourable’ to a man like former Representative, Charlie Wilson, a member of the US Congress from 1973-1996 is highly “inappropriate”: he was a “drunken, ignorant, lying, zipper-flapping, corrupt, power hungry freak!”
As recipient of this litany of abuse — with a naughty crinkle and an indulgent hauteur — ‘good time Charlie’, as he was nicknamed, reads aloud his vice-list penned by an “Australian pervert” as Charlie calls him. The Aussie intellectual has poured scorn over the book, Charlie Wilson’s War, the subject of discourse at the Texas Book Festival held in Houston recently.
The book rose to become a bestseller and seduce Hollywood to make a movie out of it (Don’t ask who will play the grinning Gen Zia as Charlie’s angel!).
Written by George Crile — a man not easily impressed and a veteran producer of Sixty Minutes, America’s best-loved Sunday segment — he is in total awe of his subject. “Famous for his capacity to drink more whiskey, chase more women, get into more scandals than any other legislator of his times, Charlie is literally a genius at it,” enthuses Crile to his audience while marvelling at “sponsoring the only successful Jehad in modern history.”
“How one man could make a huge difference” in using his influence with the CIA as the member of the all-powerful Appropriations Committee and engineering billions worth of arms transfer to Afghanistan to “drive the Russians out,” makes the curmudgeon Crile salute.
Even Crile’s critics concede that his account “important, if appalling, precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack the American foreign policy.”
Wilson, while “a seemingly corrupt, cocaine-snorting, scandal-prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations”, as Crile earlier had commented in his show, today looks at Charlie Wilson as his hero!
The six-foot-four-inches tall congressman oozes with a charisma that even today is too seductive to bypass. Wearing the detective Colombo-style raincoat, with a generous sweep of salt-and-pepper topping his weathered face, the aging Wilson, once known as “the biggest playboy in Congress” sits down to put his signature to the book many want signed by the great legend himself at the end of the talk.
“Handsome, with one of those classic outdoor faces that tobacco companies bet millions on,” is how one commentator describes him.
Pakistan has a stake in this character.
He’s been a household name, our mojo man, ever since it got revealed that General Zia pampered him like a spoilt brat, traipsing through Pakistan with his money bags and spark plugs to buttress the forerunners of the fanatic Taliban legion, the pseudo pious Zia tolerated the floozies and the flummery of the cowboy Texan.
But few know that it was a woman who tied the knot between the two: Joanne Herring, 40-something, known “as a collector of powerful men, a social lioness and hostess” was friends with Sahibzada Yaqub Ali Khan, our charming, verse-reciting (in any lingo you name it) ultimate romantic. He was our ambassador in Washington and getting Herring named as Pakistan’s Honorary Consul for Houston was a breeze for him.
Lucky for Pakistan, that Eros got Charlie Wilson to actually fall in love with the tempestuous Joanne who, in turn, got turned on by Zia (to each their own taste!) when she visited the Army House in 1980. He was then in the doghouse with President Carter, who had cut off aid because bad boy Zia had hanged Bhutto and usurped power.
Persuaded by lady-love Joanne, Charlie met Zia and the rest, as they say, is history.
The return we reaped were the killing fields of heroin, gunrunning and millions of Afghan refugees after the Soviets quit. Zia personally became a millionaire many times over.
Still, for us today, Charlie is an honourable man and therefore we pay him $31,000 a month to plug our cause on the Hill where hegemony of our enemy is felt deep and far. Not long ago, Bush in his inspirational speech honouring the National Endowment for Democracy, waxed eloquent on the Indian people’s commitment to liberty. Even Bangladesh got a mention, but Pakistan was nowhere on his lips.
The India caucus whose backbone is the US India Political Affairs Committee (USINPAC) has its deadly fangs wrapped around Capitol Hill. With the first India Caucus Day organized February last, the American-Indian community was exhorted to work closely with the Republicans controlling both the Senate and the House.
Their one big obsession? Nix Pakistan!
With our “brilliant” babus housed in our Washington DC embassy headed by Ambassador Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, we are literally giving a walkover to the Indians to the Hill. Impotent Qazi, according to a wag, should be packing his bags to quit next February.
Meanwhile, Charlie is chastened today — he has been stone sober for five years and a much married man. He says he has not met his former flame Joanne Herring for over 10. Herring, meanwhile, is also married and keeps out of the limelight — now instead of Pakistan, she serves as the Honorary Consul to Morocco.
How effective is Charlie on Capitol Hill? Apart from the much-ballyhooed book that bounced off some of its shine on Pakistan as well, what we perhaps need is a James Glassman who has reinvented journalism — as lobbying.
Tom Paine, a public-interest journal, has in its lengthy profile of Glassman by Nicholas Confessore, editor of the Washington Monthly, touched upon how to be a long-term winner in a short-term world.
Quickminded, with deft prose style and telegenic presence, the real secret of Glassman’s success is that he thrives in “the burgeoning world of Washington influence-peddling.”
‘K Street’ is the power boulevard of Washington’s “influence-peddling racket...the lobbyists and consultants as wayfarers through a thicket of moral complexity peddle their stuff.”
Glassman and his PR company, Tech Central Station (TCS), have given birth to something quite new in Washington: “journo-lobbying.”
“It’s an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think-tanks to issuing ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also fallen for K Street to influence.”
Masquerading as an independent think-tank cum magazine, Confessore reveals that instead of publishing articles, it specializes in what’s known as “corporate-financed grass-roots organizing,” such as “setting up front groups to agitate for a client’s position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians...it is startling how often the opinions of TCS writers and sponsors (giant corporations) converge.”
Glassman, who comes regularly on all the major networks and writes for mainstream newspapers, is conversant in many different topics: “He also knows how to talk like an expert on something, even if he doesn’t know anything about it.”
Now this is our man — why not bag him and ladle him with dollars to go out and fight our case not only on Capitol Hill, but in the media and even jog the greedy American corporations to come and invest in Pakistan instead of India.
“As a Washington Post columnist, his knack for colourful writing and his easy access to chat shows and op-ed pages across the country, he is an effective advocate for whatever side he chooses to take.”
The six-foot-four congressman, Charlie Wilson, once known as ‘the biggest playboy in Congress’ sits down to put his signature in the book many want signed by the great legend himself at the end of the talk 
