Tom Hanks and Charlie Wilson Interview

Before there was a war on terror, there was Charlie Wilson's War. A conversation with Tom Hanks and the Congressman he plays.

By Meg Grant

From Reader's Digest

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MARY ELLEN MATTHEWS / CORBIS OUTLINE

Tom hanks stars in the new film Charlie Wilson's War.

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COURTESY EAST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER, STEEN LIBRARY STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY

Charlie Wilson (left, while a Congressman from Texas in 1983) is thrilled to have Tom Hanks play him because, he says, “Hanks has a mature patriotism that is so straight and pure.”

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FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL

Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson.

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MARY ELLEN MATTHEWS / CORBIS OUTLINE

Tom hanks stars in the new film Charlie Wilson's War.

A Little-Known Chapter of History

Patriotism comes in many shapes. There's the straight-up sentiment of Tom Hanks, one of the most admired celebrities in America, the star of Saving Private Ryan and a dozen other blockbuster films. And there's the more unconventional patriotism of retired Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson. A flamboyant man with an appetite for strong whiskey and pretty women, Wilson represented the people of the Lone Star State's 2nd District, who elected him to the legislature and then to Congress for over 35 years.

But Charlie Wilson was much more than a D.C. party animal. For most of the 1980s, he used his position as a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to obtain billions of dollars in U.S. military aid for the insurgent groups fighting to topple the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan. At the height of the Cold War, when a direct military confrontation with Moscow would have been risky, Wilson found a backdoor way to challenge the Communist regime. While Ronald Reagan ran the White House, this iconoclastic Democrat formed a bipartisan coalition to support the ragtag Afghan resistance fighters. In 1988 the Soviets finally admitted defeat and began withdrawing from Kabul -- a major blow that helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Hanks and Wilson have teamed up to make Charlie Wilson's War, a film (based on a book by the late 60 Minutes producer George Crile) about Wilson's obsession with defeating tyranny. Hanks plays the charismatic politician who summons his charm to funnel money to Afghanistan when most of Congress is preoccupied with the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua. Ironically, Wilson's fiercest challengers are naysayers in the CIA, who resent interference from a renegade Congressman.

Though Wilson wasn't a formal consultant on the film, he routinely weighed in on matters of accuracy. Retired in 1996, the former lawmaker, now 74, left his hard-living ways behind long ago, married in 1999, and last September underwent a heart transplant. Wilson, four weeks postsurgery, and Hanks spoke with Reader's Digest about this little-known chapter of history.