At last, Hollywood has (sort of) made a pro-CIA, pro-war, anti-Soviet movie: “Charlie Wilson’s War.” It’s all about how Democrats defeated the Soviet Empire.
A better title for the movie would be “The Invisible Man,” because the man who doesn’t appear in it, and is barely mentioned in the background, is Ronald Reagan. Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer and even Rudy Giuliani – back when he was still “Rudolph” – are much more prominently name-checked than Reagan in the movie, which was directed by Sawyer’s husband Mike Nichols.
The Dec. 21 release stars Tom Hanks as a 1980s Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson, a coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, boozing liberal. Who better to write the script than Aaron Sorkin?
Wilson, backed by a Commie-hating right-wing Christian millionaire fundraiser played by Julia Roberts, helped funnel CIA assistance to the Muslim rebels in Afghanistan who originally tried to repel the Soviet invasion using weapons George Custer would have called obsolete. They needed Stinger missiles and eventually got them.
The film is going to flop, unless Christmas finds millions of Americans saying, “Hey, kids, now that everyone’s unwrapped their presents, let’s go see a movie about fighting in Afghanistan!”
The movie has something for everyone – to dislike. Some liberals will say it isn’t tough enough on Republicans (though at the end, it all but blames the U.S. for the rise of the Taliban, a notion I don’t have space to get into here), possibly because it is being released by Universal, a division of Defense Department contractors G.E. (Color me skeptical that G.E. sends an Alec-Baldwin-on-“30 Rock”-figure to spy on Tom Hanks movies and polish the dishwashers on the set.)
George Crile, who wrote the book upon which the movie is based, didn’t attempt to hide its provenance. Crile was basically a mouthpiece for a tale spun by the two guys who painted themselves as the heroes of the story: “The extensive recollections of Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos [the CIA man played by Philip Seymour Hoffman on screen] form the backbone of the greater part of this narrative,” Crile wrote in his source notes.
Anything to do with the CIA is going to have an element of uncertainty. You can say whatever you want about the CIA. They’re not going to hold a press conference to say, “You’re wrong, and by the way this is how it all really went down.”
But how much do you want to trust Crile, who died last year? Crile was the CBS producer behind the infamous 1982 documentary alleging a conspiracy led by Vietnam Gen. William Westmoreland to mislead America about the war. Westmoreland sued the network for libel. I quote The New York Times: “TV Guide printed an article listing ways it said the ‘CBS Reports’ documentary violated network fairness standards, and a subsequent internal CBS investigation found 11 instances in which the program violated network guidelines or was unfair.”
Here is Lou Cannon, in his authoritative “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” (“the best study of that enigmatic presidency yet available,” The New York Times): “Except for the Contras, the only ‘freedom fighters’ in which Reagan showed much interest were the Afghan mujahadeen.” Reagan “expressed revulsion of the brutal destruction of Afghan villages and such Soviet practices as the scattering of mines disguised as toys that killed and maimed Afghan children.” But “Reagan nonetheless initially heeded Pentagon concerns that the Stingers would be captured and copied by the Soviets.”
Cannon continues, “Undersecretary of Defense Fred Iklé, a conservative who strongly backed the mujahadeen and the Contras, thought that the Pentagon concerns were unjustifieda The CIA bureaucracy also was cautious about supplying advanced weapons to the Afghan rebels. It took pressure from Iklé and [CIA director William] Casey on their bureaucracies, and bipartisan pressure from Congress, led by Texas Democrat Charles Wilson in the House and New Hampshire Republican Gordon Humphrey in the Senate, to convince Reagan to supply the mujahadeen with the Stingers that became so crucial to their cause.”
Sorkin prides himself on getting inside the corridors of power to show us how politics really works, and he gets closer than most screenwriters. He fills his script with references to weapons systems and foreign intelligence agencies and back-channel overtures. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” like “The West Wing,” is about smart, well-meaning but flawed and rumpled people doing the best they can in D.C. considering all the conflicting forces they have to recognize.
But unless you count the Julia Roberts character, who seems to be on hand solely to add a woman to the story and anyway is portrayed as something of a kook, in Sorkin’s world only Democrats have good intentions. Cannon mentions five men above, four of them conservatives. Guess which one gets to have a movie made about him? Let’s check the biopic scoreboard. Hollywood films to date about Charlie Wilson: one. About Ronald Reagan: zero.