from Texas, hysterical about their cause,” remembers Wilson. The congressman soon found himself giving the major United Jewish Appeal speech of the year in Washington and addressing Young Jewish Leadership conferences all over the country.
This friendship with Israel grew so intimate that, years later, when Wilson determined that the CIA wasn’t willing to provide Afghan rebels with an effective mule-portable anti-aircraft gun, he secretly asked the Israelis to design one. They came through, as they always did. And when Wilson was engulfed in a drug scandal that jeopardized his 1984 reelection campaign, Ed Koch mobilized supporters in New York and Jewish backers of Israel from all across the country to pony up $100,000 in campaign contributions and save the day. It was also the Jews in Congress who would rally to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee, where he could help make sure the annual $3 billion a year in aid continued to flow. Getting the Appropriations assignment as a junior congressman was an amazing political maneuver because his own Texas delegation opposed it; they backed a Texan with more seniority. The only other congressman to ever defy his own delegation and seek an Appropriations seat was Lyndon Johnson; but LBJ failed. It was Wilson’s Jewish friends who made it possible.
From his new position on Appropriations, Wilson began to learn how Israel and other special interests use their power. He discovered that the authorizing committees, like Foreign Affairs, were little more than debating societies. He now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year. He watched and saw how one man, if he’s on the right subcommittee and knows how to play the system, can move the entire nation to fund a program or cause of his choice.
By the late 1970s, Wilson was starting to feel his power. He had become part of a small tribe of Democrats alarmed by what they perceived to be a policy of appeasement by their own party. The Israelis had been whispering in Wilson’s ear ever since Jimmy Carter came into office that the United States was getting soft, looking the other way as the Communists advanced everywhere unchecked. But Wilson’s concerns were independent of the Israelis’. He genuinely believed that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. And he was unnerved when he saw the pictures of President Carter embracing Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and kissing him on both cheeks at the arms-control talks. To him it was an ominous replay of that critical moment before World War II when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, pursuing his policy of appeasement, emerged from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time.”
Timing is everything, and it was just at this moment, with these dark thoughts racing in Wilson’s head, that Congressman Jack Murphy appeared in Charlie’s office to make an appeal. Murphy was the kind of Democrat Wilson could relate to, a West Point graduate and decorated Korean War veteran. They were drinking friends, but Murphy had not come to socialize. The two considered themselves part of a lonely group of Democrats holding the line against the Soviets. And Murphy was preaching to the converted when he savaged the president for appeasing the Communists. Now, he said, Carter was about to betray America’s oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America. It was unconscionable to stand by and let it happen, and Wilson was the only man in Congress with the power and the balls to stop it.
Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza was a particularly unattractive dictator, with thick black-rimmed glasses, weighty jowls, and a disturbing leer when he smiled. But over a bottle of Scotch in Wilson’s private office, Murphy told a heartwarming story about how he had gotten to know Tacho as a schoolboy at LaSalle Military Academy in New York, and later as his roommate at West Point. Somoza had created a little
This friendship with Israel grew so intimate that, years later, when Wilson determined that the CIA wasn’t willing to provide Afghan rebels with an effective mule-portable anti-aircraft gun, he secretly asked the Israelis to design one. They came through, as they always did. And when Wilson was engulfed in a drug scandal that jeopardized his 1984 reelection campaign, Ed Koch mobilized supporters in New York and Jewish backers of Israel from all across the country to pony up $100,000 in campaign contributions and save the day. It was also the Jews in Congress who would rally to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee, where he could help make sure the annual $3 billion a year in aid continued to flow. Getting the Appropriations assignment as a junior congressman was an amazing political maneuver because his own Texas delegation opposed it; they backed a Texan with more seniority. The only other congressman to ever defy his own delegation and seek an Appropriations seat was Lyndon Johnson; but LBJ failed. It was Wilson’s Jewish friends who made it possible.
From his new position on Appropriations, Wilson began to learn how Israel and other special interests use their power. He discovered that the authorizing committees, like Foreign Affairs, were little more than debating societies. He now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year. He watched and saw how one man, if he’s on the right subcommittee and knows how to play the system, can move the entire nation to fund a program or cause of his choice.
By the late 1970s, Wilson was starting to feel his power. He had become part of a small tribe of Democrats alarmed by what they perceived to be a policy of appeasement by their own party. The Israelis had been whispering in Wilson’s ear ever since Jimmy Carter came into office that the United States was getting soft, looking the other way as the Communists advanced everywhere unchecked. But Wilson’s concerns were independent of the Israelis’. He genuinely believed that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. And he was unnerved when he saw the pictures of President Carter embracing Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and kissing him on both cheeks at the arms-control talks. To him it was an ominous replay of that critical moment before World War II when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, pursuing his policy of appeasement, emerged from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time.”
Timing is everything, and it was just at this moment, with these dark thoughts racing in Wilson’s head, that Congressman Jack Murphy appeared in Charlie’s office to make an appeal. Murphy was the kind of Democrat Wilson could relate to, a West Point graduate and decorated Korean War veteran. They were drinking friends, but Murphy had not come to socialize. The two considered themselves part of a lonely group of Democrats holding the line against the Soviets. And Murphy was preaching to the converted when he savaged the president for appeasing the Communists. Now, he said, Carter was about to betray America’s oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America. It was unconscionable to stand by and let it happen, and Wilson was the only man in Congress with the power and the balls to stop it.
Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza was a particularly unattractive dictator, with thick black-rimmed glasses, weighty jowls, and a disturbing leer when he smiled. But over a bottle of Scotch in Wilson’s private office, Murphy told a heartwarming story about how he had gotten to know Tacho as a schoolboy at LaSalle Military Academy in New York, and later as his roommate at West Point. Somoza had created a little
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