The book on which the movie is based has a lot more information about the Democratic congressman from Texas than the movie. A few of my favourite passages from the book:
"The Texas congressman had first gone to the Alamo when he was six years old. He had been there many times since, and each time it had left him teary. Most Americans can't understand what the Alamo means to Texans. It's like Masada to the Israels. It sums up what it means to be a man, what it means to be a patriot, what it means to be a Texan. Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and all who stayed with Travis that day paid the ultimate price, but they had bought time for Sam Houston to mobilize the Texas army to defeat Santa Anna. that is what brave men did: win time for others to do the right thing......
Charlie Wilson, after all, is bona fide hedonist, But he is also guilty of concealing his other identity. It's only when he's alone and everyone else is sleeping that the other Charlie Wilson surfaced. It's a nightly affair. Usually at about three or four A.M. he finds himself awake and turns to his library..... it is to the biographies and histories of Winston Churchill that Wilson always returns on these night journeys to read again and again about the man who was cast into the political wilderness, written off as an alcoholic alarmist, and then when all was los ,rose to the occasions to save his country and his civilization from the darkness of Hitler....
The painting over his bed, his one steady nightly companion.... The painting-- a lone pilot in the cockpit of a Spitfire, patrolling the night skies of London-- had hung over his boyhood bed in tiny Trinity, Texas, at a time when the Nazis were sweeping across Europe..... The young boy with the huge imagination had already become obsessed with the war and with the magical voices coming out of the RCA radio.... Murrow from London under the Blitz and particularly Winston Churchill. It was a voice from far away, heard on a radio in a tiny town in the back of beyond. But those ringing, defiant words of Churchill, mocking Hitler and infusing a nation with the will to fight on, no matter what the cost, never to be conquered, would leave Wilson forever struck by the power of one man's spirit to change history."
I have a review of the movie below. If you like the movie also read the book. Charlie Wilson is a true patriot. Not bad for a Republican to say about a Democrat.
