Former U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, whose funding of the Afghanistan’s resistance movement against the Soviet Union was famously portrayed by actor Tom Hanks in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” has died at age 76.
Mr. Wilson was pronounced dead on Wednesday after arriving at Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin in east Texas, where he lived. He was brought to the hospital after he started having difficulties breathing. According to a hospital spokesperson Mr. Wilson preliminary cause of death is “cardiopulmonary arrest.”
Whether Wilson was as crucial to the Afghan war against the Soviets, as George Crile's book and Mike Nichols' film suggests, is still controversial among historians. But people in Pakistan still remember him as the face of the American support for Afghanistan’s Mujahideen.
"He was no longer just responsible for funding an exotic, important foreign policy,” Crile wrote. “In the minds of his colleagues, it really was becoming Charlie Wilson's war. Charlie was personally fighting the Russians."
