Charlie Wilson’s War

One casualty of the shrinking newspaper business is that older journalists aren’t around to mentor younger journalists. We are losing something called institutional memory. Our local history tells us who we are. 

When I ask people if they know the name Joanne King Herring, if they are my age and they have spent their whole life in Houston they say of course. Everyone else gives me a blank look. Next question: Have you seen the 2007 hit movie Charlie Wilson’s War, with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts? Some bells go off. But few realize that Julia Roberts played an iconic Houston woman, Joanne King Herring. Even fewer realize she spurred Congress into a proxy war involving the CIA that defeated the Russians’ efforts to take over Afghanistan in a 10-year-war that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Recently, on the evening of March 10th, Tom Hanks was in town for the NASA premiere of a multi-sensory production he co-produced called The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks. At a private reception for Hanks where pictures weren’t allowed, a sneaky cell phone captured video of Hanks entering a room, making a beeline to Joanne King Herring as if he saw no one else. He bent one knee, kissed her hand, and said something to the crowd about all of us owing her a debt of gratitude. 

Even at 95, impeccably dressed, with her still-high cheekbones, there she was. Maxine Mesinger, where are you? You should be telling us about this, pictures and all, on Houston’s society pages. 

I was 9 years old when my mother pointed out Joanne King on The News at Noon. It was the first time it ever occurred to me that a woman could actually talk about the same things that men talked about on TV. Of course, she also showed us how to wear scarves with our dresses. My mother suddenly had a scarf for every outfit. Little did I know I would later cover news at Channel 11 myself. I told Joanne all of this in a recent phone conversation. We talked for two hours. 

Joanne says those early days were rougher than they looked. I was awful. I had to learn on the job. The men flirted off the air and didn’t let me get a word in on the air. They wanted me to just sit there and look pretty.

But the audience loved her, so much so that after a decade at Channel 11, Channel 2 recruited her. The Joanne King Show ran on Channel 2 from 1974-1979. She was kind, articulate, and charming. 

In 1972 she married Robert Herring, president of Houston Natural Gas, when Houston and the Middle East were working on the social diplomacy side of their business relationships. Joanne was known for her lavish River Oaks parties with heads of state back in Houston’s Boomtown era of the 1970s. Joanne’s parties in River Oaks included people like King Hussein of Jordan and even Princess Grace (Kelly) of Monaco and Prince Rainier. She got to know Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, President of Pakistan, who made her honorary consul at the Consulate-General of Pakistan based in Houston. 

It was a job Joanne took seriously, traveling to Pakistan and witnessing masses of refugees (over 300,000) from Afghanistan who had fled into Pakistan because of a Russian invasion when it was still the Soviet Union. She and her son, Robin King, a photojournalist, documented the heartbreaking situation on film at considerable risk, in an effort to convince Washington politicians that the Afghans needed weapons to stop the communists. 

From here, Joanne, a conservative Republican, forged a relationship with East Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, a liberal Democrat, in a covert CIA effort to send arms to aid Afghanistan. As the movie depicts, she persuaded Wilson to go to Pakistan to witness the atrocities of the war that spanned 1979 to 1989. Joanne was widowed during this time. Her husband, Robert Herring, 59, passed away from cancer in 1981, while Robin was still filming in Pakistan. 

Charlie Wilson’s War, the movie, leaves you with the impression that the U.S. dropped the ball by not rebuilding Afghanistan after the war, leaving a vacuum for the creation of the Taliban, leading to 9/11. Charlie’s pleas to Congress fell on deaf ears. And while Joanne worked with villagers in a private effort to market their crafts to the U.S., America had moved on. 

Others say the Russian defeat was the final nail in the coffin of the communist Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the same year Charlie Wilson’s War ended. 

Charlie Wilson’s War is definitely worth the $3.99 streaming fee in light of today’s news. Also, The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks, will be running at Space Center Houston for the next two years (included in general admission). And finally, a documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, tells the story after Herring’s death, when his respectable Houston Natural Gas morphed into Enron – all Houston stories that tell us who we are. Institutional memory is important.

I’m with Hanks. We owe Joanne King Herring a debt of gratitude.

Editor’s note: Read more of Joanne’s story from her perspective in her memoir, Diplomacy and Diamonds: My Wars from the Ballroom to the Battlefield.