By Alexander Osang
In the elevator from the parking garage, Wilson removes a campaign sticker from his lapel and stuffs it into the pocket of his corduroy jacket. He has now arrived at the University of California's Washington Center, where he is scheduled to give his next speech.
What will he talk about?
“About the Valerie Wilson case,” he says. “All people want me talk about is the case. In the past, I was invited to speak because I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. Today I’m the husband of a CIA agent whose cover was blown. Mister Valerie.”
Wilson emerges from the elevator into a group of students outside the lecture hall, enjoying the pizza and soft drinks being served before tonight’s lecture. He sits down on one of three chairs at the podium. The director of the center and an assistant professor of international politics sit in the other two chairs -- two older men with poorly fitting suits, cheap shoes and gray faces. Wilson wears faded jeans, a checkered shirt open at the neck under his corduroy jacket, and soft brown cowboy boots. He comes across like some colorful research subject between the two academics.
They introduce him as “Ambassador Wilson,” a title he earned in Gabon, a small African nation on the equator where Wilson worked after being the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein and before becoming Mister Valerie. An island in his stormy life, in a manner of speaking.
“I know that there are people in this room with very different political views. The only thing I ask is this: Be respectful,” says the director of the center. For a moment, it becomes painfully clear what Washington’s spin doctors have done to this decent, energetic former ambassador to Gabon. They’ve spent so much time trampling around on his life that a room of 300 pizza-eating political science students have to be asked to treat him with respect. This is a man who served his country for 25 years, most of that time in hot, dusty countries, a man who stood up to Saddam Hussein and a man who played a role in resolving the conflict in Yugoslavia. One feels a need to shake the director of the center.
But then Joseph Wilson interjects: “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve been insulted by some of the best people in this country.” He stands up and gives the one-hour presentation that he gives everywhere.
He talks about the five years he spent working as a carpenter after graduating from college, and how he barely managed to pass the US Foreign Service examination. He wanted to go to France, because he spoke French. Paris and Nice would have been nice, he told the students, or perhaps Bordeaux, because the surfing is good there. They sent him to Niger, because they speak French there, as well. Wilson waits for the laughter to die down and talks about how it was in Niger that he learned to love Africa. He mentions Saddam Hussein, the mission in Kosovo and his trip to Africa at Bill Clinton’s side, which brings him to the Senegalese president’s comment. This is the end of his diplomatic career, he says, adding that there is nothing left for him to achieve.
He married Valerie Plame on the day he returned from Africa, marking the romantic highlight of his story.
Wilson concludes his lecture by appealing to everyone in the room to perform their duties as American citizens to preserve this great democracy.
It is an entertaining, adventurous journey through the life of Joseph Wilson, a tale he delivers while walking back and forth across the stage. He receives a long round of applause, a few respectful questions and, in the end, a large number of students pose for photos with Joseph Wilson as if it were some sort of hunting trophy.
When normal becomes odd
Three days later, shortly after 11:30 a.m., Wilson enters the Presidents Hall at Penn State University in rural Pennsylvania to give the same speech. This time he appears wearing a dark suit and a shimmering Hermes tie, a slim, blonde woman at his side. His wife, his story.
Valerie Plame attended Penn State before joining the CIA. That, she says, is the only reason she is accompanying her husband today. The Wilsons have arrived a little on the early side, and most of the 80 round tables in the room are still empty. As today’s lunch steams away in metal containers, the Wilsons spend a moment standing in the room, looking indecisive. An elderly couple -- the Johnsons -- approaches them.
“Do you remember us?” Mrs. Johnson asks Valerie Wilson. When Wilson looks a little uncertain, the woman pulls out a stack of photos. Valerie Wilson laughs. The Johnsons are the parents of one of her college friends. And now the Johnsons are laughing too. “I’m the husband,” says Joseph Wilson, trying to glance at the pictures. “That’s good to hear,” says Mrs. Johnson.
It’s an oddly normal moment.
An hour later, Wilson is back at the podium, explaining his relationship with his wife in the context of world politics. The guests are eating dessert -- apple pie -- and drinking coffee. Joseph Wilson talks about himself and Clinton, himself and Cheney, himself and Saddam. He shows his audience how one shakes hands with Saddam Hussein without looking, in the photo op, as if one were bowing. During the discussion following his lecture, someone asks why the columnist Robert Novak, the one who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity in the first place, isn’t being called to account.
“Novak was the only one who immediately cooperated with the prosecutors,” says Wilson, and pauses for a moment. “I called Novak a wimp a couple of times, until my wife Valerie asked me to stop because it sounds so condescending,” he says, stroking his tie and savoring the audience’s laughter for a moment. “But what can I tell you? Robert Novak is a goddamn wimp.” He looks at his laughing audience and his audience looks back at him. His wife looks sadly at the table. Joseph Wilson is an imperfect hero.
Many of the 450 guests give him a standing ovation. Their applause is unanimous, the kind of applause one would expect to hear at a party convention. On the last Friday afternoon in September in 2006, after apple pie in Pennsylvania, Wilson, together with the Bush administration’s many biographers, finally seems to have arrived in the mainstream. Today, 56 percent of Americans believe that the Iraq war was a mistake. Joseph Wilson is the talisman of their late-blooming conscience.
This is the reason for his many speaking engagements. And this is what is left of a man who was once an American hero.
Later, as members of the audience approach Wilson to congratulate him on his speech, his wife talks quietly about her life. She doesn’t make official statements, she says, and she doesn’t talk to journalists. As a CIA agent, she was first assigned to Athens and later to Brussels. Her job was to recruit foreign spies. Her cover was as an employee of an energy company.
In the spring and summer, she wrote a book that helped her make peace with the experiences of the last three years. Once the CIA approves the book, she says, it will probably be published next fall. It’ll be called “Fair Game” -- the expression Karl Rove used when discussing her with a journalist. “Wilson’s wife is fair game,” he said. Someone who can be shot at with abandon.
While her husband tells some Penn State employee that the war isn’t over, that it’s every citizen’s obligation to fight, Valerie Wilson talks about Washington as a toxic city, and about the never-ending stress she has faced there in the last three years. The sparkle in her eyes seems to fade. She looks thin, not slim, weak, not modest.
On Saturday evening, Wilson and his wife are sitting in the Penn State chancellor’s box watching a college football game against Northwestern University. The publicity campaign for Bob Woodward’s new book has just been launched. The book is called “State of Denial,” with an initial printing of 750,000. After two pro-administration books, Woodward is now criticizing the US government for its misbegotten war. It’s a thick book, but Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie are barely mentioned.
Translated from German by Christopher Sultan
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