Commentary: Is that greatness, or just scotch, in America's veins?

The two were obscure lawmakers, each charting a stunningly prescient course that ran smack into that impregnable American blockade called politics.

I speak on the one hand of former U.S. Rep. Charles Nesbitt Wilson, interest in whom has been recently invigorated by Tom Hanks' amicable cinematic tip of the hat, "Charlie Wilson's War."

If you're too young to have known - or partied too much to remember - the 1980s, you missed a real piece of work in Wilson, a randy, Chivas-swilling East Texan whom political pals dubbed "Good Time Charlie."

Wilson started out with a thoroughly undistinguished military career, graduating eighth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy and racking up the second-most demerits in the school's history.

After the service, he somehow managed to get elected to the Texas Legislature and then won 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In an effort to bed a Houston socialite with a soft spot for the Afghan mujahedeen freedom fighters, Wilson used his seat on the House appropriations subcommittee on defense to significantly jack up CIA spending for the war against the occupying Soviets.

"Significantly," in this case, was an increase from $5 million to $500 million, with each U.S. dollar matched by the Saudis. That may sound like a rounding error in today's $12 billion-a-month incursion in the Middle East, but it was real money back in the early 1980s.

Wilson's Operation Cyclone, as it was dubbed, smuggled in thousands of Russian-made weapons acquired from Egypt, giving the United States deniability and helping the mujahedeen turn the fight from a Soviet slaughter into a Vietnam-style war of attrition.

Moscow called it quits in 1989.

Wilson's one regret: That America failed at the end game by denying modest funding requests for schools and humanitarian aid that might have prevented the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan and, ultimately, today's costly war on terrorism.

Last week, we celebrated the work of the equally obscure Gaylord Nelson, the former U.S. senator from Wisconsin.

Elected to Congress in 1962, Nelson wondered why the environment wasn't a part of the national political debate, but his was the lone voice in the wilderness known as Washington on the subject. The people were concerned, he complained, but the issue had no traction with the politicians.

Finally, in 1969, Nelson announced he was organizing a national demonstration for the environment to be held in the coming spring. The idea was a riff on the anti-war "teach ins" taking place on campuses around the country, and Nelson figured his Earth Day idea would maybe catch on with Boy Scouts and small-town mayors.

Instead, 20 million Americans turned out. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against everything from oil spills to pesticides, from toxic fumes to freeways. Earth lovers young and old cleaned rivers and woodlands, collected abandoned tires and set up recycling centers.

Air pollution, they argued, should no longer be accepted as "the smell of prosperity."

Goaded into action, Congress enacted almost 30 revolutionary environmental laws over the next decade, including the Environmental Protection Act and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.

But we are, alas, a nation needing Ritalin. Our interest in the environment waned in the 1980s and support splintered. Oil prices declined and Detroit invented the SUV. Our call for clean water moved from natural springs to the kind that comes in plastic bottles.

As with Afghanistan, we lost sight of the end game.

Today's growing green movement suggests that we the people are once more ready to save the planet, and I've been waiting, impatiently, for one of the presidential candidates to lead a national push.

We need a challenge, evoking John F. Kennedy's race-to-the-moon speech to Congress, that can rally us toward renewable energy and end our dependency on foreign oil and the heavy toll of dollars and death that goes with it.

"I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary," Kennedy told Congress in that 1961 address. "But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to ensure their fulfillment."

One of our presidential hopefuls might use the same quotation today, word for word.

Gaylord Nelson, by the way, died in 2005. Charlie Wilson is still very much alive, re-equipped just last fall with the heart of a 35- year-old donor. Last I read, he was making big bucks as a consultant to the arms industry.

In his honor, stock up on the Chivas. In the winter of our discontent, it may be all we have to keep warm.

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