Heather Wilson (Photo by Heath Haussamen)
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Heather Wilson’s story includes many wonderful moments and people, but it’s also colored by the death of her father when she was 6 years old and her mother’s later marriage to an alcoholic.
This is the third of four profiles of the U.S. Senate candidates that seek to tell the stories of who they are and what shaped them.
Heather Wilson became the first in her family to go to college when she was 17. Her decision to attend the Air Force Academy set her on a path many New Mexicans are familiar with because it included a decade representing New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Wilson was a Rhodes scholar; she spent seven years as an Air Force officer stationed in England and Belgium; she was the cabinet secretary for the state’s Children, Youth and Families Department; and she was the first female military veteran elected to a full term in Congress.
The story of what drove Wilson, now a Republican U.S. Senate candidate, to succeed is one she has a difficult time telling. Though it includes many wonderful moments and people, it’s also colored by the death of Wilson’s father and her mother’s later marriage to an alcoholic – an experience that led Wilson to resolve to live a different life.
It’s a story that is critical to understanding a woman who describes herself as driven, independent, resilient, empathetic toward those whose families have failed them, and, perhaps most relevant to her public life, “a problem solver more than an ideologue.”
Her father’s death
Wilson’s grandfather on her father’s side came to the United States in 1922 after World War I. As a teenager in Scotland, he had lied about his age to join the military effort to defeat the Germans. He flew planes and searched for German submarines off the coast at a time when flying wasn’t reliable and many pilots didn’t survive.
Wilson’s grandmother, a seamstress, decided after the war to join her grandfather in America and marry him. In the United States, Wilson’s grandfather helped open airports.
Her father, George Douglas Wilson, exchanged services as a line boy for flying lessons during World War II and earned his pilot license when he was 16. He enlisted in the military in 1947, served three years, and then became a commercial pilot. He and Wilson’s mother, Martha Lou Wilson, once built a plane together.
When Wilson was 6 years old, her father was killed in a car accident while on his way home from work, leaving her mother a widow with three children. Wilson’s brothers were 8 and 4 years old at the time.
‘My life was going to be different’
A little over a year after her husband’s death, Martha Lou married a policeman from the neighboring town in New Hampshire who Wilson said had been divorced and was an alcoholic. Her mother went back to work as a nurse when Wilson’s younger brother started first grade. Wilson said it was still unusual in the 1960s for a woman with young children to work outside the home, and she and her brothers took care of themselves after school. She became quite independent.
When Wilson was in seventh grade, her stepfather lost his job. He never really had another, she said.
“He was a freelance accident investigator and photographer who continued to carry his .38 revolver in a hand-tooled holster on his belt,” she said. “His alcoholism got worse, their marriage deteriorated, and the family conflict between my brothers and my stepfather escalated.”
As the situation deteriorated at home, Wilson immersed herself in school. She was a good student in middle school; she became a great student in high school.
“I somehow figured out that doing well in school would give me options and choices that I wanted to have,” she said. “I also knew that I didn’t really like things at home. So, I made my life at school. I studied very hard and was rewarded for it with good grades.”
He extracurricular activities included the debate team, band, choir and the drama club. “When other kids drank on the back of the band bus or experimented with drugs, I had a reason not to,” Wilson said. “My life was going to be different.”
Meanwhile, Wilson’s mother told her children they were not to discuss family problems outside the home. “At the time, even my closest friends did not know my stepfather had a drinking problem,” she said.
Wilson’s younger brother struggled in school. He was a high-school freshman when she was a senior (he would go on to repeat his freshman year), had been in trouble a fair amount, and did not get along with Wilson’s stepfather. She described her younger brother as unhappy and angry and said she worried about him a lot.
One night during the fall of Wilson’s senior year in high school, while Wilson was in the den doing physics homework, her stepfather, who had been drinking, threatened to kill her younger brother during an altercation in the kitchen.
Wilson said she believed her stepfather was serious about wanting to kill her little brother. She left the house, going to a place she often went to be alone – the swings on the playground behind a nearby school. Here’s how Wilson describes what happened next:
“I saw my mother driving around the neighborhood looking for me, but I did not want to be found. Eventually, I went home. My stepfather was sleeping it off and I went to my room, sat down at my small desk, turned on the light and continued doing my physics homework.
“My mother came home and told me to get my things; we were going to stay at my grandparents’. I refused to go. She asked me why and I told her, ‘Because I have physics homework to do.’
“My mother broke down, telling me that I blamed her for the problems at home. I did not cry or get angry, but I explained to her that I didn’t need to pick a side and that this was not my problem. Eventually, she left the house without me.
“I finished my homework, went to bed, got up the next day and went to school.”
Wilson said she and her mother had been growing apart for some time and were never close after that night. “I sometimes wonder whether I should have left the house with her,” Wilson said.
Her grandfather’s blessing and a full-ride scholarship
Wilson earned an “A” in physics that year – and in every other course in high school. She was also state champion in debate, the student representative to the school board, the tenor sax and banjo player in the band, a singer in the all-state chorus, and president of the 4-H club.
“And, unbeknownst to my teachers and friends and coaches in high school, I was picking my stepfather off the cellar floor where he fell asleep curled around a bottle of Canadian Club and trying to nudge my brother into believing that life was worth living,” Wilson said.
While her mother and stepfather were getting a divorce in December of her senior year in high school, Wilson was applying to colleges. Three months later, she was accepted to the Air Force Academy and MIT. She chose the Academy – a year after it opened enrollment to women – and left home at 17.
She tells the story in a recent web video of deciding to apply to the Academy. Her grandfather was still alive, and Wilson’s mother told her she should talk with him.
“With his blessing, and a full-ride scholarship, I became the first person in my family to go to college,” Wilson says in that video.
She went on to a successful career in public service and married Jay Hone, her law professor at the Academy who she described as a “remarkable” man. They have an adult foster son who they adopted and two children still living at home.
‘I realized that day that my life really was different’
Wilson and Hone married in a small church in New Hampshire when she was 30. Her father’s best friend gave her away. The perfume she wore was from a bottle her father gave her when she was little. Her grandmother’s wedding ring became her wedding ring.
“I realized that day that my life really was different,” Wilson said. “I had made different choices. I had a satisfying career, a great education, good friends, healthy relationships, and was marrying an intelligent, great guy who was sober. We have built a wonderful life for ourselves and I have been blessed in lots of ways.”
Her younger brother graduated from high school and went on to be a musician, the owner of a music store in New Hampshire, and a “wonderful, creative, involved dad.” Her older brother is a master carpenter and married.
Wilson’s mother remarried again in 1980 to a man who helped care for her as she battled Alzheimer’s, which eventually took her life in 2007. Her stepfather died in his 50s, though Wilson doesn’t know exactly how.
“He may have died from complications related to alcoholism,” she said. “There was some speculation of suicide. Or he may have just died. He was found alone in his apartment several days after his death.”
Wilson said there are no simple answers to questions about how she became the person she is today. Her “healthy, warm, loving marriage” is part of the answer and gives her strength, as do the positive relationships from her childhood. But, she noted, the “roots of who I am are not all pleasant ones:”
“I made a choice as a teenager that my life would be different from what I saw at home, and I was determined to make decisions that would arc the course of my life toward the barnstormers, the plane builders, toward my father and grandfather, toward the love of a grandmother who always had ginger ale and oatmeal raisin cookies, and away from the tension of alcoholism and unhealthy family relationships that defined my teen and pre-teen years at my house.”
“Certainly one of the reasons I worked so hard to stay at the Academy was because I did not want to go home,” Wilson said. “Failure was not an option. As far as I was concerned, I had no place else to go.”
A conservative who knows that ‘safety-net programs matter’
Today Wilson describes herself as someone who is driven and has worked hard to succeed; she expects that if she falls down she has to pick herself back up, empathizes with those whose families have failed them, has a finely tuned ability to read people and their emotions, and is stubbornly independent, resilient and strong.
Somewhere in all of that – and in this story – is an explanation of the intricacies of Wilson’s public service. Based on her voting record, she was often ranked as one of the more moderate Republican House members during her time representing a swing district.
Wilson wasn’t always a Republican. When she first registered to vote, she chose to become a Democrat because the man who sponsored her at the Academy was a Democrat. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when she was in her 20s, that she thought more about which party she fit into and switched.
She doesn’t know whether her parents or grandparents were Democrats or Republicans. She doesn’t remember conversations about politics at the dining room table. She remembers a commitment to service from the men in her family who served in the military and her mother’s work as a community health nurse.
Wilson is conservative – she says frequently that she’s a Republican because she trusts people more than government and believes in free enterprise and a strong national defense. And while she believes individuals should help those in need – she said she tries to do so and teaches her children to do the same – she also believes government should play a role in helping people.
Wilson speaks favorably about what Title IX did for women. She helped rally enough Republicans in 2007 to vote with Democrats to keep the State Children’s Health Insurance Program going. She said she knows that “safety-net programs matter.”
“We got a Social Security check that did make a difference after my father died. I know that we need great public schools and that a great education and wonderful teachers can change the course of a life, because I lived that life,” Wilson said. “I also know that government is not always particularly competent or well-run. That’s why I trust people more than I trust government. I value freedom and free enterprise. I’m a problem solver more than an ideologue.”
Wilson believes compromise is necessary because solutions from any minority aren’t the best way forward.
She believes bipartisanship is possible even in these divided times. And while Wilson pledges to “fight passionately for the things I believe” as a U.S. senator, she said she will also seek compromise “on the matters most important to New Mexico.”
A prior version of this posting incorrectly called it Title IV, not Title IX. In addition, this article has been updated to clarify that Wilson’s brother was in his first go-around as a high-school freshman, not second, when she was a senior.