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Charles Colson

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Booking photos of Charles Colson, 1974.
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Booking photos of Charles Colson, 1974.

Charles Wendell "Chuck" Colson (born October, 1931) was the chief counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973 and was one of the Watergate Seven, jailed for Watergate-related charges.

His later life has been spent working with his nonprofit organization devoted to prison ministry called Prison Fellowship. Colson is also a public speaker and author. He is the chairman of the Wilberforce Forum, a conservative Christian political and social think tank and action group active in the promotion of intelligent design in education and in biotechnology and bioethics issues, such as human cloning and stem cell research.

Contents

Early life

Colson was born in Boston in 1931. After attending Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, he earned his B.A., with honors, from Brown University and his J.D. from George Washington University. Colson served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953 to 1955.

Nixon Administration

In 1969, Colson was appointed as Counsel to President Nixon. Colson also became involved in the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP or CREEP). Known as President Nixon's hatchet man, he is purported to have once bragged, "I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon." Colson authored the 1971 memo listing Nixon's major political opponents, later known as Nixon's Enemies List. At a CRP meeting on March 21st, 1971, it was agreed to spend $250,000 on "intelligence gathering" on the Democratic Party. Colson and John Ehrlichman appointed E. Howard Hunt to the White House Special Operations Unit (the so-called "Plumbers") which had been organized to stop leaks in the Nixon administration. Hunt headed up the Plumbers' burglary of Pentagon Papers-leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in September 1971. The Pentagon Papers were military documents about the Vietnam War which helped increase opposition to the war. Colson hoped that revelations about Ellsberg could be used to discredit the anti-Vietnam War left. In Colson's 2005 book, The Good Life, he admitted leaking information from Ellsberg's confidential FBI file to the press, but denied organizing Hunt's burglary of Ellsberg's office. In the book, he expressed regret for attempting to cover up this incident.

As Colson was facing arrest, his close friend Tom Phillips gave him a copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. This influenced Colson to become an evangelical Christian. Editorial comics in several U. S. newspapers, as well as Newsweek and Time, ridiculed the conversion, claiming that it was a ploy to reduce his sentence.

In 1974 Colson pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Ellsberg case. He was given a one-to-three year sentence. He served seven months in Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama.

Career after prison

After his release from prison, Colson founded Prison Fellowship. Colson has worked to promote prisoner rehabilitation and reform of the prison system in the United States. He disdains the "lock 'em and leave 'em" warehousing approach to criminal justice. He led the effort that liberated Elizabeth Morgan from prison. He has helped to create faith-based prisons whose populations come from inmates who choose to participate in them. All of Colson's book royalties are donated to Prison Fellowship.

Colson also maintains a variety of media channels which discuss contemporary issues from an Evangelical Protestant worldview. Colson's views are typically consistent with a politically conservative interpretation of evangelical Protestantism. In his Christianity Today columns, for example, Colson has opposed same-sex marriage, argued that Darwinism is an attack on Christianity, and claimed that the Enron accounting scandals were a consequence of secularism.

Colson has been an outspoken critic of postmodernism, believing that as a cultural worldview it is incompatible with the Christian tradition. He has debated other prominant Evangelicals, such as Brian Mclaren, on the best response for the Evangelical church in dealing with the postmodern cultural shift.

In 1993 Colson was awarded the Templeton Prize.

In 1994, Colson was famously quoted in legendary contemporary Christian music artist Steven Curtis Chapman's song Heaven in the Real World as saying: "Where is the hope? I meet millions of people who feel demoralized by the decay around us. The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws we pass, or what great things we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people. And that's where our hope is in this country. And that's where our hope is in life."

In October 2002, Colson, along with several other prominent American evangelical leaders, was a co-signer of the Land letter to President Bush which outlined a "just war" endorsement of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Colson's voice, archives from April 1969, was heard in the movie Going Upriver deprecating the anti-war efforts of John Kerry. Colson's orders were to "Destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

Colson was recently referred to by Martin Nolan as Karl Rove's "spiritual ancestor". "Pretty impressive performance," Chuck told Nolan after Kerry testified before a Senate committee. But to his boss, President Richard Nixon, as revealed on tape years later, Colson said, "This fellow Kerry that they had on last week. ... He turns out to be really quite a phony." Colson himself admitted to playing a role similar to Rove in his book, The Good Life.

On June 1, 2005 Colson appeared in the national news commenting on the revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat. Colson expressed disapproval in Felt's role in the Watergate scandal and suggested that if Felt could not remain loyal to President Nixon, then he should have simply resigned.

References

Note: Mr. Colson has a long list of publications, collaborations and has written forewords for several other books. Along with the Roman Catholic Richard John Niehaus, he edited Evangelicals and Catholics Together : Toward a Common Mission, ISBN 0849938600.

See also

External links

Kerry references

Humor link

 

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