I never met Charles “Chuck” Colson, who passed away this past Saturday at the age of 80 from brain hemorrhage complications. I have heard a lot about him from my father, however, who knew him and worked for a time at Colson’s BreakPoint. I also knew a bit about him because I’m a political junkie, and I’m fairly familiar with President Richard Nixon (R) and the Watergate scandal.
Serving as White House Special Counsel after Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, Colson quickly earned a reputation as the administration’s ‘hatchet man.’ Writing in Slate in 2000, David Plotz described Colson as having been “Richard Nixon’s hard man, the ‘evil genius’ of an evil administration.” Colson himself wrote that, at the time, he was “valuable to the President . . . because I was willing . . . to be ruthless in getting things done.” According to Plotz, Colson’s over-the-top approach to politicking led him to recommend hiring Teamster thugs to beat up anti-war demonstrators, and to propose firebombing the non-profit Brookings Institution as a cover for stealing politically damaging documents.
Colson compiled the infamous ‘Nixon’s Enemies List.’ The cover memorandum to this list stated, in part, that it was meant to aid in “dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
He later became involved in the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP), an organization rife with money laundering and slush funds that ultimately executed the well-known break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex. That incident and the subsequent cover-up nearly led to Nixon’s impeachment, but the president resigned before Congress had the chance.
Colson resigned from the Nixon White House in March 1973 to return to private law practice, and was indicted a year later for his involvement in the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Just as he was facing arrest for his crimes, Raytheon chairman Thomas Phillips gave him a copy of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which inspired Colson to a religious conversion. He soon became an apparently-devout Christian believer. When news of this conversion came out, the cynical media generally chalked it up to a ploy by Colson to reduce his sentence—an assumption that I, admittedly, may have leaped to myself, if I had been politically-interested (and, um, alive) at the time.