Charles ‘Chuck’ Colson died on April 21 aged 80, from complications resulting from a brain haemorrhage.
President Richard Nixon’s hatchet man-in-chief during the Watergate years, he was known to his colleagues as the ‘evil genius’; he spent several months in prison in 1974 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, but turned to Christ and, after his release, forged a new career as an evangelist.
Prison Fellowship
In 1976, Colson, who once described himself as a ‘flag-waving, kick’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-Liberal, Nixon fanatic’, founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries, a $50-million charitable organisation established to bring Christ to the inmates of the world’s penitentiaries.
A notable beneficiary of his ministry on this side of the Atlantic was the disgraced former Conservative minister Jonathan Aitken. Before his conversion, Aitken had got to know Colson fairly well while writing a biography of Nixon. Colson was visiting him at time he was arrested and charged with perjury. He received a fax letter on his return home from the police station. ‘The old Aitken is just like the old Colson (and like Nixon). The new Aitken shows a conversion — a real and genuine transformation... Just remember, He has his hand upon you and will give you whatever grace is needed to sustain you for what you must endure’. And, after pleading guilty and facing his prison sentence, he received another letter from Colson: ‘Keep your trust in Christ and follow his steps moment by moment, day by day, and he will guide your path’.
Capitol Hill
An only child, Charles Wendell ‘Chuck’ Colson was born into a working-class family in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 16 1931. After studying at Brown University and a brief stint with the US Marine Corps, Colson went on to graduate in Law from Washington University.
In the 1950s he was the youngest administrative assistant on Capitol Hill, where, by his own account, he learned the black arts of planting misleading stories in the press and tearing down opposition posters.
Colson worked on the 1968 Nixon campaign as chairman of the Key Issues Committee. He was then making $100,000 a year as a Washington lawyer, but he gladly took a pay cut to join the White House staff in 1969. Colson’s title was ‘special counsel’, but his real role was as Nixon’s ‘Mr. Fixit’.
The charge sheet against Colson was a long one. Among other allegations, Colson was accused of hiring thugs to beat up anti-war demonstrators, and of plotting to firebomb the liberal Brookings Institution.
Colson organised the ‘burglary’ of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills in September 1971. Ellsberg had leaked the so-called ‘Pentagon papers’ about the Vietnam War which had increased public opposition to the conflict, and Colson hoped to find dirt on Ellsberg that could be used to discredit the anti-war left.
In 1974 Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Ellsberg case. Although he was sentenced to a one- to three-year term in prison, he served only seven months. But he came out a different man.
Conversion
Colson’s conversion occurred before his prison term in the summer of 1973, when he knelt on the floor of the office of Tom Phillips, a businessman, personal friend and born-again Christian. While Colson fought back tears, Phillips prayed for him. Later, as he drove home, Colson wept ‘tears of relief’ and felt the ‘spirit of Christ’ for the first time. During his time in prison, he studied the Bible obsessively and, on his release, he published a bestselling memoir entitled Born Again.
When news of his conversion leaked in 1973, the press was inclined to ridicule Colson’s new-found faith, suggesting it was a ploy to reduce his sentence. ‘If Mr. Colson can repent of his sins, there just has to be hope for everybody’, opined the Boston Globe.
Prison Fellowship grew to be the largest prison ministry in the world, and a subsidiary of the group was founded in 1983 to develop Bible-based criminal justice and prison reform. Later Colson helped to put together the Arlington Group, an alliance of evangelical and Catholic conservatives which lobbied against same-sex marriage.
Source: Daily Telegraph and Jonathan Aitken’s biography
