Charles Colson

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File:Charles Colson mugshot.jpg
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 founder and chairman of the Wilberforce Forum which is the "Christian worldview thinking, teaching, and advocacy arm of" Prison Fellowship. Its stated goal is "...to help Christians approach life with a biblical worldview so that they can in turn shape culture from a biblical perspective."

Early life

Colson was born in Boston, Massachusetts 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 released 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 prominent 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 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

  • Charles W. Colson, Born Again, New Jersey: Chosen Books, Inc., 1976, ISBN 9060672836.
  • Charles W. Colson, Loving God, New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1983, ISBN 0061040037.
  • William A. Dembski, Charles W. Colson, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design, Inter Varsity Press, 2004, ISBN 0830823751.
  • Burden of Truth: Defending the Truth in an Age of Unbelief (Tyndale House 1998) ISBN 0842301909.
  • Life Sentence (Revell 1999) ISBN 0800786688.
  • How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale House 1999) ISBN 0842318089.
  • The Body (W Pub. Group 1994) ISBN 0849935792.
  • Being The Body (W Pub. Group 2003) ISBN 0849917522.
  • Charles Colson, Harold Fickett, The Good Life (Tyndale House 2005) ISBN 0842377492.

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

Wikiquote has quotations related to Charles Colson.

Kerry references

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