Should Colson Have Pleaded Guilty Born Again Book
Charles W. Colson, Watergate Felon Who Became Evangelical Leader, Dies at 80
Charles Westward. Colson, who equally a political saboteur for President Richard Grand. Nixon masterminded some of the dirty tricks that led to the president's downfall, so emerged from prison house to go an important evangelical leader, saying he had been "born again," died on Sabbatum in Falls Church, Va. He was fourscore.
The cause was complications of a brain hemorrhage, according to Prison house Fellowship Ministries, which Mr. Colson founded in Lansdowne, Va. He lived in Leesburg, Va., and Naples, Fla.
Mr. Colson had encephalon surgery to remove a clot after becoming sick on March 30 while speaking at a conference, according to Jim Liske, the group's chief executive.
Mr. Colson went to prison house after pleading guilty to obstructing justice in i of the criminal plots that undid the Nixon administration. After having what he called his religious enkindling behind bars, he spent much of the rest of his life ministering to prisoners, preaching the Gospels and forging a coalition of Republican politicians, evangelical church building leaders and Roman Catholic conservatives that has had a pronounced influence on American politics.
Information technology was a remarkable reversal.
Mr. Colson was a 38-year-onetime Washington lawyer when he joined the Nixon White House as a special counsel in Nov 1969. He chop-chop defenseless the president'southward eye. His "instinct for the political jugular and his ability to become things done fabricated him a lightning rod for my own frustrations," Nixon wrote in his memoir, "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon." In 1970, the president fabricated him his "political point human" for "imaginative muddied tricks."
"When I complained to Colson, I felt confident that something would be done," Nixon wrote. "I was rarely disappointed."
Mr. Colson and his colleagues "started vying for favor on Nixon's dark side," Bryce North. Harlow, a onetime advisor to the president, said in an oral history. "Colson started talking about trampling his grandmother's grave for Nixon and showing he was as hateful as they come."
As the president'southward re-ballot campaign geared up in 1971, "everybody went macho," Mr. Harlow said. "It was the 'in' matter to swagger and threaten."
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Few played political hardball more fiercely than Mr. Colson. When a deluded janitor from Milwaukee shot Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama on the presidential campaign trail in Maryland in May 1972, Nixon asked nearly the suspect's politics. Mr. Colson replied, "Well, he's going to be a left-winger by the time we get through." He proposed a political frame-upward: planting leftist pamphlets in the would-exist killer's flat. "Skillful," the president said, as recorded on a White Business firm tape. "Keep at that."
Mr. Colson hired E. Howard Hunt, a veteran covert operator for the Fundamental Intelligence Agency, to spy on the president'due south opponents. Their plots became part of the cascade of high crimes and misdemeanors known as the Watergate affair.
Their efforts began to unravel subsequently Mr. Hunt and v other C.I.A. and F.B.I. veterans were arrested after a botched burglary and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate role complex in Washington. To this 24-hour interval, no ane knows whether Nixon authorized the pause-in or precisely what the burglars wanted.
"When I write my memoirs," Mr. Colson told Mr. Hunt in a November 1972 telephone conversation, "I'thousand going to say that the Watergate was brilliantly conceived as an monkeyshines that would divert the Democrats' attention from the real issues, and therefore permit us to win a landslide that we probably wouldn't have won otherwise." The two men laughed.
That month, Nixon won that landslide. On ballot night, the president watched the returns with Mr. Colson and the White House principal of staff, H.R. Haldeman. "I couldn't feel whatsoever sense of jubilation," Mr. Colson said in a 1992 idiot box interview. "Hither we were, supposedly winning, and it was more similar we'd lost."
"The attitude was, 'Well, we showed them, we got even with our enemies and we beat them,' instead of 'We've been given a wonderful mandate to rule over the adjacent four years,' " he said. "We were reduced to our footling worst on the night of what should have been our greatest triumph."
The Watergate operation and the dingy tricks campaign surrounding it led to the criminal indictments and convictions of nearly of Nixon's closest aides. On June 21, 1974, Mr. Colson was sentenced to prison and fined $5,000. Nixon resigned seven weeks afterward later on one of his secretly recorded White House tapes made articulate that he had tried to use the C.I.A. to obstruct the federal investigation of the intermission-in.
Mr. Colson served 7 months later pleading guilty to obstructing justice in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, a onetime National Security Council consultant who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam State of war, to The New York Times. In July 1971, a few weeks later on the papers were published, Mr. Colson approved Mr. Hunt's proposal to steal files from the role of Mr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The aim was "to destroy his public prototype and credibility," Mr. Chase wrote.
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"I went to prison, voluntarily," Mr. Colson said in 2005. "I deserved information technology."
He appear upon emerging that he would devote the rest of his life to religious work. In 1976, he founded Prison house Fellowship Ministries, which delivers a Christian message of redemption to thousands of prison inmates and their families. In 1983, he established Justice Fellowship, which calls itself the nation'south largest religion-based criminal justice reform group. In 1993, he won the $1 1000000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and donated it to his ministries.
By the end of the 1990s, Mr. Colson had get a leading voice in the evangelical political motion, with books and a syndicated radio broadcast. He helped form a conservative coalition of leaders from the Republican Party, the Protestant evangelical community and the Catholic Church building. The Catholics and the evangelicals, one time combatants over issues of religious doctrine, at present joined forces in fights over ballgame rights and religious freedom, among other issues.
Mr. Colson also reached out to the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic theologian who edited the journal First Things and who had warned of a coming tide of secularism in his book "The Naked Public Square." They inaugurated a theological dialogue that resulted in the publication of the document "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" in 1994.
Mr. Colson said that he had initially gotten detest mail service from evangelicals considering of that initiative, and that the Prison Fellowship had lost a 1000000 dollars in donations. But the manifesto, pushing for organized religion-based policies in regime, cleared the path for a political and cultural alliance that has reshaped the political debate in America, adding fuel to a rightward turn in the Republican Party and a ascent conservative grass-roots movement.
In 2000, Mr. Colson was a resident of Florida when Gov. Jeb Bush restored his rights to do constabulary, vote and serve on a jury — all of them having been lost with his federal felony confidence. "I recollect it'due south time to motion on," Mr. Bush-league said at the time. "I know him. He'south a great guy."
With that, Mr. Colson re-entered the political arena. In January 2001, 6 days after President George W. Bush'southward inauguration, a Wall Street Journal editorial praised Mr. Colson's prison house work as "a model for Bush-league's ideas most faith-based funding."
When he went to the White House to state his case for religious faith equally a basis for strange and domestic policies, he found himself pushing on an open door. "Y'all don't have to tell me," Mr. Colson said the president told him. "I'd still exist drinking if information technology weren't for what Christ did in my life. I know faith-based works."
In 2006, a federal gauge ruled that a religion-based program operated by a Prison Fellowship chapter in Iowa had violated the constitutional separation of church and state. By using tax money for a religious plan that gave special privileges to inmates who embraced evangelical Christianity, the land had established a congregation and given its leaders "authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates," the estimate said.
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Mr. Colson blasted the ruling, and Prison Fellowship appealed it. Only in December 2007, a federal appeals courtroom upheld the decision.
Past so, Mr. Colson had stepped down equally chairman of the group to devote himself to writing and speaking for his causes. In 2008, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal.
Charles Wendell Colson — friends called him Chuck — was born on Oct. 16, 1931, in Boston, the only child of Wendell B. and Inez Ducrow Colson, His male parent was a struggling lawyer; his mother, nicknamed Light-headed, was an exuberant spendthrift.
He grew up at 15 different addresses in and effectually the urban center and attended eight schools. He got his first sense of taste of politics as a teenage volunteer in Robert F. Bradford's re-election campaign for governor of Massachusetts. He remembered that he learned "all the tricks," including "planting misleading stories in the press, voting tombstones, and spying on the opposition in every possible way."
He graduated from Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, in 1949, and went to Brown University with a scholarship from the Navy Reserve Officer Training Program. After graduating in 1953, he married his college sweetheart, Nancy Billings, and joined the Marines.
In 1956, Mr. Colson went to Washington as an authoritative banana to Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Massachusetts Republican. He met Nixon, who was then vice president, and became, in his words, a lifelong "Nixon fanatic." The two men "understood each other," Mr. Colson wrote in "Born Again," his memoir. They were "prideful men seeking that well-nigh elusive goal of all — credence and the respect of those who had spurned the states."
Afterward obtaining a law caste from George Washington Academy in 1959, Mr. Colson became partner in a Washington constabulary business firm, e'er practicing politics on the side, with an heart to a Nixon presidency. He was crushed when his candidate lost the 1960 ballot by a whisker to Senator John F. Kennedy.
A sympathetic biography, "Charles Westward. Colson: A Life Redeemed" (2005), past Jonathan Aitken, depicts him in these years as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, amoral man with 3 young children — Wendell Ball Two, Christian and Emily Ann — and a failing matrimony. He divorced his get-go married woman and married Patricia Ann Hughes in 1964.
She, the three children, and five grandchildren are amidst Mr. Colson'due south survivors.
In 1973, while looking for work afterwards leaving the White House and fearing that he was going to wind up in jail, Mr. Colson got into his car and found himself in the grip of the spiritual crisis that led to his conversion. "This and then-called White House hatchet man, ex-Marine captain, was crying too hard to get the keys into the ignition," he remembered. "I sat there for a long fourth dimension that night deeply convicted of my ain sin."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/us/politics/charles-w-colson-watergate-felon-who-became-evangelical-leader-dies-at-80.html
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