Чак Колсон: От советника Никсона к христианскому деятелю

American attorney and author (1931–2012)

Charles Wendell Colson (October 16, 1931 – April 21, 2012), generally referred to as Chuck Colson, was an American attorney and political advisor who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1970. Once known as President Nixon's "hatchet man", Colson gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven and also for pleading guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg. In 1974, Colson served seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama, as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate related charges. Colson became an evangelical Christian in 1973. His mid life religious conversion sparked a radical life change that led to the founding of his non profit ministry Prison Fellowship and, three years later, Prison Fellowship International, to a focus on Christian worldview teaching and training around the world. Colson was also a public speaker and the author of more than 30 books. He was the founder and chairman of The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, which is a research, study, and networking center for growing in a Christian worldview, and which produces Colson's daily radio commentary, BreakPoint, heard on more than 1,400 outlets across the United States currently presented by John Stonestreet. Colson was a principal signer of the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together ecumenical document signed by leading Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholic leaders in the United States. Colson received 15 honorary doctorates and in 1993 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the world's largest annual award (over US$1 million) in the field of religion, given to a person who "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension". He donated the prize to further the work of Prison Fellowship, as he did all his speaking fees and royalties. In 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush.

Charles Wendell Colson was born on October 16, 1931 in Boston, the son of Inez "Dizzy" (née Ducrow) and Wendell Ball Colson. He was of Swedish and British descent. In his youth, Colson had seen the charitable works of his parents. His mother cooked meals for the hungry during the Depression and his father donated his legal services to the United Prison Association of New England. During World War II, Colson organized fund raising campaigns in his school for the war effort that raised enough money to buy a Jeep for the army. In 1948, he volunteered in the campaign to re elect the Governor of Massachusetts, Robert Bradford. After turning down a full scholarship to Harvard University and attending Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge in 1949, he earned his AB, with honors, in history from Brown University in 1953, and his J. D., with honors, from George Washington University Law School in 1959. At Brown, he was a member of Beta Theta Pi. Colson's first marriage was to Nancy Billings in 1953; they have three children, Wendell Ball II (born 1954), Christian Billings (1956), and Emily Ann (1958). After some years of separation, the marriage ended in divorce in January 1964. He married Patricia Ann Hughes on April 4, 1964.

Colson served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953 to 1955, reaching the rank of captain. From 1955 to 1956, he was the assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Material). He worked on the successful 1960 campaign of Leverett Saltonstall (U. S. Republican Party for the U. S. Senate) and was his administrative assistant from 1956 to 1961. In 1961 Colson founded the law firm of Colson & Morin, which swiftly grew to a Boston and Washington, D. C presence with the addition of former U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Edward Gadsby and former Raytheon Company general counsel Paul Hannah. Colson and Morin shortened the name to Gadsby & Hannah in late 1967. Colson left the firm to join the Richard Nixon administration in January 1969.

In 1968, Colson served as counsel to Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon's Key Issues Committee. On November 6, 1969, Colson was appointed as Special Counsel to President Nixon. Colson has written that he was "valuable to the President because I was willing to be ruthless in getting things done". Nixon's White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman described Colson as being the president's "hit man". Colson authored the 1971 memo listing Nixon's major political opponents, later known as Nixon's enemies list. A quip that "Colson would walk over his own grandmother if necessary" mutated into claims in news stories that Colson had boasted that he would run over his own grandmother to re elect Nixon.

On May 4, 1970, four students were shot dead at Kent State University in Ohio while protesting the Vietnam War and the incursion into Cambodia. As a show of sympathy for the dead students, Mayor John Lindsay ordered all flags at New York City Hall to be flown at half mast that same day. A transcription made of a White House tape recording dated May 5, 1971, documents that the planning phase of the Hard Hat Riot took place in the White House Oval Office. Colson is heard successfully instigating several New York State AFL–CIO union leaders into organizing an attack against student protesters in New York. The officials armed about 200 construction workers in Lower Manhattan with lengths of steel re bar which they, along with their hard hats, proceeded to use against about 1,000 high school and college students protesting the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings. The initial attack was near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street, but the riot soon spread to New York City Hall and lasted a little longer than two hours. More than 70 people were injured, including four policemen. Six people were arrested. Two weeks after the Hard Hat Riot, Colson arranged a White House ceremony honoring the union leader most responsible for the attack, Peter J. Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades local for New York City. Brennan was later appointed U. S. Secretary of Labor and served under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Colson also proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution and stealing politically damaging documents while firefighters put out the fire.

Colson's voice, from archives of April 1969, is heard in the 2004 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." In a phone conversation with Nixon on April 28, 1971, Colson said, "This fellow Kerry that they had on last week He turns out to be really quite a phony." When Colson had taken charge of the Office of Communications, he was offered but rejected Jeb Magruder as a senior staffer, and Magruder was instead sent over to CRP, as

"At least he can't do any harm there" replied Colson. It was one of his less prescient judgements. Unknown to Colson and most other White House personnel, Magruder had been doing enormous harm by authorizing a series of James Bond style clandestine operations against the Democrats. At a CRP meeting on March 21, 1971, it was agreed to spend US$250,000 on "intelligence gathering" on the Democratic Party. Colson and John Ehrlichman had recruited E. Howard Hunt as a White House consultant for $100 per day ($100.0 in 1971 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years in dollars). Though Hunt never worked directly for Colson, he did several odd jobs for Colson's office prior to working for Egil "Bud" Krogh, head of the White House Special Operations Unit (the so called "Plumbers"), which had been organized to stop leaks in the Nixon administration. Hunt teamed with G. Gordon Liddy, and the two headed the Plumbers' attempted burglary of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in Los Angeles in September 1971. The Pentagon Papers were a collection of military documents comprising an exhaustive study of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Their publication helped increase opposition to the war. Colson hoped that revelations about Ellsberg could be used to discredit the anti Vietnam War cause. Colson admitted to leaking information from Ellsberg's confidential FBI file to the press, but denied organizing Hunt's burglary of Ellsberg's office. Colson expressed regret for attempting to cover up the incident. Although not discovered until several years after Nixon had resigned and Colson had finished serving his prison term, the transcript of a White House conversation between Nixon and Colson tape recorded on June 20, 1972, has denials from both men of the White House's involvement in the break in. Hunt had been off the payroll for three months. Colson asks "Do they think I'm that dumb?". Nixon comments that "we have got to have lawyers smart enough to have our people de , delay (unintelligible) avoiding depositions, of course, uh, are one possibility. We've got –I think it would be a quite the thing for the judge to call in Mitchell and have a deposition in the middle of the campaign, don't you?" to which Colson responds that he would welcome a deposition because "I'm not –, because nobody, everybody's completely out of it." On March 10, 1973, 17 months before Nixon's resignation, Colson resigned from the White House to return to the private practice of law, as Senior Partner at the law firm of Colson and Shapiro, Washington, D. C. However, Colson was retained as a special consultant by Nixon for several more months.

On March 1, 1974, Colson was indicted for conspiring to cover up the Watergate burglaries. and Time ridiculed the conversion, claiming that it was a ploy to reduce his sentence. In his 1975 memoir Born Again, Colson noted that a few writers published sympathetic stories, as in the case of a widely reprinted UPI article, "From Watergate to Inner Peace."

After taking the Fifth Amendment on the advice of his lawyers during early testimony, Colson found himself torn between his convictions as a Christian and his desire to avoid conviction on charges of which he believed himself innocent. After prayer and consultation with his fellowship group, Colson approached his lawyers and suggested a plea of guilty to a different criminal charge of which he did consider himself to be culpable. After days of negotiation with Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Watergate Trial Judge Gerhard Gesell, Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice on the basis of having attempted to defame Ellsberg's character in the build up to the trial in order to influence the jury against him. Journalist Carl Rowan commented in a column of June 10, 1974, that the guilty plea came "at a time when the judge was making noises about dismissing the charges against him", and speculated that Colson was preparing to reveal highly damaging information against Nixon, an expectation shared by columnist Clark Mollenhoff; Mollenhoff even went so far as to suggest that for Colson not to become a "devastating witness" would cast doubt on the sincerity of his conversion. On June 21, 1974, Colson was given a one to three year sentence and fined $5,000. He was subsequently disbarred in the District of Columbia, with the expectation of his also being prohibited from using his licenses from Virginia and Massachusetts. Colson served seven months in Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama,—with brief stints at a facility on the Fort Holabird grounds when needed as a trial witness— entering prison on July 9, 1974, and being released early, on January 31, 1975, by the sentencing judge because of family problems. At the time that Gesell ordered his release, Colson was one of the last of the Watergate defendants still in jail: only Gordon Liddy was still incarcerated. Egil Krogh had served his sentence and been released before Colson entered jail, while John Dean, Jeb Magruder, and Herb Kalmbach had been released earlier in January 1975 by Judge John Sirica. The state later dropped the charges. Colson worked to promote prisoner rehabilitation and reform of the prison system in the United States, citing his disdain for what he called the "lock 'em and leave 'em" warehousing approach to criminal justice. He helped to create prisons whose populations come from inmates who choose to participate in faith based programs. In 1979, Colson founded Prison Fellowship International to extend his prison outreach outside the United States. Now in 120 countries, Prison Fellowship International is the largest, most extensive association of national Christian ministries working within the criminal justice field, working to proclaim the Gospel worldwide and alleviate the suffering of prisoners and their families. In 1983, Prison Fellowship International received special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. During this time, Colson also founded Justice Fellowship, using his influence in conservative political circles to push for bipartisan, legislative reforms in the U. S. criminal justice system. On June 18, 2003, Colson was invited by President George W. Bush to the White House to present results of a scientific study on the faith based initiative, InnerChange, at the Carol Vance Unit (originally named the Jester II Unit) prison facility of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Fort Bend County, Texas. Colson led a small group that included Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania, who was the principal researcher of the InnerChange study, a few staff members of Prison Fellowship and three InnerChange graduates to the meeting. In the presentation, Johnson explained that 171 participants in the InnerChange program were compared to a matched group of 1,754 inmates from the prison's general population. The study found that only 8 percent of InnerChange graduates, as opposed to 20.3 percent of inmates in the matched comparison group, became offenders again in a two year period. In other words, the recidivism rate was cut by almost two thirds for those who complete the faith based program. Those who are dismissed for disciplinary reasons or who drop out voluntarily, or those who are paroled before completion, have a comparable rate of rearrest and incarceration. The commonly reported results from the study have been strongly criticized for selecting only participants who were unlikely to be rearrested (especially those who were successfully placed in post prison jobs), and when considering all of the InnerChange study participants, their recidivism rate (24.3%) was worse than the control group (20.3%).

Colson maintained a variety of media channels which discuss contemporary issues from an evangelical Christian worldview. In his Christianity Today columns, for example, Colson opposed same sex marriage, and argued that Darwinism is used to attack Christianity. He also argued against evolution and in favor of intelligent design, asserting that Darwinism led to forced sterilizations by eugenicists. Colson was an outspoken critic of postmodernism, believing that as a cultural worldview, it is incompatible with the Christian tradition. He debated prominent post evangelicals, such as Brian McLaren, on the best response for the evangelical church in dealing with the postmodern cultural shift. Colson, however, came alongside the creation care movement when endorsing Christian environmentalist author Nancy Sleeth's Go Green, Save Green: A Simple Guide to Saving Time, Money, and God's Green Earth. In the early 1980s, Colson was invited to New York by David Frost's variety program on NBC for an open debate with Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist who, in 1963, brought the court case (Murray v. Curlett) that eliminated official public school prayers. Colson was a member of the Family (also known as the Fellowship), described by prominent evangelical Christians as one of the most politically well connected fundamentalist organizations in the US. On April 4, 1991, Colson was invited to deliver a speech as part of the Distinguished Lecturer series at Harvard Business School. The speech was titled The Problem of Ethics, where he argued that a society without a foundation of moral absolutes cannot long survive. Colson was later a principal signer of the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together ecumenical document signed by leading Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholic leaders in the United States, part of a larger ecumenical rapprochement in the United States that had begun in the 1970s with Catholic Evangelical collaboration during the Gerald R. Ford Administration and in later para church organizations such as Moral Majority founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell at the urging of Francis Schaeffer and his son Frank Schaeffer during the Jimmy Carter administration. In November 2009, Colson was a principal writer and driving force behind an ecumenical statement known as the Manhattan Declaration calling on evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox Christians not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences. He had previously ignited controversy within Protestant circles for his mid 90s common ground initiative with conservative Roman Catholics Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which Colson wrote alongside prominent Roman Catholic Richard John Neuhaus. Colson was also a proponent of the Bible Literacy Project's curriculum The Bible and Its Influence for public high school literature courses. Colson has said that Protestants have a special duty to prevent anti Catholic bigotry.

In 2000, Florida Governor Jeb Bush reinstated the rights which were taken away by Colson's felony conviction, including the right to vote. On March 31, 2012, Colson underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain after he fell ill while speaking at a Christian worldview conference. CBN erroneously reported on April 18, 2012, that he died with his family at his side but Prison Fellowship later (12:30am on April 19 and again at 7:02am) pointed out that he was still alive as of that moment.

On April 21, 2012, Colson died in the hospital "from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage".