Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other 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.

[1] 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.

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.

[9] Colson was responsible for inviting influential private special interest groups into the White House policy-making process and winning their support on specific issues.

[9] In addition to his liaison and political duties, Colson's responsibilities included performing special assignments for the president, such as drafting legal briefs on particular issues, reviewing presidential appointments, and suggesting names for White House guest lists.

His work also included major lobbying efforts on such issues as construction of an antiballistic missile system, the president's Vietnamization program, and the administration's revenue-sharing proposal.

[9] Slate magazine writer David Plotz described Colson as Nixon's "hard man, the 'evil genius' of an evil administration.

[14][clarification needed] 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.

[15] 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.

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.

[10][18] 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[39] In his 1975 memoir Born Again,[40] 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 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.

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,[45] 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.

[52] Although Gesell declined to name the "family problems" prompting the release,[52] Colson wrote in his 1976 memoir that his son Chris, angry over his father's imprisonment and looking to replace his broken car, had bought $150 worth of marijuana in hopes of selling it at a profit, and had been arrested in South Carolina, where he was in college.

[58] 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.

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.

[69] 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.

[70] 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.

The letter was written by Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and co-signed by four prominent American evangelical Christian leaders with Colson among them.

He signed his name to a full-page ad in the December 5, 2008 The New York Times that objected to violence and intimidation against religious institutions and believers in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8.

Previous recipients of the award include Barbara Bush, Paul Harvey, US Senator Bob Dole, and the Meadows Foundation.

[citation needed] In 1994, Colson was quoted in contemporary Christian music artist Steven Curtis Chapman's song "Heaven in the Real World" as saying: Where is the hope?

[82] Colson had previously won the 1993 Gold Medallion award in the "Theology/Doctrine" category for The Body co-authored with Ellen Santilli Vaughn, published by Word, Inc.[83] On February 9, 2001, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) presented Colson with the Mark O. Hatfield Leadership Award at the Forum on Christian Higher Education in Orlando, Florida.

[85] 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.