The Man Who Converted to Softball

Charles Colson had always been a shadowy figure, a man feared, disliked and little known even by fellow powermongers in the White House. As the Watergate case broke open, he managed to remain in the background. Unlike other former Administration officials, he was never compelled to testify at the televised Ervin hearings. His conversations with President Nixon were conspicuously absent from the transcripts made public by the White House.

Colson's sudden decision to plead guilty to a felony charge instantly raised the question, what was he up to now? Columnists Evans and Novak speculated that he was retaliating for the unkind things said about him in the transcripts. Nixon had called him a "name-dropper" who "talks too much." The President also said that he "may well have been the triggerman" of the Watergate breakin. H.R. Haldeman characterized him as "an operator in expediency." Others last week felt just the opposite--that Colson's move was only the most devious of his many political ruses, this one designed ultimately to exonerate the President.

Contrite Tone. One thing was certain: the guilty plea was Colson's own idea. Despite some possibility that the original case against him would be dismissed, Colson late last month had his attorney, David Shapiro, call Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski to make a deal. Shapiro was reluctant but went ahead. On Friday, May 31, Jaworski wrote a letter to Shapiro outlining the sort of plea he would accept. It would, he insisted, have to be a felony, and there would have to be an understanding that Colson would later testify in all areas of the Watergate case. Late into Sunday night, Colson discussed his decision with his prayer group. It happened that Shapiro and the special prosecutor were due in court Monday morning for arguments regarding the June 17 Ellsberg break-in trial. Colson arrived with his lawyer, and in a procedure lasting only ten minutes, he pleaded guilty to an offense of his own choosing--one that had not even been placed against him by the grand jury. A few minutes later, he emerged from the courtroom to recite a statement to the press, refusing to answer any questions. The remarks were conciliatory and apologetic for his attempt to obstruct justice in the Ellsberg case.

Colson's contrite tone seemed well suited to the new life he has proclaimed for himself--that of devotion to Jesus. A nominal Episcopalian who goes to Mass with his second wife Patty, a Catholic, Colson embarked on his spiritual conversion more than a year ago. As he put it in a recent television interview: "I had an emptiness that was based upon wanting to find something else that I could achieve in my life so that I could point to my friends and my family and say, 'Look how good Chuck Colson is.' " Colson was strongly influenced by Thomas Phillips, president of the Raytheon Company and an old friend who had himself undergone a religious conversion experience. Phillips put Colson in touch with Iowa Democrat Harold Hughes, who is leaving the Senate to become a lay religious worker. Hughes accepted Colson's spiritual fervor as a sincere attempt to begin a new life.

Others have greeted Colson's transformation with cynicism and disbelief, both justified by his unsavory past. Colson, after all, in Nixon's own words, "would do anything" to help the President. "There was no warmth in the man," says John J. McCarthy, a Massachusetts conservative whom Colson helped in an unsuccessful bid for the Republican senatorial nomination in 1970. "He was a computerized being who weighed everything in terms of what it would mean for the White House." Adds a lawyer for one of the Watergate defendants, summing up the suspicions that Colson's dramatic guilty plea aroused in many: "Any man who would walk over his grandmother for Nixon would go to prison for him too." Colson himself was emphatic in his unswerving allegiance to Nixon, once saying, "When they lower me six feet under, I will go away a Nixon loyalist."

Hatchet Man. Indeed, Colson's entire career has been marked by the kind of unrelenting ambition that led him to become the White House hatchet man. As a teen-ager in Boston, he defiantly rejected a full scholarship at Harvard as he thought it too radical a university and because officials there told him, "No one has ever turned down a full scholarship at Harvard." He went to Brown instead. A man in a hurry, he became, at 22, the youngest company commander in the Marines. He married young and had three children (that marriage ended in divorce, but he remains on friendly terms with his first wife). At 27, he was the youngest administrative assistant on Capitol Hill, in the office of Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, while attending 'the Georgetown University law school at night.

Colson went to 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 60% pay cut to join the

White House staff in 1969. Early on he complained to colleagues that Nixon did not even know who he was. But Colson, whose conservative bent accorded with the President's, eventually became an almost daily visitor to the Oval Office. An initial key to his success: he effectively wooed some important labor leaders to the White House side by inviting them for chats with the President. Later he predicted correctly that Nixon would win large chunks of the labor vote in the 1972 election.

He also made conscientious efforts to please the President. When Nixon remarked once that he did not know what the stock market had done that day, Colson arranged for subordinates to get readings every half hour on the latest stock averages.

Colson apparently satisfied Nixon's yen for macho operators. He was one of those who talked of "playing hardball" for keeps, and hostile outsiders were not his only targets. He, along with Haldeman, cracked down on more genteel staffers like Communications Director Herb Klein. Though a Nixon friend for more than 20 years, Klein finally resigned. Everything Contrived. His most important role was as a resourceful if unscrupulous political operator. Colson took on the tough jobs for the President. He leaked damaging or misleading information to the press about people who criticized the President, had young men hired to pose as homosexuals supporting McGovern at the Democratic National Convention, and engineered mail campaigns in favor of Nixon's policies. He allegedly ordered his close friend E. Howard Hunt to fabricate a State Department telegram implicating President Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. At one point, according to Senate Watergate testimony, he urged that Washington's Brookings Institution be fire-bombed as a diversionary tactic in a raid to seize some politically damaging documents. "Chuck could never play anything straight," says one of his former underlings. "Everything had to be contrived, a setup. Chuck always had to stuff the ballot box."

Some of his ploys worked often enough to keep a newly reformed Chuck Colson repentant for a long time to come. Ironically, Colson had planned to leave the White House soon after Nixon's reelection to become "the Republican Clark Clifford" --the lawyer with the "in" at the White House to whom clients would flock. Now, at 42, he is just another Watergate felon awaiting sentence, disbarment and learning the virtues of softball.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.