News Intelligence Analysis
Updated June 21, 2005:
[Editor's Note June 4, 2005: Charles Colson was interviewed by Stan Guthrie in the week of May 30th, 2005 in Christianity Today, the leading evangelical magazine in the U.S. founded by Billy Graham's organization. There are material misrepresentations of fact in that article: First, according to John Rothmann, (of KGO 810 AM radio, San Francisco) who worked in the same Nixon White House with Mr. Colson, there is no evidence that Mark Felt ever released secret FBI documents to the press. Secondly, in Mr. Colson's book, Born Again, published in 1976, which he began writing while in prison, Mr. Colson makes statements that contradict his statements in the Christianity Today article. Mr. Colson appears to have forgotten for what charges he pled guilty and why he was imprisoned and what he said to the court. If he forgot so much of what he himself wrote, how can we trust him to be our guide when he admits his besetting sin was adherence to Machiavelli's rule: the ends justify the means? Is Mr. Colson an author and perpetrator of relativism? Or by his own accounts of his own behavior, has he been weighed in the scales and found wanting? It is not my intent to condemn him--to the contrary--Mr. Colson and the evangelical churches in America need our prayers. We recommend that our readers also read Ian Bell's article from the Sunday Herald (June 5, 2005) titled: Reaction to Deep Throat's Unmasking Highlights the Double Standards that Apply in a World Where Truth is Impeached. Or here. K.Y.
Update June 21, 2005:
In addition, Katherine Yurica wrote to the editors of Christianity Today on June 4, 2005, stating the following:
To the Editors:
I am a born again Christian who once served as a correspondent
for Christianity Today under the editorship of Ed Plowman
and Harry Genet. Statements made by Charles Colson in this article
are contradicted by statements Mr. Colson made in his book Born
Again. Both positions cannot be true.
I have written an answer to Charles Colson that I ask Christianity
Today to publish in the interest of truth and fairness to
your readers who are seeking the truth. If there is a curse to
"relativism" Christians everywhere have to be given
the opportunity to see who is being relativistic. My response
is posted on the web at: https://www.yuricareport.com/Impeachment/ColsonOnDeepThroat.html
Sincerely,
Katherine Yurica
There followed a copy of the article below with my endnotes.
Christianity
Today did not publish
my letter. However, as of this date, June 21, 2005, they have
published three significant letters from Christians who have
made similar points on the Christianity Today website.
However, so far, I have failed to find an internal link to this
letter page at CT so we have republished those letters here at
the Yurica
Report.]
The Truth About Charles Colson and "Deep Throat"
Déja Vue: Fruits of the Spirit or Backslidden Degeneracy?
June 3, 2005
Updated June 4, 2005
Updated June 21, 2005 and the title was changed.
By Katherine Yurica
Chuck Colson, who like Karl Rove, was the political strategist in the Nixon White House, was often called “the White House Hatchet Man.” If a nasty job needed to be done, Chuck Colson did it.
He served as Special Counsel to Richard Nixon. In 1974, Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Watergate-related Daniel Ellsberg case and served seven months in prison.
By 1976, he published his first book, Born Again, the candid story of what he did behind the scenes in the Nixon White House, and his subsequent spiritual journey. According to Colson, he became a new man in Christ. He underwent the Christian born-again experience and he wrote the book from the perspective of a new Christian. I intend to raise the question of whether Chuck Colson retains the standards he set for himself as a Christian in his book, in contrast to his statements and actions today. After-all, haven’t we heard, “By their fruits ye shall know them?”
Let’s look and see how Mr. Colson stooped to criminal acts in the Daniel Ellsberg case. At the time, the President was upset because Daniel Ellsberg was allegedly behind leaks of memorandums of classified documents he obtained while he worked for Henry Kissinger in 1969. Colson relates:
“The Attorney General concluded from FBI reports that Ellsberg was part of a Communist spy ring. The President viewed Ellsberg’s conduct as nothing less than treason. ‘I want him exposed, Chuck. I want the truth about him known. I don’t care how you do it, but get it done. We’re going to let the country know what kind of ‘hero’ Mr. Ellsberg is.’ Nixon was pacing in front of the doors to the Rose Garden, jabbing his finger in the air and repeating, ‘Do you understand me? That’s an order.’
“’Yes, sir, it will be done,’ I replied. I needed no coaxing.”[1]
But Colson goes further. He tells us exactly how he felt about Daniel Ellsberg:
“Ellsberg himself was only a name to me, a symbol of the villainous forces working to undermine our goals for peace in the world. So it was that I gathered my staff together one July day and told them to nail him in the press. Then with Nixon’s words ringing in my ears, I happily gave an inquiring reporter damaging information about Ellsberg’s attorney, compiled from secret FBI dossiers. [Colson reveals the FBI also released dossiers to the media which were published.] Next I called in friendly congressional staffers and urged a full scale, well-publicized investigation of Ellsberg, his motives and associates.”[2]
Mr. Nixon, according to Colson, wanted to hire an ex-CIA agent by the name of E. Howard Hunt who was to be paid $100 per day to research the Pentagon Papers and “analyze the political opportunities” Colson and the White House could “salvage.”[3] Then an ex-FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy was hired and Hunt and Liddy became known as “the plumbers.”
“In late summer the Hunt-Liddy team burglarized the offices of a Los Angeles psychiatrist, seeking information that might be used against a former patient, Daniel Ellsberg. With our sense of fair play gone, there was no check on the methods of these two political idealists….Our fortress mentality plunged us across the moral divide, leading to ‘enemy lists,’ a new refinement on the ancient spoils system of rewarding friends and punishing enemies.”[4]
Colson describes how he devised a plan to get rid of Senator Edmund Muskie as the front runner in the Democratic primaries: Muskie, unfortunately helped him. He made the mistake of criticizing Nixon’s proposed peace plan with North Vietnam.
“I phoned Bill Rogers…the Secretary of State, ‘Bill, you’ve got to take Muskie on for sabotaging the peace talks.’ It has been a time-honored unwritten rule that Secretaries of State stay out of partisan politics…The next morning Bill Rogers walked unannounced into the State Department press briefing room…Rogers attacked Muskie’s speech as ‘harmful to the national interest.’ His voice rising in anger, finger jabbing in the air, he charged that Muskie was undercutting our bargaining position….Roger’s blistering of Muskie was reported in every foreign capital of the world.”[5]
Colson engineered the blow from which Muskie never recovered. From that day on, political pros began to wonder aloud whether Muskie had the “internal strength to be President.” Colson wrote, “That one episode, more than all the dirty tricks combined, started Ed Muskie’s toboggan ride down from his position as the top Democratic Presidential contender.”[6]
After the damaging White House tapes and transcripts were released that revealed the plots and schemes and the attacks on citizens, Mike Wallace interviewed Colson and Wallace listed Colson’s sins: “the Burns smear, the effort to intimidate CBS before the Federal Communications Commission, public attacks on Jack Anderson …Wallace … mused: ‘A new Christian, besides talking to his God, does he do no penance for deeds like that?’”[7]
Wallace then hit Colson with another question: “Let’s turn then to the White House tapes. Do they show a morality in the Oval Office?”[8]
After several attempts at trying to answer, Colson finally said this:
“I don’t believe that when you accept Christ in your life or when you decide that you’re going to live by the teachings of Christ, that you necessarily should set yourself up as a judge of others. As a matter of fact, Christ teaches us exactly the opposite. Only God really is our Judge.”[9]
When Charles Colson stood before Judge Gerhard Gesell, he quotes the judge as saying the following:
“The whole purpose of this case, beyond its immediate objective is to direct some attention to the desirability of having a government of law, not a government of men. That is what it is about.”[10]
Colson would have us believe that those words touched him deeply:
“It was something I remembered from Civics I in school. These were the cardinal principles of American government, the real bulwark against man-made tyranny. When a man’s constitutional rights are in jeopardy, the violation, even cloaked in the time-honored protective shroud of national security, is simply intolerable.”[11]
Then Chuck Colson began to realize that he believed the break-in of the psychiatrist’s office was justified. He concluded then, “So why should my guilt or innocence turn on the particular day I first learned of the misdeed? Legal niceties made moral nonsense. God was dealing with me at that very moment….If I had gotten away with it from the sanctuary of the White House, then no one was safe…was it any less reprehensible than the burglary I was charged with? Hardly, I concluded. It was worse: damage to a man’s spirit as against damage to property.”[12]
Charles Colson stood before the court and Bill Merrill read from a document:
“We charge here that Mr. Colson is responsible for devising a scheme to obtain derogatory information about Daniel Ellsberg, to defame and destroy Mr. Ellsberg’s public image and credibility….to influence, obstruct and impede the conduct and outcome of the Elsberg trial.”[13]
Judge Gesell turned to Chuck Colson and said, “With your plea of guilty, you understand that you waive those rights under the Constitution and that all that is left is for the court to impose sentence?” Colson said, “Yes, sir.” Then he made this statement for all of us down the corridors of history to hear:
“I have come to believe in the very depths of my being that official threats to the right of fair trial for defendants such as those charged in this information must be stopped; and by this plea, Your Honor, I am prepared to take whatever consequences I must to help in stopping them.”
He continued on pages 231-232 of his book:
“Do you still wish to plead guilty?” the judge asked again. “Yes, I do, Your Honor.”
Let us now turn the clock forward to June of 2005: When the announcement came that the identity of “Deep Throat” had been revealed this week, Mr. Colson must have forgotten the remorse, humility and pain he once felt. According to the Agence France-Press, he said W. Mark Felt, the second in command of the FBI in 1972 “could have helped America avoid a wrenching political crisis, the ripple effect of which was felt in the country for decades, if he had gone through proper channels.”
In a reversal from his book, Born Again, Colson said, “Mark Felt could have stopped Watergate. He was in a position of that kind of influence. Instead, he goes out and basically undermines the administration.” (Agence France-Presse)
Colson appeared on the Today Show on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 and was interviewed. He said, “I never thought anybody with such a position of sensitivity at the Justice Department would breach confidences.” Colson then disagreed with the notion that Felt is a hero. “A hero is someone that you want other people to emulate... and to say he was a hero because he broke his trust...he broke the confidence of the president of the United States.” (CNS News)
Colson told the AP, “Mark first served this country with honor, and I can't imagine how Mark Felt was sneaking in dark alleys leaving messages under flower pots and violating his oath to keep this nation's secrets.” (Associated Press)
And in his written statement released to the press, Charles Colson said,
“I am disappointed in Mark for choosing the media as the way to expose the corruption. If he felt that the wrongs of the Nixon administration had to be remedied, he should have walked into the F.B.I. Director’s office and told him so, and if necessary walked in to the president. No matter how Felt may justify his actions, it is not honorable to leak classified information to the press.”
Oh Chuck, Chuck, after reading your inspiring words from your book and your life, do you really think that Mark Felt should have walked into Richard Nixon’s office and told him what he knew about the acts of the President and his men? And your men? And surely if you truly believe that “it is not honorable to leak classified information to the press,”—why haven’t you stood up as a true man of God, and warned President George W. Bush that his White House has violated federal law and has become debased and corrupted by the leak to reporter Robert Novak of the classified information about Valerie Plame’s CIA job, placing her life in danger in order to punish her husband? If you truly felt that the attempts to ruin Daniel Ellsberg's reputation were vile, why have you been so silent in the face of similar acts by this president? Is your morality so pliable that it bends one way for Mark Felt and another way for Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove and Mr. Cheney? And why haven't you held Mr. Bush accountable for lying to Congress in order to commit this country to a war in Iraq? It is still a federal offense to lie to Congress. But perhaps you think some lies are necessary for the nation's security.
In your book you told us how you slipped
up once in prison--in your story of how some dye was smuggled
into the prison. You wrote on pages 313 and 314:
“Did I learn nothing from Watergate? How could I forget that a series of little lies can eventually blur one's capacity to see moral distinctions about big things? ...It was a lesson learned. How easy it is to backslide, to succumb unknowlingly to temptations of the moment.....The easy way I had slid into my old pattern of behavior with the dye operation shook me deeply....It was Watergate all over again. The end justified the means. What a trap that philosophy can be!”
If following Machiavelli's rule that the ends justify the means was wrong in 1972 isn't that rule still wrong today? Oh Chuck, how far you have fallen. But there is One who is still waiting for you. But you’ll have to give up your pride, your power, and your hypocrisy. The seat of domination is no place for a Christian to dwell. Why have you left your first love? Come back to Jesus.
[1] Charles W. Colson, Born Again, Chosen Books, Inc., Old Tappan, New Jersey, 1976. at p. 59.
[2] Ibid. page 60.
[3] Ibid. pages 60-61.
[4] Ibid. page 61.
[5] Ibid. page 66.
[6] Ibid, page 67.
[7] Ibid, page 218.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, page 219.
[10] Ibid. page 220.
[11] Ibid, page 221.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid. pages 231-232.
Send a letter to the editor about this article See This Christianity Today Article:
Colson Blasts 'Deep Throat'
Christian statesman, former
Nixon
aide says leaks were unethical and
unnecessary.
Interview by Stan Guthrie
in Christianity
Today Charles Colson has sharply
criticized Mark Felt, the former No. 2
official at the FBI, for leaking classified
material to The Washington Post
during the Watergate scandal. Colson
was special counsel to President
Nixon and served a prison term for
leaking FBI files.
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