Charles Colson, 1931–2012

Charles Colson was facing arrest for the dirty tricks he had arranged for President Richard Nixon when a friend read him a passage about the folly of human pride from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. In tears as he sat reflecting on his wayward path, Colson later wrote, he raised his arms to the Lord and said, “Take me, take me.” That moment, on Aug. 12, 1973, marked the start of Colson’s career as one of America’s most influential evangelical Christians—a stark conversion from his role as Nixon’s self-styled “hatchet man.”

Colson was born in Boston to a family that stressed “hard work and upward striving,” said The Washington Post. After prep school and college at Brown University, he joined the Marines and later earned a law degree from George Washington University. In 1956, as an assistant to Massachusetts Republican Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, he met then Vice President Richard Nixon and “was dazzled by the man.” Nixon later invited him to join his 1968 campaign.

As White House Special Counsel, Colson once joked “that he would run over his own grandmother for the president,” said Time. He assembled Nixon’s enemies list, and hired Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy as the so-called White House plumbers who later raided Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The plumbers’ earlier pilfering of the psychiatric files of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, led to Colson’s 1974 conviction for obstruction of justice.

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The seven months Colson spent in prison inspired him to found Prison Fellowship, which eventually “became the largest ministry of its kind in the United States,” said TheDailyBeast.com. In his writings, Colson inspired “Christian culture warriors” to wage “a war of good ideas against bad ideas,” and helped unite evangelicals and right-wing Catholics against what he saw as widespread secularization. Yet he remained at odds with many of his conservative friends in advocating early parole for drug offenders and opposing the death penalty. “Having been touched by grace,” said The Weekly Standard, “he never felt anyone was beyond its reach.”