Requiem for a Nixon Man
The Redemption of Charles Colson's Loyalty
by Russell D. Moore
If you've ever had that archetypal dream in which you realize you've gone to work naked or that you're taking a test you haven't studied for, then you'll recognize the feeling of embarrassed dread I felt when I realized what I was doing. I was waiting in a restaurant lobby to meet one of my heroes, Prison Fellowship leader Chuck Colson. I had a book along with me to read while I waited. Unfortunately, and idiotically for me, it was a novel titled Nixon Man, with the cover art of a father and son, with the son wearing a rubber Richard Nixon mask.
I had just picked up what I was reading at the time to take with me, without one thought that this would probably be seen as, at best, some kind of ironic tease and, at worst, an insult to Colson, who had been the prototypical "Nixon man" in his pre-conversion days, a loyalty that led him to the penitentiary and to public ridicule in the global press.
I quickly hid the book in my briefcase. Just as I wouldn't want to be reading a book on the history of rum with an ex-drunk, I certainly didn't want to be reading a novel about Richard Nixon to an ex-Nixon man. When Colson arrived, I sat nervously through the first few minutes of the lunch, partly because I couldn't believe I was dining with a man whose books had changed the whole trajectory of my ministry—from his personal testimony in Born Again to his manifesto on the dangers of politicized Christianity in Kingdoms in Conflict.
But my adrenal glands were also pounding because I knew I had a book about Richard Nixon in that bag at my feet and, like the character in Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," I was afraid Colson would somehow recoil from it, even without seeing it, by the sheer weight of his guilt.
It wasn't long, however, before Colson himself brought up the subject of Nixon. He talked about Nixon's brilliance, and about how history gets it wrong when it portrays Nixon as awkward and brooding. "He was a charismatic persona," Colson said. "That wasn't conveyed on television, but with a group of people in a room . . . there was no one like him." Within minutes I could tell, Nixon wasn't an off-limits part of Colson's shameful biography. Colson was a repentant sinner, to be sure. He was a new creation in Christ. But, in some way, he was still a Nixon man.
A Good Root
In the weeks and months after the death of Chuck Colson, many of us have reflected on how God changed the old White House "hatchet man," the dirty trickster who participated in perhaps the greatest challenge to the American constitutional system in over two hundred years of our history. I was -perturbed to read newspaper and website accounts of Colson that treated him, after his death, as though he were still the Watergate criminal, as though his work in the prisons for nearly forty years after his conviction was just some way to "atone" for his crimes.
Colson didn't need to "atone" for Watergate. He believed the blood of Christ had atoned, fully, for all his crimes, both those for which he was indicted and those that would never be seen until Judgment Day. He didn't need to rehabilitate his image; he was the one who sought to discredit his image, presenting himself as a sinner in need of forgiveness.
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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