Late last month, a key figure of the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon died in Fairfax.
Chuck Colson died at age 80 due to complications from brain surgery. He underwent surgery to remove a clot after becoming ill while speaking at a conference March 30.
Students were not born when the Watergate scandal shocked the United States, but it was a crisis of historical significance resulting in the first presidential resignation in American history.
This would all be textbook stories to me too, except for my mother’s personal connection to Colson. She worked closely with him for over two decades and knew him as more than a ruthless villain.
“I worked closely with Chuck Colson for more than 20 years and knew him to be a person who in fact changed the world,” said Ellen Vaughn.
Colson was known in the media as the “evil genius” of the Nixon administration. As special counsel to the President of the
United States, he had wealth,
position, and power.
He lost it all when he was incarcerated and served seven months in the Maxwell Prison in Alabama for obstruction of justice in 1974.
Yet, through his mistakes, he found significance, purpose, and joy that he had searched for all his life.
While in prison he was inmate 23227, just a number. He saw life from the eye of the powerless. The men in prison with him seemed to rot from within. Colson had everything, and now he had nothing. When released from prison, Colson decided to help prisoners for the rest of his life.
Colson founded Prison
Fellowship, the world’s largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families. He promoted
rehabilitation of prisoners and transformation of the prison system.
After graduate school my mom met Colson at a C.S. Lewis Institute Seminar. Colson saw potential in her, so she started working with him at the Virginia-based Prison Fellowship in communications and they worked on books together. This working relationship sent her on assignments to prisons around the United States and in various countries.
My mom also covered the “great story of the twenty-first century” which was the collapse of
communism in the former Soviet Union. She and Colson coauthored about ten books where Colson would write a couple chapters, my mom would write a couple chapters, and they would edit each other’s work.
Among the works are
“Loving God,” “Being the Body,” and “Gideon’s Torch.”
At Colson’s memorial service on April 24, my mom was asked to remember her days with her former boss.
“Is what you’re giving yourself to worth it?” she said. “The first half of Chuck’s life he had the career, he had everything at his fingertips, he had the ‘American dream.’ The second half of his life he devoted himself to helping the powerless in prisons. He never would have traded the best day he had before serving in prisons for the worst day since.”