Chuck Colson was once one of Washington D.C.’s sharpest minds, a powerful special counsel to President Richard Nixon during a tumultuous era. But the seismic shockwaves of the Watergate scandal brought his high-flying career crashing down. In 1974, Colson faced the stark reality of federal prison in Alabama, serving seven months as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related crimes. This wasn’t just a political downfall; it was a deeply personal reckoning, forcing a man accustomed to influence and authority into the dehumanizing reality of prison life.
Yet, within those cold, unforgiving walls, something extraordinary began to unfold for Chuck Colson. Stripped of status and confronted with his own vulnerabilities, he discovered a profound shared humanity with his fellow inmates, seeing beyond their crimes to the men within. This unexpected journey from political powerbroker to prisoner became the crucible for a remarkable transformation, leading Colson to a deeper understanding of faith and justice. Emerging from his sentence, Colson didn’t retreat; instead, he founded Prison Fellowship, dedicating his life to prison reform and offering hope to countless others behind bars. Hear his powerful story of redemption, a testament to finding true freedom even in confinement.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Often considered one of the smartest men to pass through Washington, D.C. political culture, Chuck Coulson, who served as special counsel to President Richard Nixon, served seven months in the Federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama in 1974, as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related crimes. This is that story and its subsequent fallout, told by the man himself. We’d like to thank Chuck Coulson’s dear friends at the Acton Institute who graciously provided us with this audio. It was the last interview Chuck Coulson granted any media organization before passing at the age of eighty. Let’s begin with a montage of clips summarizing Coulson’s word Agate trial, followed by Chuck sharing his story.
00:01:15
Speaker 2: I will say to you, Mr. Shore, what I’ve said publicly to others, and that is that I had no knowledge and no involvement in the Watergate incident of any kind. That’s, I think, all I should say. But no time did I engage in any unlawful or illegal act.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: In connection with this matter.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: There is much that the public has not been told about the circumstances surrounding this.
00:01:41
Speaker 4: Matter, and a great.
00:01:43
Speaker 3: Deal more, I believe, will be revealed in the course of this proceeding.
00:01:47
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:01:52
Speaker 4: There was an unexpected and important development today in the Watergate investigations. Charles Coulson has made an arrangement with this prosecutor to tell all he knows about Watergate. As a witness for the prosecutor.
00:02:07
Speaker 5: I have watched, with a very heavy heart, the country I love being torn apart by the most divisive and bitter controversy in our nation’s history. If this is to be a government of laws and not of men, then those men entrusted with enforcing the laws must be held to account for the natural consequences of their own actions.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: Not only is it morally.
00:02:29
Speaker 5: Right that I plead to this church, but I fervently hope that this case will serve to prevent similar abuses in the future.
00:02:53
Speaker 6: I did everything my way, and it crushed and burned. I was a driven guy. I had grown up in the Depression years, where I saw neighbors standing in breadlines. I was going to get to the top no matter what, no matter what, because I wasn’t ever going to be caught in the position that I saw my parents in it. I won’t say I didn’t have a conscience. I did. I had almost a self-righteousness about me. Self-righteousness is the worst enemy of all because you can’t see your own sins. I ended up going to prison because of that. Little that I realized that my reward for being through nif way: that I’d end up in prison. But I did. For me, going to prison was a shock. You’re thrown a pair of underpants with five numbers stenciled on them. I knew I was the sixth person to get that pair of underpants. So it’s very dehumanizing, and I felt shame out in midfield. I really have made a mess of it. I’d always thought about prisons where they’re hardened convicts, and you know, they’re breaking rocks, that they’re behind bars. Or they’re violent people? There were a lot of nights when I’d wake up, it with this cold chill came over me, thinking, you know, I can get beaten up or abused. You know what prisons are like. You know, there’s a lot of forced rape in prisons. Are you going as a high-profile form of government official working to you guys that want to get to you? That’s a big drop. You couldn’t have made it without Christ in my life. I know that. But, and I couldn’t have made it if there wasn’t in the back of my mind a belief that God had a purpose for this. In the White House, you’re dealing with statistics and numbers and sizes of prisons, and you see justice as something that has to be administered by the state, and if these guys have broken the law, good enough for them, they belong in prison. In prison, I discovered a lot of human beings who had committed crimes. You had a mix of people for every kind of crime you could imagine, every stratum of life, and I discovered they’re all like I am. I suddenly realized I’m not any different than these guys. I’m not any better than these guys. I committed a crime too. Mine was, you know, nobody got killed, but we both prisoners. We had that common identification. It was a great eye-opening experience for me. I knew them to be as good people as I’ve known in my life, anyway. I mean, it could be my neighbors, could be my closest friends. I felt a real burden for them because I saw them with nothing to do. Most of them, they lie in their bunks and they’d stare into the emptiness, and they’re rotting, and the souls are corroding. And that’s the worst part about prison, is this feeling of you have no purpose, you have no meaning, nobody cares about you. So I really found myself caring for them as human things.
00:06:13
Speaker 3: And while it was the most difficult experience of my life, I can stand you tonight and honestly say to you that I thank God for it, because in prison I truly found freedom.
00:06:24
Speaker 6: When I was released from prison, I was forty-two years old. I’d had a very successful law firm. I knew how to make money practicing law. I could have gone back and done it, but I thought this is the time in my life when I should take stock. And it was during that period that I woke up in the middle of the night with what seemed to me a vision of what God wanted.
00:06:40
Speaker 7: Well, in less than a month, Minnesota will join three other states turning to the church for help and rehabilitating prisoners. The Department of Corrections is teaming up with a Christian group called Prison Fellowship.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: I came to love men, I came to know them as brothers, men that before in my life I’d have gone to any lengths to avoid meeting or being with. But above all, I saw the miracle of how God works in the life of man.
00:07:09
Speaker 6: Inmates have a capacity for scoping you out faster than any group of people ever. Remember, it’s because they’re con men, many of them, and they’ve been conned by the best. And they look at everybody through their prison, through their lens, and if you’re sincere, if you’re sincere.
00:07:29
Speaker 4: They know, like that.
00:07:35
Speaker 6: People say to me, ‘Oh, well, you were the “law and order” Nixon guy, and now you’re soft on crime. You’re working with inmates.’ No, I’m not soft on crime. I want to stop crime, but I want to stop it by the only way to ever be stopped, and that’s changing the human heart.
00:07:47
Speaker 3: The problem is not education, the problem is not poverty, the problem is not race. The problem is the breakdown of moral values in American life. The criminal justice system can respond.
00:08:00
Speaker 6: I’ve seen the moral loots to the criminal justice problem, and I realize as a Christian what’s causing it. I’ve seen people broken in that prison experience and come out understanding the Incarnation better than people who haven’t been to prison, perhaps because they know what it is to be broken. They know what Christ did for them on the cross, they know what he took away. I’ve often thought back about my time in the White House, and I can’t remember. I don’t remember anybody ever coming to me and saying what you did with the President. With all these big decisions affected my life. That’s what drew me into politics. I thought I could transform people’s lives, and I discovered I couldn’t do it. It’s what we can accomplish as we deal with people, and my greatest satisfaction, the greatest thing I think about, is things I’ve been able to do for others.
00:08:55
Speaker 8: Mr. Charles Coulson, one of the toughest of the White House tough guys, and believed by many to be standing in the need of prayer as well as a good defense lawyer. Mr. Coulson has made page one with the news of his conversion to religion. A good many people here, anxious to believe in something, are quite willing to take Coulson’s change of heart as real.
00:09:15
Speaker 3: I have admitted my life to Jesus Christ. I can work for the Lord in prison or out of prison. That’s how I want to spend my life.
00:09:26
Speaker 6: If there are people in need, you’ve got to be meeting in needs. If you really feel what they’re going through, if you can really identify with that, then you get a burden for it. That’s the root of compassion. You’re living in that person’s world instead of your own. Now, that is necessary. You can identify with people with compassion without having had to experience that. Sharing and the suffering is what gives you the common bond. But having been there, it was indelibly impressed upon me.
00:09:57
Speaker 1: And a great job, as always, to Greg Hangler, and again a special thanks to the Acton Institute for providing us that audio of a most extraordinary life and those words that he just said: “I can work for the Lord in prison and out of prison. That’s how I want to spend my life.” A lot of people were skeptical when Coulson announced that he’d found God and wanted to serve his Lord. But, boy, after a lifetime of work, there were no cynics and skeptics left, and all of prison reform, all of modern-day prison reform, all of the talk of compassion; it started with a guy named Chuck Coulson. A real beauty, a real beauty about God’s grace here on our American Stories.
Discover more real American voices.
