In this holiday season, give thanks that Richard Nixon and Charles Colson are still among us.
Sure, you think that Nixon is dead. But a seemingly endless stream of tapes released by the National Archives suggests otherwise, as the very-much-alive Colson was reminded last week.
The latest batch of Oval Office tapes lets us hear Nixon opining to aide Colson that threatening the television networks with an antitrust suit is the best way to keep them in line.
“If the threat of screwing them is going to help us more with their programming than doing it, then keep the threat,” he told Colson, a decidedly ruthless lawyer and political henchman who was tagged Nixon’s “hatchet man.”
One tape finds Colson taking credit for orchestrating a telephone blitz of NBC to persuade it to run a prime-time special on the June 12, 1971, wedding of Nixon daughter Tricia. This came not long after Nixon met with NBC executives and accused them of biased news coverage.
“Julian Goodman (NBC’s president) jumped out of his chair at the prospect of re-airing the wedding,” Colson told the president 26 years ago.
Last week, a very different Colson conceded that, yes, he had checked out many of the new tapes, albeit with a certain chagrin.
They include Nixon and fabled aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman bad-mouthing him behind his back. “I was close to those guys. But that is the way of the White House,” he said last week. “Don’t turn your back.”
The tapes rivet people, he says. “They bring out our most prurient interests,” he said. “They’re a wonderful diversion.”
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But it’s not a matter of diverting us from the tedium of everyday life. No. Sounding like a Republican activist, he says the tapes are keeping us away from what he deems rampant Democratic campaign abuses. “What has been happening in the campaign-finance area is shocking. Millions of dollars in foreign money being laundered. It defies comment.”
It’s a reflection on the times, he said, that “we are so fascinated about eavesdropping, the gossipy kind of news, while the dome of the Capitol is being swiped from under our noses.”
As for Tricia Nixon’s wedding, the tape was like “dying and seeing your life parade before your eyes. I hadn’t thought of it in 25 years.”
It has been an eventful 25 years, which include Colson serving seven months in prison. He had been convicted for the Watergate-related plot to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the then-Pentagon aide who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Colson, 66, remains a Nixon defender and ridicules a book on newly released tapes, saying he “found it marvelous the way he (the author) selected which tapes to use.” Exculpatory ones were at times left out, Colson claimed. “They just pick what can make the most damning case.”
His prime focus is religion and prisons. In a declaration some did not buy, he announced after his conviction that he had experienced a religious conversion.
Upon being released, he founded the nationwide, Virginia-based Prison Fellowship, a program to help inmates and their relatives. It includes a Christmas campaign, Angel Tree, in which volunteers bring presents to the children of inmates. It’s reachable through 1-800-398-4673.
He has written more than a dozen books on religion and delivers a five-minute syndicated radio feature, a biblical perspective on current events, to 400 stations. He travels extensively, having recently partaken in a prayer breakfast with members of the Australian government and visited slums and prisons in Hong Kong and Manila.
Along the way, he has won the $1 million Templeton Prize for promoting religion.
He is, for sure, pleased to find drops in crime nationwide but, like other criminal-justice observers, suspects the figures are fleeting. Juvenile crime is rising. “I hope I am wrong but this could be the lull before the storm. It will get appreciably worse” as the population ages 14 to 17 grows.
Colson, a man who once said he would run over his grandmother to ensure Nixon won re-election, has long believed we’re too macho in dealing with prisons.
“Vindictiveness still remains. We want to whip and beat prisoners,” he said. Get-tough laws, including reinstituting chain gangs, eliminating weight rooms, dumping courses for high school and college credit and limiting Death Row appeals, are counterproductive, he says. Recidivism rates remain high.
Colson believes that President Clinton “has said some good things on religious liberty.” But Clinton continues to lose “a great deal of credibility within the conservative religious community, Catholic and Protestant, for positions on abortion, especially partial-birth abortions. That’s morally indefensible.”
He derided Clinton’s recent speech to a big gay and lesbian group, saying, “I believe you should protect civil rights of gays and lesbians, but it’s another thing to see it as morally equivalent behavior.”
He also departs with Clinton’s “engagement” policy with China. “It’s unconscionable that we not use whatever power we have to force democratic reforms onto a regime grossly abusing human rights, executing prisoners, burning churches and using slave labor.”
The Ronald Reagan tack “was not to give an inch to communist tyrants. We seem blinded. The commercial world sees a billion customers. That’s a lot of McDonald’s hamburgers and Boeing planes. I long for Jimmy Carter.”
Of course, this holiday you may long to lock an arrogant brother-in-law in a closet or even run over a grandmother.
Don’t.
Step back and think of Colson, who will be joined by his wife and a 12-year-old granddaughter in delivering presents (tapes of Tricia Nixon’s wedding?) to several Florida children whose dad is in prison.
If hard-hearted Colson can be so moved, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.
One way is to take out some cash and give it to the baiduhai Holiday Fund.
The donations are distributed right to programs that benefit children, the hungry, the homeless and individuals with mental retardation. Administration costs are paid by the baiduhai Co. and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation. Your gift is tax deductible as permitted by law.
Please make checks payable to baiduhai Holiday Fund, P.O. Box 5120, Chicago, Ill. 60680-5120.
The baiduhai Holiday Fund is a fund of the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.
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