FROM WHITE HOUSE TO BUCK HOUSE

Alasdair Palmer meets Chuck Colson,

Nixon's hatchet man, who this week received an unusual honour at Buckingham Palace

`CONVERTED murderers make wonder- ful disciples.' Chuck Colson, Nixon's hatch- et man, the White House lawyer who said he would run over his grandmother to get his leader re-elected, has not lost his keen sense of who will be rftost effective in fur- thering his cause. His cause is now a little different from the days in which he was accused of conspiring to overthrow the US Constitution, but Colson approaches it with the same zeal and efficiency which made the phrase 'Chuck will get it done' echo around the Nixon White House. If you wanted something done, Colson was your man. He still is.

Since emerging from a seven-month stretch in prison in 1975 — he evaded charges relating to the Watergate break-in and cover-up, but pleaded guilty to smear- ing Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers — Colson has met and converted hundreds of murderers. He knows about their quality as disciples. As founder and chairman of Prison Fellow- ship, a group dedicated to converting con- victs to Christianity and thereby reforming their characters, he has visited offenders in well over 600 prisons in 30 countries.

Colson's success in rehabilitating offend- ers has now earned him the Templeton Prize. The prize is worth £650,000 — he was awarded the money personally, so could have kept it, but arranged to have it donated to his organisation. Previous recip- ients of the prize have included Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Even though Sir John Templeton, the 'global investment pioneer' who is its benefactor, says the prize is 'not for saintliness or mere good works', receiving it is still quite an accolade for the man who 20 years ago was reviled as one of the most amoral members of an amoral administration.

The prize is for 'progress in religion'. Colson's move from hit man to holy man certainly qualifies as that. But picking up the award from the Duke of Edinburgh in Buckingham Palace on Wednesday also marks a high point in Colson's social reha- bilitation. Not even Nixon has managed to wangle a post-Watergate invitation to Buckingham Palace. Colson is not the sort of evangelical American Christian who blurts out 'Praise the Lord!' at embarrassing moments — such as meeting the Duke of Edinburgh. He is much too suave and sophisticated for that. Indeed, he does not look like an evan- gelical crusader at all. He lacks the plas- tered-on grin and synthetic sincerity. He is also too tastefully dressed. With his well- tailored grey suit, well-cut hair and thick glasses, he looks like a very bright, very prosperous lawyer. Given his angular fea- tures and quick responses — he has a fast answer to everything — he could be mis- taken for one of the 'pointy-headed intel- lectuals' Nixon so reviled. In fact, he is an intellectual, though maybe of too conser- vative a temper and flat a skull to count as a true pointy-head. But he quotes Mill, Burke and Thomas Jefferson as often as he quotes Jesus.

So as we chatted over breakfast at Clar- idge's, I was relieved to encounter a cheer- ful, friendly and civilised spirit. It was hard to remember this was the man who used to do Nixon's dirty work and had been sen- tenced to serve between two and three years in prison for it. 'You wouldn't last five minutes with the murderers in a US prison,' he said as he watched me reach for a croissant. 'Not because you couldn't cope with the conditions — every cell is central- ly heated, which I understand is not the case in the UK — but because you'd either be killed or kill yourself. The other prison- ers would soon work out how soft you were. Unless you can hit back as hard as you're hit — you don't look like the kind who can — your life will be hell. You'd be raped, beaten and would end up dead by your own hand or someone else's.'

I wondered what hideous humiliations Colson had suffered during his own time inside. At that point he was famous, and very widely hated. The man from the White House — I don't think anyone would ever have called him soft — must have been a tempting target for the thugs and bullies. But Colson actually escaped more or less unscathed. He did not claim, or admit, that this was because he had hit the first person who attacked him with suf- ficient violence to scare off all future assailants. 'No . . . But then I was not in one of the tough places. Life there was not fun or comfortable, and someone threat- `Well! A fine bodyguard you're turned out to be.' cried to kill me. But it wasn't a place full of murderers and hardened criminals.'

Colson formed some close friendships in prison. On his travels round the world of prisons since he was released, he has dis- covered some intriguing differences in the quality of prisons and prisoners. He has noticed that British prisoners tend to whine the most, and to be the least able to recognise their guilt. 'They all say they were set up by the police, that they shouldn't be in the nick (he used the cock- ney word), that it isn't fair, they never did anything.' Colson believes that the regime in British gaols — like most in the western world — is cruel and inhumane. Is there any country which operates prisons along lines Colson would approve? 'Yes. South Korea, Singapore, Brazil and Zambia.' Zambia? It sounded a strange choice. But he quickly explained it. 'In the Third World, they can't afford to have prisoners sit around and do nothing all day. They have to be put to work. And work gives them dignity and self-respect. What is inhuman about the prisons in your country and mine is the terrible enforced idleness.'

This brings Colson to his main theme: the total failure of the prison system in the western world. 'Over the last 20 years, the US has spent $37 billion on its prisons. The result? An increase in violent crime of over 75 per cent.' Everyone knows that something has gone terribly wrong. But we can't put it right because 'both liberals and conservatives misunderstand the nature of the catastrophe. Liberals think that poverty and deprivation cause crime. They don't. Study after study has shown that there is no causal connection there. Crime is caused by people making the wrong choices, not diffi- cult childhoods or disadvantaged back- grounds.'

But the conservative analysis of crime is no better. Here Colson speaks from the inside. He formulated Nixon's policy on crime and wrote most of his speeches on the subject. 'We thought you could frighten people into being law-abiding citizens by threatening them with longer sentences. We were wrong. Telling people not to do something merely makes them more likely to do it — and attaching punishments acts as an additional incentive to take up the dare.'

People can't be bullied into being law- abiding citizens. And they can't be bribed into good behaviour either. The situation seems hopeless. But Chuck Colson has the answer. Enter Jesus Christ. 'The only reli- able path to goodness is conversion to God. You cannot be good without God.'

Colson believes that the problem with most conservative thinking in Britain is a failure to recognise that fact. He obviously hasn't been in Britain long enough to come across the works of the Education Secre- tary, John Patten, who last year in The Spectator argued that rising crime rates were the result of declining religious observance and the fading of the fear of damnation. Patten — along with one or two others who write regularly in these columns — would doubtless agree whole- heartedly with Colson's formulation: 'You can't separate conservative politics from the moral foundation of God. God alone can provide the absolutes.' So perhaps there is still hope for British Conservatism.

Colson's Prison Fellowship has pro- grammes inside over 1,000 prisons in the United States: they give prisoners the opportunity to study, to work, and to believe. 'An independent study', Colson claims, 'shows that offenders who have been through a Prison Fellowship pro- gramme are 22 per cent less likely to be rearrested than those who have not.' That also suggests that 78 per cent are just as likely — whatever 'likely' means — to re- offend as they were before, which does not sound quite so impressive. But statistics on crime, like those in toothpaste commer- cials, are never quite what they seem.

Still, Colson is convinced his work with prisoners has given him more power than he ever had when he 'left a $100,000 a year law practice to go and change the world with Richard Nixon. Then, I didn't change a thing. Instead, I ended up in prison.'

But does he now feel guilty about what he did? 'I still have a hard time about that. On the one hand it is difficult for me as a Christian not to repent, and not to repent publicly. On the other hand, was what I did really so bad? It was no worse than what goes on in every administration. We just got caught.' But Chuck — you lied and cheated. 'Winston Churchill said, "The truth is so precious that it has to be guard- ed by a squadron of lies." Often in politics there are cases where that is correct. It is an obvious fact that you can't tell the truth the whole time in government. There are plans which have to be secret if they are to work.' Colson was now sounding a little bit like a British prisoner: 'I never did noth- ing, it wasn't fair.'

Colson explains his 'mistakes' when working in politics as the result of Nixon. 'I would do anything to get that man elected. It wasn't just his charisma. It was also his extraordinary personal idealism. That may sound strange, but Nixon was very idealis- tic. He ended the war in Vietnam. I had two sons of draft age who wouldn't have to go to Saigon because of Nixon's ending of the war. I felt I owed him something for that.'

Colson fell because of his loyalty to his president, which he would not compro- mise. `E.M. Forster was right when he said, "If I had to choose between betraying my friends and my country, I hope I would have the courage to betray my country." Your country is an abstraction. Your friends are not.' It is a surprising doctrine to hear from a conservative, even one whose loyalty to friends cost him so dearly.