Nixon's Hatchet Man Finds Grace
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The sprinkler was still going when the car pulled up, ticking back and forth across Tom's front lawn like it didn't know it was almost nine o'clock and getting dark. I was out on my own porch two houses down, doing nothing in particular, the way you do on a warm August night in Massachusetts when the day has finally let go of its heat. I noticed the sedan because it wasn't a car from our street. It idled at the curb a long moment before the engine cut, and then nothing happened. No door opened. Just a man sitting behind the wheel, still as a photograph, while the sprinkler kept ticking.
I didn't know yet that the man in that car had spent the better part of five years standing at the right hand of the President of the United States, closer to the throne than almost anyone, feared inside those White House walls the way you fear a loaded gun left on a table. I didn't know he had an office next to Nixon's own, in the Executive Office Building, where the two of them traded grievances like men swapping keys to the same bitterness. I didn't know he'd once said, or as good as said, that he'd run over his own grandmother if it would help his President win.
He called himself, back then, a flag-waving, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic, and he wore it like a medal. Bob Haldeman warned him once, plainly, that Nixon used people and discarded them when they'd served their purpose. This man believed, the way loyal men always believe, that he was the exception. He wasn't chasing power for himself so much as burning it for someone else, feeding it into a fire that was never Nixon's alone. There's a story about a room where the President sat turning a wineglass slowly on its stem, talking about enemies, about getting them down on the ground and stepping on them, grinding a heel in, and how Kissinger smiled and nodded and Haldeman just sat there with an eager, hungry look, and only one man in the room turned his face to the ceiling instead. That wasn't the man in the car. The man in the car was one of the ones who'd nodded along, who'd agreed eagerly, who'd sowed, in his own words later, the seeds of his own wreckage.
He'd earned a name for it. Head hatchet man. Chief character assassin. The man behind the dirty tricks that made reporters and senators alike lower their voices when his name came up. He'd sent an operative to a hospital bed to squeeze a dying woman's memo out of her hands. He'd been accused of scheming to dose a columnist's steering wheel with something that would leave him babbling, or worse, dead in a ditch, so that no one would believe another word the man printed. He denied giving that order outright, allowed only that he couldn't rule out having said something like it in jest. That was the temperature of the man. Everything was possible, once you'd convinced yourself the cause required it.
By the time of the 1972 landslide, that man should have been standing on top of the world. He'd been the chief architect of the campaign, and the campaign had delivered history, a re-election so total it looked less like politics than coronation. He was leaving the White House to go back to private law, back to a income that would have made most men weep from gratitude alone. And instead he told people, later, that he stood at his office window in the weeks after the victory and felt nothing but a flat, dead question rising in him: so what.
He went back to counsel an old client, a man he'd worked for before the White House years, and found him changed almost past recognizing. Not older, not richer. Different in the eyes. When he asked what had happened, the man said he'd accepted Jesus Christ and committed his life to Him, said it plainly, the way you'd mention the weather, and the hatchet man — a New Englander, not given to that kind of talk — stared back at him with the particular discomfort of a man hearing a language he doesn't yet know he's about to speak.
Four months went by. I imagine those months the way you imagine weather building somewhere over the ocean before it ever reaches shore — nothing visible yet, just pressure changing. Then one August evening he picked up the phone and called that old client and said he wanted to come by. And that's how he ended up parked outside Tom's house that night, sitting on the porch with him for hours while the light went from gold to gray to nothing, listening to Tom read aloud from a paperback with a plain cover, a little book called Mere Christianity, written by a Belfast-born professor most people knew, if they knew him at all, from stories about a wardrobe and a lion.
The chapter was about pride. I have heard it said, since, that it fit him like a coat cut to his own measurements — a portrait, not an argument. A man who has spent years believing his cleverness and his loyalty made him useful, necessary, exempt, reads a page about the sin that convinces a man he needs no one, not even God, and something in him that had been welded shut for a long time comes loose.
He got up off that porch and walked to his car in the dark. And that's the part I actually saw, or saw enough of: the door didn't open again once he was inside it. I remember the shape of him behind the glass, unmoving, and thinking, uncharitably, that the man must be waiting for something, or drunk, or simply tired past the point of driving. I went back inside eventually. I did not know I was watching a man who had built his whole career on never showing weakness, a former Marine captain who had made a discipline out of dry eyes, sitting alone in a driveway crying so hard he could not make his hands work the wheel.
He said afterward it went on the better part of an hour. That he thought of his wife. That he wanted, for the first time in longer than he could measure, to be clean of something, though he could not yet have named the something precisely — pride, cruelty, the particular loneliness of a man who has spent his talents making enemies suffer and calling it patriotism. He expected, he said, to wake the next morning ashamed of himself, the way tears in the dark always look foolish by daylight. Instead he woke feeling better than he had in years. Lighter. As though a stone he'd been carrying without noticing its weight had finally been set down at the roadside.
I want to say I understood, right then, what I'd witnessed. I didn't. I went about my summer. It was only later, when his name started arriving in the newspapers attached to words like obstruction and grand jury and Watergate, that I put the two things together — the stranger's car at Tom's curb, and the man whose face was suddenly on every front page in the country, the one they were calling Nixon's hatchet man.
That fall his life did exactly what he said it would: it fell. The special prosecutors were closing every door in the house at once. The tapes, the enemies list, the plots against reporters and lobbyists and anyone who'd crossed the President — all of it came pouring out into daylight that summer and into the next year, and there was, I won't pretend otherwise, a great deal of satisfaction across the country when this particular man, of all Nixon's men, went down. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. He went to prison. Seven months, a camp with fences instead of walls, a long way down from a chair beside the President's.
While he was inside, something happened that felt, when I heard about it, almost too tidy to be real, except that it was documented, printed, sworn to. A prayer fellowship had formed around him by then, men who met and read scripture and held each other to account the way he'd once held staffers to account for opposition research. One of them was a former Democratic senator, a man who by any ordinary political arithmetic should have hated him, should have wanted him buried under that prison as long as the law allowed. Instead this senator, together with a congressman and two others from the group, went looking through old statutes and found one that let them offer to serve out the remainder of his sentence themselves, so that he could go home to his family. Nothing came of the offer in a legal sense. But he wrote, afterward, that for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free, even sitting in a cell at what should have been the lowest point of everything he'd built and lost.
He came out of prison and wrote a book about all of it, no excuses, admitting things he didn't have to admit, describing Nixon as by turns arrogant, vindictive, reflective, melancholy, and finally desperate — a man who could not enjoy a victory because he was always straining his eyes for the next enemy in the dark. The book became a bestseller. It also became, for a great many people, a joke. Cartoonists had a field day. Newsmen who had watched him operate for years rolled their eyes at the idea that the hatchet man had found God on a friend's porch. Some of the men who'd prayed alongside him in that fellowship weren't fully sure either. Faith is easy to announce and hard to verify, and this was a man whose entire professional life had been built on making people believe things that weren't quite true.
One of the harshest judges of all was a columnist who had once been a marked man on this same hatchet man's list — someone he'd been directed, more than once, to discredit by any means available, hospital-bed schemes and doctored files and worse. When that columnist was asked, years later, whether he believed in the conversion, he didn't answer with feeling. He went and did what he'd always done: he investigated. He talked to the people who knew the man best, tried to find the seams where the old Colson might still be hiding behind the new one's piety.
What he and everyone else watching eventually had to reckon with was that the man didn't cash in and disappear the way a false convert usually does. He didn't take the fame from Born Again and build himself a television ministry or a lecture circuit and call it a life's work finished. He went back inside prisons, over and over, year after year, not as an inmate this time but as a visitor who kept coming back on his own legs. He built an organization meant to do nothing but serve the people society had agreed to forget once the gates shut behind them — men exactly like the one he'd been for seven months, whose names had become punishments in themselves.
Skeptics kept their skepticism a long time, and who could blame them. Trust isn't a switch. The same magazine that once called him a Watergate crook eventually found itself calling him, without much irony left in the phrase, one of the country's most influential Christian conservatives, and there is something almost unbearably strange in that sentence if you sit with it: the hatchet man, the man who wanted a columnist made to look drunk on live radio, the man whose ambition helped drag a presidency into the ground, spending the second half of his life walking into cellblocks that smelled like bleach and boredom, sitting down across from men nobody else wanted to sit across from, telling them there was a version of this story where the worst thing you ever did was not the last word on who you were.
I think about that driveway more than I probably should, for a man who only saw the outside of it — the parked car, the sprinkler, the hour of stillness behind glass I mistook for nothing at all. I didn't know, watching from my porch, that I was watching the exact seam where one life ended and another one, harder to believe and harder to fake, began pushing its way up through the wreckage of the first.
He told an interviewer once that Christianity was the religion of second chances, and maybe that's the plainest way to put what happened on that street that August: not that a bad man became a good one overnight, tidy as a conversion in a pamphlet, but that a man built entirely for winning at any cost sat alone in the dark long enough to admit he had already lost the thing that mattered, and found, waiting under all that wreckage, somewhere to start again.
The sprinkler kept going that night long after I stopped watching. It would have shut itself off eventually, the way they do, ticking slower and slower until the water pressure gave out and the lawn just sat there in the dark, soaked through, waiting for morning.
