WASHINGTON — Charles Colson, the tough-as-nails special counsel to President Richard Nixon who went to prison for his role in a Watergate-related case and became a Christian evangelical helping inmates, has died. He was 80.
Colson's death was confirmed by Jim Liske, the chief executive of the Lansdowne, Va.-based Prison Fellowship Ministries that Colson founded. Liske said the preliminary cause of death is complications from brain surgery Colson had at the end of March.
Colson, with his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, was known as the "evil genius" of the Nixon administration who once said he'd walk over his grandmother to get the president elected to a second term.
"I shudder to think of what I'd been if I had not gone to prison," Colson said in 1993. "Lying on the rotten floor of a cell, you know it's not prosperity or pleasure that's important, but the maturing of the soul."