Born again, again: a new biography of Charles Colson is yet another cover-up.

• Author: Blumenthal, Max
• Position: Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed - Book Review

Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed By Jonathan Aitken WaterBrook Press; $24.95

In March, 1972, the disclosure of a memo written by Dita Beard, a lobbyist from the telecommunications firm ITT, set in motion the events that would lead Mark Felt to become the source known as Deep Throat. The Beard memo revealed that a $400,000 donation to President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign had prompted the Justice Department to scrap an antitrust suit against the company. In an effort to erase this inconvenient truth, White House special counsel Charles Colson ordered the FBI to declare the memo a forgery. Unfortunately for Colson, the veteran FBI agent assigned to the task was Felt who, after reviewing lab results, refused to issue Colson's desired conclusion. An enraged Colson berated Felt on the telephone, subjecting him to "partisan instructions and pressure," according to Felt's memoirs. The incident taught Felt that the Nixon White House would stop at little in the name of politics. It wasn't long before he was looking for a red flag in the flower pot on Bob Woodward's balcony.

This Charles Colson, the one whose name is commonly preceded by "hatchet man," is a thing of the past, according to Colson's friends, supporters, and now his biographer, Jonathan Aitken. Perhaps the most famous born-again Republican after George W. Bush, Colson has spent the three decades since Watergate working with Prison Fellowship, a penal reform organization he founded, and burnishing his credentials as an evangelical leader. He has become, in the words of Peggy Noonan, one of the "heroes of Watergate." Indeed, Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal just days after the disclosure of Felt's identity as Deep Throat that Colson "has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful."

And as if on cue, along comes an authorized biography, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed. The former Watergate felon tapped Aitken to write this account of his metamorphosis from White House hack to man of God, and it is an inspired choice. Aitken himself is a disgraced former Tory cabinet minister who went to prison in 1999 for perjury in a bungled libel suit against The Guardian, which had run a series of articles detailing his illicit dealings with Saudi arms traders. He met Colson in the course of writing a glowing biography of Nixon, and Colson ministered to Aitken during his seven-month prison term. Under Colson's influence, Aitken became, as they say in Britain, a "Christer"...