Today marks the forty-second anniversary of the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. He quit because he had to. The corruption of the Watergate scandal finally reached his desk where the buck stopped.
For those who are unfamiliar with this scandal, it began in May of 1972 when some people working to get the President re-elected broke into the Democratic National Committee's campaign headquarters which was set up in a hotel/office building called The Watergate in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. They bugged some phones for the purpose of stealing intelligence from the opposing campaign in order to gain the advantage. On a subsequent break-in in June, the burglars got caught. Nixon himself wasn’t aware of the scheme at first but some people on his re-election committee had ordered it. This is a complex story filled with intrigue, hubris, dirty tricks and obstruction of justice by some of the highest office holders in the land. To make a long story short, as the President found out about certain things, he attempted to cover them up. That made him guilty of obstruction of justice and other things, so he had to leave office or face certain impeachment and conviction.
Caught up in this scandal was Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, who occupied an office right beside the Oval Office. Colson was eventually arrested and charged for his part in the cover-up and spent almost two years in prison. After he was charged and his life was coming apart, Colson became a Christian. After serving his time, he founded a ministry that is still flourishing today called Prison Fellowship. So began Colson’s new life. (To find out more, read his book Born Again).In his book called The Good Life, Colson wrote about one of his colleagues who also served time but never really turned around. His name was John Ehrlichman who served as President Nixon's special advisor on domestic affairs. In late 1998, years after the scandal, Colson went to visit Ehrlichman who was gravely ill with kidney disease in an Atlanta nursing home. Toward the end of his visit, Colson and his friend were discussing Ehrlichman’s situation and here is a portion of that conversation from his book.
“All at once, he (Ehrlichman) said, ‘The doctor says with a little shot of morphine, he can put me out of things. There’ll be no pain. I’ll just go to sleep. Nobody cares about me anyway. Why should I stay alive? Tell me. Why should I stay alive?’ Cold chills raced up and down my back. He was serious and I wanted to give him the best answer I could muster. I struggled to choose my words carefully. A life was in the balance. I told John that his life was not his own, that it was a gift from God. I assured him that his life was created in God’s own image, which gave him an innate dignity, a dignity unaffected by circumstances.” A few paragraphs later, Colson wrote, “The reason John Ehrlichman asked that question in such a despairing frame of mind was, I am convinced, because he saw his life, first and last, as his.” By his, he meant his own.
Ehrlichman died a very sick and lonely man on February 14, 1999. Colson did have the opportunity to visit with him one more time but during his friend’s final days, Colson had a bout of the flu so he sent one of his associates to pray with John. During the prayer, he just nodded and said nothing so Colson never knew for sure if his friend and former colleague made things right with his Maker in that eleventh hour. John Ehrlichman saw his life as his own and in the end, he had nothing. He was married three times. His kids didn’t have much to do with him. All the people who once lined up to see him, whose respect he once commanded, were all gone. In the end, he saw no point to his life and because he made it his own - all about him - there was no point to his life that he could see.
Jesus said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will man give in exchange for his soul?” The paradox of keeping what you give to God and losing what you keep for yourself is a difficult one to grasp, but it is true. History bears it out. Our biggest problem is that we stubbornly refuse to learn from history.
Why is Watergate still worth discussing more than a generation later? When you probe the whole thing and learn about what was done it reveals a number of stark realities. First, otherwise respectable people are capable of very dark deeds. Second, it's a grim reminder of the capacity of the human heart to self-deceive. All the dirty tricks done by the Committee to Re-elect the President were unnecessary because the Democratic campaign under its nominee, George McGovern, was anemic and imploding. Nixon won by a landslide in November 1972 and would've won it without much effort. His re-election committee had a siege mentality and resorted to drastic measures when no real battle was underway. Third, it was a text book example of how an organization can take on the characteristics of its leader. In the unseen world, kindred spirits tend to find each other because birds of a feather flock together.
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