THOSE who knew Chuck Colson said he never changed much, to look at, from the age of 18 to the age of 80. The same owlish horn-rimmed glasses; the same liking for blazers and bow ties; and that same quizzical, half-laughing, wide-eyed look, as if another quip was coming.

He was a prankster as a boy, letting off stink bombs in cinemas and putting snowballs in hats. In young manhood, campaigning for politicians in Boston, he learned the art of “planting misleading stories…voting tombstones, and spying out the opposition in every possible way”. No surprise then that when he joined Richard Nixon's White House as special counsel, in 1969, he was soon in charge of dirty tricks. He tried to get thugs to rough up anti-Vietnam-war protesters, and dreamed of firebombing the liberal Brookings Institution to seize incriminating stuff inside. He spread the false tale that Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve, planned to enrich himself at taxpayers' expense, and listed (with sexual foibles) Nixon's enemies, to trap them later.

It wasn't so much the trickiness that caught the eye, however, as the take-no-prisoners fervour with which he did his job. Mr Colson always went further than other people. He had fitted a truck horn to his first car, a Morris Minor, the better to barge through traffic. As a student at Brown, devising challenges for new recruits to the frat house, he ordered them to produce custard pies imprinted with the shape of a breast from a nearby ladies' college. Desperate to get into the marines and go to Korea, he drilled and polished for weeks until he was good enough.

At the White House, too, coming up to the 1972 campaign, he planned total war against all that was leftist, peacenik, spineless and immoral. This was dog-eat-dog, and attack was the best possible form of defence. When the longed-for call from Nixon came, he left his lucrative law practice to do whatever he was asked. He would chew people up, and spit them out, for the president. He would break all the fucking china, as Nixon once suggested to him, to get an order ready to sign on his desk by Monday morning. “The president wants to see you, Mr Colson,” were words that set his spine tingling, as it did when he heard martial music, or the words “United States”. To be the president's point-man, his hatchet man, taking down his hunched, muttered confidences on yellow legal pads, was the fulfilment of his life.

It could be argued that he won the election for Nixon by prising off large chunks of the blue-collar, Catholic, ethnic Democratic vote. His part in the downfall was murkier. The botched burglary of Watergate was “not his baby”, he insisted (not up to his standards), though he knew Howard Hunt, one of the “plumbers”, through the burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers that did much to turn the country against the war. Destroying Ellsberg had always been Mr Colson's aim, and it was to this that he pleaded guilty in 1974. By copping that plea, some thought, he avoided harder questions, which might have passed closer to Nixon's head.

Point-man for Jesus

But between the Ellsberg incident and the prison Mr Colson had transferred his unstoppable, driving energies to another boss. This one had called him out of the blue on a visit to his friend Tom Phillips, head of Raytheon, to drum up business for his law firm after he had left the White House. Tom spoke of finding Jesus. Later they read C.S. Lewis together, about the “spiritual cancer” of pride, and the old tingling started in Mr Colson's spine—soon followed, as he tried to drive home, by floods of repentant and refreshing tears.

Just a trick of the old Colson kind, his many enemies said. A play for sympathy, no doubt, as the wolves closed in around the White House. It took him three decades to convince the world that his conversion was sincere: three decades in which, building on his sobering seven months in jail, he set up a network of prison ministries in 115 countries, established a programme of restorative justice, and took over units of prisons to run them on Christian principles, with Scripture classes and prayer-meetings. (Re-offending rates, usually 20%, were a mere 8% in his programmes.) In hundreds of fetid cells he would appear in person, Bible in hand, to urge jailbirds to a new life. He was no longer a hatchet man, but still a point-man: doing whatever needed doing, when Jesus asked. On the same yellow legal pads, in his service, he would now jot down points of theology.

Many of his enemies were still the same. Immorality, secularism, pro-abortionism, lack of patriotism: all had to be battled. Fortified by the 27th Psalm (“He shall set me up upon a rock”), Mr Colson picked teams of Centurions to “change the culture” of the country, and founded a Chuck Colson Centre to help a “Christian worldview” take hold. Behind the prayer-language was still the boy whose pride had nearly burst his new suit as he gave his high-school valedictory speech; and the low-class non-Brahmin Bostonian who, in his vast-ceilinged office beside Nixon's, had burned to destroy all non-believers in their cause and to make America great and good again. From Tricky Dicky to Jesus Christ was not, perhaps, as huge a change as everyone thought.