Richard Nixon—Charles Colson

Richard Nixon and Charles Colson were joined by a relationship that became politically consequential precisely because its most important early exchange remained disputed: associates said Colson warned Nixon that members of his circle were involved in Watergate and its cover-up, while Colson denied warning him and declined to discuss their private communications. The disagreement left two questions entangled—what Nixon had been told, and why he continued to stand with Colson and other former aides as the investigation widened.

A Reported Warning

A Colson associate told Bob Woodward that Colson had gone to Nixon as early as December and warned him that people around him were deeply involved in Watergate and were organizing a cover-up. In the associate’s account, Colson specifically warned Nixon about John Dean and John Mitchell. Nixon’s reported response was that Mitchell had denied the allegation and that he wanted evidence. The same account said two other people also urged Nixon to distance himself from Dean and Mitchell, but that Nixon would not do so. The claim therefore concerned not only whether Colson spoke, but whether a warning reached the President in a form that demanded a decision.

A White House source supplied a second account: on at least three occasions that winter, Colson had told Nixon that some of his people were involved in Watergate. Most of the warnings, the source said, focused on Dean and Mitchell. When Woodward asked Colson directly, Colson denied warning Nixon about either man or about a cover-up. Asked what he had told the President, he refused to discuss private communications with anyone, including the press, the grand jury, or the Senate committee. His answer confirmed that communications existed as a subject he would not discuss, but did not establish what they contained.

A second Colson associate then urged Woodward not to accept the denial. The associate also said Colson had explicitly told Nixon that there was evidence his men were involved in both the bugging and the cover-up. He attributed Colson’s denial to two considerations: acknowledging the warning would mean acknowledging that the President had been forewarned, and Colson feared Dean might retaliate by implicating him before the grand jury. These were the associate’s explanations, not facts Colson confirmed. The White House offered no comment on the resulting Washington Post lead story, “Nixon Alerted to Cover-up in December.” The reporting made the alleged warning public while leaving the central contradiction intact.

Silence, Evidence, and Responsibility

The accounts set a reported warning against a refusal to clarify it. Colson’s denial was direct as to whether he had warned Nixon; his refusal to discuss private conversations placed a boundary around the evidence that might settle the dispute. The associates, by contrast, described specific subjects—Dean, Mitchell, the bugging, and the cover-up—and one placed the warning as early as December. The book presents their statements as corroborating testimony, not as a transcript or an independently demonstrated record of the conversation.

That distinction matters to the meaning of the relationship. If the associates were right, Nixon received warnings from Colson and others and chose not to sever ties with the named aides. If Colson’s denial was accurate, the public record cited here does not establish that he personally gave Nixon that warning. Either way, the subsequent course—Nixon’s continued association with Colson and the other former aides—became part of the larger question of presidential knowledge and responsibility. The evidence supports the gravity of the dispute, but not an unqualified resolution of what Colson told Nixon or what Nixon understood at the time.

Continued Ties Amid the Investigation

By the period described in the later account, Colson was one of three former aides closest to Nixon and a primary target of the special prosecutor’s investigation, alongside H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. For more than six months, General Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger had urged Nixon to cut ties with the three. Nixon instead built his legal defense in concert with them and continued to meet them and speak with them by telephone. The contrast sharpened the earlier controversy: whatever the precise content of the alleged December warning, Nixon’s relationship with Colson did not simply end as the investigation mounted.

During the summer of 1973, Kissinger tried to persuade Nixon to disavow the former aides publicly and accept some responsibility for Watergate. The recommendation was angrily rejected by Ron Ziegler, who dismissed contrition as “bullshit.” The passage does not identify that response as Nixon’s own words; it shows, rather, that advice to break with the former aides met resistance within the President’s circle while Nixon continued his legal and personal association with them. By December, Haig himself had come to doubt the wisdom of Nixon’s course, even as he telephoned Katharine Graham to attack two Washington Post stories and urge her to stop publishing such accounts.

The Relationship’s Significance

The Nixon–Colson relationship thus appears in two connected but distinct forms: the disputed channel through which Colson may have warned the President, and the continuing association that placed him among Nixon’s closest former aides during the investigation. The first is reconstructed through competing recollections and Colson’s refusal to disclose private communications; the second is described through Nixon’s continued meetings, calls, and coordinated legal defense. Neither should be substituted for the other: continued closeness does not by itself prove what Nixon knew in December, while the alleged warning does not erase the later evidence of continued ties.

The reporting’s force comes from keeping those uncertainties visible. Colson’s associates described warnings detailed enough to identify both the people and the alleged misconduct; Colson rejected their characterization without opening the private conversations to scrutiny. Nixon’s later refusal, in practice, to separate himself from the three former aides gave the earlier allegation lasting consequence. The relationship became a measure of the widening gap between warnings reportedly delivered, choices made at the White House, and the public account of how the Watergate crisis was handled.