Word: colsons
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Hatchet Man. Indeed, Colson's entire career has been marked by the kind of unrelenting ambition that led him to become the White House hatchet man. As a teen-ager in Boston, he defiantly rejected a full scholarship at Harvard as he thought it too radical a university and because officials there told him, "No one has ever turned down a full scholarship at Harvard." He went to Brown instead. A man in a hurry, he became, at 22, the youngest company commander in the Marines. He married young and had three children (that marriage ended in divorce...
...Colson went to the 1968 Nixon campaign as chairman of the Key Issues Committee. He was then making $100,000 a year as a Washington lawyer, but he gladly took a 60% pay cut to join...
White House staff in 1969. Early on he complained to colleagues that Nixon did not even know who he was. But Colson, whose conservative bent accorded with the President's, eventually became an almost daily visitor to the Oval Office. An initial key to his success: he effectively wooed some important labor leaders to the White House side by inviting them for chats with the President. Later he predicted correctly that Nixon would win large chunks of the labor vote in the 1972 election...
...also made conscientious efforts to please the President. When Nixon remarked once that he did not know what the stock market had done that day, Colson arranged for subordinates to get readings every half hour on the latest stock averages...
...Colson apparently satisfied Nixon's yen for macho operators. He was one of those who talked of "playing hardball" for keeps, and hostile outsiders were not his only targets. He, along with Haldeman, cracked down on more genteel staffers like Communications Director Herb Klein. Though a Nixon friend for more than 20 years, Klein finally resigned. Everything Contrived. His most important role was as a resourceful if unscrupulous political operator. Colson took on the tough jobs for the President. He leaked damaging or misleading information to the press about people who criticized the President, had young men hired...