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Some have classified your biography of Charles Colson as "warts and all." How would you classify it and why?

I think people who call it a warts-and-all biography are people who expected hagiography and have gotten biography. I'm a faithful biographer. I have told the story in the spirit of Thomas Carlyle's definition of a biographer—he should be an artist on oath. I haven't gone for any sensational stories or revelations. I've portrayed the Chuck Colson I know and admire at various stages of his journey. And the fact of the matter is that the man he's become is not the man he was.

When he was a young man, he was pretty wild at times. He was pretty ruthless. He had a sense of humor that vastly amused some people and offended others. If you're going to do a portrait of someone like that, you can't airbrush out some of the color. I haven't gone out of my way to tell prurient stories. But the kind of story that will probably excite people if they see it out of context, is the story of the young Chuck Colson who, first of all, fought tooth and nail to break a color bar in Boston and bring a young black lawyer into his law firm as a partner. This was a big step forward, a groundbreaking step forward, which is greatly to Chuck's credit.

It's extraordinary that their relationship was so warm and so friendly that Chuck thought he could play pranks on this guy. These were not racist pranks at all. But you could see why some people might raise their eyebrows and think otherwise. One of the pranks was Chuck burning a cross on this guy's lawn in the Boston suburbs. Now this was Chuck's strange sense of humor.

A lot of Chuck's youth was spent going over the top. That's there in his letters. It's there in his lifestyle. The authenticity of the biography comes from the fact that I don't suppress inconvenient and embarrassing stories. I don't put too many of them in, but I put enough of them in to make it clear that Chuck was a wild young man, a ruthless young man, a good young man in lots of ways. But there are strange dimensions to him that are out of kilter with the Chuck Colson who came to Christ.

And what is wonderful about the story is how much God changed Chuck. I don't think I'd do anyone a service by not indicating what he was changed from.

Now you said it's not hagiography, and yet as you're talking about him here it makes me think of the apostle Paul in some ways, a reorientation of a strong-willed person toward Christ.

That's absolutely right. Obviously I didn't know the apostle Paul but my sense is that Saul of Tarsus, and even the apostle Paul, was a difficult character with tremendous energy, tremendous genius who often rubbed people the wrong way. There are good, valid comparisons between Chuck Colson and the apostle Paul.

Why did Charles Colson choose you to do the biography?

We were kindred spirits in several ways. First of all, we think that we may be about the only two people in the world who have experienced both the great high of political power at a top level in our countries, then to have made terrible mistakes of arrogance and pride and faults of character, then to have crashed into disgrace and media vilification and imprisonment. We then have found God, thanks to wonderful Christian prayer partners, went through jail and found it a spiritually enriching experience despite all the pain, then came out and said we will dedicate our lives to the service of the Lord. That's a sequence of events that is difficult to find repeated, and it's a very strong bond.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49