Education Quote by Chuck Colson

A man who helped weaponize power is trying, late, to demystify how decent self-images survive indecent acts. Colson’s Watergate takeaway isn’t a splashy confession so much as an anatomy lesson in rationalization: “well-intentioned” functions as both mitigation and warning label. He’s pointing to the psychological trap that makes political crimes feel like administrative necessities. In that sense, the line is less about Nixon-era skulduggery than about the everyday bureaucracy of conscience: once you’ve declared the mission noble, the method becomes paperwork.

The context matters because Watergate wasn’t just a burglary; it was a culture of ends-justify-means thinking, lubricated by loyalty, secrecy, and a belief that the presidency’s survival equaled the nation’s survival. Colson’s phrasing echoes the logic that kept the whole machine humming: you don’t start as “a criminal,” you start as “a protector,” “a fixer,” “a patriot.” The illegality arrives later, wearing the mask of prudence.

Then he swerves into moral absolutism: “walking in the truth,” “means as important as ends.” It’s a deliberate counterspell to the earlier rationalization, and it reads like a public self-rewrite. As a lawyer, he’s implicitly repudiating the professional temptation to treat legality as a technical puzzle rather than a boundary. The subtext is blunt: the real scandal isn’t that smart people break rules; it’s how easily they learn to call the rule-breaking virtue.