Chuck Colson (ChuckColson.org)

Charles "Chuck" Colson, evangelist, author and former hatchet man for President Richard M. Nixon, died today, two weeks after surgery on a blood clot in his brain. Mr. Colson was 80 years old.

As President Nixon's special counsel, Mr. Colson played a major role in the Watergate scandal. While serving on the committee to re-elect the president he took part in the plan for White House "plumbers" like G. Gordon Liddy to steal background information from Democratic foes.

Convicted of obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, Mr. Colson had a spiritual awakening prior to spending 7 months in prison. There he realized a calling to minister to convicts. He founded the Prison Fellowship and helmed the organization for 33 years. Mr. Colson also headed the Colson Center, which according to his official obituary was an education effort "focused on Christian worldview thought and application."

Mr. Colson remained a staunch conservative and along with his  prison ministry also lobbied against causes like gay marriage and abortion.

Various politicians issued statements regarding Mr. Colson's passing, including Indiana congressman Mike Pence, who called the death "a personal loss." and Senate G.O.P. head Mitch McConnell, who stated his "thoughts are with the Colson family, and all who have been touched" by Mr. Colson's life and works.

Karl Rove, "hatchet man" for the George W. Bush administration, talked about Mr. Colson with Christianity Today, calling Mr. Colson's trajectory after Watergate "the ultimate story of redemption." In answer to a question about Mr. Colson's influence on Mr. Bush's political victories, Rove said, "To the degree that values issues mattered in the election, Chuck's influence was probably more in the second election than in the first because of policies like the faith-based initiatives. You're putting Chuck in the wrong context. You're putting him as a political warrior instead of being a faith and culture warrior."

Feldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a "massive dose" of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car. While the aborted scheme to murder Anderson has been reported - and disputed - before, Feldstein found new corroboration: A confession before his death by ex-White House "plumber" Howard Hunt.

The Nixon/Anderson conflict really kicked into high gear when Anderson publicized documents that revealed Nixon was arming Pakistan during that country's war with India. The U.S. was supposedly neutral in the conflict. White House tapes captured Nixon's response to Anderson blowing the whistle: "So listen, the day after the election, win or lose, we've got to do something with this son of a bitch."

Even more bizarre--Nixon (and his men) were convinced Anderson, a Mormon, was part of a larger Mormon conspiracy. As NBC's Michael Isikoff notes in his article about Feldstein's book, there was a grain of truth in Nixon's Mormon paranoia. A Mormon military aide leaked the Indo-Pakistani documents to Anderson.

Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson were scheming to take Anderson down in various baroque ways before a larger crisis took all their attention. According to Howard Hunt, Colson wanted to put a "drug-laden pill in a bottle that Anderson was taking medicine from." Gordon Liddy was more creative. Hunt said Liddy "had an idea that that by wiping poison on a man's wrist that could kill him that way."

Watergate may have been one of the best things to happen to Jack Anderson--who outlived Nixon by 11 years, in the end.

[NBC]

"Mr. Smith rushed back to The Times’s bureau in Washington to repeat the story to Robert H. Phelps, an editor there, who took notes and tape-recorded the conversation, according to both men. But then Mr. Smith had to hand off the story — he had quit The Times and was leaving town the next day to attend Yale Law School."—Richard Pérez-Peña, 2 Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First, The New York Times, May 24, 2009.

Birth of Jesus Christ, circa 6 BC

Why The Times missed the story: Paper not founded until September 18, 1851.

Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Why The Times missed the story: Hawaii bureau chief was out walking his dog.

Beginning of the Twentieth Century, January 1, 1901

Why The Times missed the story: Assigning editor deemed so-called new Century "unimportant" and "faddish."

Amelia Earhart disappears while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, July 2, 1937

Why The Times missed the story: Aviation reporter, hung over from bi-wing plane junket the previous night, told his editor, "We'll write about it when the lass lands."

Woodstock Music and Art Fair, August 12-15, 1969

Why The Times missed the story: Internal Times consensus was "peaceniks rolling around in mud" is not newsworthy.

Iraq WMD's, 2002-2004

Why The Times missed the story: What? They had the story.

Birth of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt in Namibia, May 27, 2006

Why The Times missed the story: Busy covering 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia that killed 6,000 people; also, exclusive pictures of Shiloh too expensive for Times photo department.

Writes Mr. Barnes:

In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step...

Is The Times out to get Angelina Jolie—the woman whom Esquire's Tom Junod has called "the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage"?

Well, take a look at the cover of this week's New York Times Magazine.

Really uncool.

Mr. Rosen, an on-air D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News was speaking to NYTV on Monday afternoon. Next month, Doubleday will publish Mr. Rosen’s first book—a revisionist history of Richard Nixon’s downfall, called The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

As NYTV’s overcrowded bookshelf can attest, TV newsmen are constantly cranking out books that are heavy on the self-promotion and light on, um, research. Mr. Rosen’s book promises to be neither. It will weigh in at a hefty 600 or so pages, contain 65 pages of footnotes, and will include insight culled from some 250 original interviews. There was no ghostwriter. And in a clear affront to the requirements of the genre, Mr. Rosen’s face doesn’t even appear on the cover.

Mr. Rosen said Strong Man will be the first major biography of John Mitchell, the late U.S. attorney general, who played a pivotal role in the “rise, reign and ruin” of Richard Nixon. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Mr. Mitchell was convicted on a number of charges stemming from his role in the botched break-in and surveillance operation. The nation’s top law enforcement official eventually spent 19 months in prison.

“He never went on the lecture circuit,” said Mr. Rosen. “He never went on the Mike Douglas show. He never testified about Nixon to get a more lenient sentence. He never found God.”

And he never wrote an autobiography. At one point, Mr. Mitchell signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a memoir. But according to Mr. Rosen, Mr. Mitchell eventually balked at writing about Watergate and passed away in 1988, leaving the biography unwritten and leaving many details of his life—from the false notion that he commanded John F. Kennedy during World War II to the bogus suggestion that he played hockey for the New York Rangers—shrouded in mystery and misconception.

Mr. Rosen said that he will address the whole of Mr. Mitchell’s life but is most interested in clearing up his subject’s actual role in Watergate. “John Mitchell denied to the day he died that he ordered the Watergate break-in,” said Mr. Rosen. “It’s going to be a controversial book because I will come to a different conclusion on who ordered the break-in, why, what it’s purpose was and who was the real mastermind of the coverup.”

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t Mr. Mitchell. “Oscar Wilde said that our lone duty to history is continually to rewrite it,” said Mr. Rosen.

As it turned out, however, rewriting history took a touch longer than expected. Mr. Rosen said he has been “slaving away” on the book for the past 17 years. His obsession with the subject dates back even longer.

Growing up on Staten Island in the ’70s, Mr. Rosen apparently internalized some of his parent’s nostalgia for the 1960s. “I have been a lifelong Nixon and Watergate junkie since a very young age—although I should hasten to add I did play Little League,” said Mr. Rosen.

To this day, at his home in Washington, D.C., he collects rare recordings of … the Beatles. “I basically live in the past full time,” he deadpanned. “It’s amazing I make my way to work every day.”

In the late ’80s, as an undergraduate at John Hopkins University, Mr. Rosen studied political science. During the summer breaks, he worked at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, the branch of the National Archives that controls the Nixon papers and tapes. After graduation, Mr. Rosen received a grant from the late William F. Buckley to begin working on the biography.

Eventually, Mr. Rosen matriculated to journalism school at Northwestern. In his spare time, he continued collecting Watergate material. He graduated and began working in television, including a stint as a producer for NY1. He kept working on the book. Later Mr. Rosen took a job at CBS News working as a researcher for Dan Rather. Research on the book continued. Mr. Rosen joined Fox News, became an on-air talent, traveling the world and scoring exclusives interviews with the likes of William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor. In between assignments, he kept plodding away at the manuscript.

In 2002, some 11 years into the thicket, he signed a book contract. His first draft weighed in at 500,000 words—a number he eventually sheered in half. “I’ve watched the subject of Watergate go from living history, something that happened just yesterday and about which people are concerned still, to a musty-dusty Franco-Prussian War ancient history,” said Mr. Rosen.

Historically, members of the reading public who are interested in refreshing their understanding of Watergate have tended to turn to a couple of guys, who, like Mr. Rosen, report on the world of Washington, D.C.—albeit for The Washington Post, not Fox News. Can Mr. Rosen break Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein’s stranglehold on the subject?

“For what I think are self-interested reasons, certain individuals have pushed to the fore, around Watergate anniversaries, the question of, ‘Who was Deep Throat?” said Mr. Rosen. “My contrarian conclusion was that The Washington Post was largely extraneous to the outcome of Watergate. So, too, were Woodward and Bernstein.”

Gauntlet: thrown.

According to Mr. Rosen, his book will draw on hundreds of thousands of unpublished documents and tapes, including whole archives of previously untapped official Watergate evidence. “What is there new to be said about Watergate?” said Mr. Rosen. “The answer is plenty. There are whole archives of evidence that have been unexamined.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Rosen has filed stories for Fox News about subjects ranging from Hillary Clinton to David Paterson to Condoleezza Rice. Come publication time, don’t expect him to suddenly switch over on the air to covering the late John Mitchell.

Sometime soon, however, Mr. Rosen is scheduled to do an hourlong interview on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb.

“He used to work for the Nixon administration, so he’s keenly interested in the subject matter,” said Mr. Rosen. “Fox News and C-SPAN are in the same building in Washington, and every time I run into him in the coffee shop downstairs, he says, ‘Where is this book already?’ He’s been waiting patiently for a decade now.”