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> Egil ("Bud") Krogh Jr., 35, recently released after serving 4½ months in prison for his part in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, had a different kind of experience. Krogh is a Christian Scientist, but according to his wife Suzanne had become religiously inactive. The Krogh marriage was on the rocks before the Ellsberg breakin, she says, but after it, when Bud returned to the practice of his faith, the rift was healed. Just before going to prison in early February, Krogh visited Colson's new-found prayer group to talk about the spiritual reasons for his guilty plea last November.
With figures like Ford and his friends involved, Washington's spiritual renewal is clearly not a matter of Watergate or gallows repentance. It has, in fact, been growing for years. One of its roots can be traced to the early 1950s, when Mark Hatfield was a political science professor and dean of students at Oregon's Willamette University. A Conservative Baptist, Hatfield recalls that his religious life was then "totally institutional, a matter of legalistic no-nos." It was to change drastically after a sophomore named Doug Coe approached him for permission to start a chapter of an evangelical student association.
Coe, then a physics major, remembers that he "set up an experiment to see if God could really answer prayer. One thing I prayed for was that Mark Hatfield would become a convinced follower of Jesus Christ." The experiment seemed to work: Coe's own intense faith won him over, says Hatfield. "Doug talked about the Lord as if he were a friend, were really present."
While Hatfield moved up the political ladder to the governorship, his friend Coe broadened his evangelistic horizons to include political, professional and business leaders. In 1959 Coe left for Washington to join the staff of the International Christian Leadership movement, founded in the 1930s by Methodist Missionary Abraham Vereide to promote prayer breakfasts and personal evangelism among laymen.
Coe has been the untitled head of the Vereide movement—now known as "the fellowship"—since the founder died in 1969. The prayer-breakfast idea had long since caught wide attention, spreading to some 1,800 U.S. cities and towns and at least 40 other countries. But the movement has also expanded to include many other, less formal encounters: groups that meet to pray together, to study the Bible or to discuss personal problems. The fellowship is in touch with more than 100 groups in Washington alone. Most are broadly ecumenical, and have included Jews as well as Protestants and Catholics. Coe himself—like Hatfield, Laird and Rhodes—attends Halverson's Fourth Presbyterian Church, where fellowship leaders meet weekly to set policy.