Out in front: the radical witness of Bill Coffin

Christian Century, June 29, 2004 by Harvey Gallagher Cox

William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience. By Warren Goldstein. Yale University Press, 400 pp., $30.00.

A GOOD BIOGRAPHY, expertly researched and finely crafted, conveys not just the trajectory of someone's life but also a feeling for the era in which the person lived. This superb telling of the "still far from finished" life of William Sloane Coffin is just such an accomplishment.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once mused that a man must be involved in the action and passion of his times or else be judged not fully to have lived. If this is true, then Coffin lived more intensely than most of us. It is hard to think of a 20th-century churchman other than Martin Luther King Jr. who was more centrally and visibly involved in the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. Coffin not only lived those events but made some of them happen, and he inspired hundreds of young people to become involved and thus to live fully as well.

Coffin and I have been friends for (can it really be?) nearly 50 years. We first met when we were both students at Yale Divinity School in the mid-1950s. We got there, however, along quite different paths.

Coffin, who is a few years older than I, arrived after a swashbuckling early career in the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA. A sophisticated New Yorker from a prominent Manhattan family, he had studied piano in Paris, played guitar with gusto and loved to belt out Red Army songs in Russian. He stemmed from an impressive lineage of theologians and church leaders. He roared around New Haven on a BMW motorcycle and lived off campus. His fieldwork assignment was at Yale's Battell Chapel. He was easily the most visible member of our student body.

I, on the other hand, grew up in a sleepy Pennsylvania town and arrived at YDS directly from Penn State. There were no scholars or preachers anywhere in my genealogy. My overseas adventures were restricted to two summers of feeding horses and shoveling manure on relief ships to Poland and Belgium just after World War II. I lived on the YDS campus and borrowed my roommate's wheezing Studebaker to drive to my fieldwork in a struggling blue-collar congregation in North Haven. Still, Coffin and I took some of the same courses, including a memorable seminar on theology and literature taught by Julian Hartt, from which I still remember a spirited discussion about Albert Camus's The Plague, which Coffin, of course, had read in French.

After graduation we both chose campus ministry, Coffin first at Williams and then, for two decades, at Yale. I started at Temple University and then went to Oberlin College. We saw little of each other until the civil rights movement erupted during the 1960s. Coffin's unswerving moral resolve and personal daring set the tone for countless ministers, priests and rabbis, including me.

In reading about that period in Goldstein's book however, I began to feel a bit like a GI grunt who had landed on Normandy or frozen his toes in the Battle of the Bulge but only later learned what was really going on. I was definitely a foot soldier, albeit one who paid his dues in a southern jail. Coffin, on the other hand, was always either in charge or leading the charge. When I, along with a group of fellow clergy from Boston, was arrested, only the Boston Globe and the other local papers noticed. Whenever Coffin was arrested (which happened a lot) it was reported in the New York Times, and he was interviewed on network TV.

Goldstein writes candidly about how Coffin liked to be in the forefront rather than in the ranks. But though his celebrity aura could have caused resentment, it never did. Coffin earned his prominence. He took risks many of us were not yet ready to take. He not only enjoyed being a pop-culture figure, tie used the role skillfully. Few public personalities could handle the interview format more adroitly. When he appeared on TV, he always said directly and eloquently what we who lacked his deft and winning way with words would have liked to be able to say.

Coffin first caught the public eye, when he helped organize and then led the effort to desegregate the interstate bus system with what came to be called "Freedom Rides." This section of the book represents history as it should be written--with a sagacious use of sources, a strong narrative drive, and an authentic whiff of the charged atmosphere of the times. Then came the marches and demonstrations, including Selma and St. Augustine, in which I also participated, but was usually bidden by the crowd in the many pictures taken of the events. Not Coffin. Again he was up front, exposing himself to both the danger and the cameras, and when the interviews started, acting as our eloquent tribune.

About the movement to clad the war in Vietnam, Coffin at first hesitated. As Goldstein shows, he was not sure that this issue posed the same kind of clear moral choice that racism and segregation did. Also, he was on a first-name basis with many Washington leaders who supported the war (some of them Yalies like himself). That made things awkward--though it helped later when he became an antiwar leader and these people felt compelled to return his calls. Coffin's participation in the peace movement was characteristic of his style. First he agonized, but when he made his decision to oppose the war, he unstintingly poured all the power of his personal example, boundless energy and silver tongue into the fight. He did this with the support, if not the agreement, of Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, with whom he kept in close communication.