Out in front: the radical witness of Bill Coffin

Christian Century, June 29, 2004 by Harvey Gallagher Cox

One of Coffin's best skills was that he could keep more people in the loop, communicating with all sides, than nearly anyone else I have ever known. He could speak with a distraught member of the Yale board, an enraged parent and a Black Panther leader all within the same hour and somehow manage to retain the trust of all of them. But he was not mainly a mediator; he was a partisan. His opposition to the war reached its public climax in his famous trial, along with several other defendants, for turning in draft cards at a worship service at Arlington Street Church in Boston. That trial dragged on, at great financial and emotional expense to Coffin and the others, until the charges were eventually dropped.

GOLDSTEIN'S BOOK is candid, indeed at times unsparing, in probing into Coffin's personal life. His father died in 1933 when he was nine, and he maintained an unusually close relationship with his mother, Catherine. Such a bond seems quite understandable for a person who loses one parent so early. But it piques Goldstein's sometimes overactive Freudian curiosity and at times pushes his investigation close to the quagmire of psycho-history.

Coffin's first two marriages come in for microscopic, almost clinical, analysis and post hoe speculation. This may be standard operating procedure for biographies nowadays, but the reader will occasionally wince (as I did) at disclosures that must have been painful for the principals to read. Was it really necessary, for example, to assert that Coffin had so internalized his mother's view of the women in his life that he had hardly any independent judgment about them? Interesting--as they say--if true. But how much does it help us to understand who Coffin is, and how he managed to cut the swathe he did for nearly three decades?

In 1977 Coffin left the Yale chaplaincy to become the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City. Under his leadership it became not just a powerful preaching station, but--with the indispensable help of Cora Weiss (who does not get enough credit in this book)--a buzzing center for the peace and nuclear disarmament movements. Meanwhile, Coffin was one of the most sought-after graduation and special-events speakers in the country, and he had a hard time saying no to such invitations. He seemed to be everywhere, often flying across the country, but just as he had always, gotten back to Battell Chapel for Sunday services, so he was almost always back in his pulpit at Riverside Church by the time the bells rang. As Goldstein correctly states, he was becoming--next to Martin Luther King Jr.--"the most influential liberal Protestant in America."

But Coffin's red-eye schedule took a toll on family life. In later years he regretted not having spent more time with his family, although Goldstein claims that the children never seemed to complain. In the early 1980s Coffin lived through horrendous losses. His mother died. Then, a short month later, in January 1983, his son Alex, with whom Coffin had an unusually close bond, was killed after his car skidded into Boston harbor during a storm. Engulfed by grief, the family gathered in Vermont, where Coffin's brother Ned lived and where Coffin had been courting Randy Wilson, whom he later married. Randy reports that she had hoped Coffin would stay for a while, to absorb the pain. But he insisted he had to get back to New York, claiming that "the church needs me."