William Sloane Coffin Jr. was an American Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist.
Background
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. was born to considerable wealth and social position on June 1, 1924, in New York City, New York, United States. When he was 11 his father died, and he grew up in the company of tutors and teachers in New England and Paris, France.
Education
He graduated from Andover Academy in 1942, spent a year of piano study at the Yale School of Music. Later he finished Officer's Candidate School.
He returned to Yale University from 1947 to 1949 for the completion of his college degree and for religious training at Union Theological Seminary. In 1953 Coffin came back to Yale University, this time to Yale Divinity School for training which would lead him to become an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Career
In the middle of World War II he enlisted in the U. S. army. He emerged as a second lieutenant and was sent to Europe in 1945. Later he served for two years as a liaison officer with the American and Soviet forces. Because of his ability to speak Russian, he allowed himself to be recruited for a three year tour of duty in Europe with the Central Intelligence Agency. In spite of his army-CIA background, the pulpit was a natural progression.
After all, he had been named for his uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, who had been president of Union Theological Seminary for 19 years (1926 - 1945). After becoming a minister, Coffin took a one year job as acting chaplain at Andover Academy. The next year (1957 - 1958) he was the chaplain at Williams College in Massachusetts.
In 1959 he was appointed chaplain at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the position which he held for the following 17 years. The coming of Coffin to Yale coincided with the beginnings of social protest throughout America. Black Americans under the leadership of the Martin Luther King, Jr. had already transformed a segregated bus system in Alabama.
Coffin and his friends were jailed, but the reaction of the Yale faculty and administration was anything but approving that their chaplain had put himself in the position of doing time in a southern jail. Within the next five years, American participation in the fateful Vietnam War increased. At first, the majority of young Americans heeded the nation's call to arms. But as casualty lists lengthened, debate over U. S. policy sharpened and the numbers of people disapproving of America's Vietnam intervention grew.
He helped to establish committees for re-appraising U. S. foreign policy. He was one of the founders of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, a powerful peace group. By 1967 the United States had hundreds of thousands of fighting men in Vietnam. Antagonism to the war within America had moved from verbal protest to outright resistance and to draft-card burning. These were called acts of civil disobedience.
Chaplain Coffin appealed to higher law in October 1967 when he and four other people (Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Michael Ferber, and Mitchell Goodman) received draft cards from men who refused to serve in Vietnam and returned them to the attorney general of the United States. The federal government did not recognize civil disobedience as anything other than the breaking of the law. It promptly indicted them for conspiracy to aid draft resistance. The court refused to permit Coffin and his friends to place the Vietnam War itself on trial, and Coffin was found guilty. He appealed his case, and finally, in 1970, the whole matter was simply dropped.
He flew to Hanoi, North Vietnam, in September 1972 to bring home two prisoners of war who had been released. In 1976 he resigned his post at Yale, and a year later he became the senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City. At Riverside, a church built by John D. Rockefeller, Coffin found a platform for his political ideology. During this time Coffin continued his work with Clergy and Laity Concerned, only instead of focusing on Vietnam, the group worked internationally for arms control.
One of Coffin's more controversial actions occurred in 1979 when he was one of four Christian laypeople to travel to Teheran to visit the American hostages who were being held at the American embassy. Ostensibly, the role of the four ministers was to inspect the hostages and vouch to the world that they were not being mistreated.
In 1989 Coffin left his position at Riverside Church to assume executive directorship of SANE/FREEZE, an anti-nuclear organization later known as Peace Action. In 1990 Coffin was made national president of SANE/FREEZE.
He was given only six months to live in early 2004 due to a weakened heart.
Coffin never harbored any doubt that the anti-Communist foreign policies of the government were wrong. The slaughter of the Vietnamese was for him a positive evil. Coffin was a favorite speaker at anti-war demonstrations in the early 1970.
Coffin sought the dissolution of NATO and the elimination of short-range nuclear weapons. Later in the 1990 Coffin opposed the United States involvement in the Gulf War, and urged the deployment of troops in Bosnia.
Views
His first protest was against anti-Semitism at Yale. His second was to gain the admittance of more African students at Yale. He was successful in both endeavors. Coffin's third protest in the spring of 1961 was to join several other black and white ministers and students for a "freedom ride" on a Trailways bus through Alabama and Georgia.
He was also an ardent supporter of gay rights.
Personality
He was fluent in French and German, mastered the Russian language.
Somewhat aggressively athletic in behavior, young Coffin did not fit the image of a prelate. He rode a motorcycle wherever he went. He played classical piano. Finally, he was fearlessly outspoken in calling attention to discrimination and injustice.
Quotes from others about the person
A. Bartlett Giamatti said of Coffin, "You gave us energy. "Carl McIntyre of the International Council of Christian Churches said, "During the Vietnam years, he contributed to the spirit of surrender that finally gripped our country. "
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
He was influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy.
Connections
Coffin was married three times. His first two marriages, to Eva Rubinstein and Harriet Gibney, ended in divorce. He was survived by his third wife, Virginia Randolph Wilson (called "Randy"). Eva Rubinstein, his first wife and the mother of his children, was a daughter of pianist Arthur Rubinstein. The loss of their son Alexander in a car accident in 1983 inspired one of Coffin's most requested sermons.