Bill Coffin's mug shots after his arrest for civil disobedience in Montgomery, Ala., May 25, 1961.
Bill Coffin and I came to Yale in fall 1958, he as chaplain and I as freshman. At the ceremony to welcome my class (1000 males—coeducation at Yale, though only a decade off, was unthinkable), he stood out from all the other academics in dark blue robes because of his straight-shouldered leanness, youth (33), good looks, and smile. I had no idea who he was but I felt like smiling back. He was introduced and gave the invocation. My mother, in the balcony and more sensitive to eloquence than I, thought his prayer the best thing said all morning. “There wasn’t anything specifically Christian about it,” she said. “It was about courage and facing up to challenges.”
Later that semester, Coffin spoke to the 120 boys in the freshman program I was in. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and tie. I was again impressed by his muscularity and the ease with which he vaulted up to the stage. He made a joke about the vault, saying he was getting too old to do it. “I was in sports car last week,” he said. “Hardly could get in. Saw what it was like to return to the womb.” I remember nothing else he said, but I do remember thinking that he used his black-framed glasses and his occasional slurring of words to offset the overwhelming impression he gave of physical strength and beauty.
Still later that fall, he had an evening Q&A with our program. By then I would have heard that, before Yale, he had been chaplain at Williams College for a year and that the president had been glad for him move on because Coffin had attacked as undemocratic the College’s all-powerful fraternity system. Amazingly to me now, none of us boys asked Coffin about his past. I never heard him speak of his infantry service and spy work in World War II or his three years with the CIA at the start of the Cold War. I remember that he said of Yale “You’re in a place where people ask ‘What do I need to know to be certain?’ and would never think of asking ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” And later: “Look, if you guys want to go out and lay every woman you can, that’s fine,” though he was telling us there was a better way to live. I was amazed he would permit us such liberty.
In 1959 or ’60 or ’61 I learned that Coffin and some of the boys gathered around him in the campus chapel, Battell Hall, were going as “Freedom Riders” to border states like Maryland and further south. They put their bodies on the line, nonviolently, to try to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, and hotels that didn’t serve Negroes. As a well-brought-up northern liberal, I opposed segregation, but I don’t think it occurred to me to join Coffin. If it did, I rejected the idea out of cowardice, not wanting to be arrested (Coffin was three times) or beaten up by the lunatics, as I thought of them, down south.
At the end of my undergraduate years I went to see Coffin during his open office hours. I was now grown up, 22, married, and I found life to be just as I had expected: desperate, sad, and boring. I was prepared for this by my temperament and, certainly no less, by the literature classes I'd taken. Sophocles and Shakespeare, Melville and Chekhov—all the greats demonstrate that suffering is inescapable, there being no forgiveness from the responsibility of fate and time. Students more sensible than I shrugged off this knowledge as soon as they left the classroom. I believed it. I felt it deep within me.
Not only did literature teach me that life was tragic, it taught me how to respond to tragedy. With stoicism. With unembittered resignation. I was so good at doing this I got the idea that perhaps I should go into religion. Though he didn't say so, Coffin was annoyed that I, not a member of his church, of any church, was bothering him with my problems. Didn't I know he had important things to do? He folded into a soft chair across the room and listened with impatience while I wondered aloud whether I was religious enough to go to divinity school. I said—and how long it took me to get it out—that, though I wasn't at all sure I believed in God, I knew I was looking for Him. "Have you ever thought that maybe God is looking for you?" Coffin said.
I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to seem swell-headed (was I important enough for God to look for?) or too humble. It struck me as a good idea for God to be on the lookout for people since otherwise, if God really tried to hide, no one was going to find Him. "I don't know," I said. "That hadn't occurred to me. It's a nice idea." It was Karl Barth's idea, but I didn't know this.
I remember another thing from our interview. Coffin was talking about one's vocation when he said, with great feeling, "What we hope to avoid is being in the position of the man who, on his wedding night, suddenly realizes he married the wrong woman." "My God!" I thought, "he knows!" Then, "But he can't."
When I returned to Yale for graduate school in 1968, Coffin was nationally famous for leading the fight against our war in Vietnam. With Dr. Spock—the Dr. Spock—he had been convicted of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid to draft. In 1970, their convictions were overturned on appeal, and the NYT ran a front-page photo of Coffin just after he got the news while playing tennis. He was smiling, sweating, and holding a racket. By then he had divorced his first wife, the mother of his three children, and announced his engagement to his second in a curious press release that mentioned her first husband’s success as head of Encyclopedia Britannica sales in Japan.
I next encountered Coffin in his 1977 memoir, Once to Every Man, which I read to find out what happened to that first marriage, because his wife had been the pianist Artur Rubinstein’s gorgeous daughter Eva, who played Anne Frank’s sister in the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Coffin didn’t discuss their problems but he did say something that helped me justify to myself my later getting a divorce. He said, though not in these words, that he had come to realize that he wasn’t as special as he’d hoped—indeed, wasn’t special at all. If other people sometimes needed to divorce, there was no reason for him to think he would escape.
In 2002, I saw Coffin when he officiated at the memorial service for his friend R.W.B. Lewis, the Yale professor who’d been my mentor. Coffin was suffering the heart problems that killed him, his hair was white, and he walked with a cane in one hand and with his third wife holding his other arm. But his welcoming smile was unchanged. In the service he spoke about why death was necessary, giving several reasons. The one I remember was environmental: we had to make room in the world for others. If no one died, then “no Aaron Copland. No Dick Lewis. No you. No me.” He was smiling.
I know I am not the only Yalie between age 50 and 65 for whom his death comes as a reproof. Coffin lived boldly, involving himself in the great public questions of his day—civil rights, Viet Nam, nuclear-war planning. The world could easily have done without me. It was damn lucky to have him.
