William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924 to 2006) was a chaplain at Yale University from 1958, a Freedom Rider in 1961, one of the defendants in the Boston Five draft-counseling conspiracy case, and senior minister of Riverside Church in New York from 1977 to 1987. He was born on July 1, 1924, to a father who was a vice president of W. & J. Sloane, the Fifth Avenue furniture store.¹ He was a member of Skull and Bones in the class of 1949 and served with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1950 to 1953, working with Russian émigrés in West Germany.²³⁴ He died at his home in Vermont on April 12, 2006.⁵

The Sloane and Coffin families

The firm that gave the family its fortune was started by William Sloane, who was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1810 or 1811 and came to the United States in 1834. He worked for nine years in the carpet house of Thompson and Company in Spring Street, then started his own business at 245 Broadway opposite City Hall, and a few years later admitted his brother John to a partnership under the name W. and J. Sloane.⁶ The firm moved to 501 Broadway, about 1856 to 591 Broadway, and in 1867 into buildings of its own at 649 to 655 Broadway, before moving north to Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. John Sloane left the firm about 1864 without a change of name. By his death on May 23, 1879, William Sloane had taken his four sons John, William D., Henry T. and Thomas C. into the business, and he was a director of the Bigelow Carpet Company and of Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company. His will left his Bigelow stock to his widow.⁶

His daughter Euphemia Sloane married Edmund Coffin, a merchant, in New York City on February 3, 1874. Their sons were Henry Sloane Coffin, born January 5, 1877, a Yale graduate of 1897, and William Sloane Coffin, born April 15, 1879, a Yale graduate of 1900.⁷ The younger son was the father of the subject, and the elder the uncle. Another of William Sloane's sons, Henry Thompson Sloane, entered Yale in the class of 1866, was a partner in the firm from 1873 and its treasurer from 1906 to 1925, and gave Yale a recitation building and physics laboratory in 1883 and, with his brother William Douglas Sloane, the Sloane Laboratory of Physics in 1912. His published biography lists his college societies, among them Skull and Bones.⁸

Antony C. Sutton's index of members lists four Sloanes: Henry Thompson Sloane under the class of 1866, Thomas Chalmers Sloane under 1868, William Sloane under 1895 and John Sloane under 1905. It lists Henry Sloane Coffin under 1897 and William Sloane Coffin under 1900.⁹¹⁰ In Sutton's chart of what he called The Order, the Sloane family appears among the families of new wealth under the heading "Retail," in a list that runs from the Rockefellers and Paynes through the Harrimans and Davisons to the Weyerhaeusers and Pillsbury.¹¹ Ron Rosenbaum wrote in 1977 that the subject was "a descendant of an aptly named family with three generations of Bonesmen."¹²

Wayne Andrews's 1941 history of the Vanderbilt family calls William Sloane "the carpet magnate" and describes his third son, William Douglas Sloane, as "unremarkable, although charitable." William Douglas Sloane married Emily Thorn Vanderbilt, the second daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt. In 1886 he gave $200,000 to a maternity hospital at Columbia University, and his wife presented $250,000 for the enlargement of the building. Sloane died in 1915 at the age of seventy-one. Andrews lists their children as Florence, who married James A. Burden Jr. and then Richard Tobin; Edith, who married John Henry Hammond; Lilian, who married W. B. Osgood Field; Malcolm Douglas Sloane, who married Elinor Lee; and William Douglas Sloane Jr. In 1920 Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane married Henry White, who had served as United States ambassador to France and Italy.¹³

A 1922 Military Intelligence Division file in the CIA reading room records that Major Churchill of the Army's G-2 wrote to a Mr. John Sloane at Fifth Avenue and 47th Street about contacts with the foreign representatives of reputable firms. Sloane replied that he would be glad to cooperate, and in March 1922 he offered to have G-2's economic estimates of countries including Siberia, Turkey and Japan criticized.¹⁴

The subject's father, William Sloane Coffin Sr., became president of the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum's Bulletin lists William Sloane Coffin as president in its March 1933 issue, after the trustees' meeting of February 20, 1933.¹⁵ The memorial minute the trustees adopted on December 18, 1933, describes him as trustee, treasurer and first vice-president after the death of Robert W. de Forest before he became president.¹⁶ George Blumenthal was elected on January 9, 1934 to fill "the office left vacant by the death of William Sloane Coffin."¹⁷ The 1961 profile of the son calls his father a vice president of W. & J. Sloane, Inc., and the president of the museum's trustees.¹

Henry Sloane Coffin was a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary from 1904 to 1909, associate professor of pastoral theology from 1909 to 1926, minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1905 to 1926, a Fellow of Yale University from 1921 and president of Union from 1926; the reference entry gives his parents as Edmund Coffin and Euphemia Sloane.¹⁸ Sutton's text gives him a professorship of practical theology at Union from 1904 to 1926 and the presidency from 1926 to 1945, and calls the seminary "a key penetration" of The Order.¹⁹ In another passage Sutton wrote that "a Robert Taft and a William Buckley on the right" are just as important to "the fundamental change desired by The Order" as "a William Sloan Coffin and a Harry Payne Whitney (who financed the left)," and that "Their conflict is essential for change."²⁰

The 1987 feature on the subject describes him as "a member of the W. & J. Sloane furniture family, whose ancestors go back to the Pilgrims on his mother's side."²¹ Catherine Butterfield Coffin raised her three children alone after her husband's death in 1933, according to the Washington Times profile of January 1988. The same profile says that the uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, wanted the boy in prep school. Bill was enrolled at Deerfield Academy at his uncle's insistence, and his mother arranged for him to take a year off to study piano and harmony in Paris.²²

Youth and the Army

Coffin attended Deerfield and then Phillips Academy at Andover, before going to Yale to major in government.¹²² At Andover he was a classmate of George H.W. Bush; a 1988 profile of Bush says the two were also fellow members of Skull and Bones and "took separate paths afterward."²³ He joined the Army in 1943.¹ The 1958 announcement of his Yale appointment described his wartime service as an infantry officer in Europe and a liaison officer with the French Army.³ A 1961 CIA reading room profile describes him as a skillful pianist and an enthusiastic gardener, fluent in French and Russian.¹

Plattling

After the war Coffin served as a young Army officer at Plattling, Germany. The Washington Times profile says that the arrangement made at Yalta had provided for each side to return the other's citizens, and that Soviet soldiers who had deserted faced certain death if returned. Unaware of their fate, a group of these soldiers invited Coffin to a party on the eve of their return, and the profile says he was not ignorant of their doom. In his autobiography Coffin recounted that when a Soviet commandant bid him goodnight he almost blurted out "Get out quick!" but did not, and instead "drove off cursing the commandant for being so trusting." The next day the operation began, and the profile says Coffin watched several Soviet soldiers kill themselves by cutting their throats on broken windows.²² The autobiography says that his part in the operation "left a burden of guilt that I am sure to carry the rest of my life." Asked about it in 1988, he said: "That was a major tragic mistake."²²

The draft reciprocal agreement that the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved on February 8, 1945 provided that Soviet citizens liberated under American or British command "will, without delay after their liberation, be separated from enemy prisoners of war," and kept apart until they were handed over to Soviet authorities.²⁴

The CIA, 1950 to 1953

Coffin graduated from Yale in 1949 and entered Union Theological Seminary that autumn. A 1958 profile in the New Haven Register reported that he studied for the ministry at Union in 1949 and 1950, spent the years until 1953 in Europe with the Central Intelligence Agency, and in 1954 returned to Yale to complete his preparation for the ministry. The article added that because of the secrecy surrounding the work the chaplain did not discuss that phase of his career, and quoted him as saying that he had served as a liaison officer with the Russian army after the war and knew the language.²⁵

Tim Weiner wrote that in early 1950 Frank Wisner ordered a new assault on the Iron Curtain, and that the job went to "another Yale man in Munich, by the name of Bill Coffin, a new recruit with the special anticommunist fervor of an ardent socialist." According to Weiner, Coffin came to the agency through a family connection, recruited by his brother-in-law Frank Lindsay, Wisner's Eastern Europe operations officer. Weiner quotes Coffin, from a 2005 interview: "I said to them, when I went into CIA, 'I don't want to do spy work, I want to do underground political work.' The question was: can Russians operate underground? And that seemed to me quite morally acceptable at the time." Weiner adds that the postwar repatriations had left Coffin with a great burden of guilt which influenced his decision, and quotes him: "I had seen that Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy Scout. I was very anti-Soviet but very pro-Russian."⁴

Weiner wrote that Wisner placed his money on the Solidarists, a Russian émigré group, and that only the handful of CIA officers who spoke Russian, like Coffin, could work with them. In Weiner's account the agency and the Solidarists first smuggled leaflets into Soviet barracks in East Germany, then launched balloons carrying pamphlets, then sent four-man parachute missions in unmarked airplanes as far east as the outskirts of Moscow, and the agents were hunted down, captured and killed one by one. Coffin told Weiner, long after he left the agency: "It was a fundamentally bad idea. We were quite naive about the use of American power."⁴ Weiner also wrote that Lindsay, who had run Eastern Europe operations from headquarters, resigned in anguish after the collapse of the Polish resistance operation and told Dulles and Wisner that scientific and technical means would have to replace covert action, because "quixotic paramilitary missions to support imaginary resistance movements could not push the Russians out of Europe"; he dates Lindsay's report, "A Program for the Development of New Cold War Instruments," to March 3, 1953.²⁶ Weiner cited a retrospective in the Nixon-era 303 Committee record for the agency's later view that "assistance to the émigrés for the eventuality of war with or revolution within the USSR was unrealistic." The memorandum, dated December 12, 1969, says that anti-Soviet émigrés had been regarded as an important potential asset in the early postwar years, "at a time when fear of eventual if not imminent war with the USSR was very real in the West," and that they were wanted to staff anti-Soviet activities and "serve generally as a reserve for a possible war emergency."²⁷

Other accounts of the same work come from a library biography and from Coffin's own words. The Burns Library at Boston College describes his expertise in Russian as leading to "a three-year period as a CIA agent in Germany training operatives for subversive operations within the Soviet Union."²⁸ The Washington Times profile of 1988 links his decision to "spend three years in the CIA, opposing Stalin's regime" to the Plattling operation and quotes his later written view: "I now think it is unwise of the CIA to topple regimes of other countries, no matter how rotten they may be."²² In a 1967 television interview he said: "I have been three years an agent for the CIA, and I think I'm well aware of the dangers of Communism."²⁹ A 1987 feature refers to "his anti-Stalinist work for the CIA in the 1950s" and to his "fluency in French and Russian."²¹ The 1958 announcement says that during the Korean War he served abroad with the Central Intelligence Agency.³

R. Harris Smith's 1972 history of the OSS and CIA describes Coffin as one of the liberals Allen Dulles set out to bring into intelligence work, "a CIA officer in Eastern Europe" twenty years earlier. Smith quotes Coffin, from Jessica Mitford's account of the Boston trial: "Stalin made Hitler look like a Boy Scout. I was very strongly anti-Soviet. In that frame of mind I watched the Korean War shape up. But I didn't follow it too closely, or question the causes. When I graduated from Yale in 1949, I was thinking of going into the CIA, but I went into the seminary instead. After a year at the Union Theological Seminary, when war with the Soviet Union seemed to be threatening, I quit to go into the CIA, hoping to be useful in the war effort." Smith adds that Coffin "remained with the Agency until 1953," and quotes him: "The CIA financed the non-Communist left; they gave with minimal strings attached. In those days, I had no quarrel with American policy, but, in retrospect, I wouldn't be so innocent and smirchless."³⁰

Frances Stonor Saunders listed Coffin among the prominent members of "the P source," her term for the agency's connection with the Ivy League, in which she called James Jesus Angleton "the vital link," and wrote that Coffin was recruited by Allen Dulles. In the same passage she named Archibald Roosevelt Jr. and his cousin Kermit Roosevelt among "Coffin's Ivy League recruits."³¹ A 1987 speech by Robert M. Gates, then the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, lists Coffin among academics who joined the agency. It says he left the Union Theological Seminary to join the CIA for the duration of the Korean War, before becoming chaplain at Yale, and that he recalled joining because "Stalin made Hitler look like a boy scout."³²

Later statements by Coffin on the period are reported by others. Mark Tooley quoted him as saying "Even as I was getting out of the CIA, the CIA was overthrowing Mossadegh in '53 in Iran; the next year the Arbenz government, duly elected in Guatemala, et cetera, et cetera."³³ Sutton wrote that Coffin "spent three years with CIA and then became a leader of anti-Vietnam war activity."³⁴

Skull and Bones

Rosenbaum's 1977 article in Esquire describes Coffin as a CIA Bonesman who later led the antiwar movement. Rosenbaum wrote that Coffin "headed for the C.I.A. not long after graduation from Bones," and that "the man Coffin tapped for Bones, William F. Buckley Jr., was himself tapped by the C.I.A. the following year." Rosenbaum wrote that when he tried to reach Coffin about CIA recruiting in Bones, he was told that Coffin was "in seclusion," writing his memoirs. Rosenbaum asked whether William P. Bundy and Buckley, "both of whom went into the C.I.A. after leaving Bones," had found the society's experience useful as "training for the clandestine trade."¹²

A 1977 Newsweek review of Coffin's memoir, Once to Every Man, says that "Skull and Bones called him brother," and that the author had made "a mission to Hanoi" after his arrest for helping undergraduate draft resisters at Yale. The same review asks how he reconciled his Christian studies with "his concurrent decision to train agents to kill for the CIA."³⁵ The 1988 profile of Bush records that Coffin and Bush were both members of the society.²³ Sutton's text calls a Boston Five defendant "Henry Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49)," but the appeal opinion names him William Sloane Coffin, Jr.¹⁹³⁶

Union Theological Seminary and the Yale chaplaincy

Coffin studied divinity for a year at Union and was graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1956, when he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church.¹ Union's chapel was the site of his marriage in December 1956 to Eva Rubinstein, a daughter of the pianist Artur Rubinstein; the same profile gives the marriage as lasting from 1956 to 1968 and records a second marriage to Harriet Harvey from 1969 to 1980.²² A 1977 review states that Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr taught him theology, that Arthur J. Goldberg defended him in court, and that Erik Erikson psychoanalyzed him.³⁵

The appointment of Coffin as Yale chaplain, effective July 1, was announced on March 17, 1958, when he was chaplain of Williams College. The announcement identified him as a nephew of the late Henry Sloane Coffin.³ On March 27, 1958, Dulles, then director of the CIA, wrote to Coffin about the appointment.³⁷ The 1987 feature gave his Yale tenure as eighteen years.²¹ The Washington Times called him "Yale's freedom-riding chaplain," and recorded his friendships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young.²²

In September 1964 Buckley wrote in his column "On the Right" that Coffin, who had urged Americans to pray for the defeat of Barry Goldwater, had been on a speaking tour of India whose salary and expenses were paid by the United States government.³⁸

In March 1966 Coffin was listed as co-chairman, with Norman Thomas, of a National Voters' Pledge Campaign on Vietnam, whose advertisement invited readers to speak their minds on the war.³⁹ In March 1967 Armando Chardiet, a professor at Southern Connecticut State College, called Coffin and two correspondents of the New York Times, Harrison E. Salisbury and Herbert L. Matthews, "useful idiots" for the Communists in a talk to the Civitan Club. The New Haven Register reported that a colleague, Irving J. Stolberg, took "strong exception" to Chardiet's remarks and called Coffin "a fine symbol for American youth."⁴⁰

The Freedom Ride

In May 1961 Coffin joined a Freedom Ride with three white theology professors and three Black students. The group had met at Yale before leaving, and at that meeting Coffin criticized Southern ministers for failing to support the riders. The riders were arrested in Montgomery, Alabama and released on bail. In 1961 LIFE described him as a World War II veteran and a member of the Peace Corps Advisory Council. In his account for LIFE, Coffin wrote: "As Christians and Americans we couldn't not go on the Freedom Ride."⁴¹ In 1960 he had served with a Crossroads Africa group that built a community center in Mamou, Guinea.¹

The Boston Five

A grand jury in Boston indicted Coffin, Benjamin Spock, Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman and Marcus Raskin in January 1968 for conspiring to "counsel, aid and abet" registrants to evade service. Time reported that the charge carried up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, and that Coffin had collected draft cards at a rally at the Arlington Street Church and later turned them over to the Justice Department. It quoted Coffin on the day before the Pentagon march: "If they are now arrested for failing to comply with the law that violates their consciences, we too must be arrested, for in the sight of that law we are now as guilty as they."⁴² The prosecutor's papers at the Burns Library include a December 16, 1967 letter from Coffin to the FBI with an inventory of draft cards.⁴³

According to the appeal opinion, the case grew out of discussions among "a number of academic, clerical, and professional persons" in August 1967 that produced "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and a cover letter requesting signatures, signed by Spock, Coffin and two others. Coffin, Goodman, Spock and others spoke at a press conference in New York City on October 2, 1967 to launch the Call. On October 16 a draft-card burning and turn-in took place at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, arranged by Ferber and "participated in by Coffin."³⁶ The press conference was chaired by Coffin. Goodman advanced a companion paper, signed also by Coffin, entitled "Civil Disobedience Against the War."⁴⁴ The court wrote that Coffin "not only spoke but assisted in the collection of draft cards" at the church.⁴⁵ The indictment charged a single count of conspiracy under section 12 of the Military Selective Service Act of 1967, and a fifth defendant was acquitted.³⁶

Coffin was represented on appeal by Arthur J. Goldberg of New York.⁴⁶ Time reported in June 1968 that an all-male jury found Coffin, then 44, guilty together with Spock, 65, Ferber, 23, and Goodman, 44, that Raskin, 34, a former White House disarmament aide, was acquitted, and that the trial had run for 19 days. Coffin responded with the remark "I think they have confused the lightning bugs with the lightning."⁴⁷ A CIA situation report of October 18, 1968, lists fall antiwar activities and notes that Spock and Coffin had been invited to speak at one of them.⁴⁸

On July 11, 1969, the First Circuit Court of Appeals opened its opinion with the sentence "We reverse." It held that the verdicts were set aside and the judgments vacated, ordered judgments entered for Spock and Ferber, and stated that "a new trial is ordered for the defendants Goodman and Coffin."³⁶⁴⁹ Judge Coffin, who the court noted shared a surname with one of the defendants, dissented in part and would have granted acquittals to all appellants.⁵⁰

Riverside Church and SANE/FREEZE

Coffin became senior minister of Riverside Church in 1977. The 1987 feature describes Riverside as across the street from the Union Theological Seminary where his uncle had been president. Its critics in the church's Men's Class included Bryan Sterling, who acknowledged writing a newsletter editorial that accused Coffin of mismanagement and called Riverside a "notorious den for politicos of the left." The feature lists among the programs his opponents disliked a sanctuary for a Guatemalan refugee family and a fellowship group for gays and lesbians. In the interview he said, "Justice is central, not ancillary, to the Christian faith."²¹ In July 1982 Coffin wrote to the Rev. B. S. Hruby asking that The Messenger, the unsigned newsletter that the 1987 feature associates with the Men's Class, be printed and mailed from outside the church. He said that its personal attacks on staff and church members had continued after an agreement to stop them.⁵¹

In July 1987 Coffin announced that he would resign effective December 31 to head a new disarmament organization in Washington called SANE/FREEZE, formed from the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.²¹ The Washington Times reported in January 1988 that he had become the first president of SANE/FREEZE and that its top priority for 1988 was passage of the INF treaty.²²

The Tehran Christmas visit

At Christmas 1979 Coffin went to Iran with William Howard, president of the National Council of Churches, and Thomas Gumbleton, an auxiliary bishop of Detroit. They held Christmas Day services for the hostages in Tehran and carried 33 messages to the families of hostages. The clergymen said they had the names of 43 hostages they had seen inside the embassy, while the State Department contended it was "quite positive" there were 50 prisoners. Coffin offered a theory that captives using double identities might account for the difference, and the dispatch noted that he had worked for the CIA before becoming a minister.⁵²

Death

Coffin died at his home in Strafford, Vermont, on April 12, 2006, at the age of 81.²⁸ The university announcement of his death records that from 1991 to 1995 he was the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School.⁵