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William Sloane Coffin, Yale campus pastor during the 1960′s and prominent liberal, recently died. I looked at a number of obituaries. None of them mentioned that he beat his wife except for David Zincavage’s, which I found via Stromata. Zincavage’s obituary was so damning, though as mildly written as it could be considering its talk about how Coffin fractured his wife’s skull and how all three sets of CIA agents he sponsored behind Soviet lines were quickly caught, that I asked him for his reference. It is William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience by Warren Goldstein, Yale U Press, 2004. Zincavage did not exaggerate, it turns out. In fact, it seems that when he punched his wife that time, it was because she desperately wanted to talk, and he wanted to sleep instead. Here are details of that, as well as other sordid episodes from the life of this celebrated progressive man of the cloth.

… in the middle of one night, Coffin snapped. Unable to respond verbally, and feeling himself at the end of his emotional rope, he reacted primitively, physically. “I used to be a big judo guy.” he explained twenty years later “In the army I taught judo. So I know that the easiest way to take somebody out is to hit them very nicely right across here [indicating the center of the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose] a nice sharp blow like that.” He referred to this as “a gentle way of taking them out.” “I felt absolutely miserable,” he remembered. “Then I carried her back and put her in bed and went out in the woods. … And she felt very penitent about it all” in the morning.

That isn’t the fracture episode; it’s an earlier one. Note how *she* felt penitent in the morning.

Now I understand that Mencken was refererring to the Eastern Establishment in his famous quip that “A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.”

Let us continue:

Late one night in November 1974, they clashed again: “I said ‘Bill, I am scared tonight. Please talk to me.’ ‘I will not talk to you.’ ‘Just sit and listen.’ But I was hitting right at his most vulnerable spot. I said I wanted to talk, and I warned to talk about how I felt, and so forth and so on. And I pestered him. ‘Please, please talk to me. Please, please talk to me. And he went in the other room. And I came in and woke him up again and I said. ‘Please, talk to me.’ . . . I was pretty persistent. I mean, I can’t say that I wasn’t provoking.”

They had been scheduled to see a counselor the following day. Harriet remembered. “And he refused. And that’s when he clobbered me.” He remembers that it was about three in the morning, that she was drunk, and that “she broke a door down to a room where I was trying to sleep. . ,. So I said. ‘What the hell, I’ve got to do this again.’ Only this time it was dark, and I guess I didn’t take quite enough aim.” He understated. He took her to the hospital in the morning. His one judo chop had given her “a huge black eye,” she remembered. “My whole face was swollen.” He had also given her a hairline skull fracture.

Coffin told his friend Arnold Wolf: he told Ron Evans; he told others. Wolf, who could not stand Harriet, said, “We all wanted to hit her. My then wife wanted to hit her.” But when he and Coffin talked, he said, “Coffin, you can’t hit anybody but you certainly can’t hit your wife. You’ve got to get out of the marriage if that’s the way you feel. Divorce yes. Abuse no.” But Coffin did not fully understand the gravity of the situation. He did not think Harriet needed to go to the hospital. “I didn’t hit her very hard.” Wolf remembered him saying in his own defense. To Ron Evans, he was “so terribly remorseful that he had allowed this… to get to the point where he’d struck out.”

It was a measure of the loyalty Bill Coffin inspired in his friends– and Harriet’s isolation– that some were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. For Miriam Horowitz, the question was simple. “When I said, ‘How did this happen?’ she said, `I asked for it.’” When Janet Evans heard about it, her first reaction was, “If Bill had hit Harriet I’m sure he had good reason.” She had seen Harriet in some situations where… if somebody has had a lot lo drink and they’re being impossible and difficult you just say tchew, you know, out of here! So that’s my fantasy.” But the complicity of friends could not hide the fact that Bill and Harriet Coffin were in deep trouble.

Remember from my first quote that Coffin claimed he knew exactly what he was doing when he hit a person. Note, too, the reaction of his friends. It reminds me of how in Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full”, the divorced wife finds that all the friends of her famous and rich husband act as if she doesn’t exist after he divorces her for a younger woman.

Speaking of which, Harriet was the second of his three wives. He was unfaithful to his first wife, Eva. Here’s a story about the vacation trip they took without the three kids, in the hopes of repairing their marriage:

… proved far easier than relating to Eva, for his attentions lay elsewhere. On the way to India their plane stopped briefly in Teheran. While Eva slept, Coffin sneaked off the plane and scrawled a note he gave to a French officer to deliver to Manya Stromberg (by then widowed but still working in the French embassy and well-known to the French community), suggesting a rendezvous in Paris at the end or the summer. Unaware of this remarkable maneuver, Eva wondered all during the trip why her husband seemed even more distant than usual. They visited temples with erotic sculptures and she would go in while “he would sit on a wall and talk to the coconut gatherers or something.” Instead of mending the rift, “there was almost nothing going on between us that whole time.” When she finally read Coffin’s account of this episode in his memoir, the summer finally made sense, “For a forty-year-old man.’ he had concluded accurately, “I might be fleet of foot but I was also very confused.” He did see Manya in Paris. He had “carefully” planned to see her only with Bailey. At “the last moment, however,” he went “an hour early,…

You might think Goldstein’s book is unfair to Coffin, but it seems to have been very well received. Here are some reviews from the Amazon webpage. From Publishers Weekly:

Goldstein captures Coffin’s fervent commitment to helping others as well as his flaws as a husband and father. Coffin remains one of America’s most important cultural figures, and Goldstein’s first-rate biography provides a deeply appreciative and unflinchingly honest tale worthy of its celebrated subject.

Arthur R. Krieck:

This is the third biography I’ve read about a person whom I know well, and I must say that of the three, it succeeds the most at bringing its subject to life. It reads like a long visit with this extraordinary man, and it’s filled with much detail about the rich life he’s lived.

Benjamin Huang:

For those old enough to remember the 1960s, this book will rekindle the embers of your idealism; for those too young, it will provide a primer in how to speak truth to power and translate faith into action. This is essential reading for all who seek to keep alive the tradition of dissent that holds our government accountable to the principles it was founded on, and deliver a thunderous “No” to both injustice at home and the ongoing horror in Iraq.

What is truly remarkable, however, is how glowing are the blurbs by big-name liberals on the back cover of the book:

“Bill Coffin is an American knight, stranger to fear, the visionary’s best companion, a joyfully embattled Christian. his life the richest imaginable. This book is a worthy and moving introduction to his grand transcendent spirit.” Arthur Miller, playwright and author

“Warren Goldstein has given us a brilliantly insightful, richly detailed portrait of one of America’s larger-than-life heroes–a man who, despite terrible blind spots and flaws, managed to breathe passion back into Christianity and high moral purpose into the political struggles of the sixties” Barbara Ehrenreich

“This is an elegantly written biography, a portrait of a complex man negotiating complex times, written by a scholar equal to the task. In many ways this is the best way to see post-World War II America–from the inside out–through the eyes of a flawed humanitarian and restless searcher.” Ken Burns

“History will record Bill Coffin as one of the greatest hearts, great souls, great men of the Western world. Warren Goldstein brilliantly beats history to the punch.” Norman Lear

“To the punch” is perhaps not in good taste when mentioned in connection with the Rev. William “I taught judo” Sloane Coffin. Apparently being a grand transcendent spirit, a larger-than-life heroes, a great soul is not incompatible with being a callous brute.

I won’t go into Coffin’s other flaws much, but let’s switch to the Zincavage obituary I mentioned at the start, and how some of his work benefited Communism. I’m not even thinking about his work as a pastor and leftist later– just his early work, which perhaps benefited the Soviet Union unintentionally, perhaps not:

His most notable contribution to the war effort consisted of successfully sending some 1500 Russian prisoners of war back to death or prison in the Soviet Union….

He returned to Yale as a member of the graduating class of 1949. In accordance with family tradition, he was tapped for Bones. He wrote a senior paper revealingly titled: Notes Towards a History of Bolshevik Trade Unionism. In 1949, he entered Union Theological Seminary, then headed by his uncle, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, also a Yale graduate and Bonesman.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 prompted Coffin to leave the seminary to serve as an Operations Officer with the CIA. Coffin was assigned to recruiting agents from refugee camps for covert entry into the Soviet Union. His first two groups of agents simply disappeared. Pravda ran a front page cover story detailing the capture of Coffin’s third and largest group of agents.

In 1953, Coffin left the CIA and returned to the seminary, this time, however, attending Yale Divinity School. He became famous as a Divinity Student for dashingly riding a BMW motorcycle, and for regaling fellow students with tales of war-time derring-do (stories of parachute drops behind enemy lines and secret missions), and for singing Russian songs.

Goldstein’s book has more detail on some of this. Amazon allows you to seearch it. I’ve excerpted key pages, including those with my quotes above, in this pdf file .

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