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April 13, 2006
When William Sloane Coffin ’42 came to Andover in November of 2003 to accept the 23rd Claude Moore Fuess Award, the school’s highest honor given to PA alumni for distinguished contribution to public service, he walked with a halting step, and his speech was slurred, a result of surviving a stroke. But he addressed the assembly in a robust preacher’s cadence about subjects that were his passions: nonconformity, criticism, conviction and patriotism. Sadly, that voice was silenced on April 12, 2006, when he succumbed to congestive heart failure at his home in Strafford, Vermont. He was 81.
Speaking out about what he saw as his country’s flaws drove Coffin for more than 40 years as he lectured, protested and debated the most politically powerful issues of the late 20th century in the United States, among them the war in Vietnam, racism, nuclear arms, and gay and lesbian rights.
He first gained national prominence in the sixties, when, as a chaplain of Yale University, he led student anti-war activists to protest the Vietnam War by resisting the draft, and he also carried out acts of civil disobedience to protest racial inequality. As a “freedom rider,” one of a group of activists who rode interstate buses in the South to protest segregation in interstate bus travel, he was arrested and jailed. His activities in protest of the Vietnam War catapulted him into the headlines and into America’s conscience after his arrest in 1968 (along with Dr. Benjamin Spock ’21) on charges that he conspired to counsel draft evasion. He was tried and convicted, but the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the conviction.
A scion of wealth and privilege, Coffin pursued music at Andover and Yale and planned a career as a concert pianist. He studied with Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copeland’s teacher in Paris. His first wife, Eva, with whom he had three children was the daughter of virtuoso Artur Rubenstein.
Coffin interrupted his musical studies at Yale to enter World War II, a conflict he considered just and one he has said he was “lucky to be in and lucky to have survived.” After attending a Russian language school in Germany, he was for two years, a liaison officer to the Soviet military in Czechoslovakia and Germany and General George Patton’s Russian interpreter. In Germany, his assignment was to help with the forced repatriation of anti-Stalinist Soviet soldiers who had switched to Hitler’s armies before they surrendered to U.S. forces; many committed suicide rather than return to the Soviets. These experiences seared the horrors of war into his mind and left him, he said, with a lifelong burden of guilt. He returned to Yale in 1947, changed his course of study and graduated with a BA degree in government in 1949. He worked after that for short period as Protestant chaplain at Andover.
When the Cold War intensified, he worked for the CIA for three years to establish an anti-Soviet underground movement in the Soviet Union, but the effort ended in failure. After receiving a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale in 1956, he served as chaplain of Yale for 18 years.
Still in activist mode into his old age, he was arrested in 2000 for protesting the Catholic Church’s policy on homosexuality when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops held its meeting in Washington, DC.
Many awards have been bestowed on Coffin over the years, including 25 honorary degrees, and he is the author of numerous books. Credo was published in 2004, and his most recent book, Letters to a Young Doubter, was published last year.
He is survived by his wife, Virginia Randolph Wilson; a daughter, Amy; a son, David; a brother and sister; three grandchildren and two stepchildren.
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