‘60s Peace Activist Looks to ‘90s for Major Changes

William Sloane Coffin Jr. is still steaming over Newsweek’s having dubbed him “the Last Peacenik” as if he were the human relic of a bygone era, the quaint personification of love beads or charred draft cards.

He keeps repeating the term in angry disbelief. It is such a cute and cynical summation of the man and his mission, he said. Coffin is especially irked by the implication that his relentless commitment to global harmony qualifies him as a contemporary Quixote.

“I’ve done my best work in the last 20 years,” he boomed, raising his hands to the heavens, preacher-style. “I just haven’t made as many headlines.”

In fact, Coffin feels no consuming affection for the days when his visage, words and deeds were prominently recorded in every newspaper in the land. There was such a wealth of theater then--so many slogans yet so little substance or staying power.

“That’s why I never talk about Vietnam. Never,” said the man who assisted so many in resisting that bloody conflict.

Besides, Coffin insisted, the future is so much more inspiring than the past. He is not one of those predicting a resurgence of ‘60s values in the ‘90s. He foresees something altogether different. And better.

“Nothing creates a grass-roots movement like anxiety--except hope. Hope that we could actually do something,” he said. “In that sense, the ‘90s could be terrific. I think there could be a movement toward really serious disarmament.”

In fact, the nuclear-freeze movement, whose central organization, SANEFreeze, Coffin heads, has watched its momentum dissipate along with the public’s fear of Armageddon. With Gorbachev preaching glasnost and weapons cutbacks, mutual annihilation seems more remote and a freeze less urgent.

But visionaries need visions, and it is Coffin’s job to sustain his followers with his own.

He speaks convincingly of new coalitions among peace, environmental and anti-poverty activists. Nuclear proliferation not only threatens the existence of the planet, he said, but drains funds from housing, medical care, education, job training and food for the poor. America cannot house the homeless because it spends so much housing its missiles, he says.

“We’re all really sitting in each other’s laps right now,” he said of the once-disparate social movements.

Coffin also pointed to the dawning of a global consciousness that will only intensify as the ozone layer deteriorates and temperatures around the world rise. “There are practical reasons why nations are going to have to pull together,” he said. “We’re being forced to become more global in our outlook and our actions.”

If all else fails, change will come out of economic necessity. Defense is not a growth industry. Eventually, middle-class citizens will begin to realize that building bombs drives up deficits and taxes and jeopardizes their own jobs and financial security.

“People will do the right thing only after exhausting all the alternatives,” Coffin said.

For all his talk of practicality, Coffin, a former Yale chaplain and minister at New York’s Riverside Church, remains motivated by his deep religious beliefs. America’s “sin,” he said, is its “delusion of national righteousness,” its “messianism.”

“Only God has the authority to end life on this planet; all we have is the power.”

And with a sense of perspective that tends to escape those more bound by the here and now, he has the audacity to set grandiose goals and the patience to measure success in the smallest of increments.

He spoke of a severely disabled woman who has devoted her life to political organizing among North Carolina’s rural poor.

“I see extraordinary people doing extraordinary things every day,” he said.

“Justice is like a sea tide, oncoming.”