'Doonesbury' priest still sees evil lurking

By Michael Betzold
Journal Staff Writer

Sitting at a table in a busy restaurant, the incarnation of the famous Doonesbury cartoon antiwar priest seemed a lot more down-to-earth than his caricature. In fact, in a popular Thai eatery, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin was eating a plate of beef and potatoes. When he spoke it was with bluntness and passion.

"I think this country's in a really deep spiritual recession," said Coffin, visiting the Detroit area recently to speak at an awards dinner for Peace Action of Michigan. "There's so very little righteous indignation about such obvious evil."

For the man who inspired Garry Trudeau to create his counterculture priest Rev. Sloane, the obvious evil in the world today is plain and palpable. Coffin cited the destruction of the environment, the worsening of worldwide poverty and nuclear proliferation as the main threats.

"We're almost hopelessly far behind a schedule that we should have kept if we were serious about saving the planet," Coffin said. "The Cold War has frozen all our thinking for so long that we haven't moved ahead."

Forty years ago when Peace Action was founded as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE, Coffin was still a cold warrior himself. He had been a U.S. Army officer during World War II and for a few years after the war worked for the CIA aiding the anti-Stalinist resistance movement in the Soviet Union.

By the 1960s Coffin's views on American policy had changed. He was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Alabama during the civil rights campaigns of the early 1960s. A few years later Coffin was one of the first clerics to openly aid draft resisters. He was prosecuted but acquitted for violating Selective Service laws. As a minister at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he remained a prominent civil rights and peace activist and was a leader in the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. When the freeze campaign merged with SANE in 1987, Coffin served as the combined group's first national president. It was later renamed Peace Action.

As the widespread public alarm over nuclear overkill in the 1980s gave way to general complacency about nuclear weapons with the end of the Cold War, Coffin remained one of the few voices continually speaking out for nuclear disarmament.

He charges the United States government with being one of the foremost violators of the 1970 nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which calls on the nuclear powers to make good-faith efforts to divest themselves of their weapons. Currently, Coffin says, the five recognized nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France) and three others who have de facto nuclear capability (India, Pakistan and Israel) are practicing "nuclear apartheid."

"The nuclear nations are abrogating to themselves the right to produce nuclear weapons while policing the rest of the world," Coffin said. "This form of apartheid won't work any more than racial apartheid did in South Africa."

To Coffin, the issue is simple: "Either nuclear powers relinquish their rights to nuclear weapons or they must face the fact that other nations will get nuclear weapons," he says. And not just nations, but terrorists. "If research and development continues, we're going to have nuclear weapons no larger than a softball," he predicts, adding that the next Oklahoma City-style bombing could be fueled by plutonium.

Coffin believes it will take a new grassroots movement to produce global disarmament, similar to the movement which has produced an international treaty banning land mines. Coffin cites several signs of progress in the past 18 months. An international commission in Australia produced a practical plan for global nuclear disarmament, the International Court in the Netherlands ruled that nuclear weapons violated international law, President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and 60 retired admirals and generals from 17 nations issued a call for abolition of nuclear weapons.

Most of these events got little coverage in the United States, a place where, Coffin says, "newspapers deliver readers to advertisers and defend the status quo."

Asked why young people haven't gotten involved in the peace movement to the extent they did in the 1960s, Coffin replied: "When the prevailing ethos of a country is 'enrich yourself,' it takes an act of heroism to resist it."

Coffin, who lives in Vermont, still teaches, writes and lectures. He delivered the keynote address at Peace Action of Michigan's second Doug Lent Peacebuilder Awards Dinner. Long accustomed to using practical action to achieve political goals, he still can speak with a preacher's righteous indignation.

"We have neither the intelligence nor the moral soundness to handle nuclear weapons," he charged. "Human fallibility, human sinfulness and nuclear weapons are a lethal combination. People must face the notion that only God has the authority to end all life on this planet. All we have is the power, and that power is not authorized by any tenet of any religious faith. In that light, the mere possession of nuclear weapons is comparable to the possession of slaves 150 years ago."