Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Pres., Center for Defense Information
HOST:
Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr. (USN, Ret.)
Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
SENIOR PRODUCER:
Ira Shorr
PRODUCERS:
Glenn Baker
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
INTERVIEWER:
Ira Shorr
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Daniel Sagalyn
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
821
INITIAL BROADCAST:
5 February 1995
CONDITION OF USE:Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
Center for Defense Information
(C) Copyright 1995, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
MODERN AMERICAN PATRIOT:
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL, Jr.: You will see today the fifth in our series of films on the lives of American patriots. In a remarkable life, this patriot has served America in a number of ways: First, in Army uniform under GEN Patton during World War II, and in the CIA. A stark contrast in a cleric's collar, he has been a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement, and active in nuclear disarmament. His life has been full of challenges and greater achievements. You will find it both inspiring and fascinating.
Rev. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN: "What is faith? Faith is being grasped by the power of love."
Mr. IRA SHORR: William Sloane Coffin's love for justice has been shaped by the great events of the 20th Century. From the Depression to World War II, where he served as an infantry and military intelligence officer, to the struggle for civil rights, where Reverend William Sloane Coffin put himself on the front line as a Freedom Rider, testing the limits of segregation in buses like this one that traveled to Montgomery, Alabama. In the decade that followed, William Sloane Coffin tested the limits of democracy and became a national figure in the movement to end the War in Vietnam.
In the 1980s, as the pastor at New York's prestigious Riverside Church, Reverend Coffin spoke out against the madness of an escalating nuclear arms race and went on to become the president of SANE-Freeze, the nation's largest peace and justice organization. William Sloane Coffin now travels and writes extensively on issues of peace and justice and the role of the church in society. We spoke with him at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Mr. SHORR: In a recent book called "Passion for the Possible," you laid out a message for US churches and you encouraged them to envision a new kind of world and that world was based on three pillars, as I read it. One was a world where there was an end to violent conflict, a world that was free of environmental pollution. And the third pillar was, as you said, "a world in which the yawning chasm between rich and poor would be greatly narrowed."
It's ironic to think that you were born into a very different world. You were born into a world of wealth. As you said, you were one of the children of the ruling class. Where did your concern for social justice spring from?
Rev. COFFIN: There are people in positions of privilege and power who have had remarkable insight as to what was wrong with the society from which they had -- they had derived considerable financial profit. My father was one. And my uncle, who was a minister, was another.
I was lucky enough to be in World War II. Lucky to survive it, but also lucky enough to be in it. I think an awful lot of people are born conservative and have never had an important experience. And values are more caught than taught. And certainly, Vietnam veterans have had a very profound experience and have a very different view of this country and of the world as a result it, most of them.
And it was the same way out of World War II. That as a "good war," as Studs Terkel put it, but it showed me human beings behaving in the most inhumane fashion. And also, occasionally, there was a guy who fell on the grenade there was no time to throw back, so there was the good and the bad. But that was a very profound experience.
Mr. SHORR: You examine some of these experiences more closely. The experience of World War II: You mention in your autobiography that you entered it very enthusiastically. How did you come away from the war and how did your participation in the military impact your life?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I was enthusiastic it for several points of view. One, I thought the cause was just. We had to stop Hitler. Secondly, I loved the physical life and it was very, very physical.
And there's a real fairness in the military sometimes, maybe less in peacetime. But in wartime, there's a basic fairness. People are sharing their last K-rations, their last pair of dry socks. They're really pretty decent to each other. And enlisted people, as long as they say "sir," at the end of the sentence, can say almost anything they want to the officers except "no." But, you know, it's -- it's the good life, it was for me, in many cases, age 18, 19, 20, 21.
But, you're right. At the end of the war, I was very chastened by all the violence and I was well aware of the problems that seemed absolutely overwhelming at the end of the war. Solutions cause problems, and the solution of war caused all kinds of problems. The rebuilding of Europe, which actually we did quite well with the Marshall Plan. But I was much chastened after the war.
Mr. SHORR: Did it make you doubt whether the war was the way to solve international conflicts?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I went into war thinking, you know, that those who want to keep their hands clean end up with no hands. That there's such a thing as irrelevant righteousness, and pacifism struck me that way. The end of the war, I began to wonder if fighting fire with fire didn't just leave more ashes. But I wasn't a convinced pacifist at the end of the war, no.
Mr. SHORR: You said that your ability to sing two Russian songs altered the course of your life, and that it took you in a different after the war. What was it about being able to sing two Russian songs that --
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I convinced a drunk commandant of Russian descent that I was terribly gifted for languages. And so, he agreed that I should come to this school, which was for those who already spoke Russian, and I had told him in three months I can learn it, you know, being very cocky. So, that was the agreement. And if I hadn't been able to sing those two Russian songs, he never would have thought I could learn Russian.
And then, in Czechoslovakia, as the Russian liaison officer, and then in Germany -- I was GEN Patton's Russian interpreter -- I kept on working every night with a displaced person doing Russian history, Russian literature. It was wonderful.
Mr. SHORR: Indeed, that led you to working with the CIA after the war was over in the early 1950s. What was your participation with the CIA about?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, in my two years as a liaison officer with the Russian army in Czechoslovakia and Germany, I saw that Stalin was the only person around who occasionally could make Hitler look like a Boy Scout. There were about 20 million displaced persons in Germany after World War II. One million Russians did not want to go back.
Mr. SHORR: And so, you worked in the CIA --
Rev. COFFIN: When the CIA was basically trying to help patriotic, anti-Soviet Russians start something political underground. We were dreadfully unsuccessful and it probably was a bad precedent, but that's what we were trying to do.
Mr. SHORR: From your involvement in war, from your --
Rev. COFFIN: You see, I was absolutely right about the Soviet Union being evil. I was a little bit too optimistic about my own country.
Mr. SHORR: What do you mean by that?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, it takes a sinner to catch a sinner, but we thought we were vastly superior to the Soviets. Actually, when you look at the number of invasions that the United States carried on, let's say, from the end of World War II and compare it with the Soviets, we outdid them in imperialism.
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.
Mr. SHORR: Was your entrance into the ministry, in a sense, a door into more active political involvement?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, yes. I didn't go into it for that reason. I went in because I was really compelled by scripture. But social justice is at the heart of the Gospel.
Mr. SHORR: Now one of those unjust structures that you worked against was segregation in this country and you participated in the "Freedom Rides," the so-called "Freedom Rides" down South, went to Montgomery, Alabama. There was very striking image in your autobiography about getting into Montgomery, being taken by Ralph Abernathy to his home and, upon entering the house, coming upon a six-year old, who was a child of one of the parishioners at Abernathy's church. Describe that experience and what it meant to you.
Rev. COFFIN: Well, we were a mixed group, black and white, but I was the first one into the house. It was chaos outside. The crowds were always trying to beat us over the head and throw rocks at us. And we walked in and this six-year old looks up at me and he says, "White man, are you going to hurt me?"
I said earlier we're born conservative and hadn't had an important experience. That's a very important experience. See, that -- You can't have an experience like that without changing from giving intellectual assent to the proposition that all people are created equal to feeling the monstrosity of inequality, and that's qualitatively different. And that kid did wonders for me.
You know, I fell down on my knees and threw open my arms and said, "Come on, that's the last thing in the world I'm going to do. You're not going to hurt me, I'm not going to hurt you. Come on, let's -- let's hug each other," you know. I'll never forget that kid. He did wonders for me.
Mr. SHORR: Now here is somebody who had fought very patriotically as a World War II soldier and you were on the other side in regards to the Vietnam War. Why?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I think, basically, after World War II, you could say the United States went from isolationism into interventionism without passing through internationalism. And you could say the same thing of the Soviet Union. They went from isolationism into interventionism without passing through internationalism. And I was very much upset by that time about the tremendous amount of intervention.
I've already mentioned Iran and Guatemala then, but what about landing in the Dominican Republic, landing Marines in Lebanon, and the War in Vietnam was just the latest of a long series of interventions. And then, of course, it was the largest -- the largest intervention.
But I was getting worried that the United States was arrogating to itself a right it would never accord any other nation; namely, the right to decide who lives, who dies, and who rules in Third World countries thousands of miles away. Anybody who knew anything about that situation, anyone who cared enough to do his homework, was patriotic enough to see that good Americans weren't asked to die bravely in a bad cause should have known that this was an enormous mistake.
Mr. SHORR: And yet you must have been called anti-American for what you did in opposition to the Vietnam War --
Rev. COFFIN: Oh, yes.
Mr. SHORR: You committed civil disobedience, you were indicted for promoting draft resistance.
Rev. COFFIN: Right. But I'm -- I'm a patriotic American who knows his American history. And I often used to say, particularly to groups of veterans who were always out to disrupt meetings, "Let me remind you that Abraham Lincoln, when he was elected to the House of Representatives, stood up in 1847 and said the war against Mexico was unnecessary and unconstitutional. Now hands up. How many of you think that Abraham Lincoln was unpatriotic?" And nobody put up their hand.
I said, "All right. So, it's possible that you can love your country and oppose one of its wars. You oppose American practices in the name of American beliefs. You oppose the president in the name of the American presidency," and so forth.
Mr. SHORR: During the 1980s, you were minister of Riverside Church, in New York, one of the nation's foremost churches, and you brought that church into the nuclear arms race issues. What moved you to say that the church should be involved with issues like the nuclear arms race?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, only God has the authority to end life on this planet. All we human beings have is the power. And as our power to do so is so clearly not authorized by any tenet of the faith, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, the mere possession of nuclear weapons struck me as an abomination in the sight of the Almighty comparable, let's say, to the mere possession of slaves 150 years ago. And the analogy could be pressed because, 150 years ago, the conversation went between those who said we must humanize the institution of slavery and the others said, no, we have to abolish it.
So, in the 1980s, the discussion was between those who said we must limit the horrible, horrible fallout of these weapons of mega-destruction -- the neutron bomb, for instance, destroyed people but not property, the perfect capitalist bomb, I suppose you could say -- and those who said, no, we should abolish every last weapon from the face of the earth. So, I saw this clearly as a religious issue, clearly as a religious issue, just as I see the environment as clearly a religious issue, and just as I see the matter of rich and poor clearly as a religious issue.
Mr. SHORR: We're in the post-Cold War world. The Soviet Union is history. The United States remains now as the world's military superpower. What do you think the role of the US military should be right now in the world?
Rev. COFFIN: If I were President Clinton, I would say to the Joint Chiefs one of your primary responsibilities is to tell me how I can lead the world in responsible disarmament. Because the fact of the matter is, the lesson of Somalia is that they're not going to run out of weapons -- they're not going to run out of ammunition for 20 years. The whole world is awash with weapons. If the nuclear powers don't get serious about disarmament, they have to face the fact that any country in the world that wants nuclear weapons eventually is going to get them.
Mr. SHORR: And what is getting serious mean? The US and Russia have said we'll get down to 3500.
Rev. COFFIN: US and Russia, right. We've got the start down, START I and START II. You know, now let's have another. Let's get 50 percent reduction. Come on. Another 50 percent reduction after that. Let's just keep moving. We don't need nuclear weapons, don't need nuclear weapons, basically. Now that takes a lot of thinking, but let's start thinking if we really need them, and so forth. The same would be true of chemical weapons and biological weapons.
And then it comes to conventional weapons. Well, the world would be a lot safer place if we could really cut back on conventional weapons. I would like, for instance, for church folk the world around -- and let's throw in Muslims and Jews to make it really good interfaith -- to call on governments of this world to do two things.
One, do not promote foreign policy goals through the sale and transfer of weapons. That should be a moral no-no. And it used to be we didn't do it. But now we can't go into Saudi Arabia to defend the Kuwaitis without promising the Saudis
$23 billion of shiny new American weapons. That should be the first moral no-no.
The second one should be an old idea come around again: Weapons shouldn't be sold for commercial profit. Here is Bishop Tutu in South Africa calling on the South African government to dismember its military-industrial complex, even though in an economically bad time in South Africa, exports of military weapons are very important for the South African economy. Tutu is doing exactly what an Episcopal bishop should be doing. In this country, we haven't begun to face this.
Mr. SHORR: People would say, okay, great, the United States could stop, but other countries will continue to sell, so what good is it going to do?
Rev. COFFIN: No. No, that's the whole point. That we need to monitor, publicize the sale and transfer of weapons in the same way that the slave trade was cut off. Slavery -- The first step against slavery was to cut off the slave trade. And the first step against massive military arsenals is to cut off the arms trade.
Now the UN has now been authorized to monitor and publicize all sale and transfer of arms. That's a recognition that what we're talking about is pretty serious for the world community. So that would be one thing I'd ask the American military.
The other thing I would say to the American military, look, we can't be top cop, okay? And we can't ask other people to give their troops to some international UN police force and then say but we can't do that, we're superior, we're not going to put our troops ever under the command of somebody at the UN, that's for other people. I mean, that's what Gingrich is saying. That's what Jesse Helms is saying. We're superior. America is an exceptional country. We don't have to behave the way other countries do. That's not right. That's not going to wash.
So, we ought to be willing to put in our defense budget an item to fund an international police force, or a share of it, and we should be willing to put our troops at the service of a UN force, which would probably be commanded by an American anyhow.
Mr. SHORR: Now to those that are opposed to investing more in UN armies or a UN standing police force, I guess the argument is that the United States loses some of its ability to act for its own national interest if we give up some of our military power to an international body.
Rev. COFFIN: But an international police force would be doing American interests; it would be doing everybody's interests. Let's put it this way. Just as today the states have the right to invade the privacy of the family to protect people from child abuse and battered wives, things like that, so the international community needs to have proper authorization to intervene in the internal affairs of a country to prevent gross violations of human rights.
Now in the country, we don't say, 'well, we'll allow your family to go into that family and straighten them out.' No, it has to be a larger body doing that. And then the same way in the international community. It has to be a larger body, not one nation going and straightening out another nation. The interna- tional community has to be the one charged with trying to do something about the depredations of nationalism, and racism, and ethnocentricity, all of which will be vastly easier when the world is disarmed, significantly disarmed.
Mr. SHORR: What was your position on the use of the US military or the use of military in Haiti, for example, as a way to resolve the conflict in that country?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I certainly thought that once -- once you have the UN reaching an agreement with a country like Haiti, then that agreement's got to stand. And that meant that when they broke the agreement last October, a year ago October, that was the time for the UN to act, and it didn't. That would have been the time for the -- if the United States was going to assume responsibility to send Carter, Colin Powell, Sam Nunn down to Haiti, say, 'Look, we'll pave the exit path with roses, but you got to go. You got to go.'
Now I happen to think that the United States did the right thing in Haiti for all the wrong reasons. It would have been far preferable had it been originally an international force, but if -- and I know this is very tricky. We're a Grenada away from a disaster. By the time you air this program, we may have hit that disaster. But, so far, that occupation of Haiti, peaceful occupation of Haiti is paying off. It's paying off. So, basically, I'm for -- If it had been an international body taking this action, I would have thought that would be far preferable than to have a national action doing it.
Mr. SHORR: And how do Americans benefit if there's a stronger international peacekeeping presence or a stronger UN, more able to resolve international conflicts?
Rev. COFFIN: All right. If we moderate national sovereignty by accepting disarmament with stringent international inspection, on-site inspection without right of refusal, we moderate national sovereignty by disarming, with everybody else
-- with everybody else. We moderate national sovereignty by signing the Montreal Protocol, which says we're going to move against the "greenhouse effect," the whole world has to move against the "greenhouse effect" or the whole world will lose the ozone layer.
Mr. SHORR: And, of course, a lot of people would hear that and say, 'Boy, are you an idealist' and 'you're not in touch with the real world.'
Rev. COFFIN: Right. Right. I would argue that's the way some people felt at the end of the War of Independence. The thirteen states decided to govern themselves by the Articles of Confederation. Well, the Articles of Confederation didn't work. They mirrored the problems of the time, they didn't solve the problems of the time. So, our spiritual forbearers, to their great credit, abandoned the Articles of Confederation for the sake of a constitution which demanded that the states abandon a certain amount of their independence for the sake of a stronger, more effective whole. And the states were well-served by accepting the Constitution and abandoning the Articles of Confederation.
The analogy holds now for nation states and the world. The nation states will be well-served if they begin to moderate their national sovereignty for the sake of global loyalty.
Mr. SHORR: You said that your visits to Africa and Nicaragua were "born again" experiences for you. What did you mean by that?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, I think it was seeing a kind of unquenchable spirit alive and well among inhabitants living in terribly harsh, not to say cruel conditions. Now you don't have to go to Nicaragua or Africa. You can go in the inner cities in our country and see very much the same thing.
Mr. SHORR: And you have seen the connection, or -- or you make the connection between war and poverty, as Martin Luther King did at the Riverside Church.
Rev. COFFIN: If all the money's going to go into military budgets, it's not going to be available for other things. What would do more perhaps for our society -- Well, there are so many things, it could do so much. But just take something like job training.
Industry ought to be training people for jobs; industry's not about to do it. All right, let's see if we can give them some incentive. We will offer you tax incentives if you will train people for jobs. We will offer you tax incentives if you will provide jobs. For every hundred jobs, you get a tax deduction. But we aren't doing that. Then we say, 'well, then the government's got to provide job training.' 'Oh, no, we haven't got the money for that.' But if you didn't put all that money into the military, you'd have money available. I'm not saying that money solves everything, but, boy, you have a hard time doing anything without some money.
Mr. SHORR: What keeps you optimistic that change can come? You've worked against some very tough issues for many decades. We're in a tumultuous time as we approach the year 2000. What keeps you optimistic that positive change can happen?
Rev. COFFIN: Well, first of all, I'm more hopeful than optimistic. Hope being a state of mind independent of the state of the nation. The opposite of hope is not pessimism, but despair. And if we can keep despair at bay and just keep the faith, despite the evidence, knowing that in only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. But, in a way, over the long run, there is room for a certain amount of optimism.
I was thinking the other day that the whole course of American history has been to make the Constitution more consonant with the Declaration of Independence: All people are created equal, in value, that is. The Constitution has 26 amendments. Two of them deal with prohibition. One of them deals with the judiciary, that's 1795. Three of them deal with the presidency. All the others, all 20, whether it's granting freedom to slaves, votes to women, eliminating the poll tax, instituting the income tax, lowering the voting age, allowing residents of D.C. to vote for the president, every one of them mandates an extension of democracy.
The whole course of American history can be seen as a whole journey of very difficult social struggles in order to make democracy more vibrant, more just, to make what's legal more moral. And it is of some importance that often, when what now seems self-evident was initially ridiculed and resisted, church people were found where the fighting was fiercest, because they understood that the mandates for justice are really at the heart of the gospel.
Mr. SHORR: Reverend Coffin, thank you very much.
Rev. COFFIN: My pleasure.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
Center for Defense Information
(C) Copyright 1995. Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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