Once to Every Man, by William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
Bishop, Joseph W. Jr.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Once to Every Man, by William Sloane Coffin, Jr." denizens of different worlds, the spaceship takes off as ceremoniously as it arrived, and all is well in the galaxies. A half hour of this sublime space processional gave me the uncomfortable...
...The future course of the Reverend Mr...
...Perhaps because the qualities that distinguish the Reverend Mr...
...He would be leaving behind the cruel and suffocating atmosphere of official Soviet anti-Semitism for surroundings where he and his fellow Soviet Jews could freely pursue a healthy Jewish life...
...Otherwise, all that the technical wizardry succeeds in doing is drawing attention to itself...
...In a good science-fiction movie, like Star Wars, the extraordinary special effects are seemingly effortless and are used as instruments in achieving a larger goal, that of telling an adventure story...
...Brooks' recording, "The Two Thousand Year Old Man," his monologue in the short film The Critic, and his first full-length film, The Producers, rank with any of the great comic achievements...
...Another lesson he might have drawn from this traumatic experience is that good conscience does not command active and enthusiastic efforts to bring about the abandonment of millions of unwilling people to a regime which we knew then, and know even better today, to be quite as brutal as Stalin's...
...His major activities in his thirties and forties were, of course, his civil-rights and Vietnam crusades...
...Indeed, he claims that his belief that conscience may justify disobedience of constitutional laws or lawful orders had its genesis in 1946, when he participated in the forcible return to Soviet control—which meant torture, death, or, at best, years in concentration camps—of several thousand Russian defectors who had been captured fighting for the Germans...
...Mr...
...His role in the Army and the CIA was to train other men for danger and death...
...So it is unfortunate that so little of his comic talent has found its way to the screen...
...Despite Israel's democratic appearance, he writes, "there is a complete blanket of purely totalitarian power exercised by one or, at the very best, a group of related socialist parties...
...As Coffin came to realize, rather late in the day, "the peace movement was no longer peaceful...
...After several inspired but uneven movies, Woody Allen seems to have realized the importance of some sort of structure, as his wonderfully comic character study, Annie Hall, attests...
...Coffin, following his emotions, was right about the civil rights of blacks, although I am not sure that the tactics he and his friends adopted did as much to promote that cause as did those of quieter people...
...something tells me that the black faithful might have preferred their own pastors and their own brand of Christianity...
...As these problems have intensified—during a period roughly equivalent to the time Mr...
...His statement that he "came to realize that the belief that Christ is Godlike is less important than the belief that God is Christlike" leaves me in the dark as to his belief in the divinity of Christ...
...Afterwards, the Soviet Union did permit the first large groups of Jews to leave for Israel, and among the emigres was Ephraim Sevela, one of the heroes of the February sit-in...
...everyday Americans—Legionnaires, hard hats, insurance salesmen, cops, low- and middle-level corporate executives—and he certainly shows very little understanding of them and their often conventional or conservative beliefs...
...He dimly perceives the dilemma and attempts to resolve it, first, by portraying the rulers of North Vietnam as patriotic, courteous, reasonable, patient, and humane (he has a good deal to say about the criminality of American actions in Vietnam, but nothing about the numerousmassacres and other violations of international law committed by the North Vietnamese), and, second, by arguing that the United States refused to negotiate a reasonable compromise settlement of the war...
...In fact, considering his frequently expressed contempt for things material, Coffin seems to have had his share, or more, of amenities like summer cottages at Squam Lake and islands off the coast of Maine...
...At the time of his departure, Mr...
...Once they had done so, he deplored their basing the defense on legal rather than political issues, thus depriving him of an opportunity to deliver some stirring anti-war sermons from the witness stand, and complained, with more justice, of the fees they charged...
...The vision of a just and global future," apparently to be organized by such as Ramsey Clark and Cora Weiss and, of course, himself, "beckons insistently...
...Arthur Goldberg's $25,000 for arguing his appeal was probably a special cut-rate, but Gold-berg's discount prices are like a sale at Cartier' s .) The traits that marked his youth persisted and grew stronger in middle age...
...The sad thing is, however, that Israel turned out to be not only not as good as our dream but scandalously below acceptable standards...
...Sevela's career as an early Jewish activist testifies to the sincerity of his purpose and lends weight to his judgment...
...He is totally disenchanted with Israel and speaks with the utmost despair about his own fate and that of the Jewish people...
...Coffin sincerely detests the Russian variety of Communism, of which he saw a good deal as an Army liaison officer immediately after World War II and thereafter as a CIA 30 The American Spectator March 1978 agent...
...It is not that his enumeration of the difficulties of Israeli life is fanciful...
...I find his grapplings withthe insoluble (at least for Christians) problem of evil no more enlightening than those of other theologians...
...Facile descensus Averno, and there was a short and slippery slope from such harmless theatricals as burning draft cards to "trashing," arson, violent interference with the freedom of speech of supporters of the war, and even bombing and murder...
...It contains much that I did not know...
...What he calls "the thinking public" is limited to members of the Peace Movement...
...Sevela's book does in...
...But the idea that conscience may justify the violation of constitutional laws played a much larger part in the anti-war movement...
...I can testify from personal experience that some of the people whom he regards so affectionately commonly preferred personal abuse to reasoned argument and often displayed little concern for the legal rights of people so benighted as to disagree with them...
...The idea that a negotiated compromise was possible is simply a delusion, though it was probably shared by Kennedy and Johnson, if not by Nixon...
...To my thinking, zap-gun and laser fights are just about the only good reason for going through all the trouble of simulating space-age mechanisms, just as, as Dwight MacDonald once said, the only good reason for making an ancient Roman spectacular is the opportunity for one or two orgy scenes...
...it is simply wrong to equate the CIA, even at its worst, with the KGB, as he regularly does...
...Yet to recognize these problems is hardly an exceptional achievement...
...12.95 Hillel Fradkin In February 1971, twenty-four Soviet 1 Jews staged a sit-in and hunger strike in the reception hall of the Supreme Soviet...
...The former excuse is largely based on a guided tour of Hanoi, in the course of which he seems to have believed whatever he was told (including the Prime Minister's statements that there would be "no reprisals" in South Vietnam and that there would be an "interim government of national concord"), never asked any embarrassing questions, and never asked to see what his hosts did not choose to show him...
...Complexities are not for Coffin...
...By devoting a .large part of the book to a description of his life in Russia, he takes care to impress upon the reader that he speaks from a privileged podium...
...he quotes verbatim and from memory a great many glowing and unreserved oral tributes paid him by various maestri...
...Simply put, it is boring to watch a spaceship hovering and blinking above an observation platform when it could be doing something interesting like decimating the platform and terrorizing the countryside...
...I think it not impossible that he may yet see the great truths of Episcopacy and wind up in such congenial company as that of the Right Reverend Paul Moore, with mitre, crozier, pectoral cross, and the rest of the gaudy regimentals of an- Episcopalian bishop...
...I was not personally acquainted with Coffin and knew almost nothing of his private life...
...He lays claim to a privileged perspective in another respect,as well...
...founded, the result of extreme credulity in a mythical Israel created by the imagination of Soviet Jews...
...But such reasons for opposing the Kennedy and Johnson policies in Indochina had little to do with justice or morality and certainly did not require a friendly view of North Vietnam...
...Thus, the handles of George Patton's famous revolvers were of pearl, not silver...
...Certainly he is not an atheist, nor even an agnostic, and equally certainly he is not, though nominally a Presbyterian, an orthodox Calvinist or an orthodox Christian of any variety...
...That was not his fault...
...I find less convincing his reasons for giving up, in order to accept the chaplaincy at Andover, then at Williams, and finally at Yale, his purpose of ministering to a slum parish...
...Silent Movie made me wish I was watching Buster Keaton...
...Sevela spends the other major portion of his- book describing and evaluating these defects...
...On strictly prudential grounds, a rational man might have concluded, as many did, that no national interest of the United States justified wading into the morass...
...Nor are the problems of Vietnam thoroughly analyzed by the simple, dogmatic, and dubious assertion that the United States had no "moral right to intervene massively and unilaterally in the civil affairs of South Vietnam and [no] legal right to bomb North Vietnam without so much as a declaration of war...
...Like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Silent Movie, Brooks' latest film is a series of gags loosely linked together for the purpose of parodying a familiar movie genre...
...That issue was not prominent in the civil-rights campaign, which rarely involved any violation of constitutional laws...
...Coffin are more attractive in a young man than in one of riper years, I liked best the early chapters, dealing with his life, his adventures in the Army and the CIA, and his amours, up to the age of about 30...
...This view has been given the lie in the The American Spectator March 1978 31...
...But his subsequent pictures (Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie), the ones that seem to have secured most of his current following, have all been feeble exercises compared with his early work...
...Coffin himself never advocated violence, but he has few harsh words for those who did...
...The Cambodian Communist state seems actually to be more murderous...
...It was obvious then, and is still more so today, that North Vietnam would never accept anything less than the total subjugation of the South...
...There he can be counted on to make life more rewarding for the religious editors of the Times and other papers, to say nothing of the TV camera crews...
...Ephraim Sevela / Gateway Editions, Ltd...
...The problem of sustaining comedy for ninety minutes or more without the benefit of a strong plot or character has rarely, if ever, been solved...
...I have no doubt that, if he had been given the chance, he would have been a gallant combat officer...
...and hallelujahs, and also gratifying sales, among the true believers in the Gospel of Uplift, confirms the impression of him that I formed at the time...
...Sevela finished writing his book...
...Israel has been afflicted, especially in recent years, by the problems of bureaucratic and economic inefficiency, political graft, social and economic divisiveness, and the hostility of Arab neighbors...
...Sevela's judgment is his discussion of Israeli political life...
...thus, the anything-for-a-laugh rationale behind the humor of High Anxiety is ultimately self-defeating...
...For if it were limited to his critique of Israel, it would be at best an uninteresting book and at worst a dangerous and pernicious distortion of the character and problems of Israeli society...
...fact have two themes...
...I was neither—at best (or worst) I was a member of what George Orwell, describing his own background, called "the lower upper middle class" —but I knew and was intrigued by several specimens of the breed...
...There is also a good deal about the noble and self-sacrificing things that, for various reasons, some beyond his control, he never gets around to doing...
...He did not need, andshould have resisted the prompting of his vanity, to make the point by quoting General Eisenhower's praise of the aggressive way in which he trained infantry replacements in France...
...Now Brooks spoofs the master of suspense...
...It also omits some things that I knew (such as his 1970 observation that the New Haven trial of some Black Panthers for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a suspected informer was "legally right but morally wrong," which led me to wonder whether he meant that the kidnapping, torture, and murder were legally wrong but morally right), but on the whole it strikes me as a reasonably frank and accurate portrait of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a subject to which the author has evidently devoted a great deal of attention...
...Brooks' newest film, High Anxiety, is no exception...
...There may also be some significance in the fact that Coffin was a rich kid, a genuine member of the American upper class...
...still more importantly, the slaves could not possibly have been freed if the Union had not been saved...
...His carelessness about a number of minor facts is symptomatic of his approach to serious issues of fact...
...Now, six years later, Mr...
...Hitchcock is funnier...
...The laws of statistical probability suggest that one who acts largely on the basis of intuition, impulse, and emotion will be right about as often as he is wrong...
...As a relative newcomer to Israel, he (along with other Soviet Jews) can see its defects more clearly than most Israelis, who he believes have become so inured to life in Israel as to be indifferent to or unconscious of its faults...
...In the decade that began in the early sixties, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale University, almost daily adorned and enlivened the front pages and the tube...
...The most dramatic example of the intemperate and false character of Mr...
...His virtues, which are of the heart, and his weaknesses (I will not say "vices"), which are mainly of the head, can be shortly summarized...
...There is much in these pages of the young Coffin's passion for athletics, foreign languages and countries, and especially music...
...Atheneum / $12.95 Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...Although he claims religious conviction as a basis for most of his controversial actions, it is not easy for a reader (especially one who, like me, has been an agnostic since infancy) to figure out just what his religion is...
...But it may be significant that there is not much about ideas and books, other than Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski, of whom his reading seems to have been largely a by-product of his interests in Russian and (in the latter case) religion...
...At the time I said, in a couple of magazine pieces that were rather less admiring than most of his press coverage, that he struck me as a generally goodhearted and engaging fellow, but one not much given to rigorous analysis or hard thinking about hard problems...
...But he rejects this notion...
...The Producers was, and still is, genuinely outrageous, precisely because the antics of Bialystock and Blume always remained within the realm of possibility...
...In the first place, the Constitution commanded Lincoln to save the Union, but left emancipation to his and the people's conscience...
...At one point he even resorts to having someone blurt out "Bulls--t," presumably for irreverent comic effect...
...Two early sequences in Close Encounters are along more traditional science fiction lines and they put Spielberg's uncommon melodramatic skills to good use...
...Even if all the gags were ingenious, over a long stretch the effect would still probably be tiresome...
...Coffin's evangelism is not entirely clear...
...Coffin has precisely nothing to say about events in any part of Indochina since 1975...
...When Steve McQueen said it to Robert Vaughn in Bullitt, I can remember there was quite a stir...
...I suspect that he took to Holy Orders largely because they gave him so good a platform from which to preach his version of morality...
...good case could be made for Mel Brooks being the funniest man in the country...
...In particular, I think he was wrong about civil disobedience...
...Once to Every Man, which will undoubtedly generate a chorus of hosannas Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale University...
...Many of them were, but many were not...
...Criticizing Abraham Lincoln because "he was more committed to political union than The American Spectator March 1978 29 to the loftier goal of emancipation" suggests a very inadequate understanding of both Lincoln and the Civil War...
...The problem with Mel Brooks' new everything-goes comedies is that everything is expected...
...If doctrine is so unimportant to him, Que diable allait faire dans cette galere...
...The target this time around is the Hitchcock thriller...
...Sevela looked forward with high hopes to his new life in Israel...
...Neither are shades of gray...
...The nature of his strong but fuzzy religious belief would not matter, of course, were it not for the fact that he is, after all, an ordained clergyman, franchised to counsel believing...
...Sevela does consider the possibility that he is to blame for his great disappointment, that his fantasies about Israel so impaired his judgment that he was incapable of recognizing Israel's virtues...
...Duty has called him to an even snugger harbor, the cure of souls at the Riverside Memorial Church...
...His emotions and intuitions served him better in the civil-rights movement than they did in the much more complex and doubtful problem of Vietnam, where there were at least two sides to every question...
...He also hoped to see realized there his political and social ideals, ideals he had learned as a member in the Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) but which in the Soviet Union proved to be only a shameless and hypocritical facade...
...Similarly, when he set out to get himself jailed for counseling resistance to the draft, and Nero (in the unlikely person of Ramsey Clark) tried to throw him to the lions, he seems to have been rather easily persuaded to plead Not Guilty and let his lawyers get him off...
...Each scene is practically a skit unto itself, and without such distractions as developed personalities and overall logic, the punch lines quickly become mechanical and predictable...
...Like the vast majority of autobiographers, he doesn't give himself any the worst of it—as he says, "there was no point in being too harsh on oneself'—but he is as honest as most and more so than many...
...I can see no reason for Coffin's readiness to believe, and even participate in the staging of, North Vietnamese propaganda, when he would never have done as much for Stalin or even Khrushchev or Brezhnev, except his extraordinary ability to believe what he wants to believe...
...But when the material is often amateurish and sometimes simply stupid, as in High Anxiety, the effect is all the more wearisome...
...Since The Producers, Mel Brooks has followed the reverse pattern: He seems to have forgotten what he originally did so well...
...In fact, they formed the major themes of the most recent Israeli election campaign, which was well underway before Mr...
...The purpose of this unprecedented public display of dissent was to demand the right of free emigration to Israel...
...BOOK REVIEW Farewell, Israel...
...Brooks forces and contrives situations to fit pat punch lines and continually depends upon outrageous shock gags that are neither shocking nor outrageous...
...Byron White was the Deputy Attorney General, not an Assistant Attorney General, under Robert Kennedy...
...In Israel he would be able to escape from such hypocrisy and achieve his highest personal ambition, to be an honest man...
...It is a happy circumstance that Mr...
...The most salient of the latter are vanity, intellectual laziness and its corollary—a lack of skepticism, self-righteousness (particularly in his later years), and a deficient sense of humor...
...But it was probably just as well...
...Although the Close Encounters notion of benign aliens is clearly admirable for its optimism and peace-lovingness, feisty aliens are more entertaining, and much less disappointing...
...He left Yale, fearing that it was too much of a "safe haven," but again the slum parish eluded him...
...The former include physical courage, energy, humanity, frankness, and friendliness...
...A half hour of this sublime space processional gave me the uncomfortable feeling I was spending the evening in church rather than watching a sci-fi movie...
...The hawks were quite as irrational and quite as "moral" as the doves, for they saw the American involvement as an effort, like the "police action" in Korea, to prevent a totalitarian regime from taking over a somewhat less totalitarian neighbor by brute force...
...Coffin, on the other hand, does not seem much interested in common, vulgar...
...he keeps using such phrases as "in touch with a deeper reality" and "religious truths [are] probably apprehended on a deeper level than they [are] comprehended...
...Nevertheless, I missed him when he left Yale and the spotlight, and not entirely for the same reasons that the Sioux mourned the passing of the buffalo from the range...
...Christians on spiritual matters...
...They were willing to palaver in Paris, so long as that seemed likely to persuade the United States to withdraw, but that was all...
...the replacement depot to which he was sent in World War II was at Lichfield, not "Litchfield...
...Eugene V. Rostow was Under Secretary of State, not Assistant Secretary...
...BOOK REVIEW Once to Every Man: A Memoir William Sloane Coffin, Jr...
...Sevela has spent in Israel—they have become the standard fare of public and private discussion...
...He seems to have thought that all his fellow evangelists, including even the likes of Daniel Berrigan, were gentle, thoughtful, and scholarly humanitarians...
...It did not occur to me to envy them, any more than a cat curses its fate because it is not a lion, but as exotics they and their habits interested me greatly...
...He intended to be a concert pianist and perhaps might really have become one...
...Sevela finds these hopes to have been cruelly unHillel Fradkin spent last year in Israel as a research fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem...
...Watching Young Frankenstein made me wish I was seeing a Universal horror picture...
...His life was a happy whirl of marches, rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, press conferences, and TV spectaculars...
...But that was ten years ago and now that sort of language is about as startling as "Stick 'em up...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
