I, for one, never happened to see a reverend with a madras tie before Bill Coffin. But then, most things about Yale's galvanic chaplain don't quite match the stereotyped trappings of the traditional man of the cloth.

For example, your garden variety cleric usually isn't a CIA-trained expert on Russia. Nor has he been instrumental in organizing a movement which profoundly affected the fabric of American society (the freedom rides of the early '60's.) Nor does he yet harbor a secret desire to be a concert pianist.

A robust six-footer, beginning to succumb to a follicle defoliation and a corpuscle accumulation, Coffin radiates a certain bon vivant, I'll-lick-any-man-in-the-house love of live. Whether charging long at full speed, cracking a joke, or intently explaining his latest scheme to some vaguely conspiratorial group, his leg slung over the side of the armchair, this exuberance oozes from him.

It didn't develop over night, as a peek at his biography will show.

Graduated from Andover in 1942, Coffin spent a year at the Yale School of Music, then entered the wartime Army, where after 1945 he served as liason with the French Army, until he left in '47. Returning vet Coffin promptly whooshed through Yale in two years, zigged to Union Theological Seminary for one, zagged to the CIA as a Russian specialist for three (by now we're up to 1953); at last he decided that Yale Divinity School was where the right questions were being asked, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1956.

After one year as Andover's Chaplain and a second at Williams College, he came home to roost at Yale, where he's been ever since.

But though he may have settled down physically, he hardly settled down to a quaint life of wondering about the nature of God and worrying about the lack of enthusiastic interest in the four part Sunday afternoon seminars on God and man at Yale.

He simply decided that example is the best sermon. Rather than talk about the evils of racial prejudice, he took a seat on the first freedom ride and ended up in jail. He was one of the most effective recruiters for Aaron Henry's 1963 FDP campaign in Mississippi. When Russian studies professor Frederick C. Barghoorn was detained in Russia, he organized the protest.

Since 1964, he has been talking about Vietnam from the pulpit; on a State Department sponsored trip to India in 1964, he told the people to "pray every night to whomever you pray that Goldwater will not be elected," a move which led William F. Buckly Jr. to accuse him of prayermongering. As one Yalie put it, "whenever anything came up, he'd be there, making a meaningful commotion."

Not unexpectedly, he receives a lot of criticism for his actions, a great deal of it from within his own Church. "Sure I get criticized on this...but the only hope of the Church is to make itself relevant. It gets upset about free love, I get upset about free hate. It's one thing to say let justice flow, another to work with irrigation...If you visit a guy in prison, he's interested in a job when he gets out. If you're really concerned you gotta get involved with the problem of unemployment."

When he isn't off on some twentieth century crusade, Coffin tries to spend about four hours a day dispensing hard-headed advice to those who seek his counsel. He also thinks a lot. Early this summer he found himself "kind of in a funk" thinking about Vietnam.

As he tells it, "I had a hunch that the next big push after civil rights and poverty would be in the area of international affairs. I thought about the possibility of having a new kind of program with the breadth and depth of the civil rights movement. But the problem was to find a focal point...Where is the logic of the present policy most vulnerable? What in foreign affairs was the equivalent of a Mississippi lunch counter?

"After talking it over with quite a few people, I finally decided that the whole China question would be the place to start." Coffin whipped up a draft of his ideas and sent it around to an impressive list of selected political thinkers in and out of the government.

"The answers," he remembers, "that came back were all the same. It's a great idea but you can't leave out Vietnam."

What we had to do was put the present Vietnam logjam into the context of the main problem of U.S. Asian policy, the failure to deal effectively with China.