Scoop
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/books/review/Shafer-t.html
By JACK SHAFER
Published: October 8, 2009
Ramparts stands with a handful of 20th-century American magazines
Playboy, the Harold Hayes-era Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy and Wired
whose glory days continue to influence editors. Each of these
magazines not only grabbed the zeitgeist but shaped it. If you've
never heard of Ramparts or have only vague awareness of its
significance, Peter Richardson's compact history, "A Bomb in Every
Issue," will assure you of its place in the magazine pantheon.
This San Francisco Bay Area magazine didn't live long, starting in
1962 as a quarterly and expiring in 1975. Its very best pages
appeared between 1966 and 1968: in that short span, it restored the
lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into
journalism, exposed Central Intelligence Agency excesses, helped turn
Martin Luther King Jr. against the Vietnam War, gave radicalism a
commercial megaphone and boosted the careers of such notable
journalists as Warren Hinckle (who gave the magazine its heart),
Robert Scheer (who gave it its brain), Adam Hochschild, David
Horowitz, Peter Collier and Jann Wenner.
Like those other great magazines, Ramparts influenced competitors
across the media universe. Richardson, the author of "American
Prophet," a book about Carey McWilliams of The Nation, credits
Ramparts with inspiring the investigative edge of "60 Minutes" and
says that when The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, "it
was claiming part of Ramparts' territory." It was the magazine Time
loved to hate, calling it "slick enough to lure the unwary and
bedazzled reader into accepting flimflam as fact" in a 1967 article
titled "A Bomb in Every Issue."
Schooling the mainstream media wasn't on the agenda when the
trust-funder Edward M. Keating published the first issue. The
institution in his sights was the Catholic Church, which he hoped to
liberalize by sponsoring a dialogue between the clergy and the laity.
As liberal Catholic literary quarterlies went, it was a worthy
magazine, dispensing poetry prizes and publishing Thomas Merton's
meditations on the gathering black revolution. But it wasn't until
Warren Hinckle, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, jockeyed his way
from promotions director to the executive editorship in 1964 that
Ramparts really became Ramparts. The transformation would prove as
dramatic as if Partisan Review had gone to bed one night and woken up
the next day as Guns and Ammo.
A sensationalist in both life and work, Hinckle liked to second
George M. Cohan's maxim that whatever you do, you should "always
serve it with a little dressing." He looked like a dandy, drank the
way other people breathed, sweet-talked one wealthy person after
another into financing the magazine, spent their money with abandon,
kept a monkey named after Henry Luce in the office, hyped every issue
to the bursting point and, more often than not, produced a magazine
that was worthy of that hype. He was a pirate, as everybody noted,
right down to the eye patch.
Publishing breakthrough articles was only part of the formula,
according to Adam Hochschild. The key, in his words, was to "find an
exposé that major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a
big enough splash so they can't afford to ignore it . . . and then
publicize it in a way that plays the press off against each other."
Hinckle had a partner in this success, a working-class Bronx kid
turned radical academic named Robert Scheer. The duo wasn't so much
Lennon and McCartney as Ringo and George. The rascal Hinckle meshed
so perfectly with the serious Scheer that Jessica Mitford, a
contributor, took to calling them "Hink/Scheer."
Ramparts' first big story came in 1966, when Scheer revealed the
C.I.A.'s partnership with Michigan State University in the training
of police officers in South Vietnam and the writing of the South
Vietnamese Constitution. "Before the Michigan State story, the C.I.A.
rarely received negative press, much less strict oversight,"
Richardson writes. Outraged, the C.I.A. retaliated with a secret
investigation of Ramparts' staff and investors in hopes of uncovering
foreign influence, but it found nothing.
In 1967, the magazine struck again, uncovering the agency's
clandestine backing of the National Student Association, an
organization that represented American students at international
meetings. Unable to stop the scoop, the C.I.A. sought to deflate it
by scheduling a press conference at which leaders of the association
would confess to the connection. When Hinckle found out, he
pre-empted the C.I.A. by purchasing full-page ads in The Times and
The Washington Post touting his forthcoming article. The agency
fought back with even more snooping clearly illegal as it
"investigated 127 writers and researchers and 200 other Americans
connected to the magazine," Richardson writes. Readers loved it:
circulation rose from 149,000 to 229,000.
Traditionally, radical journalism came packaged in the graphic
equivalent of jeans and a work shirt. But the hip, slick and
provocative look that the Ramparts art director, Dugald Stermer, lent
the publication gave even Esquire a case of envy (it tried to hire
him). For the Michigan State article, Stermer ran illustrations of
all the principals dressed in M.S.U. athletic garb. An interview with
Hugh Hefner was accompanied by a foldout featuring Hef. A piece about
assassination conspiracies repurposed a photo of John F. Kennedy as a
nearly completed jigsaw puzzle.
The magazine's success prompted Hinckle to daydream about a media
empire that would include TV and radio stations. He actually got a
Sunday Ramparts newspaper off the ground in 1966, but when it folded
the next year it tossed the young Jann Wenner out of work. Wenner
promptly appropriated the paper's design with Stermer's permission
to serve as the template for Rolling Stone.
Ramparts was very much a creature of the Bay Area's rebellious
climate. It identified with the uprisings at Berkeley, endorsed the
authority-questioning ethos of the Beats (although Hinckle spurned
the hippies) and drew on the region's radical tradition. Scheer even
ran for Congress in 1966, challenging an incumbent liberal Democrat
in a district that included Oakland and Berkeley. (He lost.)
The magazine injected itself directly into local, radical politics
with its sponsorship of the Black Panther Party. "Ramparts made
celebrities of the Blank Panthers," Richardson writes, "and their
star power increased the magazine's cachet." Thanks to the magazine's
sponsorship of the party and Eldridge Cleaver, who became a staff
writer, the Panthers were recognized around the world as revolutionaries.
The Ramparts-Panther romance, which began in 1967, looks naïve today.
The magazine's skeptical radar could penetrate government lies but
failed to detect this violent organization's essence. David Horowitz,
who along with Peter Collier led the magazine after Hinckle was
pushed out in 1969, laments the legitimization of the Panthers and
blames them for the murder of a former Ramparts employee, Betty Van
Patter, who did bookkeeping for the party.
Although Ramparts continued to break important stories that the
establishment press ignored, the magazine didn't glisten after
Hinckle the impresario left. Richardson attributes the decline to a
number of causes. Like all niche-creating magazines, Ramparts
attracted competition that wound up stealing readers; at the same
time, it abandoned part of its audience by embracing New Left
orthodoxy, which "rejected anything short of revolution." The
magazine also ran out of liberal millionaire donors. Its accrued
losses must have run into the tens of millions, making it unlike
pantheon magazines that made money.
The lessons Ramparts taught American journalism are still being
studied wherever investigative reporting is practiced. The magazine
showed that the rarest asset in journalism is picking the right set
of questions, usually the ones nobody else has the sense to ask. This
book satisfies on every level and whets the appetite for a big, fat
Ramparts anthology.
--------
'A Bomb in Every Issue,' by Peter Richardson
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/12/DD9L19T0EK.DTL
Jonah Raskin, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, October 12, 2009
A Bomb in Every Issue
How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America
By Peter Richardson
(New Press; $25.95; 247 pages)
I wrote for Ramparts once - a cover story about the sons of convicted
atom-bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that was published in
1973, not long before the magazine died. But I'd been a reader for
nearly a decade before then. I also knew many of the celebrated
Ramparts writers. During my days in the movement against the war in
Vietnam, and in the hippie counterculture, I rubbed shoulders with
Tom Hayden, Maxwell Geismar, Eldridge Cleaver and San Francisco's
inimitable Warren Hinckle, who made Ramparts into one of the most
raucous American magazines for a few brief years in the 1960s.
Peter Richardson traces the Ramparts story from its innocuous
beginnings as a Catholic magazine to its sad and untimely end. He
names the big names, and a few of the lesser known, describes the big
stories, and suggests the ways that Ramparts influenced the world of
journalism then, and the mass media today. But to argue, as he does,
that Ramparts changed America seems over the top. Maybe that's to be
expected; in its heyday Ramparts exaggerated a lot, and often
presented a cartoon version of politics.
The prose was never flat, the covers never dull, and the photos never
bland. Ramparts grabbed readers by the lapels. It went for the
jugular, stuck its tongue out at the White House, the CIA and the
FBI, and embraced bearded, cigar-smoking guerrillas such as Che
Guevara. But it didn't make a revolution in the staid world of
American reporting all by itself. In 1960s America there were
hundreds of provocative, flashy underground newspapers - the Barb and
the Tribe in Berkeley, and the Dock of the Bay in San Francisco - and
Richardson's failure to discuss them and their influence on
journalism is a serious flaw. In some ways, Ramparts stole the
thunder of those papers.
"A Bomb in Every Issue" is a good title for a book about Ramparts,
but this book doesn't capture the magazine's or the era's wildness,
and irreverence. Granted, the main players are all here; Richardson
offers capsule biographies of most of them. He also tells colorful
stories about the editors' watering holes in North Beach, and how
women were treated - in a word, "sexist" - but for the most part he
doesn't conjure up what it was actually like to be in the thick of
the Ramparts office in 1966, 1968 and 1969. What might have been a
riveting tale turns out to be rather humdrum.
Having said all that, I would add that "A Bomb in Every Issue" could
be useful for today's students and bloggers who are curious about
magazine culture in the United States in the Vietnam era. Richardson
suggests the ways in which Ramparts reflected the era in which it
thrived, and also some of the ways that Ramparts influenced the
larger culture. What's especially eye-opening is the extent to which
the magazine strayed far beyond the confines of traditional
journalism and entered directly into the political fray of the day.
Members of the extended Ramparts family put down the pen and took up
the placard, and perhaps even the gun. Robert Scheer ran for
Congress. Eldridge Cleaver brought the Black Panther Party to the
attention of middle-class white students who decided they wanted to
be hip and black. Tom Hayden spread the gospel of rioting in the
streets. Ramparts provided a home for rebels of almost all stripes,
and for a time it helped to make rebellion seem chic and even glamorous.
Richardson has read the memoirs and the history books. He's
interviewed many of the Ramparts writers and editors, including
Hinckle, Scheer and David Horowitz. He relies too heavily on
Horowitz's view of the 1960s, the Panthers and the magazine itself,
and carelessly repeats rumors and innuendoes about the murder of
Rampart's bookkeeper Betty Van Patter. Real fact checking would help,
and a tad more analysis.
But Richardson has peppered his account with lively comments, most of
them from reporters who cut their eyeteeth in newspapers long before
the 1960s. Jessica Mitford, the daughter of British aristocrats, and
the Bay Area's glorious queen of the muckrakers, said of Hinckle and
Scheer, "Hink/Scheer are the mag, the creators of everything that's
so splendid about it. ... But one does wish they could be a trifle
less Animal Farm-ish about it." I.F. Stone of I.F. Stone's Weekly, a
lone voice in the political wilderness of the 1950s, said, "I've seen
snot-nosed kids like you guys come and go. You're not going to change much."
Eight Ramparts covers from 1964 to the 1970s are reproduced here, and
support the cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words. I wish
the magazine still existed and that Hinckle was editing it. I'd write
for Ramparts again in a flash.
--
Jonah Raskin teaches media law in the communication studies
department at Sonoma State University.
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