A Review of A Bomb in Every Issue

A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

by Peter Richardson, 247 Pages, The New Press, $25.95.

After struggling for the right superlative for Ramparts – Was it the most important magazine of its day? The most representative of the New Left? – I settled on one that wasn’t subject to debate: Ramparts was my favorite magazine – ever.  If we were to name the most significant magazine of the twentieth century American Left, it would be hard to deny The Nation, which has lasted the entire hundred years. Yet a couple of others arguably burned more brightly, although far more briefly.  The Masses, which ran from 1911-1917, comes to mind – and Ramparts, which spanned 1962-1975.

Ramparts didn’t just report news; it made news. It was a politically radical magazine with style. If you thought left wing politics ought to be hip, Ramparts was probably what you read.  And if it, indeed, had a bomb in every issue, as its nemesis Time Magazine once said of it, then we might say that Peter Richardson’s zippy new biography of the magazine has a firecracker on every page.

Ramparts was on quite a different course, however, when Edward Keating started it as a liberal Catholic magazine the year Pope John XXIII set about to renew the Church in the Second Vatican Council.  The first issue contained a symposium on author J.D. Salinger, but soon the magazine published Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk author of a widely-read autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” who was then in the process of engaging with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.  And then came an article by the magazine’s future editor, Robert Scheer, examining New York archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman’s enthusiastic support for the Vietnam War.  Ramparts was, Scheer said, “The only place willing to publish it.”  Warren Hinckle, a recent student newspaper editor at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco who was also rising to power at the magazine, explained the transition from there: “It was the idea of the church being wrong: If the church was wrong, then the government wasn’t far behind. If the government was wrong, then hell, all bets were off. Why should you believe anybody?”
National notoriety followed with the publication of an interview with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose new play, The Deputy, prompted international furor with a portrayal of a Pope Pius XII generally indifferent to the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.  Or more precisely, the notoriety came when the San Francisco based magazine held a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in defense of the play’s right to be performed on Broadway. The event typified the qualities that Hinckle – a figure about San Francisco to this day – brought to the magazine – brilliant promotion (Bloody Marys served at the press conference) and a flagrant disregard for budget.

Jessica Mitford, the author of “The American Way of Death” who loaned her name to the magazine masthead, described Hinckle and Scheer as “brilliant young bandits doing an extraordinary job,” but bemoaned their “ruthless handling of people.” This would include the ouster of founder Keating who had “found himself in the eye of a hurricane,” in the eyes of Ramparts art director Dugald Stermer, when Ramparts “became a national force. I don’t think any of us had that in mind when we started out.”  Keating himself said, “They threw me out like an old shoe.” The “bandits” were brilliant enough, though, to maintain connections with such Keating finds as Eldridge Cleaver, recently released from prison and on his way to fame with the Black Panther Party.

Until its final demise (it survived one bankruptcy), the magazine would play a signal role in the blowing apart of prior conventional wisdom that “the Sixties” are rightly or wrongly identified with.

Ramparts would never be accused of carrying concealed weapons – oftentimes the bomb in the issue was right on the cover: The December 1967 issue showed four hands holding the burning draft cards of Hinckle, Scheer, and two other staffers.  They later told a New York grand jury that those were their draft cards, but not their extremities – the photographer had used hired hands.  (No one was indicted.)  The April 1969 cover featured a young boy holding a Vietnamese National Liberation Front flag with the caption: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” And if irony was your style, there was all-American artist Norman Rockwell’s May 1967 cover drawing of Bertrand Russell for an issue highlighting the British philosopher’s withering critique of American foreign policy.

In its customary budget-be-damned style, the magazine sent ten reporters to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where they produced a daily Ramparts Wall Poster. Contributors of the day included Tom Hayden, who would be indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the convention and stand trial as part of the Chicago Eight; Adam Hochschild, future founder of Mother Jones magazine; Paul Krassner, editor of the intermittent and infamous The Realist magazine; past Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby, author of the seminal but now largely forgotten book, “Containment and Change;” and Richard Rothstein, future New York Times education writer. Pete Hamill and Hunter Thompson were also in the wings.

In 1970, David Horowitz – before his abrupt about-face denunciation of his New Left days and long career as a leading intellectual figure of the New Right – emerged as the new editor when a staff collective ousted Scheer (who remains a working journalist of the left to this day.)  Hinckle had already left to found the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly that famously paired Hunter Thompson with cartoonist Ralph Steadman and sent them off to the Kentucky Derby to drink mint juleps and report the decadence they found. The magazine lost the impish touch of the Hinckle/Scheer days, but its politics remained largely unchanged.

Ramparts published Che Guevara’s Bolivia diary and Robert Kennedy’s final interview. It exposed the Central Intelligence Agency funding of the National Student Association and gave early attention to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigations of the JFK assassination. Sports psychologist Harry Edwards’ article about the use of steroids was decades ahead of the curve. It interviewed Huey Newton and John Lennon, and published Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, and Seymour Hersh. When the stories themselves weren’t enough, Keating, Scheer, and Stanley Scheinbaum, another magazine affiliate, all ran antiwar campaigns in the 1966 Democratic congressional primaries. None won, but each shocked the local establishment with how many votes a newcomer could get by advocating withdrawal from Vietnam.

By the time its finances finally brought it down, Ramparts had touched upon – and usually in a memorable way – the lion’s share of the issues that dominated the remainder of the century.