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.

Che and Evo: ¡Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

As the wide scale release date for Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Che, starring Benicio del Toro as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, draws near, the second half of the movie, Guerrilla, needs to be placed in a proper historical context.  The first half of the movie has a more accessible plot considering the general populace is more familiar with the Cuban Revolution. But what about Bolivia during Guevara’s involvement there?  What about Bolivia today?  The small South American nation seems to be left out of worldwide political discourse for the most part.  Soderbergh’s biopic about the radical ideologue will certainly increase awareness not only about Che and Marxism, but also his continuing struggle that is embodied by current Bolivian president, Evo Morales.

Che is concerned mainly with two pinnacles of its namesake’s existence.  The first half of the film, The Argentine, covers the Che’s involvement in the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel Castro.  The latter half, Guerrilla, follows Guevara’s final revolutionary attempt in Bolivia.  His endeavor eventually fails, and he is executed for his subversion.

Guevara’s activities in Bolivia came during a time of quasi-military rule under President René Barrientos of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement. The Barrientos administration attempted to maintain popular support within the peasantry while blatantly serving foreign interests, mainly the United States.  The president had initially come to power through an armed coup d’état in 1964 while he was serving as vice-president.  He would later be elected with help from the military.

Monument to Che Guevara in La Higuera, Bolivia

After recovering in Prague from a failed revolutionary effort in the Congo, Che began to meet with Bolivian dissidents in late 1966 or early 1967.  With a band of Cuban soldiers and supplies from Havana, Guevara made his way to the Ñancahuazú region of Bolivia where a military training camp was set up.  There he began to recruit and train Marxist-sympathizing peasants.  The recruiting process was largely unsuccessful given that the Communist Party of Bolivia did not support his guerrilla movement.

In total, a ragged band of about 50 guerrilla warriors began an armed assault against the Bolivian army.  They won a few small victories throughout 1967, but the tide turned against them as Barrientos, with help from the CIA, took a strong stance against Guevara’s efforts.  Guevara’s small forces were quickly encircled by the Bolivian military and subdued in October of 1967.  Che himself was captured and placed in a schoolhouse where he was later executed. Reportedly, his last words were “shoot, coward, you are only about to kill a man.”  The execution had been ordered by President Barrientos himself.

Barrientos’ decisions surrounding the quelling of Guevara’s movement and his local supporters would eventually lead to his political demise.  During the onslaught against Che’s troops, a group of Bolivian miners came out in support of the insurgency.  Barrientos sent soldiers to extinguish this spreading sentiment.  This resulted in the soldiers massacring approximately 30 civilians of both sexes.  His authoritarian actions in both situations led to the loss of what popular support he still had.  In order to regain his popularity, the president took to traveling around the Bolivian countryside and explaining his actions.  While on this journey, Barrientos perished in a helicopter accident in 1969.  The country then plunged into decades of political and economic turmoil that lasted until the early 1990s. The political situation remains unstable even today.

Che’s gift to Bolivia would not be his dream of a violent revolution, but his socially progressive ideals.  He also encouraged anti-capitalist sentiments within the largely indigenous populace.  These concerns would later form the basis for the backlash to neoliberal globalization and neocolonialism imposed by the international community.

Evo Morales at Inauguration

Evo Morales was elected to the presidency of Bolivia on December 4, 2005.  Since then he has carried on a legacy that began in his country with Che.  He is the first indigenous president of Bolivia and is seen by many as the first step to throwing off the shackles of Western imperialism.  He raised the minimum wage by fifty percent soon after his election.  In a landmark move, he partially nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America after Venezuela.  In doing so, he has exponentially increased the amount of capital available to the national government.  This has allowed Bolivia to heavily invest in social welfare programs, which have been largely successful; as of December 21, 2008 Evo Morales has declared Bolivia an illiteracy-free region.

Despite Morales’ success and popularity, in early 2008 there was an autonomy movement in the Santa Cruz regions, the wealthy area of Bolivia, which was instigated by wealthy oligarchs.  This move led to rioting, which was reportably supported by the US ambassador to Bolivia.  The ambassador was promptly expelled from the country for his alleged subversive position. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, in a show of solidarity with Morales, also expelled the American ambassador to Venezuela.

The US “War on Drugs” has also been a point of contention for Bolivian policy as the coca leaf is a traditional herb used by the indigenous people there as a remedy for altitude sickness and as a mild stimulant.  Morales, a former coca farmer and union organizer, has allowed for more legal production of the plant.  In response to this action, the United States has placed Bolivia on its narcotics blacklist and has stopped all aid to the poorest nation in South America.

Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez

All of these events culminated in an unsuccessful attempted coup against the Morales government in 2008.  The coup may have been tacitly supported in my opinion, although not very vocally, by the government of the United States.  Unanimously, the leaders of every South American country came out in support of the Morales government, and Hugo Chavez pledged military support for his political ally.  The coup failed, but some of the regions were granted a level of autonomy as a result of the coup attempt.

The rejection of US authority when viewed with Guevara in mind can be seen as a continuation of his beloved revolution.  Although for now, mass bloodshed has not been necessary to attain progressive goals in Bolivia, the future is uncertain. Recent declines in worldwide commodity prices put many of Morales’ social programs in jeopardy. This has the potential to lead to tumultuous times not only in Bolivia, but also throughout Latin America. Time will tell whether a socialist democracy can survive such an economic shock. As such, history will either view Guevara and Morales as idealistic failures or heroic humanitarians.  As for me, I’ll hope for the latter.