BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Back When Ramparts Did the Storming

By Dwight Garner

Oct. 6, 2009

See how this article appeared when it was originally published on

NYTimes.com.

Ramparts magazine was born outside of San Francisco in 1962 as a sober literary quarterly, a “forum for the mature American
Catholic.” It was serious but it was dull. Its first issue resembled, one designer said, “the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls
school.”

A funny thing happened to Ramparts, though, on its way to the graveyard of hapless small magazines. It lost religion, picked
up a vibe in the Bay Area air and, like the understudy from “Hair” who goes on to become Janis Joplin, morphed into
something wild: a slick, muckraking magazine that was the most freewheeling thing on most American newsstands during
the second half of the 1960s.

Ramparts had bite and style and sometimes even heart. It printed the Eldridge Cleaver prison letters that became “Soul on
Ice,” and hired Cleaver on staff. It published Che Guevara’s diaries. In 1967 it ran a photo essay called “The Children of
Vietnam” that led the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to criticize America’s involvement in that war for the first time.

The major voices on the left lined up to get into its pages, from Susan Sontag to Seymour Hersh to Angela Davis to Noam
Chomsky, even a young Christopher Hitchens. Ramparts’ political scoops so rattled the Central Intelligence Agency that it
spied on the magazine’s staff members and investors.

Peter Richardson, in his appealing if choppy new book, “A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts
Magazine Changed America,” charts the publication’s high points with a gleam in his eye. Ramparts stood apart from the
brawling underground press of the 1960s not only because of the quality of its writing, but also for its élan, its aura of brewing
drama.

A famous 1969 Ramparts cover

showed a 6-year-old boy holding a
Vietcong flag.
Michael Sexton

The magazine looked good. It was printed on glossy stock and, rare for an alternative magazine, had national distribution. (In
1968 its circulation was nearly 250,000, more than double that of The Nation.) Its covers were provocative, occasionally
bordering, Mr. Richardson acknowledges, on seditious. One infamous Ramparts cover from 1969 depicted a 6-year-old boy
holding a Vietcong flag. The caption said: “Alienation is when your country is at war, and you want the other side to win.”

(On a 1966 broadcast of “Firing Line,” William F. Buckley Jr. tried to force a Ramparts editor, Robert Scheer, into admitting
that he was “un-American.” Mr. Scheer fired back that Buckley was “highly anti-American” for offenses like his “contempt for
freedom” and support for the McCarthy committee.)

Ramparts was omnipresent. It took out full-page ads in newspapers like The New York Times. Its antagonist was Time
magazine, which loved to poke holes in its reporting. Time titled an article about Ramparts “A Bomb in Every Issue.”
Ramparts existed, in one form or another, from 1962 until 1975, but Mr. Richardson leaves no doubt that its finest years arrived
in the late ’60s under the editorship of Warren Hinckle, a young former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. Hinckle embraced, editorially, a kind of controlled mayhem. He wore a black eye patch, a result of a childhood accident,
and was piratical in other ways. He kept a pet capuchin monkey named Henry Luce in the Ramparts office. He frequently
worked out of a North Beach bar called Cookie Picetti’s, and his drinking and stamina were legendary.

One writer described walking into a bar with Mr. Hinckle, only to watch as the bartender, without prompting, set up 15
screwdrivers. Mr. Hinckle polished them off. He was a looser, less literary, left coast version of Willie Morris, then the
celebrated editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Under Mr. Hinckle and another editor, the politically sophisticated Mr. Scheer, Ramparts eventually began printing 24 issues a
year. The good times didn’t last. Ramparts never made money. Mr. Hinckle was criticized for indiscriminate spending,
including renting luxury hotel rooms during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago a decision that infuriated
some staff members and made the magazine seem elitist and out of touch.

Peter Richardson, author of "A Bomb

in Every Issue."
Michael Sexton

Ramparts’ politics were grainy, shifty, hard to define. The magazine spent so much time savaging the liberal consensus in its
editorials, Mr. Richardson suggests, that it afflicted conservatism less than it should have. Its reporting was always its calling
card. The magazine, the sociologist and former Ramparts contributor Todd Gitlin says, was “a place where grown-up
journalism met the movement.”

I wish “A Bomb in Every Issue” was, at times, a bit more grown-up. Mr. Richardson has his hands around a good, ticking story,
but his writing is too genial and trippy and romanticizing. (“For the first time, a radical slick was reaching a broad audience
and blowing its mind,” he writes.)

He shies away from rigorously placing Ramparts in context. There’s little here about the history of America’s alternative,
rabble-rousing press, from Tom Paine’s days through our own.

Mr. Richardson is so focused on Ramparts that he barely notices the full-on freak show that was America’s underground press
during the 1960s. (It’s hard to believe you could write a book about a militant Bay Area magazine during the 1960s and not
mention, even once, The Berkeley Barb, one of the country’s best and most impish underground newspapers.)

There are shadows this book should cast that it does not. For the whole story of this journalistic era, the book to read remains
Abe Peck’s “Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press.”

Publishers should declare a moratorium on subtitles that include any variant of the phrase “Changed America.” But Mr.
Richardson does give a strong sense of Ramparts’ impact on its era, and of its lingering influence. Both Mother Jones and
Rolling Stone, to name just two magazines, were founded by former Ramparts staff members. Jann Wenner met Jane
Schindelheim, whom he later married, while working at Ramparts; she provided the seed money to start Rolling Stone.

One Ramparts contributor, the journalist Jessica Mitford, admiringly called Ramparts’ editors “brilliant young bandits.” Mr.
Richardson’s book may overstate this magazine’s significance. But it doesn’t take a long day searching for something truly
new to read at the newsstand, or on the Web, to wonder if too many of American journalism’s would-be bandit-editors have
vanished into other lines of work.