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NY Times, August 26 2016
Warren Hinckle, 77, Ramparts Editor Who Embraced Gonzo Journalism, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Warren Hinckle, the flamboyant editor who made Ramparts magazine a
powerful national voice for the radical left in the 1960s and later, by
championing the work of Hunter S. Thompson, helped introduce the
no-holds-barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism, died on
Thursday in San Francisco. He was 77.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pia Hinckle said.
Ramparts was a small-circulation quarterly for liberal Roman Catholics
when Mr. Hinckle began writing for and promoting it in the early 1960s.
A born provocateur with a keen sense of public relations, he took over
as the executive editor in 1964 and immediately set about transforming
Ramparts from a sleepy intellectual journal to a slickly produced,
crusading political magazine that galvanized the American left.
With cover art and eye-catching headlines reminiscent of mainstream
magazines like Esquire, Ramparts aimed to deliver “a bomb in every
issue,” as Time magazine once put it. It looked at Cardinal Francis
Spellman’s involvement in promoting American involvement in Vietnam and
the Central Intelligence Agency’s financing of a wide variety of
cultural organizations.
It published Che Guevara’s diaries, with a long introduction by Fidel
Castro; Eldridge Cleaver’s letters from prison; and some of the wilder
conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. The
magazine’s photo essay in January 1967 showing the injuries inflicted on
Vietnamese children by American bombs helped persuade the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. to take a public stand against the war.
The covers became countercultural classics: an illustration depicting Ho
Chi Minh, the Communist leader of North Vietnam, as Washington crossing
the Delaware; a photograph of four hands (belonging to the magazine’s
top editors) holding up draft cards that had been set on fire.
By 1967, the magazine, which began with about 2,500 readers, had a
circulation of nearly 250,000 and an ability to wrest coverage, however
grudging, from mass-circulation magazines and newspapers.
“What journalism is about is to attack everybody,” Mr. Hinckle told The
Washington Post in 1981. “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out
to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough
controversy to attract attention.”
Warren James Hinckle III was born on Oct. 12, 1938, in San Francisco,
where his father, Warren Hinckle Jr., was a shipyard worker and his
mother, the former Angela DeVere, worked in the accounts department of
the Southern Pacific Railroad. At 10, he lost an eye in a car accident,
and for the rest of his life he wore a large eye patch, which became a
prominent feature of his buccaneering image.
He attended Roman Catholic schools and enrolled in the University of San
Francisco, a Jesuit institution, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in
philosophy in 1961.
As editor of the college newspaper, The San Francisco Foghorn, he showed
early signs of the flair that would insert Ramparts into the national
conversation. On a slow day, he and a friend generated news by burning
down a wooden guard house at the entrance to the campus, an incident he
described in his 1974 memoir, “If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade.”
After graduating from college, he started a public relations company and
ran, unsuccessfully, for the county board of supervisors before joining
The San Francisco Chronicle as a city reporter.
In 1962, he married Denise Libarle. The marriage ended in divorce. In
addition to his daughter Pia, he is survived by his wife, the writer
Susan Cheever, from whom he was separated; his companion, Linda Corso;
another daughter, Hilary Hinckle; a son, Warren Hinckle IV; and five
grandchildren.
His relationship with Ramparts began inauspiciously, when Edward M.
Keating, who founded the magazine in 1962, hired him to develop a
promotional plan. Mr. Hinckle proposed a splashy party at a Manhattan
hotel for leading Catholic laymen and journalists, with models and film
stars thrown in for glamour. Mr. Keating, appalled, fired him.
Undeterred, he contributed an article on J. D. Salinger to the
magazine’s first issue and, after whipping up press attention for an
article on the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in
June 1964, was named executive editor.
It was a turning point. Before the year was out, he had transformed the
publication from a quarterly to a monthly and hired Robert Scheer, a
seasoned foreign correspondent, who wrote some of the magazine’s most
hard-hitting antiwar articles and secured the rights to publish the
Guevara diaries.
In short order, Ramparts scored some stunning coups. A cover story
exposed Michigan State University’s Vietnam Project in the 1950s as a
C.I.A. front to train Saigon police and stockpile ammunition. It
persuaded Donald W. Duncan, a former special forces sergeant in Vietnam,
to describe how he was trained to torture prisoners. (Mr. Duncan died in
2009, but his death became widely known only in May.)
Mr. Hinckle extracted maximum publicity at every turn. When the C.I.A.
learned that Ramparts was about to reveal the agency’s secret funding of
a long list of organizations, including the National Student
Association, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Encounter and Partisan Review
magazines, it tried to minimize the impact by holding a news conference
to admit the facts.
Mr. Hinckle counterpunched. “I was damned if I was going to let the
C.I.A. scoop me,” he wrote in his memoir. “I bought full-page
advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post to scoop
myself, which seemed the preferable alternative.” The magazine received
a George Polk Award that year for its coverage.
Ramparts was always in the news, always in chaos, always in debt. The
hard-drinking Mr. Hinckle often worked from Cookie Picetti’s, a bar in
San Francisco’s North Beach that was frequented by the police. When Mr.
Cleaver told him that colleagues at Ramparts objected, he challenged him
to name a decent left-wing bar. He spent lavishly, traveling first-class
and staying in top hotels. He particularly enjoyed treating investors to
sumptuous meals at their expense.
In Feed/Back magazine in 1975, Adam Hochschild, a staff writer and later
a founder of Mother Jones, wrote: “All action at the magazine swirled
around him: a pet monkey named Henry Luce would sit on his shoulder
while he paced his office, drink in hand, shouting instructions into a
speakerphone across the room to someone in New York about a vast
promotional mailing; on his couch would be sitting, slightly dazed, a
French television crew or Malcolm X’s widow (who arrived one day
surrounded by a dozen bodyguards with loaded shotguns), or the private
detective to whom Hinckle had given the title Criminology Editor.”
With the magazine teetering on bankruptcy, Mr. Hinckle resigned as
editor in 1969. Ramparts carried on until 1975, but the end of the
Vietnam War and the splintering of the American left left it stranded.
With Sidney Zion, a former legal affairs reporter for The New York
Times, Mr. Hinckle founded Scanlan’s Monthly, named for a pig farmer and
reprobate whom the two men had heard being toasted, sardonically, in a
pub in Ireland.
The magazine lasted only eight issues, but Mr. Hinckle used his platform
to his advantage. He ran a scathing profile of the French skier
Jean-Claude Killy that Hunter Thompson had written for Playboy, which
rejected it. He then dispatched Mr. Thompson to cover the Kentucky
Derby, in company with the English illustrator Ralph Steadman. The
resulting article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” put
Mr. Thompson on the road to gonzo glory.
Mr. Hinckle briefly edited City of San Francisco, a magazine owned by
Francis Ford Coppola. “Insiders joke that Hinckle is the only man who
can spend money faster than Coppola can make it,” Newsweek wrote. After
that magazine ceased publication in 1976, Mr. Hinckle founded another
magazine, Frisco, which quickly died.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as a columnist for The Chronicle, The San
Francisco Examiner and The San Francisco Independent, he validated his
reputation as a free-swinging street brawler. He led a campaign to
remove “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” as the city’s official song,
calling Tony Bennett “an over-the-hill Italian croaker,” and attacked
Dianne Feinstein, when she was mayor, with such gusto that she once
tried to empty a drink over his head.
“He’s a man who invents things, who often gets his facts wrong, who gets
carried away by the emotion,” Maitland Zane, a reporter for The
Chronicle, told SF Weekly in 1996. “He lets his prejudices dictate his
writing. He’s not even a good speller.”
In 1993, Mr. Hinckle revived The Argonaut, a 19th-century magazine once
edited by Ambrose Bierce, as a thick journal devoted, he told The Times
in 1994, to “muckraking, left politics and the willingness to promote
new writing and celebrate popular culture.”
In 1969, Mr. Hinckle described Ramparts under his editorship as “totally
and absolutely and joyfully biased.” He added: “We went in to hang the
Saigon government, to kill the war in Vietnam. That’s what political
journalism is about.”
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