Back When Ramparts Did the Storming
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/books/07garner.html
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: October 6, 2009
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.
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.
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.
.
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