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A BOMB IN EVERY ISSUE

How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

A sensationalist in both life and work, ­Hinckle liked to second George M. Cohan’s maxim that whatever you do, you should “always serve it with a little dressing.” He looked like a dandy, drank the way other people breathed, sweet-talked one wealthy person after another into financing the magazine, spent their money with abandon, kept a monkey named after Henry Luce in the office, hyped every issue to the bursting point and, more often than not, produced a magazine that was worthy of that hype. He was a pirate, as everybody noted, right down to the eye patch.

Publishing breakthrough articles was only part of the formula, according to Adam Hochschild. Hinckle had a partner in this success, a working-class Bronx kid turned radical academic named Robert Scheer. The rascal ­Hinckle meshed so perfectly with the serious Scheer that Jessica Mitford, a contributor, took to calling them “Hink/Scheer.”

Ramparts’ first big story came in 1966, when Scheer revealed the C.I.A.’s partnership with Michigan State University in the training of police officers in South Vietnam and the writing of the South Vietnamese Constitution. “Before the Michigan State story, the C.I.A. rarely received negative press, much less strict oversight,” Richardson writes. In 1967, the magazine struck again, uncovering the agency’s clandestine backing of the National Student Association, an organization that represented American students at international meetings.

Traditionally, radical journalism came packaged in the graphic equivalent of jeans and a work shirt. But the hip, slick and provocative look that the Ramparts art director, Dugald Stermer, lent the publication gave even Esquire a case of envy (it tried to hire him). For the Michigan State article, Stermer ran illustrations of all the principals dressed in M.S.U. athletic garb. The magazine’s success prompted Hinckle to daydream about a media empire that would include TV and radio stations. Wenner promptly appropriated the paper’s design - with Stermer’s permission - to serve as the template for Rolling Stone.

Ramparts was very much a creature of the Bay Area’s rebellious climate. It identified with the uprisings at Berkeley, endorsed the authority-questioning ethos of the Beats (although Hinckle spurned the hippies) and drew on the region’s radical tradition. Scheer even ran for Congress in 1966, challenging an incumbent liberal Democrat in a district that included Oakland and Berkeley. (He lost.)

The magazine injected itself directly into local, radical politics with its sponsorship of the Black Panther Party. “Ramparts made celebrities of the Blank Panthers,” Richardson writes, “and their star power increased the magazine’s cachet.” Thanks to the magazine’s sponsorship of the party and Eldridge Cleaver, who became a staff writer, the Panthers were recognized around the world as revolutionaries.

The Ramparts-Panther romance, which began in 1967, looks naïve today. The magazine’s skeptical radar could penetrate government lies but failed to detect this violent organization’s essence. David Horowitz, who along with Peter Collier led the magazine after Hinckle was pushed out in 1969, laments the legitimization of the Panthers and blames them for the murder of a former Ramparts employee, Betty Van Patter, who did bookkeeping for the party.

Although Ramparts continued to break important stories that the establishment press ignored, the magazine didn’t glisten after Hinckle the impresario left. Richardson attributes the decline to a number of causes. Like all niche-creating magazines, Ramparts attracted competition that wound up stealing readers; at the same time, it abandoned part of its audience by embracing New Left orthodoxy, which “rejected anything short of revolution.” The magazine also ran out of liberal millionaire donors. Its accrued losses must have run into the tens of millions, making it unlike pantheon magazines that made money.

The lessons Ramparts taught American journalism are still being studied wherever investigative reporting is practiced. The magazine showed that the rarest asset in journalism is picking the right set of questions, usually the ones nobody else has the sense to ask. This book satisfies on every level and whets the appetite for a big, fat Ramparts anthology.

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