Radical Sheet

What the short, rumbustious history of Ramparts magazine means for modern journalism.

Flipping through The New York Times on the morning of February 16, 1966, a reader would have come across a startling photo: a stern-faced soldier, standing against a pitch-black backdrop, crowned by the bold declaration “I quit!” The soldier was Donald Duncan, a decorated Green Beret who had just returned from Vietnam. The small print announced Duncan’s opposition to the war after an 18-month tour. “I couldn’t kid myself any longer that my country was acting rationally, or even morally,” he said. But the photo wasn’t telling his story. It was selling it–it appeared in a full-page ad promoting the newest scoop from Ramparts magazine.

That wasn’t the first, and was hardly the last, of the Bay Area-based monthly’s provocations. In its brief and glorious heyday during the late 1960s, Ramparts produced a succession of images and stories that jumped out of newsstands and shook readers by the shoulders: four hands holding aloft burning draft cards; a portrait of Black Panther Huey P. Newton behind bars; an exhortation for more student uprisings and “two, three, many Columbias”; an all-American tyke holding the Viet Cong flag under the headline, “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.”

The magazine bloomed during a fertile period for radical media. Underground newspapers and leftist journals–the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, Viet-Report, Rat–sprouted like wildflowers in the 1960s. But none of them were as big, as brash, or as influential as Ramparts. This was no austere newsletter that took pride in its obscurity. Its covers were as eye-catching and inventive as anything mainstream publishing produced. Ramparts was unrepentantly glossy, filled with ads (a no-no for some on the left), groundbreaking design, and a pop savvy that tempered the sting of its incisive critique. Warren Hinckle, the executive editor, proudly wrote of the influential Ramparts style: “[B]y the late 1960s one could line up Evergreen Review, Harper’s, Atlantic, New York magazine, Esquire and Ramparts and be unable to tell the chicken from the egg.” By aping the look of the corporate media it mercilessly hammered, the magazine gave a sheen of mainstream legitimacy to radical ideas.

Considering that an entire continent’s worth of trees has been felled commemorating the ‘60s, it is something of a surprise that a proper history of Ramparts has never been published. Peter Richardson’s A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America redresses that oversight. The editorial director of PoliPointPress, a publisher of progressive books, and author of a book on 1960s Nation editor Carey McWilliams, Richardson is steeped in the world of leftist ideas and journalism, and he ascribes an autobiographical dimension to his interest, noting that he grew up in the Bay Area and was marked at an early age by the very milieu that gave rise to Ramparts.

Richardson’s book offers a breezy, blow-by-blow account of the magazine’s short-lived existence. If anything, for those hungering for such a history, it might be a little too brisk–at a mere 227 pages including endnotes, the book whets one’s appetite for a longer, more immersive chronicle, not to mention an anthology of Ramparts’ best. But what’s here is choice. Relying heavily on two autobiographies by Ramparts editors–David Horowitz’s Radical Son and Hinckle’s If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,, a gonzo memoir that’s due for rediscovery–Richardson also includes material from recent interviews with many of the magazine’s principals to put in perspective its unlikely achievements.

Smart enough to get out of the way of a story that needs no embellishing, Richardson fills in the backdrop with convincing color, placing Ramparts firmly in its unique historical moment. The dramatis personae is a writer’s dream: eccentric millionaires, Berkeley radicals, Black Panthers, a dipsomaniac editor. Richardson is a lucid and even clever writer (a nice touch: lyrics from “The Star Spangled Banner” are used as chapter titles, a nod to Ramparts’ provenance). “If 1968 was the year America had a nervous breakdown, Ramparts was its most reliable fever chart,” writes Richardson. (The chapter is aptly titled “Bombs Bursting in Air.”) The line sums up Ramparts’ importance in the story of American journalism. In the postwar era’s most tumultuous decade, the magazine became the scrapbook of the zeitgeist. Richardson strains to make a case for Ramparts’–and his project’s–relevance to today, but he need not try so hard. The magazine’s singular brilliance and influence on its time more than qualify it for remembrance.

In recapitulating the story of Ramparts, it’s striking how much its arc mirrors that of the New Left. The historian John Patrick Diggins wrote that “the New Left started in a spirit of moderation and ended calling for nothing less than revolution,” and so it was with Ramparts, which went from impassioned reformist pleas for civil rights in the early ’60s to rejectionist calls for American defeat in Vietnam by the end of the decade.

Founded by Edward Keating, a millionaire liberal, Ramparts began life as a Catholic intellectual journal, a platform from which Keating could engage the church in a high-minded discussion between liberal Catholics and Church leadership. A typical symposium was a 1963 two-part series on Jesuit education–not exactly rousing material.

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