The perilous fight: the rise of Ramparts magazine, 1965-1966

California History, Summer, 2009 by Peter Richardson

AT ITS PEAK, Ramparts magazine was America's premier leftist publication. Founded by Edward Keating in 1962, it began as a Catholic literary quarterly based in Menlo Park, California. But when a young Warren Hinckle became editor in 1964, he turned Ramparts into a monthly, hired Dugald Stermer as art director, shifted the magazine's focus to political topics, and recruited Robert Scheer to write about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Over the next four years, Ramparts moved to San Francisco, adopted a cutting-edge design, forged links to the Black Panther Party, exposed illegal CIA activities in America and Vietnam, and published the diaries of Che Guevara and staff writer Eldridge Cleaver.

A Time magazine headline in 1967--"A Bomb in Every Issue"--described the magazine's impact. (1) The same year, Ramparts earned a George Polk Award for excellence in magazine journalism, and its circulation climbed to almost 250,000. But the magazine declined as quickly as it had risen. After filing for bankruptcy in 1969, Ramparts was reorganized and published with diminishing success until 1975, when it closed for good. Since then, the Ramparts story has slipped off the public radar. (2)

Ramparts' rapid ascent was propelled by an extraordinary combination of events, decisions, and improvisations undertaken shortly after Keating ceded editorial control of the magazine to Hinckle. This essay, adapted from a longer study of the magazine's history and influence, focuses on an especially critical period in the magazine's development. (3) Although Ramparts' success cannot be traced to any specific person, Hinckle's decision to hire Robert Scheer dramatically changed the course of the magazine, and Ramparts' mercurial confluence of raw talent, youthful energy, and dazzling showmanship would shape progressive journalism for a generation.

TRANSFORMATIONS

As Hinckle took the editorial reins at Ramparts, the nation was slowly turning its gaze to Vietnam. Few had protested when the Kennedy administration backed the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, but by 1963, Diem had lost support even in South Vietnam, where the Buddhist majority resented his pro-Catholic policies. When the Kennedy administration signaled that a coup would be welcome, South Vietnamese generals assassinated Diem and his brother in early November 1963. Three weeks later, Kennedy himself was slain in Dallas.

The following year, a U.S. spy ship reported that it had been fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Lyndon Johnson ordered a retaliatory air strike against two North Vietnamese naval bases. Three days later, and three months before the 1964 presidential election, Congress authorized Johnson to use whatever force was necessary to support freedom and protect peace in Southeast Asia. Although Johnson declared that he sought no wider war, he also maintained that the United States would defend its national interests.

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Ramparts rejected the official line. Its cover photograph of 1965 was a dramatic close-up of a vulnerable Vietnamese woman and child. Inside was an interview with U.S. Senator Frank Church, Keating's friend from their undergraduate days at Stanford. Church called the U.S. intervention in Vietnam a mistake but insisted that America was obliged to support the South Vietnamese effort. "The thing we must remember," he said, "is that there is no way for us to win their war for them." He called the South Vietnamese government "incompetent, to say the least," and warned that the United States must be prepared to withdraw if that government proved incapable of prevailing. (4)

The issue also included a long article by Robert Scheer on naval medical officer Thomas Dooley and his book, Deliver Us from Evil. Although little remembered today, Dooley was a well-known figure with a remarkable personal history. Born into an affluent Midwestern family, he attended Notre Dame University and squeaked through medical school before joining the navy in 1954. He volunteered for a mission called Passage to Freedom, whose purpose was to transport predominantly Catholic refugees to South Vietnam after communists took control of the north. Administering a medical unit in Haiphong, he successfully prevented major epidemics in the refugee camps. His efforts drew the attention of journalists on the lookout for human-interest stories, and he soon decided to write a book about helping Vietnamese refugees. (5) Published in 1956, Deliver Us from Evil presented the Vietnam conflict as a morally simple one between godless communists and freedom-loving Vietnamese. "We had come late to Vietnam, but we had come," Dooley wrote. "And we brought not bombs and guns, but help and love." (6) The book sold briskly and was translated into more languages than any previous book except the Bible. (7)

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In his article, Scheer argued that the lack of historical context in Dooley's book made it an unreliable guide to Vietnamese politics. In particular, Dooley neglected the effects of French colonialism and the popular uprising against it. For that reason, Scheer maintained, the book "served to greatly confuse the American public on the true situation in Vietnam. It gave the delusion that we were simply helping a whole people along the path to freedom when for better or worse they wanted to travel the other way." (8)