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The covers of Ramparts magazine easily spoke for themselves—think the cover art of New York magazine fused with whatever went on inside of a young Iggy Pop’s head. Whether the design had JFK rendered into jigsaw puzzle pieces or the First Lady of South Vietnam in a Michigan State University cheerleader outfit, the cartoons themselves were enough to make any ’60s American radical all giddy.
And Ramparts, a Catholic quarterly turned secular monthly publication, perfectly captured the era’s New Left firepower, zeitgeist-shift readiness, and youthful dynamism, all the while playing the Rottweiler for various left-wing causes. At its mid-’60s peak, the magazine was home to an unmatched pack of muckrakers and activists, pumping out exposé after exposé, rallying cry after rallying cry. Among famous alumni are Seymour Hersh, Tariq Ali, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, and Angela Davis.
Author Peter Richardson’s latest book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, chronicles the history, triumphs, and eventual collapse of the groundbreaking publication. In his book, set for release on Tuesday Sept. 8, he traces the magazine’s brief thirteen-year existence that was powered by a give-‘em-hell, zero-tolerance-for-compromise verve. Reading Richardson’s descriptions of how the editors and contributors mingled and operated, one gets the refreshing impression that the Ramparts staff lived as if they were storming the Bastille on a daily basis.
The College Reporter talked to Richardson about his new book, the enormous influence Ramparts had on the world of journalism, and how today’s bloggers aren’t so different from the New Left reporters and polemicists.
TCR: You compared the life of Ramparts magazine to that of a rock band in one of the book’s earlier chapters. What really made that kind of muckraking network so exhilarating, and why couldn’t it last?
Richardson: These were very young people who really didn’t have any direct access to anybody very powerful. You might compare them to bloggers today. But they were fearless and they didn’t stay away from big or controversial issues. And they had an extraordinary coincidence of talent and historical opportunity. That’s part of why it was so exhilarating. And for people at the time who were concerned about the [Vietnam] War and civil rights, there really weren’t any outlets of that kind that they could read, so you had these small-circulation, intellectual journals. But there really wasn’t a high-production value magazine that you could buy at the newsstand that would take a strong stand against the war. So that’s what I think was really interesting, the ability to really challenge the culture.
As for why it couldn’t last, one thing was that, then and now, there wasn’t a very good
business model for that kind of journalism. Political magazines on the left and the right always lose money. National Review loses money. Mother Jones loses money. They all need funding. They can’t survive on advertising revenue and their circulation. It’s like what Carey McWilliams of The Nation used to say, “there’s only about 250,000 people in the whole country who really care about ideas.” It makes it really tough to be a moneymaking enterprise in this field.
TCR: With similar and still prominent left wing and culture publications like The Nation and the Ramparts offspring magazine Rolling Stone, what relevance does Ramparts have for a whole new generation of progressives or aspiring troublemakers in investigative journalism?
Richardson: In some ways, [my] book couldn’t be more timely. The way the newspapers are falling like pins, younger writers and journalists are going to have to make another way in the world. But in sort of the same way, the people who started Ramparts also faced a difficult media environment, in the sense that nobody really knew that it would work. They were thinking that they’d use Time magazine methods to break New Left kind of stories. And nobody had really done that before. So Ramparts opened up this new universe of alternative media that we have now. And you can draw a straight line from Ramparts in the ’60s to blogs like Daily Kos now. There’s an interesting historical parallel between the two: they both came out of nowhere, they both opposed an unpopular war, and they both used their media platform to support anti-war candidates, while targeting pro-war Democrats.
And you have to remember that these periods of vibrant muckraking are the exception, not the rule. The real muckraking is typically not done by big media; it’s usually done by savvy fringe players who play the big media outlets off each other. And Ramparts was very good at that. And bloggers can do that, too. My prediction is you’re going to start getting bloggers breaking big stories, and it’s already started to happen. When The New York Times starts picking up [bloggers’] stories on their front page, you have a whole new ballgame, and it’s going to look a lot like what Ramparts did. The platform’s different, but there’s always a possibility for that kind of resurgence, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out.
TCR: Do you see any other worthwhile Ramparts parallels anywhere in the country or world today, whether it is in television, online, or print?
Richardson: Well, Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, they’re still around. And there’s a genetic link because those guys were all in Ramparts at one point. And Salon.com grew almost directly out of Mother Jones, so there’s that genealogy there. There are also websites like Talking Points Memo. But one thing that might not be obvious, but I think it’s an important outgrowth, is the PBS series Frontline. It was founded in the ’80s, and one of the producers, Lowell Bergman, was a Ramparts contributor. Also, Ramparts made Hunter S. Thompson possible. He was very influenced by the magazine, and [Ramparts editor] Warren Hinckle put him together with [his future collaborator and illustrator] Ralph Steadman.
And while Ramparts was doing blockbuster stories that were getting picked up by The New York Times, it wasn’t too long after that that 60 Minutes thought, “hey, we could do that,” or when The New York Times would run the Pentagon Papers. So even the big outlets were influenced by the kinds of journalism that Ramparts was doing, especially in the mid-’60s.
TCR: To you, what was the single most important political lesson wedged between the page of Ramparts, and why was it so necessary for the development of American political life? Some would say napalm and Vietnamese children, while others would say it was when they shined a flashlight on the CIA’s delinquency.
Richardson: Certainly, those two are very important, but another story we’ll be talking
about a lot is [the CIA covertly funding] the National Student Association story, which doesn’t seem like hair-raising stuff today because we’re used to a generation of reporting on the CIA. People weren’t doing those stories at that time. And I think the link to the Black Panther Party is also very important. By hiring and arranging for the release of Eldridge Cleaver, and then putting him on the masthead, this was a huge thing. And perhaps most importantly, [the editors] were not Communists, but they weren’t afraid of being called Communist.
TCR: And for a question hinged more on the superficial, what was your favorite Ramparts cover, and why?
Richardson: With the covers, there was always a mix of big stories, visual sophistication, and a lot of irreverence. A good example is the cover that was a Norman Rockwell illustration of Bertrand Russell. That was very, very critical of the American war effort in Vietnam. So, you take this all-American illustrator and you have him do a portrait of a ferocious critic of American foreign policy. This stuff blew a lot of people’s minds, and these covers were all apart of a complete failure to honor authority. This artwork continued the old tradition to poke fun at the powerful, combining it with serious whistleblower stories.
Junior Asawin Suebsaeng is the managing editor. His e-mail is asuebsae@fandm.edu.
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