Ramparts: The End of Muckraking Magazines

...Others who came and went from Ramparts then-and there were many-were the same...

...no one was exactly sure how much...

...Finally he’d be off on the night plane to see new backers in the East...

...Gorer says the Victorians were prudish about sex because the human body was thought inherently sinful...

...So he stayed up most of the night rewriting them into one story in his own colorful style (blurring a few facts in the process), put both writers’ by-lines on it, and flew off to New York...

...newspapers win Pulitzer prizes when their stories send a crooked union official to jail or force a congressman out of office...

...it also published an autobiographical account by Don Duncan, a former Special Forces sergeant, documenting practices like torturing prisoners and killing civilians-things no longer news now, but which were then...

...Yet these pieces brought readers a richness and subtlety of understanding even the best newspaper never would...

...He expounded on all this at length, and so charmed everyone with his customary flair, that nobody really questioned him...

...No one cared very much about accuracy...

...Perhaps this wasn’t the only reason why 1 had to publish the article elsewhere-writers always prefer to think that editors who don’t like their work do so only for the most scurrilous motives...

...But muckraking has its limits, and one of them is that it can distract you away from the more thoughtful kind of analysis I just outlined...

...The Cubans had just given Ramparts Che Guevara’s Bolivia Diary, and I was told we couldn’t do anything that would risk offending them...

...The idea was to put out, with typical Ramparts attention to form over sub stance, a daily newspaper called the Ramparts Wallposter...

...When a newspaper can throw a whole team of reporters into an investigation for months, a magazine with a small budget can’t compete...

...There is a certain danger in muckraking, namely the idea that the gist of it is to expose an evil so it can be corrected...

...And the only one with a mass circulation...

...I participated in only a few hesitant protests in the two years I was there...

...And the magazine finally hired a fact-checker, to verify information in articles...

...The argument we were having briefly gave way to a collective sigh of-pleasure, as we handed the copies around the room lovingly, remembered how much work had gone into the issue, and discussed how, despite the misprint here or the transposed photos there, it was still pretty damn good...

...Jacobs is a feisty 55-year-old with the energy of a man of 20, who has written numerous articles and books and has made himself an expert on the Middle East, covering that conflict trenchantly from both sides...

...And it hired Seymour Hersh, the man who had broken the My Lai massacre story for the tiny Dispatch News Service, to do full-time muckraking...

...Then towards, the end of 1973 I was looking for a job...

...Editor Warren Hinckle said . . . .” To be a good editor you need not only a skillful pen but also the tact of a diplomat and the patience of a wet-nurse...

...I often sat in the city room listening, over the clatter of news tickers and the squawks of the police radio, to the older reporters talk about all the stories they couldn’t get into the paper...

...If it checked out, the Times would run it...

...You can be too rigid about such things, but at least they embody the idea that you have to run your own lives along the lines you are advocating for society as a whole...

...On at least some of the better newspapers, reporters were no longer sitting around the city rooms complaining about the stories they couldn’t write, as they had when I had started in San Francisco...

...These auxiliary skills are absolutely necessary if you don’t want to merely talk to a small clique of readers who agree with you already...

...It is not enough to throw the rascals out: you must look at the mixture of psychological and financial motives, the values and cultural climate, the complexities of relationships between political leaders and people vying for their favor, and the economic system in which almost anything is available for a price, which turned them into rascals in the first place...

...At parties we would gather in one corner: “. . . yes, but wait till you hear what they did to me...

...The Great Crash came soon after the 1968 Democratic Convention...

...Don’t get me wrong: I think some muckraking is valuable, and I’m glad more newspapers are doing it-particularly at a time when the government is trying to frighten broadcasters away from controversy...

...Also you need a structure flexible enough so that peopleparticularly women-don’t get trapped forever in menial jobs...

...I felt increasingly reluctant to identify myself as a Ramparts reporter...

...people charged that your demands of the 20th broke faith with the ultimatum agreed to on the 19th, and so on...

...There were dozens, all told with a bitter humor: a multi-million dollar sewer construction swindle, embarrassing remarks by a candidate for mayor the paper was backing, six months of a reporter’s research on a tax official’s misdeeds...

...The Right Kind of Muckraking For one thing, a magazine that doesn’t have a newspaper’s daily deadline pressure can take the time and care to examine not just what the unemployment statistics are or what the Senate voted on yesterday, but what it feels like to be on unemployment, or to be a senator...

...Ramparts, and the other magazines which had been in the vanguard of muckraking suddenly found themselves well to the rear, and in need of a new role...

...After the press conference was over, I watched a radio newsman use one of our phones to call in his story for broadcast...

...I think the reason for this is a pitfall in magazine editing akin to the old saw about how you can’t be only partly a virgin...

...This lasted four or five minutes, and then the bickering resumed...

...most people get the same base wage, those with dependents get more...

...Hinckle broadened the magazine’s circulation and coverage until eventually there was an article on Catholic matters only every few months...

...Ramparts lost somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 a year...

...he found a whole roomful...

...And once certified as bona fide news, there would be the familiar sight of a row of station wagons from the San Francisco TV stations lined up outside the office when we came to work the next morning...

...I was surprised and disappointed all this could not be reported...

...The saddest thing about these financial squeezes was that the people who needed the money most were often paid last...

...Today this kind of writing does not have to be fanciful Utopian sketches out of somebody’s imagination...

...And the San Francisco-based Ramparts did all this with a dazzle totally unlike the earnest greyness of the serious liberal or radical magazines...

...Nowhere were the unresolved questions more apparent than in the notion that everything had to be run by a “collective...

...Taboo subjects are often those you cannot comprehend or conquer...

...You commission five such pieces and maybe only one of them will be really good...

...It finally ran up a debt of over $2 million...

...Still press-conferencing full blast, he announced to the world that most of the Ramparts editorial staff was leaving the magazine, with him, to start a new journal called Barricades...

...And so you can go and take a look at it with all the tools of good reporting: a critical eye, accuracy, a sensitivity to your own emotional responses, and a sense of humor...

...The Ramparts editors were never sure whether they wanted a magazine that was radical or one that was commercially successful, and in the end the package got the better of the product...

...He and Scheer, pleased with the idea of themselves as part of an old literary tradition, frolicked at the Algonquin and reportedly ran up a bill there for more than $50,000...

...Hinckle was an experience, and the experience usually overwhelmed people and separated them from either their money or their common sense...

...A magazine editor also has to cope with the sheer flow of material...

...The editors descended on Chicago for a week, renting a 10-room suite costing $10,000 at the Ambassador Hotel...

...In retrospect, I wonder if the idea really had that kind of merit...

...The community of radical journalists in this country is small, and I kept running into people who had horror stories about their treatment...

...Their power was absolute, and they were always rearranging the magazine at the last moment when they changed their minds about articles or had some catchy new idea...

...One example: In 1966 there was a newspaper strike in San Francisco, and Hinckle, in a typically inspired but absurd move, jumped into the gap by starting a daily paper...

...As a result it missed one or two issues a year (always explained away gracefully, in the “died...

...The idea was to put out a similar publication while neatly side-stepping RamQarts’ colossal debts...

...James Ridgeway captured the atmosphere in an article in The New York Times Magazine several years ago: “In the dining room Hinckle would be recounting his scheme for a publishing empire, expanding Ramparts, starting one, two, or three radio and television stations, starting an authors’ agency, setting up teams of reporters who would get the goods on LBJ, NATO, the Pope, etc...

...Hinckle and Scheer ran Ramparts capriciously, as if it were a toy...

...Periodically Hinckle and Scheer would vow to turn over a new leaf, and would appoint some new editor whose job was to see that writers didn’t keep getting abused, but they never gave the person any real power...

...When you look back at the journalism of the 19th-century socialists-from the Marxists to the Fabians-this is the quality it had...

...perhaps, but it leapt out at you from the newsstands, and more and more people were paying attention...

...Ramparts has weathered many storms since then, but now it is in the midst of perhaps its worst...

...I went to work as a staff writer for Ramparts in the fall of 1966...

...But there is a difference between offering someone the chance to learn to write and edit and acting as if he or she had the skill already...

...He began his spiel to the assembled reporters: “Gentlemen, the Sunday Ramparts died today...

...Ramparts’ expos& were necessary steps on the way towards a climate that allowed a Washington Post editor to keep pushing his reporters to take a closer look at the story even after seven men went to jail for Watergate...

...He stared at it silently a few moments, then lined up a wastebasket at the end of his desk and slid the whole mess into it...

...Each month brought some new expos& The most important, which will remain a small landmark in the history of how Americans lost their innocence in the Vietnam era, was the disclosure that for years the CIA had financed a number of supposedly private organizations, including the Natiodal Student Association (NSA...

...Ramparts was an exciting alternative in those days...

...A little flashy, Adam Hochschild was a writer for Ramparts...

...Some of our journalist friends were enthusiastic and agreed to write...

...Hinckle hired limousines to get him about in New York, and everywhere he went he took large groups of people out to meals on credit cards-often, in effect, wining and dining prospective investors with money they hadn’t invested yet...

...And there was much to analyze: that the CIA found it profitable to support a liberal, anti-colonialist group like the NSA said a great deal about the different faces of American anti-communism...

...It died...

...Hadn’t it run photos of Vietnamese children maimed by American bombs when no other publication dared to...

...The piece was mainly favorable, but it also made some criticisms of the Cuban regime...

...He held press conferences at any excuse and called one to announce the paper’s death...

...Before the Bay of Pigs The New York Times knew the invasion was coming and said nothing...

...In the process he used up most of Keating’s money, and went out and raised more...

...of success.’’ And he went on to say how: the paper was so successful, readers and distributors were demanding so many more copies, that we simply could not fill the demand...

...Factional warfare escalated...

...The evening before they had to go to the typesetter, Hinckle decided the articles would look better combined...

...In New York, Hinckle and his managing editor, Robert Scheer, held court at the Algonquin Hotel...

...And there they sat...

...A few days later he called again: he had just been told his review had been bumped for “lack of space...

...One time he commissioned two writers to do two separate articles on different aspects of the same subject-the 1967 trial of Captain Howard Levy, the dissenting Army officer...

...In its zeal to change everything the New Left has thrown away a few things too many, and one is the notion of apprenticeship...

...Even though its originators had gone, Ramparts’ arrogant style lingered on...

...For months or, literally, years...

...Near the heart of that attitude, I think, was a certain naive arrogance, a vague feeling that because we were a Movement magazine, because we were battling the Goliaths of the oil industry and the Nixon Administration, we were somehow not bound by the laws that affected everyone else in the world-laws of common sense office procedure and a clear spelling out of who’s in charge here...

...When we agreed to a six-person Ramparts editorial board, I did not think twice about the fact that none of the other people in the group (besides Jacobs, Parker, and myself), had ever written a magazine or newspaper article...

...it was beyond the editors’ control and in a way was a credit to their earlier victories...

...I’ve learned a good deal from those times when the strange path of Ramparts has crossed my own, so it has not been a waste...

...Scheer was deposed not long after Hinckle...

...I don’t mean that every article must conform to a political line, or that the magazine has to sound like a party platform, but some sense of that vision must be there...

...Small magazines in the United States are probably doomed to be like third parties-their most lasting effect is to have a few of their ideas picked up by their stronger and more conservative competitors...

...But curiously, no matter which new editor was in and which old one was kicked out, the magazine stayed the same...

...Surprised because 1, and I think a lot of other people, remember it as being much worse...

...Or, to take another example, a newspaper can reveal that a Spiro Agnew is on the take and can force him out of office...

...The CIA story could have been that window...

...When one credit card company started complaining, he simply switched cards...

...A magazine’s opportunities are thus difficult and complicated...

...The big creditors could get their money by threatening to call a loan and the printer could always threaten to stop the presses...

...Most were returned immediately, but a certain proportion always looked interesting enough to merit further reading and were routed to the desks of various editors...

...But there was a deeper problem than these behind Ramparts’ decline...

...Hence in what follows I’ll try mainly to ask what lessons there are for the future...

...And that leads you toward exposing only those evils that can be corrected...

...An unending series of conspiracy-theory stories about President Kennedy’s assassination grew in cr e asi ng 1 y murky - my s t e rious deaths and strange coincidences and hinted conspiracies-and never added up to anything solid...

...In his notable essay, “The Pornography of Death,” the British anthropologist Geoffrey Forer says that certain subjects are taboo because they so gravely threaten the values on which prevailing patterns of thought are built...

...They were rather rudimentary questions of power and control, and they showed that none of us had ever absorbed the lessons they probably teach in Business Administration 1A: that lines of authority must be clear, that factional disputes develop a momentum of their own, that simple actions (e.g., getting a new cover designer) grow complicated when they mean wresting power from someone else...

...In one of the manifestos traded during those months of conflict between us and some of the old Ramparts staff, references were made to “irreconcilable differences” between us and them-which is, I realized later, the language of the newly re formed California divorce law, where neither partner is held to blame...

...Few businessmen or administrators would have had trouble recognizing the problems that were developing, but there was an unspoken proscription against openly discussing them at Ramparts...

...For often that is an essential part of understanding why the senator votes for bigger bombers, or why an unemployed man throws rocks at a black family moving onto his block...

...At the time of its greatest prominence, Ramparts had managed to combine a distinctly Left political view with the things necessary to reach a wide audience : large-scale direct mail promotion, advertising, lively typography, art and photographs, skillful public relations...

...Soon afterwards came the rebellions back at the magazine’s home office...

...We let the magazine’s label excuse too much...

...In a way, our attitude was a little like that of the American socialists in the first decades of Soviet Russia...

...When newspapers are telling us what happens, a magazine has a reason to exist only if it can tell us why and how it happens, and a lot more besides...

...But the fact that Che diary business was mentioned at all makes my point about sacred cow tendencies...

...Yet Ramparts was so concerned with making as big a splash as possible with the disclosure that it never really presented a serious political analysis...

...Then would follow a business lunch where Hinckle would consume a dozen Scotches without showing the slightest effect and sketch dummies of the next issue’s pages on the restaurant’s placemats...

...The magazine was rather uneven during this period, mirroring the uncertainties of its time and its readers by heading off in some strange directions: Pop-Art covers, an article on how to cheat the phone company, a long piece almost endorsing one of the new gurus...

...We’re not the first generation in this country to learn the limits of muckraking, but one problem with American radicals today is that we often choose to forget our history...

...A number of ex-staff members believe in the Ramparts Curse...

...I had left the magazine in disgust before all this, but I found it easy to follow events by keeping up with angry petitions that periodically arrived in my mail...

...A bit of radical chic imitating the French student revolts of several months before...

...I helped work on the-story in a very small way, and still remember the tension that built up in the office as the deadline approached: the meetings held in restaurants so no one could overhear, the dashing out to phone booths to get away from tapped telephones...

...A good muckraking story should be much more than that: a window onto society’s very structure...

...His greatest talent was public relations...

...Ramparts was founded in 1962 by Edward Keating, a wealthy convert to Catholicism, who first used the magazine to call for reform in the Catholic Church...

...It’s worth digressing to examine them, for they provide a useful standard by which to judge not just Ramparts, but a lot of other magazines as well...

...Finally, in the first of the coups and counter-coups which have characterized Ramparts’ history, Keating tried to fire Hinckle...

...but a magazine that is radical in the best sense of the word must go beyond that and examine the whole system behind it...

...I’ve often wondered why the coups took so long to come...

...Things which would have seemed outrageous anywhere else I viewed as simple personal disagreements between me and the management...

...Hinckle rallied the other backers to his side and deposed Keating...

...I learned a great deal about my own capacity for unfairness and ferocity in such disputes, and about how the process narrows your vision...

...A few months of chasing lost manuscripts and making promises to writers and later discovering you didn’t have the authority to keep them, drove the numerous people who tried it, including me, out of the job...

...The first either of the writers heard of it was after the magazine was printed...

...No newspaper would have published Elinor Langer’s series of articles about working for the telephone company that appeared in The New York Review of Books a few years ago, or James C. Thomson’s examination in The Atlantic of the sexual and cultural climate of the bureaucracy of Vietnam-era Washington, or Susan Sontag’s account of her trip to Hanoi, which was as much an examination of herself as of Vietnam...

...ten years later it published the Pentagon Papers...

...In what is usually the last gasp of a dying magazine, the subscription list is up for sale...

...Most important, we shared a vision of what a robust Left magazine Ramparts could be: a journal on the model I described a few pages ago, vigorously socialist yet not hesitating to criticize the fashionable blind spots of American radicals...

...Another matter: Whether it is on the left or the right, any magazine that is consistently objecting to the status quo has a responsibility to hold *I resigned from the magazine in 1968 because it would not print, or even really discuss with me, an article I had been commissioned to do on Cuba...

...Perhaps the same should apply here...

...As I was finishing writing these recollections, a friend called to tell me Ramparts had just accepted a review from him: They said it was great, a brilliant critique of writer X, and it would run in the next issue...

...Editors and staff alike worked long hours at low wages, producing some thoughtful editorials and more serious political writing...

...When you attack the big media conglomerates, you can also do an article on the remarkable popularly controlled national radio system in Holland...

...For it is a story which has something to say not just about Ramparts itself, and not just about the movement (we used to call it The Movement) for radical change in America, but also about the process of political journalism and the limits of the muckraking on which Ramparts made its name...

...I remember one scene that could have come out of Day for Night: We were sitting around having one of our interminable meetings...

...If one dared to ask where the money was really going to come from, Hinckle would fall back into his chair and suck on his grasshopper while Scheer lunged forward...

...I felt still better as I got to know another person who would be with us, Richard Parker, a young economist-turned-journalist, author of a book on income distribution and a founder of a good-and solventalternative newspaper in Santa Barbara, California...

...Ramparts is not alone in its office politics problems...

...It was as if there were a Ramparts Curse, which had stayed with the magazine through successive generations of editors...

...of success...

...I think there is something good in the idea of collective control...

...But Keating, a real estate investor, had no experience in journalism, and to edit his magazine he hired Warren Hinckle 111, a young San Francisco reporter and public relations man...

...Also, there is the simple question of justice: virtually all newspapers and magazines in this country are controlled simply by whoever had the luck to inherit them or the money to buy them...

...After Ramparts exposed the CIA’S support of the NSA and other groups, some liberal senators promptly suggested a consortium of public and private funding to support these same organizations doing the same work, since they couldn’t get CIA money any more...

...And always, there was money...

...Meanwhile, the magazine continued to be published during our dispute, almost as if it were a separate entity...

...Later, embarrassed, more editors offered other reasons...

...There is also a good practice at Ramparts and a few other surviving New Left enterprises-you are paid according not to title, but to need...

...Cooptation, wateringdown...

...You end up spending all day in meetings, instead of thinking, writing, or editing manuscripts...

...Every article doesn’t have to be treated this way, but this gives an idea of the possibilities...

...All action swirled around him: a pet monkey named Henry Luce would sit on his shoulder while he paced his office, drink in hand, shouting instructions into a speakerphone across the room to someone in New York about a vast promotional mailing...

...there were too many Esquire-style staged photographs (like the one of Christ on a cross in the middle of a Vietnam battlefield...

...Wasn’t Ramparts a radical magazine after all...

...There were good stories too: an extraordinary account of the electronic spying by the National Security Administration, penetrating radical critiques of American foundations and the politics of population control, and some longoverdue self-criticism of New Left strategy...

...Ramp ar ts lo s t circulation steadily through the early 70s, going from over 200,000 to around 60,000 today...

...But Hinckle saw the convention demonstrations, like everything else, from inside a comfortable bar, and the Wallposter staff revolted when he published a banner-headline story: TEAR GAS IN THE PUMP ROOM...

...A daily paper takes a lot of reporters, a lot of money, and a lot of people to distribute it, none of which Ramparts had...

...One advantage we’ve got over the last century is that the world is diverse enough now so that somewhere, somebody is likely to be doing a lot of the things you’re advocating...

...Ramparts would publish books, set up book clubs, start a syndicate...

...Even though the magazine was publishing everyone from Barry Commoner to Jean Lacouture, increasing numbers of writers would have nothing to do with it...

...They were right...

...The Ramparts Curse For the next several years I had little to do with Ramparts...

...The story was front-page news all over the world...

...You come to work in the morning and find three or four people slipping into someone’s office and shutting the door...

...Once I saw Robert Scheer, just returned from a trip abroad, despairingly confront a vast, half-sorted tangle of things on his desk: press releases, unanswered letters, unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, phone messages, speaking invitations, article queries...

...Others said things along the lines of: you guys may be all right, but you’ll never pull all that off with Ramparts...

...The boundaries of authority were murky between Jacobs (officially editor), Parker (managing editor), and myself on the one hand, and the three other staff members who sat with us on a six-person “editorial board...

...Then all three of us resigned, with a good deal of anger...

...Hinckle had the pen but not the rest...

...But not so...

...What’s the matter?’ he’d say, ‘Got no guts?’ It was like a visit with Cohn and Schine...

...up some sort of a vision of the society it wants instead...

...From a distance it looked good: the magazine’s proletariat of underpaid researchers and other staff people was revolting, and it was high time...

...In addition to the question of relevant skills was simply the stupefying amount of time and energy it takes to run every major decision through a group of six people...

...But while this was going on, Hinckle and Scheer were living it up...

...meetings followed meetings...

...There were disagreements over our wanting to hire professional advertising salesmen and graphics designers...

...At the height of its fame, Ramparts received about 40 unsolicited manuscripts a day...

...But the ploy failed, and the only resignation was his own...

...After a while, this behavior began to earn the Ramparts editors a widespread reputation for arrogance and insensitivity...

...We handle power badly because it is so wrapped up with the things we are fighting: that other kind of power that can drop thousands of tons of bombs, can buy judges and congressmen, can close down a factory and throw 500 people out of work...

...To do the last, Ramparts would leak the story in advance to TheNew York Times...

...For a week after the CIA story first broke, the Times and other leading newspapers competed to see who could unravel the tale further, chiefly by searching for anyone else who had received money from the foundations we had identified as CIA conduits...

...Evil men and destructive institutions are made, not born, and unless you can give some insight into the process, your reader might as well stick to the six o’clock news...

...Any other system is bound to be more equitable than that...

...Power, its implications in normal human relations, the need to arrange it intelligently, is the American Left’s latest taboo...

...This way of doing things is important, because it also helps avoid the dullingly negative quality that magazines of social criticism tend to have...

...When Ramparts was finally reorganized so that it was actually owned by a collective of staff members from all departmehts, it sounded like a good guarantee against its previous autocracy...

...yes-but that is better than nothing...

...today we understand the body much better but we no longer believe in the afterlife, hence death is obscene...

...When you have a photoessay on the horrendous depersonalization of the American automobile assembly line, you can also look at some of the new cooperatively owned factories in France...

...A friend went to the magazine to search for a manuscript that had not been returned...

...As time went on and the three of us grew to respect the abilities of certain of our colleagues less and less, the whole arrangement seemed increasingly insane...

...Clearing his throat and adopting that deep, authoritative radio voice, he began: “The newspaper Sunday Ramparts died today, died...

...A few days after that he managed to get someone to admit that they hoped to get writer X to write for Ramparts and did not want to offend him...

...here at last was someone strong enough to break the Ramparts Curse...

...And so the problem is that if you just expose a particular evil, without any deeper analysis, people will respond with changes that just touch the surface...

...In the last few years, scores of operations on the Left-womens’ groups, peace campaigns, free schools, and alternative media like the Pacifica network of radio stations (where things get so bad the different factions denounce each other on the air)-have all had trouble with the bugbear of power...

...on the cover of the issue with his story was a color photo of Master Sergeant Duncan with all his medals, under the headline “I Quit!’’ (Michigan State’s role in Vietnam was illustrated by a cover of Madame Nhu as a MSU cheerleader...

...Ramparts: The End of Muckraking Magazines by Adam Hochschild I first heard of Ramparts when I was an apprentice newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the mid-1960s...

...In fact, when I look back at copies of the magazine from the last several years, I’m surprised at how much good stuff there was...

...Both groups began demanding limits on his power, which he was unwilling to give...

...They flew East, first class, once or twice a month...

...So perhaps this is as good a time as any to take a look at the magazine’s history...

...You can have nine really solid articles, but if the tenthis “The Third Sex,” or an uncritical paean to one of Ramparts’ favorite sacred cows, like the Black Panthers, the North Vietnamese, or at one period of time, Cuba,” that’s the one everybody will remember and judge the magazine by...

...The staff discovered all this when we arrived at the office one morning to find the locks had been changed...

...American radicals of the last few years have been pretty faddish and foolish about a lot of I) things, and up to a few months ago it was a foolishness I shared...

...When the chance came to work with him at Ramparts, I said yes...

...Once or twice, at the beginning, when some incident raised the sticky question of who would have the final authority to edit a manuscript, it was brushed aside with “well, we’ll work it out in practice,” and “we just have to learn to trust each other...

...We lasted three months...

...Its publication followed a pattern which for some months worked marvelously: find an expose major newspapers are afraid to touch, publish it with a big enough splash so they can’t afford to ignore it (as, for example, they had ignored various aspects of the CIA/NSA story disclosed in previous years by a congressional committee, by The Nation, and by an SDS pamphlet), and then publicize it in a way that plays the news media off against each other...

...Things fell apart over much more mundane issues...

...For all its faults, Ramparts has not been a waste either...

...of success” manner, in a note on the table of contents page), running up thousands of dollars in over time typesetting costs...

...It would be nice to say that Jacobs, Parker, and I left Ramparts over some matter of great principle-a disagreement about China or about the question of terrorism...

...I could see the end was near when we reached what I have noticed (from having watched it happen several times) is usually the climactic phase of factional disputes: the Time of the Caucuses...

...The Hundred Daw I watched Ramparts’ decline with a mixture of I-told-you-so satisfaction and sadness that a magazine that had promised so much was speaking in so uncertain a voice and to an eversmaller circle of readers...

...other tenants on the same floor wonder why groups of people are always out whispering in the hallway...

...We are repulsed by the idea of spelling out clearly where power lies, because this kind of clarity so often goes with rigid hierarchies: the military, civil service, big corporations...

...TIE Ramparts editors never mastered the flow...

...Then it was still on our side, and its gross inaccuracy here, or unethical treatment of someone there, was somehow less serious than if some other magazine had done them...

...And so the magazine is back to its old ways...

...Rather it appealed to me: there seemed something vaguely innovative in the idea that hard work in the less glamorous areas of the magazine (the others had previously done mostly production, advertising, and copyediting) should earn you something...

...But using the techniques of the society you’re attacking is dangerous, unless you’re completely clear about your own intentions...

...But you have to make the effort...

...Ramparts did a little of this, but not nearly enough, because it never quite found a personality that was a strong alternative to its old role as a muckraker...

...I heard that Ramparts, seeking a way out of its morass, had asked Paul Jacobs, a veteran San Francisco journalist and equally veteran radical, to take over as editor...

...That left the photographers, artists, and writers to wait and wait for their checks...

...photo agencies wouldn’t send pictures unless they were paid in advance...

...The style of searching for hidden scandals which Ramparts and a few other lonely voices had begun finally culminated in Woodward and Bernstein...

...The investors were fed up with Hinckle’s lavish ways with their money, the staff with much more...

...He was a huge pirate of a man, a 200-pounder with a black patch on one eye, and he raced through each 18-hour day with dizzying speed...

...These are difficult articles to get, for you can’t just point somebody in one direction and say, “There’s the story, go get it...

...Hincklestyle high-spending stopped, partly because there was no more money to spend...

...The glossy covers had too many boasts of “Exclusive...

...in college I had imagined myself a crusading reporter, and moreover had thought this would be a fine way to be a part of the movement for civil rights and social justice which had begun in the Kennedy years...

...We watched all this with a heady sense of being part of something new in modern American journalism: we were a magazine-of dissent, but we were being heard...

...Hinckle was only 28 during Ramparts’ heyday and was an extraordinary phenomenon...

...I met one recently who claimed that the reason for the curse is that God is really a liberal Catholic and got mad at the magazine when it kicked out its founder, Church reformer Edward Keating...

...Now, in the early 7Os, suddenly everyone was doing muckraking...

...We also wanted a magazine which kept promises to writers, paid on time, and edited articles with the sympathy of three people who had been free-lancers themselves...

...It was only after my enthusiasm with Ramparts and its exposes faded, and I had left the magazine, that I remembered one day the college paper I did on the first muckrakers...

...Some issues were excellent...

...The paradigm I had taken was Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle to stir people to action over the exploitation of the working class and the need for socialism, and was dismayed to find instead that it only resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act...

...for trying out ideas or finding ways to improve an article, four or five heads are usually better than one...

...In 1966 it had broken such stories as how Michigan State University had helped train the South Vietnamese secret police...

...Many magazines have some kind of editorial board...

...Major stories were written with the liveliness of detective novels...

...A December, 1973, cover story, “The Third Sex” implied you were just not with it if you weren’t actively bisexual...

...What had once been the arrogance of a magazine on the rise became, in the years after Hinckle, the arrogance of a magazine impoverished and declining...

...I read it sporadically, followed the court gossip, and saw in the magazine’s pages hazy promises of reorganizations, expanded coverage, Washington bureaus...

...And it shouldn’t compete, on the same terms...

...on his couch would be sitting, slightly dazed, a French television crew, or Malcolm X’s widow (who arrived one, day surrounded by a dozen bodyguards with loaded shotguns), or the private detective to whom Hinckle had given the title of Criminology Editor...

...Some aspects imprbved...

...Ultimately the flashiness had a corrupting effect on the magazine...

...So the Daily Ramparts soon became the Sunday Ramparts...

...For that is the only reason to spread the troubles of one small and faltering institution over so many pages in the first place...

...both sides broke promises...

...Some months later, when the paper was draining great amounts of money and manpower from the magazine we were trying to put out at the same time, Hinckle reluctantly killed it...

...You do not admit that the other side’s idea for an article is good or that an author your side contacted produced a bad piece, because to do so weakens your position...

...The door to the conference room popped open, and in walked the business manager with the first copies, just rushed from the printer, of our latest issue...