|
Article Excerpt
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.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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)
BERKELEY RADICAL
Scheer's contribution marked a watershed in Ramparts' development. Edward Keating's passion--and his wife Helen's money--had launched the magazine, Hinckle had transformed it, and art director Dugald Stermer was upgrading its look. But Scheer added political insight and deeper ideological commitments that grew out of his upbringing, studies, and activism.
Scheer was born and raised in New York City near the Allerton Avenue "Coops," the cooperative apartment complex in the Bronx built by communists in the 1920s. Both of his parents were garment workers and labor activists. His father, a German immigrant, was an erstwhile Lutheran, Wobbly, and communist who was kicked out of the party for refusing to settle a strike. Scheer lived with his mother, a Russian Jew who never applied for U.S. citizenship, in a building whose tenants were mostly Russian Jews or Russian Orthodox. (9) A latchkey kid, he delivered milk, scalped tickets, worked in a stencil factory, and took odd jobs around the neighborhood to supplement his mother's meager income.
Scheer struggled with learning disorders as a youth, but a science teacher encouraged him to study engineering, pointing out that it was his best chance to enter college. Once admitted to City College of New York, he switched his major to economics. He also learned to debate at City College, where verbal conflict bordered on the gladiatorial. When his classes were over, he worked at the post office before returning to his mother's apartment late in the evening.
After graduation, Scheer attended Syracuse University but soon transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to study economics. Once there, he was offered a fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies, but his interests weren't limited to Asia. "I couldn't go to China," he recalled later, "but I could go to Cuba." (10) He made that trip in the summer of 1960. Back in Berkeley, he gave impassioned speeches about Cuba and American foreign policy on the university campus near Sather Gate. Maurice Zeitlin, a graduate student in sociology and a charismatic speaker, joined him in that effort. After one of their stem-winders, Bay Area poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti approached them and suggested that they write a book based on their speeches for City Lights, his North Beach publishing company and bookstore. Scheer conducted some of his research at the Center for Chinese Studies, whose archives contained transcripts of Cuban radio programs. Because of his dyslexia, he dictated whole chapters. For editorial help, the authors recruited David Horowitz, a graduate student in English and a member of their Marxist study group.
Scheer's work on the book didn't help his standing at the Center for Chinese Studies. When a new director was appointed, Scheer was reprimanded for misusing the center's copier and lost his fellowship. "They were pissed off that I was writing a book and giving speeches," he said later. (11) He turned to the economics department for financial support but came away empty-handed.
Upon finishing his master's thesis, Scheer celebrated with Zeitlin in Berkeley before they headed across the Bay Bridge on Scheer's motor scooter. Their plan was to show the thesis to Ferlinghetti at City Lights. While driving on the bridge, they noticed that other drivers and passengers were gesturing at them, which they construed as hostile reactions to their beards and long hair. But when they turned around, they saw the pages of Scheer's thesis blowing off the back of the scooter, across the traffic lanes, and into the bay. "In those days, it was very difficult to make a copy of a large manuscript," Scheer recalled, "so I was out of luck." (12)
Although he never received his master's degree, Scheer continued working on the Cuba book with Zeitlin. In the end, however, Ferlinghetti chose not to publish it. Stuffed with charts and tables, it was too academic for City...
|
