A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

by Peter Richardson

A Mother Jones "Best Book of 2009," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and repeatedly scooped the New York Times, changing American journalism forever.Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly transformed into a "radical slick," winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its "explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." According to the Los Angeles Times, the magazine "not only blew the cover off the biggest stories of the era, it also helped set the ideological agenda for its core demographic, the New Left, and forced the mainstream press to follow its lead."Ramparts' list of contributors—including Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag—formed a who's who of the American left. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, former staffers founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and include some of the most illustrious names in journalism (names like Robert Scheer, Jann Wenner, and Warren Hinckle), and Ramparts remains an inspiration to investigative journalists today.

Genres: History, Journalism, Nonfiction, Politics, American History

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 18, 2009

About the author

Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. He is currently completing a book about the first decade of Rolling Stone magazine.

Richardson's essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets. Excerpts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Bookforum. A busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.

From 2006 to 2023, Richardson taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. His cultural commentary has been featured in major newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad, and he has appeared in several documentary films and television programs. He is regular guest on radio programs and podcasts, and he speaks occasionally at universities, museums, book festivals, and historical societies.

Richardson's professional experience includes editorial stints at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers.

In the 1990s, Richardson was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Iceland, and an NEH Summer Seminar fellow at Harvard University. He also wrote a textbook on stylistic revision, now in its second edition. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Born and raised in the East Bay, he now lives in Sonoma County.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

How does an obscure west coast Catholic magazine, fueled by east coast wealth, cigarettes and Christian intellectual fiction become the radical left "slick", design-forward muckraker of the 1960s? How do you go from the nuns of genteel Menlo Park to the napalm of the graphic Vietnam War? From giving out haughty poetry prizes to giving out ink space to The Black Panthers?

This is Ramparts, a magazine you more than likely have never heard about, but one that changed journalism as we know it. Many of the writers and editors and short-lived hangers-on are still writing today, and some are even on the air (an unexpected example would be Brit Hume, who is now on Fox News). This is really a story of a bunch of larger than life figures (and egos) who created out of sheer determination a media mouthpiece that questioned conventions and, at times, made really questionable decisions. It's a story of the mid/late 60s and early 70s in America, which was in a crisis of identity and rife with unrest. So much happened in such a short period of time and while there was no social media back then, there were journalists and newly minted "muckrakers" who exposed the CIA, the Establishment and galvanized thousands across the country.

At times, the anecdotes of the players at Ramparts are out of a cartoon: the only copy of a doctoral thesis flowing out of a backpack while crossing a bridge on a motorcycle, reporting on the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention from a five-start hotel, a pet office monkey named Henry Luce, and more and more. In between all of this, they managed to print a magazine that angered, motivated, and impacted thoughts and minds on the left and on the right.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A breezily told life-and-times account of Ramparts magazine and its late impresario, the larger than life Warren Hinckle. Ramparts went from an old money funded highbrow magazine in Menlo Park in 1962, to one of the key sensationalist New Left publications, based in San Francisco. The real topic of the book, however, are the fissures of radical politics in late 60s San Francisco: while there was a shared hatred of establishment, technocratic, repressive let tolerant limousine liberalism, there were deep disagreements about the counterculture, and skepticism (and worse) about the emergent gender-focused politics that would become central to the 1980s. It's legacy lived on after the magazines demise, through the activities of its alumni, including its cultural proclivities through Jann Wenner, who founded Rolling Stone; its left muckraking through Adam Hochschild, who founded Mother Jones; its foul-mouthed, alcohol-fueled irreverence through Hunter Thompson; and its political iconoclasm through its rightward traveling alumni, including eventual Fox News anchor Brit Hume and generalized whacko bird David Horowitz. A breezy portrait of a particular, febrile, fertile political-cultural moment and place.

[C.D. Reimer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The underground publication, Ramparts, which started off as a Catholic literary journal in Menlo Park, CA in 1962, moved to San Francisco and later Berkeley to become a secular slick with a muckraking mission that impacted journalism and politics in the United States, and spawned several notable successors - Mother Jones and Rolling Stone - before shutting down in 1975.

If you're not that familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area political scene in the 1960s and early 1970s, this book covers all the milestone events in passing or with great detail: the Hell's Angels murder at a rock concert, the CIA spying program in the universities, the revolutions in Latin America, the Berkeley protest movements, the Democratic presidential convention in Chicago, and the violent rise of the Black Panthers.

Despite the anarchy and chaos of those times, many of the people involved with the publication, either directly or indirectly, end up having mainstream lives that were radically different from their liberal youths. Except for Henry Luce, the pet monkey who ran amok in the office and slipped into obscurity.

[The American Conservative]

'Peter Richardson’s book vies with Gitlin’s own The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage as one of the most vivid accounts of the antiwar and eventually anti-American New Left. Richardson tells the story in miniature—in little more than 200 pages—through the rise and fall of the radical magazine Ramparts, which blazoned on one cover in 1969, “Alienation is when your county is at war and you want the other side to win.”'

Read the full review, "A Fistful of Dynamite," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Clifton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and informative glimpse behind the curtain. As dramatic as anything would have to be concerning these "muckraking" journalists. RAMPARTS MAGAZINE was seminal to my eschewing conventional wisdom in my formative teens and early twenties. A Quixotic endeavor that struggled to survive, then, sadly, died too soon.

[Jordie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprisingly well written history of Ramparts Magazine. A small political and cultural muckraker that was briefly prominent in the Sixties before going under. If you're curious about the history of Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, Weather Man, San Francisco, Hunter S. Thompson or Rolling Stone I'd recommend checking it out. It's all tied together in this book.

[Matthew]

"The article made it clear that the CIA secretly used Michigan State University to train Saigon police, maintain a stock of ammunition, and write the South Vietnamese constitution." (50)

[Dan Sharber · Rating 3 out of 5]

meh. it was vaguely interesting if you want to know the ins and outs of running a magazine but if you want movement history from the 60's and 70's there are many better books to read.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fills in some info on Ramparts, but is entirely consistent with the standard '60s declensionist narrative.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and insightful history of the frequently incendiary and highly influential left-wing periodical.