Ppjc Presents

With Author Peter Richardson The rollicking story of Ramparts—the magazine that captured the zeitgeist of the ’60s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, brought the new left into American living rooms, and made an indelible imprint on American journalism "Ramparts was part of the media mud puddle out of which some of the most lively forms of journalism crawled, like gonzo journalism and new journalism. . . . It was rambunctious and clever at a time when journalism had grown stodgy and stale." —Mitch Stephens, author of A History of News A Bomb in Every Issue tells the largely untold story of the wild ride of this hugely influential magazine that achieved countless firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time. Launched in 1962 as an intellectual Catholic quarterly, within five years Ramparts had become a secular magazine and won a George Polk Award for “its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition.” Deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, its contributors included Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag. It was in its pages that Che Guevera’s diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver (which became Soul on Ice) first appeared. But by 1975, out of money and time, it had folded for good. Ramparts was “the journalistic equivalent of a rock band,” Richardson argues and, despite its early demise, it left an important journalistic legacy, influencing a generation of reporters and editors, that is still apparent today. Peter Richardson is the author of American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams. He is the editorial director at PoliPoint Press and the interim chair of the California Studies Association, and teaches courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. He lives in Marin County, California.