In the late sixties, Ramparts stood out among the masses of underground and left wing magazines. Founded in 1962 as a Catholic literary journal, it became closely associated with the New Left, drawing its inspiration and staff from the movement. Ramparts was written, however, for the public at large or at least those “with it” enough to read it. From the late sixties to the early seventies, Ramparts was not only the most prestigious but also the most profitable name in American left-wing letters.
What was the secret of Ramparts' success? In a way, it was all a matter of appearances. The aesthetic of a left-liberal publication tends to lean towards the cheaply produced: The Nation, The New Republic, the drably academic Dissent, Z, or the poorly Xeroxed The Socialist Worker. Often suspicious of flashy advertising and eternally strapped for cash, most progressive publications place little emphasis on style. Ramparts was different. It was slickly produced, in a glossy magazine format that had in more in common with TIME than In These Times. In the words of former editor Peter Collier, such lean and attractive presentation allowed Ramparts to “[express] radical left values in a way mainstream people could understand.”
Of course, it wasn’t as superficial as that. Good looks will only go so far, and if high production values were Ramparts’s initial ticket to mainstream visibility, it was the content that kept the magazine relevant. In the frenzied political climate of the sixties and early seventies, with various branches of the American government up to all kinds of bad behavior at home and abroad, Ramparts served as a locus for good old American muck-raking. In 1966, Ramparts was the first national magazine in the U.S. to attack America’s use of napalm in Vietnam. The magazine also exposed the CIA’s manipulation of the National Student Association, the collaboration between University of Michigan academics and South Vietnamese government, and, less impressively, was one of the first to question the official history of the Kennedy assassination. While breaking news, Ramparts also helped define the required reading of the New Left, running the diaries of Che Guevara and Eldridge Cleaver, and interviews with luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Erica Jong and Susan Sontag.
All this was done with a staggering assemblage of journalistic talent. Ramparts alumni include: Robert Scheer (Truthdig), Sol Stern (City Journal), Todd Gitlin, Martin Peretz (The New Republic), Adam Hochschild (Mother Jones), David Horowitz , Lowell Bergman (PBS Frontline editor, inspiration for Michael Mann’s The Insider) and Christopher Hitchens.
It is interesting to note how many of these writers and editors went on to undergo political conversions, from Peretz’s shift to a hawkish neo-liberalism and Hitchens’s idiosyncratic embrace of “liberal interventionism,” to the outright reversals of Cleaver, Stern, and Horowitz, all of whom became conservatives. Even after financial difficulties and personality conflicts ultimately forced it to shut down, Ramparts continues to reflect the fate of the New Left in the divergent trajectories of its former staff, with only a few, such as Scheer and Bergman, seeming to truly carry on the magazine’s tradition.
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What was the secret of Ramparts' success? In a way, it was all a matter of appearances. The aesthetic of a left-liberal publication tends to lean towards the cheaply produced: The Nation, The New Republic, the drably academic Dissent, Z, or the poorly Xeroxed The Socialist Worker. Often suspicious of flashy advertising and eternally strapped for cash, most progressive publications place little emphasis on style. Ramparts was different. It was slickly produced, in a glossy magazine format that had in more in common with TIME than In These Times. In the words of former editor Peter Collier, such lean and attractive presentation allowed Ramparts to “[express] radical left values in a way mainstream people could understand.”