Ramparts Magazine
| editor | Warren Hinckle |
|---|---|
| managing editor | James F. Colaianni |
| Categories | left-wing politics |
| Frequency | monthly |
| Publisher | Edward M. Keating |
| Year founded | 1962 |
| Final issue | 1975 |
| Based in | San Francisco, California |
Ramparts was a glossy illustrated American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 to 1975 and closely associated with the New Left political movement. Unlike most of the radical magazines of the day, Ramparts was expensively produced and graphically sophisticated.
Ramparts was established in June 1962 by Edward M. Keating in Menlo Park, California, as a "showcase for the creative writer and as a forum for the mature American Catholic." The magazine declared its intent to publish "fiction, poetry, art, criticism and essays of distinction, reflecting those positive principles of the Hellenic-Christian tradition which have shaped and sustained our civilization for the past two thousand years, and which are needed still to guide us in an age grown increasingly secular, bewildered, and afraid."
The early magazine included pieces by Thomas Merton and John Howard Griffin, but one observer compared its design to "the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls school." Under editor Warren Hinckle, the magazine upgraded its look, converted to a monthly news magazine, and moved to San Francisco. Robert Scheer became managing editor, and Dugald Stermer was hired as art director.
Ramparts was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Its April 1966 cover article concerned the Michigan State University Group, a technical assistance program in South Vietnam that Ramparts claimed was a front for CIA covert operations. For that story, Ramparts won the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In August 1966, managing editor James F. Colaianni wrote the first national article denouncing the US use of napalm in that conflict. One of the magazine's most controversial covers depicted the hands of four of its editors holding burning draft cards, with their names clearly visible.Ramparts also covered conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. The magazine published Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver, later republished as Soul On Ice. Upon his release from prison, Cleaver became a Ramparts staff writer.
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