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

$12 advance ($6 students with ID advance)/ $15 at door

First Congregational Church of Berkeley (in sanctuary)
2345 Channing Way at Dana 

Robert Scheer and Peter Richardson discuss the influential history of Ramparts Magazine at First Congregational Church of Berkeley.

 The short lived (1962-1975) but utterly remarkable Ramparts magazine, which, originally founded as a Catholic literary quarterly, quickly became the premier leftist publication of its era. Deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, Ramparts’ list of contributors – Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Tariq Ali, among others – forms a veritable who’s who of politics and journalism. It was in its pages that Che Guevara’s diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver first appeared, and it is where neo-con David Horowitz cut his teeth in journalism, before renouncing his left-wing political radicalism.

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

By Peter Richardson

ISBN-13: 9781595584397
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: New Press, 9/2009

Ramparts 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. Although Ramparts folded in 1975, it left an important legacy. Former staffers Jann Wenner and Adam Hochschild founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones respectively. The magazine’s combination of high audacity and solid reporting deeply influenced a generation of progressive writers and remains an inspiration for investigative journalists.

Author Peter Richardson situates Ramparts within its Bay Area context and assesses its impact on the national stage, while bringing to life the way in which Ramparts entertained readers, mirrored the New Left’s fascination with the media, and exemplified new possibilities for American journalists.  Richardson, chair of the California Studies Association, teaches at SFSU and is the author of American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.

Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig.com and a contributing editor of The Nation. From 1964 to 1969, he was managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts, after which he spent close to twenty years at the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book is The Pornography of Power.

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