MAGAZINE EXPERIMENTING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100470007-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 1, 2004
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: September 11, 1970
• Content Type: NSPR

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Approved For Release 200 101/11 - ~ A~ P88-01 11 . 4 L~
Ilinckle also found photographers and writers w to,
SA4r,b'RANCISCO--The offices of Ramparts magazine airplane strike, that he flew to New York,via Paris on
have,, becii. pulled out of here and relocated a.cross the the grounds that it was the only way to get' there.'
-bay in the city 'of-Berkeley's low-rent district. Ram- Wherever he went, it was always first class, even at the
parts broke and reorganized under the bankruptcy 1968 Democratic convention where the magazine's left-
act, is so poor it puts out one issue at a time and hopes, radical staff had to suffer their boss and his friends
but its quondam editor, Warren Ilinckle III; remains oil drinking it up in a suite in the city's most expensive
this side of the bay, drinking awesome amounts of hotel while they swallowed tear gas clown on the
streets.
Scotch whiskey, "There's something about expense accounts and Ram-
He does this at Cookie's, a Kearney Street tavcrti parts that drove the left crazy. If we'd lost that money
hangout for cops and other old-time urban types. There with a commercial magazine, nobody would have said
are pictures of. Jack Webb, Orval Faubus and George anything, but the left is schizophrenic about money,"
Wallace on the walls; in the men's room somebody's rich estrpeople mortheileft drive Volksaagensense.
" own IBM
The
Written that "Mulcrevy is a fruit." It's the kind of a stock and give people money to build bombs."
joint that is prized as a genuine remnant at a moment He appears to find the criticism a little confusing,
when people think the genuine may only be found in and perhaps he really does because Hinckle is more of
second-hand stores. an editorial genius than a radical who can understand
Cookie's isn't where you'd expect to see the editor'of other radicals. "The job of journalism should be to
make ideas work, to drive people crazy, and not just
the most influential left magazine since The Masses, but record things," says Hinckle, who's attracted to the
IIinckle likes, it, and he says that his ex-star writer, swirl of leftist thought because it supplies the analyt-
EIdridge Cleaver, used to like it too. It fits the profile ical and conceptual means for making the journalism
that IIinckle shows the world-mission district Irish- which drives people nuts. Creativity in American arts
man, boozer, ex-citysicle newspai)er reporter, unpredict_ and letters comes almost exclusively from the left, and
able madman, lover of the genuine. " Hinckle knows this and uses it without particularly
At 31, IIinckle has already done too much Ito be con-' subscribing to it.
sidered a young nut working on becoming a colorful old Ilinckle ran out of financial expedients and resigned
-eccentric. Although Ramparts lost Upwards of $4 mint from Ramparts about the time the Nixon administration
-lion-`.`I tried to save it by chasing miIlianaires up and -was assuming office. The left-liberal anti-Johnson coali-
down mountains in Switzerland" - the magazine has tion was falling apart; the hated man who'd given it
had an incalculable impact on American: periodical unity was out of public life, and with him, Hinckle
:publishing. thinks, the reader enthusiasm which helped make Ram-
When Hinckle started in the mid-'60s, left=wing parts began to disintegrate too. It was time to raise
thought, left political analysis were excluded front money for a new magazine, which would be different,
American mass media. Even muckraking had been rele- less political, more diffusely cultural, less arresting
gated to fly-spooky journals that lived on the back racks visually. He was looking for something a little softer, a
of a few-New York City newsstands.. Hinckle created little more literary.
,radical slick, a Beautifully designed publication on shiny ' The new product, which has now gone through.
paper with four-color pictures of. startling editorial seven monthly issues, is called Scanlan's-named, we're
content. - told, after a heroically anonymous. Irish pig farmer.
At its height, Ramparts itself probably never sold Designed by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, it is dif-
more than a quarter of a million copies, but its influ ferent but quite as handsome as Ramparts in. its own
once on other magazines has been immense. Harper 's way. While Scanlan's is more broad-gauge with articles
hired Dugald Stermer, the gifted art director who made on Winnie the Pooh and how you, too, can forge credit
Ramparts, to redesign what had been its bleakly dull cards and rip off corporate America, it can still make
product. Atlantic followed by redoing itself through the politics read like more than a couple of old bores trying
medium of borrowing many of Stermer's ideas. Rolling to out-talk each other. The October issue, for example,
Stone, the c. untr 's n t s } Qcossful Q~c42S5et1zine should be a doozy.
hired Sterm ~p vs~Ca WI ~ s `~t1anPIA-RpP~$ti0I13r'44 tiR. Oi ZlUO4 O9p7-Ylinckle said. "It's
now also widely imitated 'layout. allout guerrilla .warfare in the United States. For some
if they had nothing else and they often had much more,
wrote with a zipping energy that the Eastern publica-
tions lacked. His magazine brought the expose back
into vogue and popularized a wider and more biting
treatment of events. It's inconceivable that Life would
have done its celebrated issue of the pictures. of the .
Vietnam war dead had there been no Ramparts. Where
thb New Yorker had accustomed people to long arti-
cles in depth, Ramparts explored breadth, the relating
of an event to many elements across a society.
As a businessman, Hinckle was as much a failure,as