Ramparts was a frequently controversial and influential radical-left American news journal produced from 1962 through 1975. ¹ A January 1967 criticism from the editors of Time accused Ramparts of placing a metaphorical “bomb in every issue.”  ²

Ramparts opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War, with one report claiming this was “an equal or greater evil” than “racism in America.” ³ A 1969 cover featured a small American boy holding a Viet Cong flag, under a caption that read “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” ^{4 5} Martin Luther King, Jr. credited Ramparts coverage for his decision to publicly oppose the war and claimed the United States had become “the major purveyor of violence in the world.” ¹ An April 1966 scoop revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, using professors at Michigan State University, secretly had been responsible for creating the government of Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of South Vietnam. ^{1 6}

Ramparts produced sympathetic reports on other communist regimes and individuals. A 1970 first-person commentary from a member of the first Venceremos Brigade wrote that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was “totally fantastic—completely overwhelming.” ⁷ In 1968, David Horowitz (who has since affiliated with the political right-of-center) wrote that North Korea had become “one of the most successful and independent countries of the Sino-Soviet bloc.” ⁸ In 1966 and 1973 issues Ramparts promoted the work of journalists who proclaimed the innocence of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. ^{9 10}

In 1972 Ramparts produced the first comprehensive exposé of the work of the National Security Agency. ¹² In 1967 the magazine broke the news that the Central Intelligence Agency had been covertly funding the National Student Association (previously considered an independent, left-leaning student group) since the 1950s. ^{13 1} Despite the animosity of the some of the publication’s left-of-center readers, Ramparts also produced favorable reviews of the work of Soviet dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and criticisms of the Weather Underground, a radical-left domestic terrorist group. ^{14 15 16}

Ramparts covered the early animosity towards carbon dioxide emissions, ¹⁷  the creation of several climate policy groups, ¹⁸ and early electric vehicles. ¹⁹ Opposition to corporations and capitalism was a recurring theme of the magazine’s coverage of climate and energy issues. ^{20 21} Ramparts ran hostile coverage of the first Earth Day, ²⁰ the oil and gas industry, ²² nuclear energy, ^{19 23} and genetically modified crops. ²⁵ The magazine also published contributors who were skeptical “peak oil,” the theory that the world was running out of petroleum, ²⁷

Background

Ramparts was created in 1962 with an investment from Edward Keating, an independently wealthy Catholic convert and California resident. The publication was first headquartered in Menlo Park, a community in California’s Bay Area, later moved to San Francisco, and was also headquartered in Berkeley. By 1967, circulation had grown to 229,000. ¹

On the brink of insolvency since its creation, Ramparts ran out of money for the last time and ceased publication in 1975.  Keating’s investment in the magazine, along with his family’s wealth, were exhausted by 1965. In 1967 the magazine’s board of directors voted to remove Keating from his role in Ramparts. ¹

In A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, journalist Peter Richardson wrote that Keating’s initial objective was to create a Catholic literary magazine that would “serve as a showcase for creative writers and Christian intellectuals” and “host serious discussions between Catholic clergy and laity.” The name was derived from the verse regarding ramparts in “The Star Spangled Banner.” According to A Bomb in Every Issue, one reason Keating preferred the name was because he believed his magazine would “receive a plug every time the national anthem was sung.” The first issue of Ramparts appeared in May 1962, and according to Richardson “looked like the poetry annual of a midwestern girls school.” ¹

In late 1964 Ramparts moved from quarterly to monthly publication and by then had begun to evolve into the radical-left news and ideas journal that would prevail for the remainder of its history. The October 1964 issue featured “Harlem Diary: An Extraordinary Account of the Harlem Riots—told by the people who were there—in words few white men have ever heard,” and a report on the failure of a planned march by the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Harlem. The cover of the November 1964 issue showed a cartoon image of then-Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater as a rattlesnake and featured a symposium of more than a half dozen essays criticizing him, his campaign and his political ideology. ²⁸ (For more on the PLP and its influence, please see the InfluenceWatch profiles of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground.)

The “Letters” section in the January 1965 issue was sub-headlined “The New Ramparts” and contained correspondence from readers who both appreciated and opposed the publication’s decisive turn toward political issues during the latter months of 1964. ²⁹

“Having been a charter subscriber and constant reader of Ramparts, I deplore its alarming drift toward the sensational,” wrote a man from Tennessee. “I have come to expect a certain dignity in Ramparts, and am now saddened at the prospect of its fading.” ²⁹

“I have just finished reading the October Ramparts,” observed a reader from Indiana. “This could become an important magazine. The article on the Harlem riots was excellent [. . .] I think, however, that you must try to present more sound factual material in the articles. A monotonous shrill note of emotional protest will soon become wearisome.” ²⁹

“Basically your journal has ceased to be Christian in any true sense, unless I’m wrong about the basis for Christianity being Charity,” wrote a Catholic nun from Los Angeles. ²⁹

As late as the April 1966 issue, editor Warren Hinckle was still remarking on the Catholic roots of the magazine by recounting a joke made by independent political journalist I.F. Stone, who was Jewish. Stone had then recently spoken at a Ramparts-sponsored town hall meeting in New York regarding the Vietnam War: ³⁰

He felt a little strange speaking at a meeting sponsored by a Catholic magazine [. . .] Then Stone looked up and down the [Ramparts] masthead and blinked. “There haven’t been so many Jews involved in a Catholic operation,” he said, “since the 12 Apostles.” ³⁰

In January 1969, Ramparts declared bankruptcy. David Horowitz and Peter Collier replaced Robert Scheer and Warren Hinckle as the managerial leadership, and Ramparts reorganized and began publishing again in April 1969. ¹

Finances

The first accountant for Ramparts claimed Keating originally planned to invest somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 (between $1 million and $2 million in 2025 dollars) of his own money to launch Ramparts, and then sustain it on a low budget with subscriptions. However, Keating’s wife, Helen, explained that “Ed was constitutionally incapable of doing anything cheap.” In 1964, a single promotional effort for an issue featuring an interview of German playwright Rolf Hochhuth cost $50,000 (more than $500,000 in 2025 dollars). According to A Bomb in Every Issue, a CIA officer who looked at Keating’s tax returns for 1960 through 1964 “reported that Keating had been writing off losses of $450,000 per year” ($4.5 million in 2025 dollars). ¹  

By the end of 1964 Keating confessed to the Ramparts executive editor Warren Hinckle that he was broke. Hinckle settled in as the major fundraiser while he ran the publication from 1964 to 1969, and over that period claimed to have raised more than $2 million ($17.1 million in 2025 dollars). ¹

A Bomb in Every Issue reported that during this period Hinckle gave his fundraising pitch to Eleanor Gimbel, a donor to left-of-center causes who had married into a department store fortune. During the presentation, Hinckle inadvertently stepped on and killed one of Gimbel’s small dogs. ¹

Funding the sharply ideological magazine with advertising also proved a challenge. A deal with Pan American Airways was terminated because the firm objected to the targeting of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. There was also a failed attempt to enlist support from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. ¹

Fred Mitchell, another independently wealthy individual, became one of Ramparts’ main benefactors, the publisher and the senior editor. Mitchell later told a friend that by 1971 he had put as much as $800,000 ($6.2 million in 2025 dollars) into Ramparts. ¹   

A Bomb in Every Issue also reported that Hinckle established a “reputation as a spendthrift” when he ran the magazine for Keating. In one anecdote describing this behavior, Hinckle denied that he had once flown to New York, from Chicago, but with a layover in Paris, to avoid an airline strike. Instead, clarified Hinckle, he had flown all the way from San Francisco to New York, with the detour through Paris, to evade the labor dispute. “If I had been in Chicago,” he quipped, “I would have just taken a cab.” ¹

“The changing media climate could certainly have sustained a fiscally responsible mass-circulation New Left publication,” wrote former Ramparts editor Sol Stern in 2010. “But responsibility and restraint were alien words in the Ramparts offices. There were too many Algonquin Hotel junkets, flights around the world chasing stories that never panned out, and three-hour, booze-filled lunches at the priciest restaurants in our San Francisco neighborhood. Anyone who came to Ramparts with an ‘inside-the-establishment’ exposé—like the Green Beret from Vietnam who wrote about why he had quit, or the ex–FBI agent who promised to prove that the CIA was behind President Kennedy’s assassination—not only wrote for the magazine but became a permanent staffer, adding to Ramparts’ ever-swelling payroll.” ¹²

“Hinckle set a pace that was even more flamboyant,” wrote Horowitz. “Three-hour, six-martini editorial lunches […], junkets at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, and first-class fare wherever he and Scheer went …” ¹²

According to A Bomb in Every Issue, “the staff dropped from fifty to nineteen” and the “monthly budget was slashed from $200,000 to almost a quarter of that figure.” (The sum of $200,000 per month in 1969 was the equivalent of $1.8 million per month in 2025 dollars, or $21.6 million annually). ¹

To maintain the magazine’s solvency, Horowitz permitted what he characterized as “borderline criminal” behavior, such as funding staffers by laying off half of them at a time so they could collect unemployment benefits. When the unemployment benefits ended, Ramparts officially rehired the laid off staff, but then laid off the other half. ³²

At its peak, Ramparts was both a platform and a seedbed for a generation of reporters, activists, and social critics. Its contributors included Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Susan Sontag, William Greider, Jonathan Kozol, and a young Christopher Hitchens, who wrote for Ramparts under a pseudonym. More surprising, perhaps, was the magazine’s Washington, DC, contributing editor-Brit Hume, the Fox News host and anchor. Two Ramparts writers left to create Rolling Stone, and three editors decamped to found Mother Jones. On the literary side, the magazine ran work by Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, Erica Jong, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez-seven years before Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. ²⁸

Vietnam War

Critical coverage of the Vietnam War was an enduring feature throughout the history of Ramparts. A May 1967 Ramparts editorial declared it the “crucial moral and political issue of our time” and “an equal or greater evil” than “racism in America.” ³

Ramparts frequently featured controversial cover images regarding the Vietnam War. The December 1967 cover image was of four hands held aloft, holding draft cards on fire that showed the names of some of the magazine’s male contributors. The April 1969 cover featured an elementary school-aged American boy holding a Viet Cong flag, under a caption that read “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” ^{4 5}

Escalation

Ramparts produced 11 issues in 1965 and at least half of them contained one or more reports regarding and implicitly making a case for the termination of what was then still a comparatively restrained American military involvement in Vietnam. The January 1965 issue contained a “special report” on Vietnam, which included an interview with then-U.S. Sen. Frank Church (D-MT). “I think that the government in South Vietnam has been incompetent, to say the least,” said Church. “It must be viewed for what it is, a military despotism. Communist North Vietnam is also such a despotism, but this hardly gives the people of South Vietnam a clear-cut choice between free government and tyranny.” ³³

The April 1965 issue began with an editorial examining the reelection of Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson and what that meant for a variety of national concerns, including Vietnam: ³⁴

Vietnam will become another Algeria, with escalating barbarism, if we continue with “more of the same.” Are we to hurl more napalm bombs on more women and children? Are we to continue our bombings in Laos? If Laos, why not North Vietnam and even Red China? If we decamp, we run the risk of a Communist takeover, but as far as the Vietnamese people are concerned, one tyrant is the same as another—merely standing on their necks with different boots. But we are hung up on Vietnam; our national pride won’t let us swerve off a ruinous course. We will be immoral rather than lose face. ³⁴

The December 1965 issue included another Vietnam essay by Scheer, “The Winner’s War,” describing the evolution and escalation of the American involvement during the year. From 1956 through the end of 1964, there were 416 Americans killed in action in Vietnam. During 1965 alone another 1,928 Americans were killed. An additional 52,565 Americans would be killed in the conflict from 1966 through 1970. ^{35 37}

Fall also made a prediction about the demands Vietnam might make on the American military: ³⁷

When Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times’ noted military commentator, suggested last spring that one million Americans might be required in Vietnam he was greeted with general derision and disbelief. Now we can say that one million American troops is a quite possible figure, though it might be reduced if other nations send in troops. ³⁷

At the end of 1965 there 184,000 U.S. service personnel in Vietnam, an increase of more than 120,000 over the prior year. By April 1969, the total American commitment exceeded 540,000, with more than 60,000 additional allied troops contributed by Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Thailand. From January 1965 through March 1973, a total of more than 2.5 million individual American military personnel were sent within the borders of South Vietnam. ³⁹

In “Hang Down Your Head” Ramparts editor Robert Scheer accused Dooley of grossly misrepresenting the situation in Vietnam: ³⁹

On the American side, the use of the Catholic refugees for propaganda served to greatly confuse the American public on the true situation in Vietnam. It gave the delusion that we were helping a whole people along the path to their freedom when for better or worse they wanted to travel the other way. In order to stop them, we had had as a last resort to destroy their countryside and villages with Napalm bombs and chemical defoliates. The one indisputable fact of the Vietnam story is that the U.S. is on the unpopular side. It is time for the American public to criticize America’s colonial adventure as much as we did those of the French. In order to do this, we must rid ourselves of the Tom Dooley-Cardinal Spellman type of myth about the aspirations of the Vietnamese. ³⁹

Years later, Dooley was exposed as a covert CIA asset who had fabricated many of the assertions in his book. One of Dooley’s most damning critics was William Lederer, a former U.S. Navy official who had been instrumental in bringing Dooley’s book to life. A 1991 report in the Los Angeles Times contained this statement from Lederer: ⁴¹

In “The ‘Vietnam Lobby,” Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer reported that an “unusual alliance” of socialists, “liberal politicians” and military leaders had banded together to build a lobbying group that promoted escalation of American involvement in Vietnam: ⁴¹

The “VIETNAM LOBBY” was an unusual alliance of ex-left intellectuals, conservative generals and liberal politicians. Its primary goal was to convince the public that “free Vietnam” was accomplishing miracles and could withstand the Red onslaught if the United States would continue its support. One year after Buttinger’s return from Vietnam, in the fall of 1955, the “lobby” achieved a measure of formal organization with the establishment of the American Friends of Vietnam. The Friends, for the next six years, were in the forefront of the fight to maintain [South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình] Diem’s regime as a “showcase of democracy.” ⁴¹  

Hinckle and Scheer also wrote that the American Friends of Vietnam was particularly successful in pressuring a reluctant President Dwight Eisenhower to back Diệm and escalate U.S. involvement in the region: ⁴¹

They had trouble convincing Eisenhower, so they pressured his administration into line. Then they set out to convince the country. ⁴¹

Michigan State University’s “Vietnam Project”

According to A Bomb in Every Issue, the first major investigative report produced by Ramparts was the April 1966 cover story: “The University on the Make—or How MSU helped arm Madame Nhu.” In addition to breaking news, the report led to an illegal investigation of Ramparts by the Central Intelligence Agency. Ramparts staffers Warren Hinckle, Sol Stern and Robert Scheer were credited on the byline. ^{1 6}

On the cover of the April 1966 issue, Ramparts provided a cartoon portraying the controversial Trần Lệ Xuân as a Michigan State University cheerleader. Colloquially known as “Madame Nhu,” she was the widow of Ngô Đình Nhu, the brother and close advisor to former South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm. Prior to the murder of both brothers in a November 1963 coup, and because Diệm was a bachelor, Madame Nhu had acted and been portrayed as the “First Lady of South Vietnam.” In the role she was notorious for insensitive attitudes towards internal critics of the South Vietnamese regime. ⁶

The original reporting exposed that a team from Michigan State University had been covertly responsible for creating much of the apparatus of the Diệm regime along with the CIA. Wesley Fishel, initially an assistant professor of political science, was a friend of Diệm and the creator and manager of MSU’s so-called “Vietnam Project” from 1955 until its termination in 1962.  Ramparts reported it was “the largest single project ever undertaken by an American university abroad, a project that spent the incredible amount of 25 million in American taxpayers’ dollars in giving “technical assistance” to the Republic of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem.” (The $25 million in 1962 is equivalent to more than $260 million in 2025 dollars). ⁶

“His published work was virtually non-existent and he was absent from his classes for years at a time,” the report said of Fishel. “But, in 1957, MSU promoted him to the rank of full professor.” ⁶

Ramparts also reported that CIA officers “were hidden within the ranks of the Michigan State University professors,” with many of them given “academic rank” and “formally appointed by the University Board of Trustees.” ⁶

“The one American Diem really trusted was Wesley Fishel […] the MSU inspection team returned to East Lansing and recommended a massive technical assistance contract, unprecedented in the history of university operations overseas,” wrote the Ramparts team. “This contract committed Michigan State to do everything for Diem, from training his police to writing his constitution.” ⁶

According to an “MSU inventory” reproduced in the report, the school also purchased small arms for the South Vietnamese. The inventory listed ammunition needed by machine guns, rifles, grenade launchers, handguns and mortars. Ramparts posed a question on this point in the report’s concluding sentence: “The essential query, which must be asked before the discussion of Michigan State’s behavior can be put into any rational perspective, is this: what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?” ⁶

In A Bomb in Every Issue, Peter Richardson wrote that the MSU report “startled the U.S. intelligence community,” and caused CIA director William Raborn to order a “high-priority” investigation of Ramparts, its staff and sources. ¹

“The order violated the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA and prohibited it from spying on U.S. residents,” wrote Richardson. “That violation meant that cover-up would also be required.” ¹

The two-month investigation resulted in the discovery of two staffers affiliated with the Communist Party USA. It did not reveal links to foreign funding of Ramparts, the legal justification the CIA could have used to legitimize its domestic surveillance operation targeting American journalists. ¹

Special Forces Correspondent

Beginning with the February 1966 issue, former U.S. Army Master Sgt. Donald “Don” Duncan of the 5^th Special Forces group became a Ramparts correspondent. ⁴²

“The whole thing was a lie!” was the cover story for the February 1966 issue, which featured a photo of Duncan in uniform. It was a first-person account of his Special Forces training and his disillusionment after his deployment to Vietnam. “When I was drafted into the Army, ten years ago, I was a militant anti-Communist,” Duncan began. ⁴²

Duncan accused the South Vietnamese government of corruption and the United States of operating a counterproductive bombing campaign, and asserted that the Americans had failed to offer the people of South Vietnam an alternative to communism other than “anti-communism,” which he wrote was a “lousy substitute for democracy.” ⁴²

“I don’t think Vietnam will be better off under [North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s] brand of communism,” argued Duncan. “But it’s not for me or my government to decide. That decision is for the Vietnamese.”  ⁴²

“I had to wait until I was 35 years old, after spending 10 years in the Army and 18 months personally witnessing the stupidity of the war, before I could figure it out,” wrote Duncan, referencing anti-war protesters near the end of his report. “That these young people were able to figure it out so quickly and so accurately is not only a credit to their intelligence but a great personal triumph over a lifetime of conditioning and indoctrination. I only hope that the picture I have tried to create will help other people come to the truth without wasting 10 years.” ⁴²  

Viet Cong interview

“A talk with the Front,” a November 1967 report from Ramparts correspondent Sol Stern, was an interview with Nguyen Thi Binh, a representative of the National Liberation Front (NLF). More commonly known as the “Viet Cong,” the NLF was the communist guerilla force that fought to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. Stern wrote that he had conducted the interview while in communist Czechoslovakia with “41 assorted anti-war Americans and delegations from the NLF and from North Vietnam.” ⁴³

“[D]espite the half million foreign troops ranged against it, despite the substantial aid it is getting from the North, it is the Front, alive and doing quite well on its own, which is confounding the Pentagon,” wrote Stern. “The evidence, even from American sources, makes it quite clear that it is the NLF which has managed to neutralize the American military throughout most of South Vietnam and frustrate the American and South Vietnamese pacification efforts. In the face of the most massive military effort ever conducted against a revolutionary movement, the NLF infrastructure has actually become stronger and more deeply entrenched in the villages of South Vietnam.” ⁴³

Stern reported the NLF was “extremely confident” that “the U.S. will eventually have to deal directly with the NLF on its own terms.” ⁴³

Stern’s account sharply contradicted official statements made that same month by U.S. military commanders. On November 21, 1967, the commanding officer of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, gave a speech at the National Press Club in which he argued the U.S. was winning and the Viet Cong was “bankrupt.” ⁴⁵

Ordinarily (and, many feel, blissfully) the civilian briefer has little or nothing to say. On this occasion, however, he had been assigned to read the official report of an American investigation of American planes dropping American bombs on the village of Thlok Trach. The report followed the attack by ten days. Cambodia had protested the attack, understandably enough, since the Cambodians believe (and apparently we have come to agree) that Thlok Trach is in Cambodia. In the course of protesting the attack, Cambodia also noted that a group of neutral observers, including members of the International Control Commission, had witnessed the event.

The report which Stuart read to the reporters on August 12 said simply that attacks did occur on “targets in the vicinity of Thlok Trach village on 31 July and 2 August.” They were launched, it said, in response to fire which U.S. helicopters had received from the area. The U.S. was sorry that the observers were endangered; however, according to the maps studied in the course of the investigation, the targets were on the Vietnamese side of the border.

Reporters don’t like to work any more than anybody else, especially on sultry afternoons, but sometimes they have to ask questions, and on this occasion those questions led to a quick, dizzy spiral into the looking-glass world of officialese.

[…] Further questions by those who could get their heads out of their hands squeezed out the admission that it was not certain who administered the village, but it was thought to be the Viet Cong. The information was also elicited that the inhabitants of the village are ethnically Cambodians (his emphasis, my italics).

[…] Some days later, it was decided in Washington that Thlok Trach—obviously damaged goods and stolen by the NLF anyway—should be awarded to Cambodia. ⁴⁵

Bombing North Vietnamese Dikes

In the October 1972 Ramparts, journalist David Landau reported on an allegation by North Vietnam that American bombing raids were dangerously compromising a dike system that protected the nation from flooding. ⁴⁶

“Hanoi’s representatives in Paris have [. . .] informed Henry Kissinger and other U.S. officials in private negotiations, that American bombs falling on the Red River Delta have in fact wreaked substantial damage on North Vietnam’s dikes,” wrote Landau. “Yet North Vietnamese communications also show that U.S. government statements on the dike bombings, and the ensuing public debate in this country, have focused on the largely meaningless issue of whether American planes are making direct hits on North Vietnamese dikes.” ⁴⁶

“The greatest harm to the dikes, according to these communications, has been perpetrated not through direct bombardment, but rather through attacks on nearby targets, which cause immense shock waves to travel through the ground and slowly undermine the structural foundations of the dikes themselves,” continued Landau. “Decades old, composed of earth material, and vulnerable to even the slightest tremor, the dikes of the Red River Delta have likely been severely damaged in this way by America’s mammoth air offensive against the North.” ⁴⁶

The distinction between deliberate and accidental destruction was important, noted the Ramparts report, because deliberately flooding civilians could be prosecuted as a war crime.  ⁴⁶

“But to maintain in any serious way that the dikes constitute a military target would [. . .] defy every precept of international law, especially the Nuremberg judgments under which the Nazi High Commissioner for Holland was sentenced to death for having ordered the opening of the Dutch dikes in 1944,” wrote Landau. ⁴⁶

On this point, Landau may have erred in specific details, though not in substance. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Nazi High Commissioner for Holland, does not appear to have been convicted on a charge related to the opening of the dikes. A 1969 faculty paper from the Northwestern University School of Law regarding war crimes reveals that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower warned Seyss-Inquart that if he continued to flood Holland, then he and his subordinates would be held responsible “as violators of the laws of war who must face the certain consequences of their acts.” ¹

King had been motivated by “The Children of Vietnam,” a January 1967 Ramparts photojournalism report from William F. Pepper. The feature included both Pepper’s photographs of children harmed by the war and commentary. ⁴⁹

“Luan, age eight, was one of two children brought to Britain last summer through private philanthropy, for extensive treatment at the Mclndoe Burns Center,” wrote Pepper, of one child. “He came off the plane with a muslin bag over what had been his face. His parents had been burned alive. His chin had ‘melted’ into his throat, so that he could not close his mouth. He had no eyelids. After the injury, he had had no treatment at all—none whatever—for four months. It will take years for Luan to be given a new face (“We are taking special care,” a hospital official told a Canadian reporter, “to make him look Vietnamese”).” ⁴⁹

In a response to the report, Time magazine published a criticism of Ramparts, using the headline “A Bomb in Every Issue” that would later be repurposed by Peter Richardson for his history of Ramparts. ¹

The January 1967 issue of Ramparts was one of several King purchased before boarding a plane for a trip to Jamaica. After looking at Pepper’s essay and photographs, King couldn’t finish eating and told a traveling companion that “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.” ¹

For the May 1967 Ramparts, King’s April speech was reprinted as his “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam.” ⁵⁰

“They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops,” said King. “They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them—mostly children.” ⁵⁰  

The May 1967 issue also feature a Ramparts editorial calling for King to run for president in 1968. ³

“This magazine urges that Dr. King and Dr. [Benjamin] Spock be drafted to run in 1968 for President and Vice President, respectively,” wrote the Ramparts editors. “We will do everything within our power to effectuate this distinguished ticket because without it we fear the great debate of ’68 will revolve around everything except the real issue. If Lyndon Johnson is re-elected in 1968, there will be no limit to the arrogance of American power.” ³

FBI Issues

Throughout its history Ramparts reporting covered (and started) controversies regarding the FBI, CIA and the American national security state. ⁵¹ For more information on the FBI and issues related to this section, please see the InfluenceWatch profiles for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Communist Party USA.

The FBI after Hoover

In “After J. Edgar, Who?” (March 1965) former FBI agent William Turner recounted the history of the FBI under its longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and speculated on the reforms he believed were needed after Hoover exited the post. ⁵¹

Turner criticized his former employer for allowing a “cult of personality” to develop around Hoover and for its indifference to prosecuting civil rights violations and organized crime. ⁵¹

“Never again should an FBI chief be permitted to become so intimately identified with the organization that he is an institution in his own right and cannot be separated from it,” wrote Turner. “And now is the time to partially decentralize the FBI, to reduce the breadth and scope that has bred undue power, influence and intimidatory potential.” ⁵¹

“The FBI operates at its own pleasure, unrestrained by customary checks and balances,” warned Turner. ⁵¹

Accusing the Bureau (and Hoover) of failure to prosecute violent racists, Turner wrote that “it seems incredible that a bureau able to riddle the Communist Party with informers could not have long ago duplicated the feat with the Ku Klux Klan, known to have been implicated in practically every premeditated act of racial violence South of the Mason-Dixon line.” ⁵¹

On the organized crime front, Turner accused the FBI and its chief of being a “reluctant dragon.” “It is one of the more perplexing paradoxes of history that major crime and the FBI have flourished simultaneously,” concluded Turner. “Hoover clearly wanted no part of the fight: he alternately claimed that organized crime didn’t exist or shunted it aside as a local problem.”  ⁵¹

Making recommendations for reform, Turner suggested removing counterintelligence from the FBI’s mandate so the Bureau could focus exclusively on domestic criminals and organized crime. “The two fields are as immiscible as oil and water,” he argued. “Techniques that catch bank robbers and car thieves don’t necessarily catch spies. Counterespionage is a subtle cat-and-mouse game totally unsuited to the cop mentality that tends to be heavy handed and light-thinking.” ⁵¹

The FBI and Organized Crime

The FBI’s history of indifference towards investigating and suppressing organized crime syndicates was the focus of journalist Fred J. Cook’s May 1965 Ramparts essay: “The FBI and Organized Crime.” ⁵²

Cook observed that the “FBI’s vaunted record has been built against second and third stringers—it has never successfully tackled the real overlords of crime.” As examples, he listed nearly a dozen gang leaders the FBI had failed to stop, including Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Vito Genovese. ⁵²    

“Except for one minor rap on the knuckles given to Capone, not a name in the lot appears on the FBI’s well-publicized record,” wrote Cook. “Yet, peculiarly enough, the very years that saw these men acquire such awesome power were the same years that saw J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI grow from obscurity to holy household legends. The two developments danced hand in hand down the decades. It seemed to occur to no one, in the blind idolatry that has been lavished on the bureau and its all-powerful director, that these were most curiously incompatible partners for such a minuet.” ⁵²  

Cook’s analysis identified several examples of Hoover preventing both the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, most notably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration), from chasing crime syndicate bosses. ⁵²  

As one example, Cook identified Los Angeles police chief William Parker as one of “the few challengers” to the FBI’s behavior: ⁵²   

“The FBI shows great interest when stolen property moves across a state line,” Chief Parker said, “but little interest when some criminal or criminal mobs move from state to state. I strongly believe crime will destroy America if something isn’t done!”

Asked whether he thought the FBI could handle the crime-busting job, Chief Parker replied bluntly: “They could, but they have shown no indication that they will or that they want to!”

Such, then, is the picture of the FBI’s failure to solve, even to tackle, the crime problem that matters most. ⁵²  

Crime journalists and historians have repeatedly observed that Hoover did not pursue the mafia because he was concerned that well-financed criminals could bribe or otherwise corrupt his agents. Cook included this concern among his reasons why Hoover had built a federal crime fighting force incapable of attenuating the influence of organized crime. Other factors included a desire to keep the FBI’s conviction rate unblemished by difficult to prosecute crimes, and the inadequacy of the agents hired by Hoover. ^{53 52}

The essay begins with the observations of a federal prosecutor who accused an FBI agent of arriving in the middle of a New York City Police Department surveillance operation against a local drug lord and in so doing blowing everyone’s cover: ⁵²  

“He was completely obvious, of course, to everyone in the neighborhood because FBI agents all look like FBI agents” the head of the frustrated Federal team moaned later. “This kind of thing used to happen all the time. We would get calls from police in the middle of an investigation that an FBI agent was in the neighborhood trying to survey premises we were watching — and making himself completely obvious to everybody.”

“When it comes to scientific detection, the FBI is terrific. Take car thefts, bank robberies, crimes in which fingerprints or ballistics evidence or other scientific details are important —and the FBI is in its element. But not in surveillance. There they are a complete flop! ⁵²  

“As a result of Hoover’s selection policies, his personnel is not best suited to undercover work,” concluded Cook. “Hoover’s fetish for clean-scrubbed, 100 percent American types with college degrees has produced a generally high-class bureau; but when it comes to infiltrating underworld rings, the hard-boiled local detective or narcotics agent, capable of looking as if he has just rolled out of a rumpled bed after a hard night with a bottle and a blonde, is often more effective.” ⁵²  

Hoover died in 1972. A sustained FBI effort to suppress organized crime began in 1978, and by 1990 the Bureau had inflicted major damage on the leadership and effectiveness of what until then had been the nation’s most powerful mafia groups. ⁵³ (For more on this history, please see the InfluenceWatch profile of the FBI.) 

Illegal Bugging

Former FBI special agent turned Ramparts contributor William Turner was the author of “I was a burglar, wiretapper; bugger; and spy for the FBI” in the November 1966 issue. In the essay, Turner explained the process of and confessed to participating in the FBI’s policy of using illegal warrantless wiretaps to conduct surveillance on American citizens. ⁵⁴

Earlier that summer, an illegal FBI bug was exposed because of a U.S. Supreme Court case involving a powerful lobbyist appealing his conviction for tax evasion. The FBI had illegally broken into the residence of the lobbyist, placed a listening device, and then captured conversations between the lobbyist and his lawyer discussing the case. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried but failed to prevent disclosure of the bug to the Supreme Court. ⁵⁵

In July 1966, less than a week after the bug and the FBI’s conduct in the case were publicly revealed, Hoover ordered FBI agents to terminate the Bureau’s use of break-ins and opening first class mail, both of which were intelligence-gathering methods that had been used for decades. The CIA, which had also benefitted from the FBI’s mail-opening program, unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Hoover to revive it. ⁵⁵

According to A Bomb in Every Issue, Turner warned his “Ramparts colleagues that the government was watching them.” ¹

“Wiretaps are your tax dollars at work,” said Turner. “If you phone isn’t bugged, we’re not doing our job.” ¹

“At a San Francisco cocktail party recently I had the odd sensation of hearing a voice from the past that I couldn’t quite place,” wrote Turner in his November 1966 Ramparts essay. “I studied the face—it was totally unfamiliar. Then it suddenly dawned on me: the voice was one I had heard many times while monitoring the taps in the ‘clubs.’ It belonged to Robert Treuhaft, a prominent civil liberties lawyer and husband of noted author Jessica Mitford.” ⁵⁴

“It was a chapter in my career I would just as soon forget,” admitted Turner. “And now it appears that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would just as soon forget he ever authorized electronic snooping. […] the discovery that in 1964 the FBI planted a listening device in the hotel suite of lobbyist Fred Black Jr., threatened to topple his conviction of income tax evasion.” ⁵⁴

According to A Bomb in Every Issue, the appearance of Turner’s reports about the FBI in the pages of Ramparts led Hoover to draft an internal memo about Turner. “It’s a shame we can’t nail this jackel,”[sic] wrote Hoover. ¹

Other National Security Issues

Rosenberg Case

In the January 1966 issue, journalist Rex Stout reviewed the book Invitation to an Inquest. Written by Walter and Miriam Schneir, it argued that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted and executed for espionage, had been innocent. The communist espionage agents were convicted of stealing U.S. atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union. The pair received a death sentence and were executed in June 1953 but always maintained their innocence. ⁹

In his essay, “The Case of the Spies Who Weren’t,” Stout wrote that the Rosenbergs had been “convicted of a crime, not only of which they were innocent, but which had never been committed.” Listing the witnesses used against the Rosenbergs, most of whom were also Soviet spies, Stout wrote: “all of them lied.” ⁹

For the August 1973 Ramparts, Walter Schneir reviewed The Implosion Conspiracy, a book written by trial attorney Louis Nizer. Implosion made the case that the Rosenbergs were guilty, an assertion Schneir disputed. The headline of Schneir’s Ramparts review was “The Second Frame Up of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” ¹⁰

“It is interesting that when a book like The Implosion Conspiracy is looked at carefully,” wrote Schneir, “what one finds is not clever and sophisticated invention but—as with so many of the political cases of the ’50s—crude fabrication that bespeaks a contempt for the audience.” ¹⁰  

In 1995 the U.S. government declassified and publicly released the “Venona” archive, secret decryptions of Soviet signals intelligence the U.S. Army began intercepting during the late 1940s. Venona proved the existence of the spy ring run by Julius Rosenberg and that it had transferred atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. ^{13 1}

“At its peak in 1960, over 400 schools were affiliated with NSA,” wrote Stern. And within the United States, it was an affiliation of students who “responded to the new militant protest mood on the campuses.” ¹³

“It supported students against the draft, opposed the war in Vietnam, and participated in civil rights struggles,” explained the Ramparts report. “It played a crucial role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of its staunchest supporters.” ¹³

But international NSA chapters were used by the CIA to both check the influence of the Soviet Union and gather intelligence on political figures overseas. All of this, including the CIA support, was kept hidden from most of the youth affiliated with the NSA. ¹³

“The agency’s goals were to counter similar groups under Soviet control abroad and to recruit foreign students,” wrote Peter Richardson in A Bomb in Every Issue. “As the world would soon learn, the NSA wasn’t the only organization receiving funding this way. During the 1950s and 1960s, a long list of cultural, labor, educational, religious and media groups were on the CIA payroll. Recipients included the Congress for Cultural Freedom […], the AFL-CIO […], Harvard University’s International Summer School (Henry Kissinger), political magazines (Encounter and Partisan Review), and the ironically named Independent Service for Information (Gloria Steinem).” ¹

The CIA learned of the Ramparts story and, after concluding it could not prevent the report from being published, decided to pre-empt it by revealing the NSA/CIA connection in advance, ideally rendering the Ramparts report “old news.” ¹

According to A Bomb in Every Issue, Warren Hinckle, the editor of Ramparts, discovered the CIA’s plan and decided to preempt their preemption. ¹

“I was damned if I was going to let the CIA scoop me,” said Hinckle. “I bought full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post to scoop myself.” ¹

Hinckle’s advertisements led to eight members of Congress sending a formal protest to President Lyndon Johnson, charging the CIA with seizing an “unconscionable extension of power” and being “as much a threat to American as foreign democratic institutions.” ¹

The CIA responded by acquiring and reviewing the tax records of Ramparts founder Edward Keating and embarking on a plan to discredit the magazine with planted media reports. ¹

To this end, according to A Bomb in Every Issue, “a syndicated column by Carl Rowan, former director of the United States Information Agency, implied the magazine’s NSA exposé was part of a Communist plot.” ¹

Time magazine also ran a story very critical of Ramparts, referring to it as a “sensation-seeking New Left-leaning monthly.” ¹

“I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing,” said one CIA official, according to A Bomb in Every Issue. “The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off […] We were not in the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal security role in the United States.” ¹

A Bomb in Every issue also revealed that the NSA report led to a spike in circulation for Ramparts, from 149,000 to 229,000 readers. The first figure, according to the book, was already roughly double that of The Nation, a rival left-wing magazine that at that time had existed for a century. ¹

Chemical and Biological Weapons

The cover story of the June 1969 Ramparts was titled: “Nerve Gas Was Tested on 6400 Sheep by the Army, Accidentally. It Works.” ⁵⁷

Written by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the report told the story of the airborne test of a lethal nerve agent by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. What was meant to be a minor release of the nerve gas to test its dispersal pattern in high winds became a much more serious accidental release when the dispersal tanks failed to close as planned. Just before the malfunction the wind had been blowing strong towards nearby Salt Lake City and Hersh learned some computations had estimated the nerve agent would remain lethal at a range of 394 miles. ^{57 12 12}

“Theoretically,” asked Ramparts, “if we know where every Soviet missile installation, military aircraft and missile submarine is at every moment, we are much closer than anyone realized to a first-strike capacity that would cripple their ability to respond.” ^{12 12 1}

Civil Rights Movement

The cover story of the June 1965 Ramparts was a multi-essay feature under the title “The South at War.” It was an in-depth report on the violence directed earlier that year at non-violent civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. The essays framed the conflict as a reenactment of the U.S. Civil War: “The Five Battles of Selma.” The introduction, which included a crude battle map, portrayed the “Union” capital as Atlanta, Georgia, home-base of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Selma was identified as the capital of the “Confederacy.” ⁶⁰

“Massah LBJ and His Nigrahs,” a November 1965 Ramparts opinion essay written by left-wing journalist and filmmaker Saul Landau, criticized President Lyndon Johnson for doing too little to help African Americans beyond just secure their right to vote, an accomplishment Landau portrayed as cynically benefiting LBJ as much as anyone. ⁶¹

“However, in Mississippi some of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff, now working for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP), are bitter over the passage of the Voting Rights Bill,” observed Landau. “It was not their objective merely to win the vote so that Johnson could claim these newly enfranchised blacks. This was not why so many were beaten, jailed and murdered.” ⁶¹

Following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Eldridge Cleaver wrote “Requiem for Nonviolence” in the May 1968 Ramparts. He predicted a “holocaust coming” to the United States in reaction to the murder. ⁶²

“The violent phase of the black liberation struggle is here, and it will spread,” wrote Cleaver. “From that shot, from that blood, America will be painted red. Dead bodies will litter the streets and the scenes will be reminiscent of the disgusting, terrifying, nightmarish news reports coming out of Algeria during the height of the general violence right before the final breakdown of the French colonial regime.” ⁶²

The murder of King was not a “sad day for America,” Cleaver concluded, “because America worked so hard to bring it about.” ⁶²

Cleaver joins Ramparts

In 1966 Ramparts founder Edward Keating assisted the successful effort to parole violent felon and future Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver from a California prison and then employed him as a correspondent for the magazine. ¹

In June 1966, while still incarcerated, Cleaver provided “Notes on a Native Son,” his first content for Ramparts. The report was preceded by an introduction from Ramparts writer Paul Jacobs, who summarized Cleaver’s history. ⁶³

“Today, Cleaver is ready to be judged as a writer—not as a prison writer or a writer about prisons, but just a writer,” wrote Jacobs. “He is an authentic voice, and a powerful one. We believe his voice is worth hearing and we believe, too, that some day it will be heard all over the land.” ⁶³

Cleaver’s essay was a severe criticism of African American writer and novelist James Baldwin as a traitor to his race. “The racial death-wish is the driving force in James Baldwin,” wrote Cleaver. “His hatred for blacks, even as he pleads what he conceives as their cause, makes him the apotheosis of the dilemma in the ethos of the black bourgeoisie who have completely rejected their African heritage, consider the loss irrevocable, and refuse to look again in that direction.” ⁶³  

“Letters from Prison,” an August 1966 report from Cleaver, was an examination of the United States, race relations, and his desire to “straighten up and fly right” and “concentrate on my writings.” ⁶⁴

“We are a very sick country—I perhaps am sicker than most,” wrote Cleaver. ⁶⁴

“Eldridge Cleaver […] has served eight years of a one-to fourteen-year sentence in various California prisons,” read a note preceding the essay. “The editors are pleased to present a selection of letters from this extraordinary writer …” ⁶⁴

“I became a rapist,” confessed Cleaver in the essay. “To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto […] and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. […] It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women— and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.” ⁶⁴

Black Panthers visit Ramparts

During early 1967, African American radical-left organizations in the San Francisco area planned a memorial conference honoring Malcolm X, to be held on the two-year anniversary of his February 1965 assassination. Betty Shabazz, Malcom X’s widow, was an invited speaker and the conference sponsors were concerned for her safety. The Black Panther Party was asked to escort her from the airport to an interview with Cleaver, then a writer for Ramparts. ⁶⁹

“The black guerrillas have become convinced that it is impossible to achieve decent human values within this system and that it must therefore be overthrown,” concluded Stern. He portrayed the rioters as a domestic armed revolution against the American government and compared them favorably to the Viet Cong fighting the U.S. military in South Vietnam. ⁶⁹

“Today, bands of young negroes around the country are preparing themselves for guerrilla warfare in the cities,” reported Stern. “The ghetto is a vast sea in which the guerrilla can swim. He can venture forth to sabotage the installations of the government, or, hidden in the ghetto, he can hold down a whole company of infantry and then disappear into the crowded city. The guerrilla knows that he can never hope to overturn the government by such tactics, but his perspective is a world-wide one. America, the suppressor of world revolution, becomes over-extended. Every soldier that must be garrisoned at home to keep the lid on the ghetto is one less that can be sent overseas to suppress another colored revolution.” ⁶⁹

The essay opened with words from Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton that had been spoken before the 1967 riots: “We are already at war… The racist dog police must withdraw from the black community.” ⁶⁹

“There is something of Detroit in the street corner rallies held by the Black Panthers in the black communities of the Bay Area,” reported Stern. “At these rallies small groups of young bloods gather to hear Bobby Seale and Newton tell them how, when the time comes, they can ‘take care of business’ in groups of threes and fours. The ‘business’ they are talking about is ‘executing white racist cops’ or dropping molotov cocktails into strategic industrial installations. It is all suddenly very real and serious when you ask Huey Newton […] and he tells you confidently that when the time comes, it won’t be just the killing of a couple of cops but part of a whole nationally coordinated effort aimed at the entire ‘white occupying army.’” ⁶⁹

“Detroit was a revolutionary battlefront,” argued Stern. “It was treated by the authorities not like a mere outbreak of criminal lawlessness, answerable by measured justice, but like a revolution that had to be suppressed by anti-population measures.” ⁶⁹

Stern also denounced as “nonsense” a competing theory that the riots were instead merely an economic protest. Stern reported that “it is not the poorest, least-educated blacks, but a better-educated, indeed almost middle class, radical black intelligentsia that forms the vanguard of America’s black guerrillas.” ⁶⁹

Stern predicted the guerrillas didn’t need and would not respond to economic assistance because they had “probably been through the best schools and rejected their values.” He characterized the guerilla vanguard as “articulate and well-educated young men who have become black Kamikazes.” ⁶⁹

“Negroes riot, the press and the urban sociologists now almost unanimously agree, because they lack housing or education or jobs,” wrote Stern. “Thus a new riot prevention mystique grows, abetted even by ‘moderate’ civil rights leaders, which suggests that a little more poverty money spent, a police review board, better schools, an extra swimming pool, will have a direct effect on the propensity to loot and snipe in the ghetto. It is a dangerous liberal myth, not because it is not well-intentioned, but because it is already outdated and ignores the real, new factor in the Black Revolution—the black urban guerrilla. The black guerrilla will not come down off his sniper’s perch or stop making molotov cocktails because of a little more welfare money in the ghetto, since he has probably already rejected a job with the poverty program—or perhaps he has a job with the poverty program by day and still wants to burn down City Hall by night.” ⁶⁹

To demonstrate this point, Stern wrote that a “secret and anonymous interview with some of the Newark snipers published in Life magazine shows that they are middle class young men who organized themselves after doing civil rights work in Mississippi in 1965.” As other examples, Stern wrote that Huey Newton graduated from an “excellent and integrated” high school and later attended a year of law school, while Stokely Carmichael attended “Bronx Science High School, probably the best prep-school for success in the U.S.” ⁶⁹

Analyzing the motives of the domestic guerrilla fighters, Stern wrote they had “decided that it was no use trying to liberate their people by appealing to the good sense and conscience of their white neighbors; instead, they became convinced that their freedom could only be wrested through force and turmoil.” ⁶⁹

The new guerrilla leader, concluded Stern, had “long-range plans to disrupt and wreak havoc on the system that he feels produced the ghetto in this country and oppression all over the world—even if those plans mean the loss of his life.”  ⁶⁹

Racial Partition of the United States

In July 1967 more than 1000 delegates representing nearly 300 groups met in Newark, New Jersey, for the first ever National Conference on Black Power. The conferees adopted the “Black Power Manifesto,” that called for starting a “national dialogue on the desirability of partitioning the U.S. into two separate and independent nations, one to be a homeland for white and the other to be a homeland for black Americans.” ^{70 71}

For the December 1967 Ramparts, Robert S. Browne contributed an essay defending the resolution. Browne was an economics professor at Farleigh Dickinson University and had attended the Black Power Conference as a workshop facilitator. His Ramparts essay was titled “The Case for Black Separatism.”  ^{70 71}

Eldridge Cleaver revisited the idea in “The Land Question,” written for the May 1968 Ramparts, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. ⁷²

Citing systematic oppression against “black people,” the 1967 resolution for partition declared there was “little prospect that this oppression can be terminated, peacefully or otherwise,” that “black people do not wish to be absorbed into the larger white community,” and that “the physical, moral, ethical, and aesthetic standards of white American society are not those of black society and indeed do violence to the self-image of the black man.” ⁷¹

“I have listened to the voices of my people and I know that they are desperate,” reported Browne. “Talk of violence and of revolution hangs heavy in the atmosphere of both black and white America.” ⁷¹

Writing that the “resolution received perhaps the most thunderous ovation of the entire Conference,” Browne argued this “unmistakably revealed […] the depth of the despair about white America which is now prevalent in the black community.” ⁷¹

Among the reasons for the “despair,” Browne included “gloomy statistics on black unemployment, income, housing and disease” which had occurred “against the background of a decade of both unprecedented national civil rights activity and unprecedented national prosperity.” ⁷¹

“The black community clearly sees itself getting a progressively smaller share of the pie as the pie itself grows ever larger,” added Browne. ⁷¹

Browne reported that the ideal of racial integration, one of the central goals of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, was opposed by many who had adopted the partition resolution. ⁷¹

Cleaver also denounced integration, arguing that it was the means by which the United States would control African Americans as colonial subjects. In its place, he argued they should join together as a separate people seeking a homeland, much as the Zionist movement of Theodor Herzl led to the founding of modern Israel—a comparison Cleaver deemed “fascinating.” ⁷²   

“Viewed on the international plane,” wrote Cleaver, “Integration represents an attempt by the white mother country to forestall the drive for national liberation by its colonial subjects.” ⁷²

“Understandably,” wrote Browne, “it is the black masses who have most vociferously articulated these dangers of assimilation, for they have watched with alarm as the more fortunate among their ranks have gradually risen to the top only to be promptly ‘integrated off’ into the white community—absorbed into another culture, often with undisguised contempt for all that had previously constituted their heritage.” ⁷¹

Listing the American military involvement in Vietnam, television violence and other factors that he claimed would deter some Black Americans from seeking integration, Browne wrote that Americans had built “a culture which approves of violence, indeed enjoys it.” ⁷¹

A year later, Cleaver concluded that “black men know that they must pick up the gun, they must arm black people to the teeth, they must organize an army and confront the mother country with a most drastic consequence if she attempts to assert police power over the colony.” ⁷²  

Browne defended the partition proposal as “not a radical resolution” and compared it to the Declaration of Independence. “But it is more moderate in tone than Jefferson’s Declaration and its action clause stops considerably short of that of the 1776 document,” claimed Browne. “Significantly, it asks not for separation but merely for dialogue.” ⁷¹

“It is increasingly apparent to blacks and whites alike that their national marriage has been a disastrous failure,” concluded Browne. “Consequently, in the search for ways to remedy this tragic situation, divorce should obviously not be ruled out as a possible solution. The Black Power Conference resolution asks America to do no more than to give it serious consideration.”  ⁷¹

“Partitioning of the U.S. into separate black and white nations will conceivably appeal to both the Southern white racist and the Northern black nationalist, and it can with equal inaccuracy be characterized as painfully conservative or wildly radical,” Browne argued. “The intent of the resolution, however, is to free the partition concept from the deadly embrace of extremists and to afford it consideration by moderates of both races.” ⁷¹

In his May 1968 essay, Cleaver profiled a Black Panther Party proposal for a United Nations-supervised vote by African Americans on whether they wanted a separate nation or UN recognition as a separate people within the United States. ⁷²

“The mere widespread agitation for such a plebiscite will create a major crisis for U.S. imperialism,” predicted Cleaver. ⁷²

Population Control and the Green Revolution

Opposition to modern agricultural practices, most notably the so-called “green revolution” and water desalination, and the related issue of population control, were recurring features in Ramparts. According to Encyclopedia.com, the Green Revolution was “the notable increase in cereal-grains production in […] developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s” that “resulted from the introduction of hybrid strains of wheat, rice, and corn (maize) and the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, including irrigation and heavy doses of chemical fertilizer.” These technologies “allowed many developing countries to keep up with the population growth that many observers had expected would outstrip food production.” American agronomist Norman Borlaug won a 1970 Nobel Prize for his contributions to the Green Revolution. ⁷³

“India’s prospects are even more bleak,” reported Weissman. “Chemically resistant miracle grains will soon produce miracle pests, which could easily wipe out whole areas. Early high yields depended heavily on unusually good weather-which is not dependable, and on irrigation—which is reportedly salting the soil. These problems have led many experts to question how long the revolution will remain green. But most of the experts still come down on the side of more ‘modern’ agriculture, without even exploring possibly safer alternatives like the high-yield, labor-intensive and biologically-integrated ‘gardening’ of the best traditional Asian agriculture.” ⁷³

Weissman also predicted that the introduction of the profit motive to India’s food production would displace farmers and create economic turmoil. ⁷³   

“But the real disaster is more immediate,” he wrote. “The same high food prices which gave incentive to growers also put sufficient food out of the reach of those who need it most. Commercial agriculture, by definition, produces for profit, not people. At the same time, the new seeds required irrigation and pesticides, and heavy inputs of fertilizer, the costs of which soared with the removal of government price ceilings. […] Those who haven’t the capital, or can’t get the credit from village moneylenders or meager government programs, are pushed off their land and into an agricultural proletariat or worse, while the new Kulaks, the peasant capitalists, re-invest their profits in modern labor-saving machinery. The inevitable result of this trend is class and regional conflict.” ⁷³

The “positive side” of this conflict, according to Weissman, was that it would create sympathy for Left-wing revolutionaries. ⁷³

“As in the Philippines, where peasants displaced by the commercialization of agriculture are strengthening the Huk resistance, the Green Revolution in India is producing a Red Revolution,” wrote Weismann. “For the first time since Independence, militant revolutionary movements have led Indian peasants into rebellions in different parts of the country.” ⁷³

The Hukbalahap “Huk” Rebellion was a communist uprising in the Philippines that was mostly defeated in 1954 by the Philippine government, with American assistance. But remnants of the Huk resistance continued into the 1970s. ⁷⁵

Ehrlich’s 1969 Ramparts essay amplified an argument made in The Population Bomb, his 1968 best-selling book in which he predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s and that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” ⁷⁵

In the alternative future imagined by Ehrlich, the Green Revolution was exposed as “more talk than substance” by the early 1970s. ⁷⁵

“Distribution of high yield ‘miracle’ grain seeds had caused temporary local spurts in agricultural production,” wrote Ehrlich, who also imagined this good fortune had coincided with “excellent weather that had produced record harvests.” This allowed us to falsely “indulge in an outburst of optimistic propaganda about staving off famine.” ⁷⁵

But “reality was not long in showing itself,” Ehrlich told Ramparts readers, as if he were a narrator from decades in their future. He somberly added that famines returned, and crop yields fell. ⁷⁵

“Everywhere hard realities destroyed the illusion of the Green Revolution,” wrote Ehrlich of his prophecy. “Yields dropped as the progressive farmers who had first accepted the new seeds found that their higher yields brought lower prices—effective demand (hunger plus cash) was not sufficient in poor countries to keep prices up. Less progressive farmers, observing this, refused to make the extra effort required to cultivate the ‘miracle’ grains.’” ⁷⁵

A cascade of disasters ensued, according to Ehrlich’s dystopian future, including “miracle rats” who began eating the “miracle rice” as early as 1969. ⁷⁵

“It was a combination of ecosystem destabilization, sunlight reduction, and a rapid escalation in chlorinated hydrocarbon pollution from massive Thanodrin applications which triggered the ultimate catastrophe,” wrote Ehrlich of what killed off life in the ocean. In Ehrlich’s fictional future, “Thanodrin” was a Soviet-built agricultural technology created to bail out the failures of the American-led Green Revolution. But Thanodrin just exacerbated the problem. ⁷⁵

In this nightmare scenario, the starving and desperate world was forced to turn to radical population control. ⁷⁵

“A pretty grim scenario,” wrote Ehrich, returning to the real world. “Unfortunately, we’re a long way into it already. Everything mentioned as happening before 1970 has actually occurred; much of the rest is based on projections of trends already appearing.” ⁷⁵

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he warned Ramparts readers. ⁷⁵

“It took several million years for the population to reach a total of two billion people in 1930, while a second two billion will have been added by 1975!” explained Ehrlich. “By that time some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” ⁷⁵

“Man is not only running out of food,” warned Ehrlich in the final paragraph, “he is also destroying the life support systems of the Spaceship Earth.” ⁷⁵

There were 3.6 billion people alive when this essay was published in 1969, more than 4.6 billion by 1982, and 8.2 billion by 2024. ⁷⁸

“The world possesses today the technical capacity not only to dam and regulate the flow of streams and rivers, and to drill to depths required to tap geologic deposits of water; but also to desalinate the seas and to transport water, via pipelines, from the seashores to any inland area that we choose.,” wrote McCarthy. “There is literally no need for deserts to exist anywhere on Earth if we decide otherwise—and if we are prepared to pay the price.” ⁷⁸

“Given the appropriate technological applications, accompanied by the necessary social and political transformations, mankind can now conquer the Sahara, extending immeasurably the world’s food producing capability,” concluded McCarthy. ⁷⁸

Profiling the technological options for desalination, and the energy use needed for them, McCarthy judged that nuclear power “bids fair to be the generally adopted method of desalting.” ⁷⁸

“It is named the double-effect nuclear reactor, differing from the conventional reaction is largely dissipated in raising the temperature of enormous masses of sea water to the point at which pure water vapor can be distilled,” McCarthy explained. “A variant of the double-effect reactor is its installation below sea level, in the ocean itself, so that sea-water intake, through suitable one-way containers, requires no mechanical exertion to provide the water input.” ⁷⁸

After acknowledging concerns being raised about the safety of nuclear power, McCarthy asked: “Does the danger of death of many by starvation outweigh the dangers and ecological injuries involved in the double-effect reactor?” ⁷⁸

Ramparts contributor Gene Marine was critical of desalination in an April 1967 report. ¹⁹

“In the rush to find new sources of clean water, the technique that has most captured the popular imagination is the desalinization of sea water,” wrote Marine. “But when you’ve finished the desalinizing, what you have left is a bunch of hot brine. You can’t dump it back into the ocean on the spot; you’ll raise the temperature considerably and thus endanger all the offshore life.” ¹⁹

Genetically Modified Food

In “America the Raped,” his two-part series in 1967, Ramparts contributor Gene Marine identified hybrid corn and other genetically modified agricultural products as dangerous because they destroyed genetic diversity. ¹⁹

“Usually, of course, the dangers of ecological destruction are less dramatic,” he wrote. “For instance, we’ve been extremely successful in developing and growing hybrid corn. As a result, we’ve almost lost hundreds of corn varieties that fell by the wayside—thereby making it impossible to experiment with new hybrids, discover possible new disease resistant strains, or make any other use of the genetic information stored in these varieties. […] few people have yet reached the idea of the conservation of genetic information—the idea that we ought to keep every species of animal or plant alive, and in its own ecosystem, because we have no way of knowing what characteristics of what animal, plant or microbe may someday prove to be in some way valuable. The variety of corn that is not grown today, because it isn’t economical in competition with today’s hybrids, may be the variety which will prove, tomorrow, to be resistant to an as yet unforeseen disease.” ¹⁹

Climate, Energy and Capitalism

Ramparts covered the climate concerns regarding carbon dioxide emissions, the creation of climate policy groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the first Earth Day, early electric vehicles, the oil and gas industry, and nuclear energy. Opposition to free enterprise and businesses was also a recurring theme of the magazine’s coverage of climate and energy issues. ²⁰

Opposition to Capitalism

In May 1970 the Ramparts editors argued that major environmental and other policy objectives could only be achieved if Americans were willing to “junk the business system and its way of life, and create revolutionary new institutions to embody new goals—human and environmental.” ²⁰

Proposing an end to capitalism as the solution for many problems was a recurring theme from many Ramparts contributors. “The crisis of the environment must be viewed in terms of a paradox central to modern society,” wrote contributor Martin Gellen, in another essay for the May 1970 Ramparts. “The mobilization of the productive energies of society and the physical forces of nature for the purpose of accumulating profits or enhancing private power and privilege now conflicts directly with the universal dependence of men upon nature for the means of their common survival. A society whose principal ends and incentives are monetary and expansionist inevitably produces material and cultural impoverishment—in part precisely because of the abundance of profitable goods. To make an industry out of cleaning up the mess that industry itself makes is a logical extension of corporate capitalism. What is needed, however, is not an extension of what is already bad, but its transformation into something better.” ²¹

“We simply don’t need any more gross national product, any more unnecessary goods and factories,” wrote the Ramparts editors in May 1970. “What we do need is a redistribution of existing real wealth, and a reallocation of society’s resources. Everyone knows what this redistribution and reallocation should do; the crises of the last ten years have made it all so obvious: The poor must have adequate income, the cities must be rebuilt to fit human requirements, the environment must be de-polluted, the educational system must be vastly expanded, and social energies now poured into meaningless pursuits (like advertising and sales promotion) must be rechanneled into humanly edifying and creative activities.” ²⁰

The May 1970 editorial concluded by praising anti-capitalist arsonists who had razed a Bank of America branch office in Santa Barbara, California. An image of the bank on fire was on the cover of the magazine, with a caption-quote from the editorial reading, “The students who burned the Bank of America may have done more towards saving the environment than all the Teach-ins put together.” ²⁰

Carbon Dioxide Emissions

“A few decades ago it would have been absurd to describe carbon dioxide and heat as ‘pollutants’ in the customary sense of the term,” wrote Murray Bookchin in the May 1970 “Ecology Special” issue of Ramparts. “Yet in both cases they may well rank among the most serious sources of future ecological imbalance and pose major threats to the viability of the planet.”  ¹⁷

Explaining the “greenhouse effect,” Bookchin wrote that “the gas will inhibit the dissipation of the earth’s heat into space, causing a rise in overall global temperatures which will melt the polar ice caps and result in an inundation of vast coastal areas.” ¹⁷

Earlier, in “America the Raped,” a two-part series in the April and May 1967 Ramparts issues, contributor Gene Marine had promoted the carbon emissions concern. ¹⁹

“What with industrialization and its attendant burning of carboniferous fuels, we have managed since 1900 to raise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by at least ten, and possibly 15 percent,” wrote Marine. “[…] Burning all that coal and wood and fuel oil is releasing it faster than the atmosphere can handle it.” ¹⁹

He also quoted the 1966 Congressional testimony of Thomas Malone, who claimed the human-caused carbon dioxide emissions had already increased temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius in the lower atmosphere and 2 degrees in the upper atmosphere. ¹⁹

“If the earth is warmed,” Malone warned Congress, “the ice melts and the sea level would be raised so high that, were it to happen, we would probably have to swim home from this building this morning.” ¹⁹

“The situation could become serious by the end of the century,” warned Malone, speaking of the year 2000. ¹⁹

“That’s 33 years from now,” added Marine in his report. ¹⁹

Oil Industry Criticism

The oil industry was a target of Ramparts writers throughout the history of the magazine.

Barry Weisberg reported on oil drilling in Alaska for the January 1970 Ramparts, and claimed that “oil is a uniquely devastating ecological enemy” ²²

“The oil industry, virtually a world government, presides over an economy organized toward the destruction of life,” wrote Weisberg. “Its power must be broken, not merely circumvented.” ²²

“An industry that has been able […] to treat the U.S. State Department as a subsidiary headquarters, and at whose bidding America brings down sovereign governments (as in Iran), should not expect to have much trouble making its way in Alaska,” predicted Weisberg. ²²

“Already the landscape of Alaska is dominated by a crude mix of the worst Texas gulf coast and Southern California plasticity,” reported Weisberg. “Housing is composed almost entirely of imported pre-fabricated units or trailers. A ticky-tacky frontier bar atmosphere permeates every Alaskan town.” ²²

Ramparts contributor James Ridgeway reported that the oil companies exercised significant influence over the use of other fuel sources. ^{79 80}

In March 1971 he wrote that “major oil companies have withheld large supplies of natural gas from the market in an effort to drive up natural gas prices.” ⁷⁹

“The largest 20 or so oil companies already produce most of the natural gas,” reported Ridgeway in in the October 1971 Ramparts. “They control 80 percent of the uranium resources and more than 20 percent of coal production.” ⁸⁰

“But like uranium, coal belongs pretty much to oil companies anyway: 12 percent of the coal produced today comes from Consolidation Coal, which is owned by Continental Oil” added Gene Marine in the March 1974 Ramparts. “Another 11 percent comes from the three companies owned respectively by Occidental, Gulf and Standard of Ohio.” ⁸¹

In the May 1974 Ramparts, contributor Peter Barnes reported on a U.S. Senate proposal to create a federal petroleum firm to compete with private oil companies. “The case for public development of energy resources has always been a strong one, except that nobody until recently seemed willing to make it,” reported Barnes. “The non-competitive nature of the oil industry is well-known. So, too, is the takeover by oil companies of competing fuels-natural gas, coal, uranium, shale and geothermal steam.” ⁸²

“The UAW backed the idea, and George Meany went even further, calling for nationalization of the oil industry,” wrote Barnes of the Senate proposal. Citing the examples of British Petroleum and others, Barnes reported “countries with publicly owned oil companies are more numerous than countries without them.” ⁸²

“Nevertheless, if the U.S. moves now to catch up with its past in this one area, there is no telling what might happen next,” concluded Barnes. “A public energy corporation, or a series of them, might be followed by competitive public enterprises in other critical areas: autos, steel, aluminum, drugs, banking and insurance readily come to mind. The possibilities are exciting.” ⁸²

Criticism of the First Earth Day

The main editorial in the May 1970 “Ecology Special” issue of Ramparts criticized the first Earth Day event. As of 2024, annual Earth Day events were managed through the Earth Day Network, but in 1970 were also called an “Environmental Teach-In.” ²⁰

“We think that the Environmental Teach-In apparatus is the first step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the environment even further,” predicted the Ramparts editors. “We do not think it will succeed.” ²⁰

The essay also criticized the Earth Day events for deflecting attention from what the Ramparts editors argued were more important concerns, particularly the Vietnam War. ²⁰

“This spring the Nixon Administration is busy undoing 15 years of struggle for school integration; the police continue to murder black people in the streets; the American judicial system is disintegrating and, in the eyes of the State, every radical has become a conspirator; the war machine in Washington has made clear its intention to stay in Vietnam indefinitely and to spread its war to Laos,” they wrote. “All this—and the Teach-in organizers want to banish everything but environment to the back pages of our minds. They must be blind, or perverse, or both.” ²⁰

The unsigned essay argued that destroying the capitalist system was the real solution to environmental and other challenges. In conclusion, the editorial praised anti-capitalist arsonists who had recently razed a Bank of America branch office in Santa Barbara, California. An image of the bank on fire was on the cover of the magazine, with a caption-quote from the editorial: “The students who burned the Bank of America may have done more towards saving the environment than all the Teach-ins put together.” ²⁰

Gene Marine remained similarly pessimistic in his “Scorecard on the Environment,” written in December 1973 for Ramparts. “For a while, in 1969 and 1970, there was almost something called an ‘ecology movement,’” wrote Marine. “It is gone […], leaving behind (like a vagrant breeze that serves its ecological function) a few traces, possibly important, possibly not.” Some of the “few traces,” as explained in the next subsection, were five climate nonprofits, four of which still existed as of 2025. ⁸³

Addressing “radical” left-wing activists of the 1969-1970 era, Marine added that “the ecology movement, such as it was, was seen by them as a liberal ploy to distract attention from the important issues: war, racism, capitalism.”  ⁸³

Creation of Climate Groups

Many of the largest left-leaning climate policy groups in the United States were created during the years when Ramparts was published. The magazine initially provided critical coverage of the movement. In a May 1970 essay on the rise of the “Eco-Establishment,” Katherine Barkley and Steve Weismann argued that the environmental movement had been created by corporations such as oil companies and philanthropic nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation because they “needed a grass-roots movement to help consolidate their control over national policymaking, bolster their hold over world resources, and escalate further cycles of useless economic growth.” They referred to them as “corporation conservationists.” ¹⁸

In 1965, according to Barkley and Weismann, the Ford Foundation created a special “Resources for the Future” fund with a $1.1 million grant ($11 million in 2025 dollars). ¹⁸

“The trustees of the Ford Foundation, an executive committee of such international resource users and polluters as Esso and Ford Motor, established a separate Resources and Environment Division which, since 1966, has nourished such groups as Open Space Action Committee, Save-the Redwoods League, Massachusetts Audubon Society, Nature Conservancy, and the Environmental Defense Fund,” wrote Barkley and Weismann. ¹⁸

Barkley and Weismann also reported that Friends of the Earth was created in 1969 when founder David Brower “broke with the Sierra Club” and received $200,000 in seed funding from the head of the Atlantic Richfield oil company. ¹⁸

The $200,000 grant in 1969 was the equivalent of $1.7 million in 2023 dollars. In its tax returns for the year ending June 2023, Friends of the Earth reported total revenue of $16.8 million. ¹⁸

While otherwise pessimistic about the future of the left leaning climate movement, Ramparts contributor Gene Marine praised five specific climate nonprofits in his “Scorecard on the Environment” report for the December 1973 issue. ⁸³

The groups he listed were the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF),the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Public Advocates, the Center for Law in the Public Interest, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. (Always legally independent from the Sierra Club, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was renamed EarthJustice in 1997.) ⁸³

“Most of the important decisions in environmental law, those favoring the rest of us over private corporations or big business oriented Federal agencies, have been won by one of five groups,” added Marine. ⁸³

Marine identified EDF as “the one that really made environmental law meaningful in America.” All five, according to Marine, were “supported in part (from 12 percent to 50 percent) by the Ford Foundation.” ⁸³

Referencing 1972 funding from Ford Foundation, Marine reported the five received a cumulative total of $884,000 to support “lawyers who are more or less on our side.” According to Marine, NRDC received $365,000 of the $884,000 from Ford Foundation, Public Advocates received $275,000, EDF received $120,000, the Center for Law in the Public Interest received $75,000, and EarthJustice received $49,000. ⁸³ (In 2025 dollars, the $884,000 cumulative total for the five was worth $6.3 million.)

Marine also reported that the Ford Foundation was planning to cease its funding of the five and quoted the executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund who predicted that the loss of Ford Foundation support would lead to “a crash in the environmental law market.” ⁸³

As of 2024 the most recent IRS reports from four of these groups (excluding the Center for Law in the Public Interest) showed combined total annual revenue of more than $573 million. ⁸⁶

“With […] the plentiful supply of domestic oil, there is no need to drill on the U.S. outer continental shelf,” reported Ridgeway. “Fossil fuels are plentiful in Alaska, Canada, Venezuela and the Middle East, and there is enough oil to meet U.S. demands for 400 years in oil shale in the Rocky Mountains.” ⁸⁶

Afterward, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo coincided with gasoline shortages in the United States and what has historically become known as the first “oil crisis.” ⁸¹

The March 1974 issue also contained “The Energy Crisis is coming . . . in about 200 years,” written by contributor Richard Parker. “If there ever was an energy crisis, it’s over now,” began Parker, before making his case that the energy shock had been an artificial creation of western oil firms seeking profits and American political meddling in the Middle East. ⁸⁸

“To hear energy czar William Simon and others tell it, the world is running out of oil-which is, in fact, nonsense,” reported Parker. “Even at present levels of consumption, oil reserves are large enough right now to fill demand well into the next century. The Middle East alone contains somewhere between 350 and 400 billion barrels of proven reserves, and there is reason to believe these are severely low estimates.” ⁸⁸

Parker also addressed the abundance of American energy resources. “In fact, when one compiles the list of known oil reserves, then adds recoverable gas, uranium, and coal (19.5 trillion tons), and then allows for only fractional development of oil shale and tar sands, the U.S. will not have to worry about any energy supply crisis until somewhere around the year 2150-nearly two centuries away,” wrote Parker. “So much for the fuel shortage—or at least the long-term fuel shortage.” ⁸⁸

In “Notes on the Energy Crisis,” James Ridgeway’s contribution to the October 1973 Ramparts, he was less optimistic about the future of American petroleum resources than he had been in 1970. ²⁷

“Assuming that the structure of the petroleum and mining industries remains the same, the result is that fuel and energy prices will rise steadily,” reported Ridgeway. “If current rates of growth continue,” he predicted, then American energy resources would “be reduced substantially, perhaps exhausted by the end of this century, or more probably by the middle of the next.” ²⁷

Shale Oil Report

A May 1967 Ramparts report on the oil industry written by Adam Hochschild included an analysis of the potential for shale oil production to revolutionize the American petroleum market. That revolution began forty years later. ²⁵

“A new industry will emerge that promises to dwarf petroleum in meeting the world’s energy needs,” wrote Hochschild, quoting from a United Nations report about the potential of shale oil. Of the potential for domestic shale production, he reported that the “Department of the Interior recently said that the three-state oil shale area has the equivalent of roughly 70 times the known U.S. reserves of crude oil.” ²⁵

“The waste products resulting from present shale mining methods would be mountains of rock and dust, thousands of feet high, which would hardly improve the wild and beautiful scenery of one of the last great unspoiled areas of the American West,” reported Hochschild of the shale mining methods available in 1967. ²⁵

He also anticipated some of the cleaner, less environmentally damaging methods the oil industry would later use to exploit the resource. “That is why it is vitally important to wait for technological advances before any oil shale production is begun,” Hochschild wrote. “What scientists are working on now […] is what is called in situ retorting. In situ retorting basically means getting the oil out of the rock without getting the rock out of the ground. It involves melting the oil out of the rock by means of underground explosions and heating, then drilling a standard well to suck the oil out. This method wouldn’t permanently scar the landscape.” ²⁵

“In 2006, before the shale boom,” according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “the U.S imported about twice the oil it produced.” Annual U.S. oil production in 2006 was 1.8 billion barrels, down 47 percent from its peak in 1970, and equal to the U.S oil output for 1949. ⁹³

For the March 1972 Ramparts, Ridgeway reported on the benefits of a pending deal by an American energy firm to purchase natural gas from Algeria and bring it to the United States. ⁹⁴

“For Algeria this deal, which involves more than $1 billion, represents a major step in breaking away the country’s developing economy from the oppressive French colonial influence and involving it instead with the U.S. where Algeria doesn’t even have diplomatic relations,” wrote Ridgeway. ⁹⁴

“The Algerian deal probably will come under attack from an unexpected quarter,” predicted Ridgeway. “Environmental groups, which are partially responsible for the pressure on electric utilities to use more gas, are seriously considering challenging the project because of its potential hazard to the environment.” ⁹⁴

“Environmental challenges to the Algerian project would be ironic,” explained Ridgeway. “Ecologists have applied much of the pressure which is causing electric utilities to use more gas. They have pushed hard for strict air pollution regulations, limiting the amount of sulfur emissions, and thereby virtually excluding coal as a fuel. […] At the same time, ecologists successfully blocked a variety of nuclear power projects . . .”  ⁹⁴

Ridgeway’s Ramparts reports described natural gas as a cleaner fuel for electricity generation. “In the late 1960s there was a particularly keen demand for the clean burning natural gas because of air pollution in big metropolitan areas,” wrote Ridgeway, in an October 1973 Ramparts report. ²⁷

“The gas will be liquified, then shipped in specially constructed tankers to east coast utilities which are both short of gas and in need of a clean fuel because of increasingly strict air pollution regulations,” Ridgeway wrote in March 1972. ⁹⁴

He also addressed the issue in a March 1971 Ramparts report in which he discussed the business practices of major petroleum firms: “They are in a position to engage in bizarre business transactions, such as the shipment of Alaskan natural gas to Japan rather than to California where it is needed to reduce air pollution.” ⁷⁹

Nuclear Energy Criticism

For additional information, please see the InfluenceWatch profile for Opposition to Nuclear Energy.

In his 1967 “America the Raped” series, Gene Marine wrote that the “Engineers assure us that we can get rid of sulfur dioxide in the air and stop the ecological damage done by big dams on watersheds if we will only turn to nuclear power; but nuclear plants create radioactive wastes and ‘thermal pollution.’” ¹⁹

In a December 1973 report titled “Scorecard on the Environment,” Marine wrote that “it is almost impossible to show that some kinds of projects are ecologically acceptable; nuclear power plants are among these, since despite the plaints of power companies, nobody knows what the environmental issues of a nuclear plant may be.” ⁸³

And in a March 1974 essay titled “Alternate Energy: Here Comes the Sun,” Marine wrote that nuclear power had “safety problems of a high order” and “an enormous waste problem.” ⁹⁵

In a six-page report about nuclear power for the May 1970 “Ecology Special” issue, free-lance journalist Roger Rapoport claimed it represented the “ultimate pollution” and that the nuclear power industry was a “totalitarian polluter” that had “more freedom to pollute than any other power structure in the country.” ²³

The heroes of Rapoport’s report were researchers John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, who opposed the Atomic Energy Commission’s policy on radiation risks with their “linear theory of radiation exposure which says that any radiation, no matter how slight, poses risks.” ²³

Rapoport wrote: ²³

Charging that currently allowable radiation pollution could cause as many as 32,000 extra cancer deaths each year, they are calling for a ten-fold reduction in present radiation exposure limits.

[…] Both Gofman and Tamplin have had a continuing interest in radiation dangers throughout their professional lives, but Gofman’s concern was hard-earned and dates back to 1941 when he was a Berkeley graduate student . . .

[…] Gofman received a disastrous overdose of radiation, at least 100 times the permissible exposure level. So far, Gofman has fortunately not experienced any ill effects from the overexposure. ²³

Gofman died of heart failure in 2007, at age 88, 66 years after the radiation exposure. ⁹⁷

“Accidents aside, a nuclear power plant means an increase in radiation, and […] any increase in radiation means an increase in birth defects, leukemia, and in genetic mutations,” wrote Marine. “This is not precisely measurable either, which leaves you with the question of how many birth defects and how many cases of leukemia are ‘worth it.’” ⁹⁷

Gofman and Tamplin were referenced again in an August 1974 Ramparts report written by Tom Zeman. ⁹⁸

“The nuclear reactor program has proved a disaster,” concluded Zeman. “But, as we learned during the Vietnam War, the fact that a program has proved to be futile, destructive, and unsuccessful even in its own terms, does not mean it will stop. Failure may instead be the incentive for frantic escalation.” ⁹⁸

Zeman returned to nuclear power criticism in an April 1975 Ramparts report, wherein he wrote that nuclear power development carried the “gravest environmental and social implications.” ⁹⁹

“And nuclear power plants leave another legacy,” reported Zeman, “one far more dangerous than even the worst effects of fossil fuel plants—intensely radioactive waste products, often seething with their own heat, which will remain a severe threat for thousands of years.” ⁹⁹

Electric Vehicles

In his 1967 “America the Raped” series for Ramparts, contributor Gene Marine wrote about proposals to limit automobile ownership, promote electric vehicles, and restrict air travel. ¹⁹

“Electric automobiles, still a difficult conception for most of us, can be a reality whenever we’re ready,” he argued. “[I]t’s a simple matter of cost.” ¹⁹

“State Senator Nicholas Petris of California has introduced an anti-pollution bill that would make it illegal to own two cars (if powered by internal combustion engines) after a given year,” reported Marine. “[Petris] did it, he says, as a compromise to a proposal by the state director of public health that internal-combustion-powered automobiles be banned completely from the state by 1980.” ¹⁹

Marine also discussed a then-ongoing proposal to expand air travel capacity in the New York and New Jersey area, which he opposed. ¹⁹

“If a fourth jetport is not built, perhaps some factories will move,” he concluded. “Some are moving anyway. […] But in the long run, the people will go where the jobs are anyway. Certainly some human families will suffer; but human families will suffer far more if we go ahead and build all the jetports and the canals and the freeways, and fill in the swamps and dam the canyons. […] There are, of course, tomorrow’s bigger jets. They will carry more people into the same airports—they may need longer runways, but they don’t need new airports. And even if they did, why not carry the argument further? Do we need bigger jets?” ¹⁹

Domestic Political Reporting

Ronald Reagan

In the November 1965 issue, journalist Jessica Mitford reported on the prospect that Ronald Reagan would enter the 1966 race for California governor, a race Reagan would win one year later. At the time of her report, the future U.S. president was a retired actor and TV personality who had become a Republican political activist. ¹⁰⁰

Both Democrats and Republicans provided Mitford optimistic observations regarding Reagan’s charisma and intellect. A committed leftist who had resigned from the Communist Party USA only seven years earlier, Mitford wrote that what she was hearing was “rather scary.” ¹⁰⁰

The chair of the Los Angeles Republican County Committee told Mitford that Reagan was “vital, dynamic, youthful in approach” who “talks sincerely, has appeal to people who are emotionally groping around and are upset with how things are.” While incorrectly predicting Reagan’s electoral chances were “more symbolic than real,” the Republican official also observed that the “intellectual content of his speeches is better than I would expect” and that he had a “messianic thing about him—a great white light.” ¹⁰⁰

While also incorrectly predicting Reagan would not win the 1966 race, the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party Committee nonetheless warned Mitford that Reagan could be “a most effective and attractive candidate” and that “anyone taking him too lightly would be a fool.” ¹⁰⁰

“I used to try to avoid political arguments [with Reagan],” said one man who knew Reagan while both served in the U.S. Army. “The statistics-quoting was unnerving, it went on endlessly, a fountain.” ¹⁰⁰

In November 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California by defeating incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Brown. In their October 1966 cover story, “Golly Gee, California is a Strange Place,” the editors of Ramparts analyzed the state of the race. The 23-page report was sharply critical of Brown and the California Democratic Party establishment for failing to live up to their left-leaning principles and provided grudging compliments to the Reagan campaign. ¹⁰²

The Ramparts editors wrote that it would not “make much difference to California if Brown does or does not squeak through” because “the triumph of the right is inevitable because liberalism—not just unfortunate, well meaning Pat Brown—has failed California.” ¹⁰²

Their report began with a quote from a young African American woman at a town hall where Brown had gone to campaign: ¹⁰²

“Governor,” she said, “I don’t know why you came here. You haven’t listened to anything we’ve said and all you do is make speeches to us. I think you came here just to get our votes.” “That’s right,” boomed a chorus of echoes from the rest of the Negroes in the hot back room. Pat Brown was on a secret visit to Watts.

About the size of the ghetto, the population of the ghetto, the problems of the ghetto, he displayed an alarming ignorance. The temperature in the room grew hotter in tone as well as fact while Brown consistently, and with increasing anger, refused to commit himself to any course of action on even the smallest point. ¹⁰²

For the prior two years, reported Ramparts, “Pat Brown has said nothing on civil rights that would disturb the tranquility of an Alabama sheriff.” ¹⁰²

“Liberalism in California has become a tabulating machine for votes, a penny-arcade toy for testing popularity,” they wrote. “Brown and his aides de camp have themselves destroyed any principled alternative to Reaganism.” ¹⁰²

Recounting a recent successful effort to purge a left-leaning official from the California Democratic establishment, Ramparts concluded that “more thought” had been put into the purge than “has gone, so far, into defeating Ronald Reagan: after all, a right winger is one thing, but a maverick liberal who goes around talking about what liberals are supposed to believe is worse than merely a threat. He’s a personal embarrassment.” ¹⁰²

“Brown is merely the fall guy for the failure of a whole style of liberal politics which has had its day in California and has failed to catch on,” they wrote. ¹⁰²

Ramparts also criticized Brown’s campaign for exaggerating Reagan’s extremism and conceded that Reagan’s campaign was telling the more compelling story. ¹⁰²

“Brown’s campaign today is listless, defeatist, unimaginative,” they wrote. “[…] Reagan’s campaign has vitality and dedication, and so far it has stuck meticulously to principles which are carefully conservative, but certainly not ‘radical right’ […] Ronnie is turning the voters on. […] Pat Brown, on the other hand, is saying nothing, except what a terrible right winger and inexperienced neo-fascist Ronald Reagan is.”  ¹⁰²

They were repeatedly critical of the Brown campaign’s effort to portray Reagan as too extreme for California voters: “True, he is guilty of having said in 1963 that ‘there can be no moral justification for the progressive income tax,’ but that makes him a conservative crowd pleaser, not a fascist.” ¹⁰²

They also wrote that “to claim, as the Democratic ‘dossier’ does, that Reagan ‘uses his considerable platform talents as a magnet to build up neo-fascist organizations,’ is a gross exaggeration.” ¹⁰²

“Pat Brown and his chief political strategists decided, on the basis of a private poll, that Ronald Reagan would be easier to beat in November than moderate Republican George Christopher,” reported Ramparts. “[…] They reached far into the past, and fed to columnist Drew Pearson the tired, 20-year-old story of Christopher’s technical arrest for violating state milk regulations (he owns a dairy). The ‘news break’ unquestionably helped Reagan defeat Christopher.” ¹⁰²

The editors concluded that California’s “Democrats are now sorry” about building up Reagan at the expense of the more moderate Republican, “but being sorry doesn’t alter the fact that they themselves helped create the Reagan threat which they now try to use to frighten disenchanted liberals into supporting Pat Brown.” ¹⁰²

Previewing the 1974 California gubernatorial election, before which Gov. Reagan announced his retirement as governor, Francis Carney wrote in the November 1974 issue of Ramparts that Reagan’s presidential ambitions had both muted his effectiveness as governor and damaged his potential for higher office:  ¹⁰³

First of all, an era, the Reagan era, will come to an end no matter who wins the gubernatorial election. Reactionary, pitiless, and benighted, Reagan could never quite wholly impose his own bleak vision on the diverse and restless people of California. A legislature loosely managed by his political enemies, a state court system long admired for excellence at its appellate levels, such organized interests as labor, public employees, teachers, and conservation groups, a generally competent press corps in the state, along with the voters themselves, combined to hold Reagan in some kind of check. In addition, his own silly and arrogant ambition for a presidential nomination forced him to brake his sanguinary impulses. He might draw hoarse, exultant roars from GOP fat cats with his calls for a “bloodbath” for dissident students or an “outbreak of botulism” in the turkeys wrapped for distribution to urban poor people in response to SLA demands, but he could not openly turn such inhumanity into steady policy without dooming his presidential hopes. The American people, fortunately, were not ready for the real Ronald Reagan.

[. . .] He both embodied and appealed to the worst that is in us: greed, heartlessness, and a sullen determination to hold on to what one has and to hell with everybody else. That was Reaganism. Some will mourn it; some will not. ¹⁰³

Robert F. Kennedy

The cover art on the February 1967 issue of Ramparts was a painted portrait of then-U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), the brother of former President John F. Kennedy. The feature, “A political portrait of Robert Kennedy,” written by Robert Scheer, was an examination of the ideological positions of RFK and how he differed from incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. ¹⁰⁴

Scheer portrayed Kennedy as insufficiently different and often right-leaning. ¹⁰⁴ Writing of the “Kennedy plan” for revitalizing an African American neighborhood in New York City, Scheer wrote that it promoted “a return to the market economy,” was “reminiscent of Ronald Reagan,” and “would not be likely to shock even the more conservative members of the Senate.” ¹⁰⁴

“Reliance on government is dependence and what the people of our ghettos need is not greater dependence but full independence, not the charity and favor of their fellow citizens, but equal claims of right and equal power to enforce those claims,” said Sen. Kennedy, as quoted by Scheer. ¹⁰⁴

“Kennedy’s involvement with the Vietnam problem goes back to the first days of his brother’s administration when he did as much as any man to get us deeply involved there,” wrote Scheer, of RFK’s foreign policy. “While Eisenhower had argued that the United States had done all it could for South Vietnam and that she must now sink or swim on her own, the new Kennedy administration had a more ‘dynamic’ approach, which centered around the theory of ‘counterinsurgency,’ and Bobby was one of its strongest advocates.” ¹⁰⁴

“At this point Kennedy’s program for America differs in no essential way from that of LBJ or any other mainstream politician,” wrote Scheer. “He shares the prevailing view of the Cold War and the benevolent workings of modern capitalism, and very carefully avoids any fundamental criticism of either. In his reliance on private investment as a panacea for the ills of American ghettos and underdeveloped countries alike, he is clearly to the right of the New Deal. He has also been unwilling to deal with the problem of our massive military industrial complex and to talk about conversion from a war economy to a peacetime one.” ¹⁰⁴

“For all the zest of the Kennedy men, they have retained a conservative approach to issues, having carefully cultivated an aura of youth as an alternative to political integrity and commitment,” concluded Scheer. “It is a stance which provides the illusion of change without its troublesome substance.” ¹⁰⁴

In March 1968 Sen. Kennedy announced he would challenge Johnson in the Democratic presidential primaries. Johnson left the race shortly thereafter. While campaigning for the nomination in California in June 1968, Sen. Kennedy was assassinated. ¹⁰⁴

Régis Debray

The September 1967 Ramparts cover feature was “The Radical Philosophy of Régis Debray,” by Adam Hochschild. A portrait of Debray appeared on the cover. Ramparts also republished excerpts from Debray’s book, Revolution dans la Revolution?  ^{105 106}

Then a 26-year-old French communist philosopher, Debray was an ally of the Cuban Communist Revolution and was being held in Bolivia along with Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara. Guevara never left Boliva and was executed in October 1967, while Debray survived and was released by the Bolivians in 1970. ^{108 109}

Weather Underground

Ramparts printed several critical reports about the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground (also known as Weatherman or the Weathermen) was a radical-left violent extremist group that was active from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. It was born in 1969 as “Weatherman,” a dominant faction within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing-turned-revolutionary Communist organization that split apart shortly after founding of Weatherman. ^{108 109}

Through at least May 1970, according to historian Arthur Eckstein and journalist Bryan Burrough, the Weather Underground aggressively promoted efforts to kill police officers and military personnel as part of its goal of sparking the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. While no murders have been conclusively tied to the Weathermen, police officers were injured in at least two Weatherman attacks. ^{108 109}

Eckstein summarized Debray’s thinking as it was adopted by the early Weathermen: “The population’s assumption that the police and the army were unassailable could be undermined only by killing soldiers and policemen.” In this way a “small guerilla band, if committed enough, could—through violence against the state […] eventually become the nucleus of a large people’s army.” ¹⁰⁸  

Eckstein wrote that the Weathermen were committed to a communist overthrow of the United States, and “tired of protest” and “wanted to prepare for war.” ¹⁰⁸

The Weatherman Manifesto, according to Eckstein’s analysis, proposed a communist “Red Army” that was “clandestine, centrally controlled, and trained in military tactics.” Proposing to ignite a communist revolution in the United States, it called for working-class white youth to open a domestic battlefront in the supposed world-wide war against capitalism and imperialism. This battle would include allies such as the Vietnamese communists fighting U.S. forces in Southeast Asia like the Viet Cong and black militants such as the Black Panthers fighting what the Weathermen asserted was an identical war of liberation against the U.S. government at home. Eckstein also noted the Manifesto judged that the “white working class in general” (apart from the youth) were “bought off by a combination of materialism and racism,” and thus not a useful ally in the communist liberation struggle. ¹⁰⁸

Writing of the Weather faction’s break with SDS in a March 1971 report for Ramparts, David Horowitz wrote that “it was Weatherman which, as a leadership faction in SDS, collaborated in the destruction of the only national youth organization capable of carrying out the actions it now calls for.” ¹⁴

Largely critical of the tactics and effectiveness of the Weather Underground, Horowitz concluded they had made life harder for the Left: ¹⁴

Groups like the Weatherman and the revolutionary hucksters and hipsters who have followed in its wake have done nothing else, they have helped to create a climate in which members of the Movement—let alone potential allies—no longer feel confident of their vanguards, but in fact feel threatened by them, morally if not physically. Perhaps the most damaging effect of the Weatherman syndrome is that even those who would neither join nor endorse them still accept them as the true revolutionaries. Whatever else they were they are certainly a hard act to follow. Now the workaday political organizing that must be done will seem only the shadow of an act, compared to the setting of a bomb. People have to regain confidence in the legitimacy of their politics. ¹⁴

Horowitz returned to this criticism in the September 1974 issue: ¹¹⁰

For there is an irreducible romanticism in illegal and military actions which speaks to the moral idealism of the revolutionary spirit, regardless of the political facts. It also provides a welcome alternative to the arduous and unglamorous task of organizing real constituencies for practical political objectives. The Weather people did not really care that they were destroying SDS […] They were individualists in the classic American vein. By their example, they intended to set the world on fire, and if they did not, well they wouldn’t be around to cry over the pieces.

There is a necessary complement to the romanticism of revolutionary violence, namely the paranoia of fascist repression (and its early syndrome, police infiltration). ¹¹⁰

In March 1970, a Weather Underground bomb being built for use against a U.S. Army officers dance at the Fort Dix military base detonated prematurely. The blast destroyed a New York City townhouse, killing the bombmaker and two other members of the Weather Underground. In a February 1973 Ramparts report, Andrew Kopkind concluded the event marked an unpleasant coda for the New Left: “All journalistic milestones are suspect, but let one stand: the Greenwich Village “townhouse” explosion, which killed three Weatherpeople, signaled the end of the logical progression of “New Left” movements.” ^{109 111}

Kopkind concluded:

The Weather Underground continued after the townhouse explosion, as active bombers for a year, then as “New Morning” culture freaks. I get excited when they pull off an action, I hope they keep at it, but I’m not sure why. I don’t see where it will lead. Perhaps for everybody this is more or less a time to hold on. Coalitions form and dissolve; they make their gains, or losses, and serve to keep alive both the reality and the illusion of a Left, a movement in an ambulatory coma waiting for a revolutionary kiss to bring it to life again. ¹¹¹

(For more information on the Weather Underground, please see the following InfluenceWatch profiles: Weather Underground, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Students for a Democratic Society, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.)

I.F. Stone

For the February 1968 Ramparts, contributor Sol Stern wrote a sympathetic profile of left-wing journalist I.F. Stone. The occasion was Stone’s 60^th birthday and the 15^th anniversary of the launching of his subscription-based newsletters. ¹¹²

Subsequently named I.F. Stone’s Weekly and then I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly, the eponymous news and commentary publication was produced consistently from 1953 through 1971. Staffed only by Stone and his wife, the influential reports were read by prominent figures such as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Eleanor Roosevelt. ¹¹²

“Ironically enough, it is I. F. Stone, rather than his more ‘influential’ colleagues, who has proved the virtues of a truly free journalistic marketplace,” reported Stern. “Working anachronistically as a 19th century entrepreneur, he is one of our few free men.” ¹¹²

“A journalistic pariah without a newspaper to work for, he wasn’t even a good credit risk,” wrote Stern of Stone’s decision to strike out on his own. ¹¹²

“The major problem was finding the several thousand people who might […] be willing to sustain a radical newsweekly to be delivered to them through the mails at a cost of $5.00 per year,” reported Stern. “It was, Stone now recalls, ‘like looking for a needle in a haystack.’” ¹¹²

According to Stern, Stone used the mailing list from a defunct newspaper that had just laid him off to help build a list of 5000 paid subscribers by January 1953. Assuming his subscribers all paid the $5.00 annual rate, this yielded gross revenue of $25,000 during his first year in business, or $295,000 in 2025 inflation-adjusted dollars. ¹¹²

“And unspectacularly, without promotional campaigns or publicity, the subscriber list began to grow,” continued Stern. “Within a short time, Stone had paid off the loans that helped him get started, and he stood unencumbered, the successful bourgeois owner of a tidy little business. […] The weekly now grosses over $100,000 per year. Since the costs of the enterprise—other than mail rates and printing—have remained relatively fixed, Mr. Stone’s venture is turning a neat profit.” ¹¹²

An annual gross of $100,000 in 1968 was the equivalent of $857,000 in 2025 dollars. ¹¹²

“The image of the journalist as a guardian of the public welfare is a convenient cliche which might find its way into almost any high school journalism class,” concluded Stern. “But few of Stone’s colleagues have helped him breathe life back into the platitude. If there were more, we would not now be celebrating the simple achievements of a quiet and unspectacular man who turns out more important copy than the mass of Pulitzer Prize journalists backed up by their monolithic institutions. Izzy Stone has taken upon himself the painful role of watchdog in a time when most of his colleagues bark rarely and bite not at all.” ¹¹²

Journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote another long analysis praising Stone’s legacy for the May 1974 Ramparts. ¹¹⁴

“He flourished long before and survives after other experimenters in independent radical journalism withered or withdrew,” concluded Kopkind. “I don’t know if there is a future for his style of writing in America, at least in the near and middle distances. But it is a valuable form to encourage, and an important idea to pursue.” ¹¹⁴

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In 1974 Ramparts published several reports praising Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The left-wing magazine was criticized for doing so by some Ramparts readers. Solzhenitsyn was then the author of The Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume history of Soviet labor camps and other atrocities committed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. ^{15 16}

“Although almost 20 years have elapsed since the famous Khrushchev Report on the crimes of Stalin,” wrote Horowitz, “it is clear that many radicals still do not understand either the significance of the events described, nor their continuing impact on revolutionary politics not only in the Soviet Union, but internationally as well.” ¹⁶

An editorial preface to the Horowitz essay explained that Ramparts was dedicating “a significant portion” of the June 1974 issue to Soviet dissidents because “we believe that the efforts of Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and other Soviet ‘dissidents’ to reveal and document the truth about the Stalin terror, and to challenge the system of political imprisonment and repression that remains as its legacy, is not a secondary issue, peripheral to the Left, as has often been suggested or assumed.” Instead, argued the editors, the dissident cause was “one of the most important struggles in the world today, and that supporting this struggle is one of the first and most pressing responsibilities of radicals and revolutionaries everywhere.” ¹⁶

The following year, in 1975, Republican President Gerald Ford declined to meet with Solzhenitsyn. Two 1982 Washington Post accounts claimed Ford’s refusal had been based “on the advice of his secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger” and took place “to avoid provoking leaders of the Soviet Union.” ¹¹⁸

Webb began his account with the description of a scene from the Democratic Platform Committee at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. According to Webb, a “welfare mother” named Beulah Sanders angrily told the committee members “you don’t care about poor people.” ¹¹⁸

“Those underprivileged like Mrs. Sanders, who provide the continuing electoral majorities for the Democratic Party, can no more take part in the Party’s actual decision-making than they can drive Ferraris or vacation at St. Tropez,” reported Webb. ¹¹⁸

Citing figures from the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Webb wrote that ten percent of the delegates had earned more than $50,000 annually, while the next richest 20 percent of DNC delegates earned between $25,000 and $49,999. Adjusted for inflation, an annual salary of $25,000 in 1964 was worth more than $250,000 in 2025 dollars. ¹¹⁸

Webb tabulated that 30 percent of 1964 DNC delegates were “businessmen” and that this was “more than 30 times the number of union officials who simultaneously occupied the hall.” ¹¹⁸

“A working man who hated ‘bosses’ might have felt uncomfortable on the floor of the ’64 convention,” concluded Webb. He estimated that 91 percent of the delegates had to pay $500 in expenses to attend the DNC event, or more than $5,000 each in 2025 dollars. ¹¹⁸

Webb also reported that contributions in excess of $500 accounted for 69 percent of fundraising by the Democratic Party for the 1964 federal election, while only 28 percent of Republican money came from contributions of $500 or more. Addressing contributions of $10,000 or more for 1964, Webb reported that Democrats “collected nearly $1,240,000 in really large gifts, while the Republicans gathered only $869,000.” ¹¹⁸

Donations of $500 or $10,000 in 1964 represented (respectively) $5,000 and more than $100,000 in 2025 dollars, while $1 million in 1964 was the equivalent of $10.1 million in 2025. ¹¹⁸

Webb also analyzed what he believed was the impact of these donors and delegates on the Democrats. “Delegates like these are not boat rockers,” wrote Webb. “They like the status quo, both in American society and within the Democratic Party. Party leaders rely on these ‘loyal’ delegates for the votes at the national conventions. The delegate is someone who has already gotten something out of the political process. Sitting on the convention floor, he remembers that party job or the lucrative highway contract he received or the importance of the state funds deposited in his bank. He’s also reminded of how much he enjoys rubbing elbows with the high and the mighty. Thus, since he has received something, he ‘owes’ something in return. He’s loyal because it could cost him too much to buck the party leaders. He has been rewarded for ‘service’ to the party with a delegate’s badge. Because of his loyalty (and wealth), he is in a position to make some decisions which are very crucial to America.” ¹¹⁸

Webb argued that this dynamic is why then-U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) was unable to defeat incumbent Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey for the 1968 Democratic nomination. (Though eligible to run again in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson had announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection.) ¹¹⁸

“Though hardly challenging the legitimacy of the corporate and propertied hegemony in the party, McCarthy’s mild criticism of Johnson’s Viet-Nam policy was enough to make him persona non grata among party regulars,” reported Webb. “An insurgent candidate like McCarthy is faced with enormous problems the moment he tries to run against that carefully constructed Trojan Donkey—for the rules of the Democratic Party are written to help the writers of the rules. Bucking the stack of loyal delegates is no easy task. Receiving the cold shoulder from the party bosses, the insurgent decides he will take his case to the people. A noble thought. But it’s easier to think noble thoughts than to carry them out. The party bosses who helped write the laws have made such an undertaking almost impossible.” ¹¹⁸

John Bailey, then the chair of the DNC, held the “real power” at the 1968 DNC nominating convention, wrote Webb. One official quoted in the Ramparts analysis claimed Bailey controlled a “stacked convention.”  ¹¹⁸

1972 Presidential Election Analysis

For the September 1972 Ramparts, contributor James Ridgeway wrote “The Democrats: A winning strategy?” The essay analyzed the potential for Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern to upset incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon in the 1972 election. ¹¹⁹

“McGovern faces a fight in November, but his prospects are not nearly so glum as the columnists make them out to be,” predicted Ridgeway. ¹¹⁹

Ridgeway calculated that McGovern had a strong chance of winning at least 160 of the 538 electoral college votes, and then analyzed the potential path from there to a 270-vote majority. ¹¹⁹

“A prominent theory among political reporters holds that this year Nixon can be expected to sweep the South, mountain states and probably take the farm belt states,” wrote Ridgeway. “By tradition the President can pretty much be expected to win in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Indiana, Oregon; he has a good chance in Wisconsin, and in Delaware. For their part, the Democrats probably can win Connecticut, Washington, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Maryland, West Virginia and South Dakota, if historic voting patterns hold true. In all, according to the theory, the Democrats will come out at best with 80 to 90 electoral votes among the smaller states. The Republicans, however, will not win sufficient electoral votes in their small state sweep to win the election. This leaves the vote in the 10 megastates as crucial. Of these McGovern, again on historical precedent, should take Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania.” ¹¹⁹

McGovern won in only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Nixon’s 1972 reelection was one of the most lopsided presidential landslides in American history. ¹¹⁹

The Republican won 49 of 50 states and 520 electoral votes. Theoretically, even if President Nixon had lost all ten of the “crucial” (i.e.: most populated) “megastates” in the Ramparts analysis, he still could have won the election with 275 electoral votes. ¹¹⁹

Feminism

The February 1968 edition of Ramparts featured one of the magazine’s many controversial cover photos. The picture was of a woman, wearing a low-cut, cleavage-enhancing black dress, but cropped from the neck down so her face was not visible. The only words on the cover were in tiny letters above her left shoulder: “Women Power.” A women’s group accused editor Warren Hinckle of portraying feminist women as “having two tits and no head,” and named him the winner of their “Male Chauvinist of the Month Award.” ¹

The cover story, co-authored by Hinckle and his sister, Marianne Hinckle, was titled “A History of the Rise of the Unusual Movement for Women Power in the United States.” The report was critical of many of the historical legends of the women’s movement: ^{1 120}

For in all historical candor, the feminist movement in late 19^th and early 20^th century America was not the libertarian thing it is cracked up to be, and highly-touted progressive ladies of that period were in reality rather narrow minded bitches with the morality of Lucretia Borgia and the class of Tugboat Annie. If this judgment seems harsh or hasty, one should remember that no less a suffragette leader than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of the abolitionist, campaigned on racist grounds against ratification of the 14^th Amendment because it deigned to give black men the vote before white women. She was not above using, in public and in print, the term “Sambo,” and warned against the enfranchisement of “Africans, Chinese and all the ignorant foreigners the moment they touch our shores.” ¹²⁰

Commenting on Betty Friedan, who had founded the National Organization for Women less than two years earlier, the February 1968 report reached this conclusion:

But Mrs. Friedan essentially accepts this society and its power structure as presently constituted; she simply wants some of the men to move over a little to make room for the ladies who are now in the back of the bus. This view puts her in the right wing of the new women power movement, since all the other ladies we shall meet have strong compunctions about leaving society as it is. ¹²⁰

The progress of the women’s liberation movement (and alleged lack of progress) was also covered in a December 1969 Ramparts report titled “The Rise of Women’s Liberation.” The author, Marlene Dixon, concluded that real progress would not be possible until American culture and politics became socialist: ¹²¹

It must be abundantly clear that radical social change must occur before there can be significant improvement in the social position of women. Some form of socialism is a minimum requirement, considering the changes that must come in the institutions of marriage and the family alone.

[. . .] Women must learn the meaning of rage, the violence that liberates the human spirit. The rhetoric of invective is an equally essential stage, for in discovering and venting their rage against the enemy—and the enemy in everyday life is men—women also experience the justice of their own violence. They learn the first lessons in their own latent strength. Women must learn to know themselves as revolutionaries. They must become hard and strong in their determination, while retaining their humanity and tenderness. ¹²¹

A December 1971 Ramparts report analyzed the birth and progress of women’s studies programs at universities. Written by Roberta Salper, one of the first professors in these programs, the essay examined both the desire and potential for women’s studies to bring about a socialist America. ¹²²

“Women’s Studies should generate not the kind of feminism that culminated in the right to choose between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon,” concluded Salper, “but the kind of feminism whose demands can no longer be granted by American society because they are demands for a socialist, non-sexist, non-racist society.” ¹²²

Military Disability Report

An April 1973 Ramparts report written by journalist Mark McIntyre analyzed a military disability retirement system that was allegedly being abused by senior officers. ¹²³

One of McIntyre’s examples was a 62-year-old former Air Force general who was receiving a $26,000, tax free, annual retirement salary, based in part on a 100-percent disability diagnosis of “skin cancer and circulatory problems.” Leaving aside the tax-free benefit, $26,000 in 1973 is the equivalent of $194,000 in 2025. ¹²³

The report began by describing that the general, supposedly totally disabled, engaged in a twice-weekly “strenuous swim.” McIntyre quoted the general, who said his swim routine was a “really great way to keep in shape” and that he would “recommend it to anybody.” ¹²³

McIntyre contrasted the disability claims by generals with claims made by enlisted personnel:

If the Army and Air Force’s disability system is unduly generous to generals, it seems absolutely penurious to many retiring enlisted men. The case of ex-Sergeant First Class John M. Hmura, who retired from the Army after more than 31 years of service last May, provides a good example. Prior to his retirement last year he had had a heart attack, an ulcer, diabetes, liver trouble, loss of hearing, and arteriosclerosis. In addition he suffered occasional paralysis caused by painful calcium deposits in his spine. Nevertheless, Army physicians examining him at Ft. Meade, Maryland last fall and judged Hmura “fit to return to duty” and denied him any disability whatsoever. Enraged, Hmura threatened hospital officials with exposure through the press. Five months later he was reexamined at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and begrudgingly granted 60 percent disability. Now at 53 he is supporting his family on $6400 of tax free income. [In 2025 dollars, $6,400 is the equivalent of $48,000.] ¹²³

An addendum following the report noted: “After Mark Mclntyre completed the investigation for this article the Pentagon announced new rules governing disability allowances.” ¹²³

Foreign Reporting beyond Vietnam

North Korea

In a March 1968 Ramparts report titled “Southeast Asia: The Two Koreas,” David Horowitz provided a positive assessment of the economic and political conditions in North Korea. ¹²⁴

“A Japanese satellite (like Vietnam) until the end of the Second World War, a Soviet satellite in the early Cold War period, North Korea has unexpectedly emerged from its devastation by the American Air Force as one of the most successful and independent countries of the Sino-Soviet bloc,” reported Horowitz. ¹²⁴

After writing that North Korea’s political evolution had been “intriguing and instructive,” Horowitz claimed this accomplishment was “overshadowed by the truly remarkable story of the country’s economic recovery and advance.” He contrasted this unfavorably with South Korea, writing that “North Korea’s economic success is incalculably magnified by the dismal failure of South Korea’s own recovery program.” ¹²⁴

“A predominantly agricultural area before the war […] North Korea is today regarded primarily as an industrial nation,” Horowitz reported. “Since World War II, her industrial output has grown more than eight times while her agricultural output has doubled. In some key areas, such as the production of electrical power, North Korea has approached the levels of Italy and Japan. So striking has been her advance that in the judgment of the eminent Keynesian Joan Robinson: ‘All the economic miracles of the postwar world are put in the shade by these achievements.’” ¹²⁴

A 2011 report from the Association of Asian Studies concluded that with “the possible exception of a few years in the 1980s,” North Korean “food production was never able to meet basic nutritional needs, and chronic food shortages were common.” ¹²⁸

Sontag wrote:

Perhaps the first thing a visitor to Cuba notices is the enormous energy-level. It is still common, as it has been throughout the ten years of the revolution, for people to go without sleep—talking and working several nights a week. In the way that the Cubans talk, too, and in the extraordinary accomplishments of labor and productivity, it seems sometimes as if the whole country is high on some beneficent kind of speed, and has been for ten years.

They are high. Like all revolutions, the Cuban one is a reorganization—and a vast release—of human energy. Needless to say, this release of energy is experienced as “liberating.” Even deprived of the right to go into private business or to see pornographic films, the great majority of Cubans feel vastly more free today than they ever did before the revolution. But it can’t be denied that many of their freedoms seem constricting to us. And the energy of the Cuban revolution must be defined quite differently from the energies American radicals seek to liberate at home.  ¹²⁸

“A Letter from Camp Venceremos,” posted in the August 1970 Ramparts, provided another positive portrayal of the Cuban dictatorship. The author, Chris Camarano, was a member of the first Venceremos Brigade, a radical-left activist group that organizes trips to communist-ruled Cuba as a way for sympathetic Americans to demonstrate their solidarity with the country’s government and their opposition to United States government policies. The Ramparts account was a memoir from her trip. ¹²⁹

Camarano wrote this of her impressions of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro: ¹²⁹  

Fidel is totally fantastic—completely overwhelming. He is direct, candid, immediate, humble, brilliant, audacious. Some of us were able to have an informal rap with him and he told us wonderful stories about the fighting in the Sierra Maestra. Lots of funny incidents came rushing out. Jesus, he was so lit up—could have gone on for hours, I’m sure. ¹²⁹  

She also wrote that the Cuban press was superior to the American media: ¹²⁹  

The news reports here show even Movement news service in the States to be truly for shit. There are zillions of important things happening all over the world every day that are never mentioned in our press—especially Latin American and Far Eastern news. Of course we all knew this before-but even the most skeptical of us never understood the degree to which everything is sifted, selected, distorted.

The reports here are fantastic—extensive, detailed coverage of even the smallest events in all countries. Radio broadcasts last for hours and offer not only good reportage but a lot of analysis. As a result, the general level of political consciousness here is something not to be believed. ¹²⁹  

“Some days I almost wish I’d find some dirt under the rug to balance things out,” concluded Camarano of her visit to Cuba. “But no-in its continuing struggle, the revolution is consistently beautiful.” ¹²⁹

Susan Sontag later became a more nuanced critic of communism, saying in a 1982 speech that fascism and “overt military rule” was the “probable destiny of all Communist societies.” ¹³¹

The island is austere. Rationing is tight and consumption restricted. Children receive one quart of milk a day, adults, unless a medical diet requires it, none; a loaf of bread and one fourth to three-fourths of a pound each of rice and beans are allotted to each adult per day. Meat, when available, is rationed to three-fourths of a pound per week, though seafood and pizza, both new in the Cuban diet since the revolution, are more easily obtained.”

[ . . .] the present austerity, say government leaders, is planned. It is the result of the extraordinary and unprecedented rate of investment, 31 per cent of the Gross Material Product (GNP exclusive of services), and of the use of scarce foreign exchange to buy capital goods rather than consumer goods. ¹³¹

China

As the world’s largest revolutionary communist government, the People’s Republic of China was a nation initially favored by the New Left in general and the Ramparts writers in particular. Republican President Richard Nixon’s diplomatic breakthrough to China in 1971 and subsequent state visit in 1972 led to a reexamination of the relationship between the American Left and communist China. ¹³²

“Inside China: In the wake of the Cultural Revolution” was printed in the August 1971 Ramparts. Reporting on the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, author John Gittings reached this conclusion: ¹³³

Life, in short, is not too bad at all in post-Cultural Revolution China, though it might yet be better. This in itself is enough to make China—by comparison with the rest of the developing world—the big story of the postwar decades.

What Mao and his colleagues are trying to do—to give an entire nation of seven hundred million a uniquely socialist “world outlook”—must make China the story of the century. ¹³³

In the October 1971 Ramparts, editor David Horowitz analyzed the history of American relations with China and the new opening by the Nixon administration. He wrote that the new policy toward the communist state was consistent with what he alleged was a link between American capitalism and imperialism and reached this conclusion: ¹³²

If the cast of characters seems monotonously familiar in all these negotiations and maneuverings, that is an inevitable consequence of the stability of those long-term corporate interests and powers on which the American overseas empire is built and which American foreign policy, by the grace of such bodies as the Council on Foreign Relations, is designed to serve. [. . .] As long as the control of the world’s resources and wealth is an open possibility for giant corporations with immense political and cultural power at their disposal, the pursuit of empire will continue. And the task of carrying it on will be transmitted through the generations. ¹³²

In March 1972, Horowitz wrote that the friendly American diplomacy with China signaled the end of Cold War politics and a compromise of the anti-imperialist principles of communist states: ¹³⁴

The first step in acclimating oneself to the present phase of the global contest is to absorb the fact that the old cold war has broken down, along with the binding alliances that characterized it. This does not mean that economic and social factors have ceased to be significant in world politics. It merely signifies that in the present phase of the international conflict, the actions of the major powers, including the communist states, are dictated by considerations of short-term (and short-sighted) self-interest, to a more blatant degree and in a less dissembled fashion than before. ¹³⁴

In July 1972, Horowitz argued that China’s diplomatic deal with the United States had betrayed North Vietnam. He concluded that this was a signal to the “international left” to become less attached to the large communist powers and assume more of a leadership position in the worldwide leftist movement: ¹³⁵

The extent that China does seem to be following the Soviet path, despite profound and often inspiring internal differences between the two countries, can be attributed to the lack of real political debate in China over foreign policy questions. The absence of any public discussion of the momentous shift in Chinese policy represented by the invitation to Nixon, the demotion of Lin Piao without any public political discussion, are themselves an enormous barrier to the development of an approach to international affairs which would alter the patterns previously established. Here the international left, which does not labor under the restraint of the opposition factions in the Chinese and Russian Communist Parties, has an important role to play in developing a realistic analysis of forces and policies, and in stressing the internationalist responsibilities of the two major communist powers. But it can only play this role if it breaks free from the simplistic categories of the past, and the simplistic patterns of its own previous solidarity and response to revolutions in other countries. ¹³⁵

“Et tu China?” was written by David Kolodney for the May 1972 Ramparts. Kolodney judged China’s diplomatic breakthrough with the United States to be a betrayal of the left by the communist power: ¹³⁶

Bringing our conception of the Chinese revolution down to earth has a tremendous significance, not merely for those who call themselves Maoists, but also for those who would never even consider such a designation. For the China that we supported or opposed was an illusion, and we allowed that illusion to define for us a model of true revolution, barely realizing how deeply we internalized that definition or how much it dominated and distorted all our perceptions of revolutionary politics. Certainly China has much to answer for today: embracing Nixon while the bombs still fall on Vietnam, after years of the most unrestrained and divisive attacks on the Soviet Union for its own policy of detente; supporting West Pakistan’s ruthless suppression of Bangla Desh, and counter-insurgency in the Sudan and Ceylon. But if the American Left is to advance beyond a vacuous moral revulsion at Chinese policy or a contorted apologia in its defense, we also have to take ourselves to task for our own credulity. ¹³⁶

Also in the May 1972 issue, author Jim Peck analyzed the decision sympathetically from the perspective of the Chinese regime: ¹³⁷

In its remarkable experimental society, China remains an inspiration and a hope if not a model, for many in the Third World.

“That image will surely be tarnished by China’s new foreign policy, which all but writes off the Left in in numerable countries and all but marks the end of any meaningful commitment to an internationalist ideology.

“Yet the Chinese might well argue that they must first face problems of building socialism among their own people, that concessions and compromises are an essential part of the contradictory path of their revolution, and that they are still terribly poor in the face of a wealthy and powerful capitalist system. Within the advanced world, the Chinese now suggest, the revolution must come. Until it does, China will continue with its own national goals. None of its troops are overseas. Its aid programs are generous and non-exploitative. What more can it do if not concentrate on the advancement of a quarter of mankind? ¹³⁷

1. Richardson, Peter. A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. 2009. The New Press. New York, New York.
2. “Magazines: A Bomb in Every Issue.” Time. January 6, 1967.
3. “A King-Spock Ticket.” Ramparts. May 1967.
4. Ramparts. December 1967.
5. Ramparts. April 1969.
6. Hinckle, Warren; Sol Stern and Robert Scheer. “The University on the Make.” Ramparts. April 1966.
7.   Camarano, Chris. “A Letter from Camp Venceremos.” Ramparts. August 1970.
8.   Horowitz, David. “Southeast Asia: The Two Koreas.” Ramparts. March 1968.
9. Stout, Rex. “The Case of the Spies Who Weren’t.” Ramparts. January 1966.
10. Schneir, Walter. “The Second Frame-up of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” Ramparts. August 1973.
11. “U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir.” Ramparts. August 1972. Accessed February 28, 2025. https://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-elint.htm
12. Horowitz, David. Radical Son. The Free Press: a division of Simon & Schuster. New York, New York. 1997.
13. Stern, Sol. “A Short Account of International Student Politics & the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.” Ramparts. March 1967.
14. Horowitz, David. “Revolutionary Karma vs. Revolutionary Politics.” Ramparts. March 1971.
15. Raskin, Marcus. “Soviet Dissent: In Search of Forgotten Men.” Ramparts. March 1974.
16. Horowitz, David. “Solzhenitsyn and the Radical Cause.” Ramparts. June 1974.
17. Bookchin, Murray. “Toward an Ecological Solution.” Ramparts. May 1970.
18. Barkley, Katherine; and Steve Weissman. “The Eco-Establishment.” Ramparts. May 1970.
19. Marine, Gene. “America the Raped.” Ramparts. April 1967; Marine, Gene. “America the Raped: Part II.” Ramparts. May 1967.
20. “Editorial.” Ramparts. May 1970.
21. Gellen, Martin. “The Making of a Pollution-Industrial Complex.” Ramparts. May 1970.
22.  Weisberg, Barry. “Alaska-The Ecology of Oil.” Ramparts. January 1970.
23. Rapoport, Roger. “Catch 24,400 (or, Plutonium Is My Favorite Element).” Ramparts. May 1970.
24.  “Green Revolution.” Encyclopedia.com. May 13, 2018. Accessed September 20, 2024. https://www.encyclopedia.com/plants-and-animals/agriculture-and-horticulture/agriculture-general/green-revolution
25. Hochschild, Adam. “Opinion: Teapot Dome 1967?” Ramparts. May 1967.
26. Deming, David. “M. King Hubbert and the rise and fall of peak oil theory.” AAPE Bulletin. June 1, 2023. Accessed September 25, 2024. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/aapg/aapgbull/article/107/6/851/623376/M-King-Hubbert-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-peak-oil.
27. Ridgeway, James. “Notes on the Energy Crisis.” Ramparts. October 1973.
28. Edmond, Lez. “Harlem Diary.” Ramparts. October 1964; Hinckle, Warren. “The March that Failed.” Ramparts. October 1964.
29. “Letters: The New Ramparts.” Ramparts. January 1965.
30. Hinckle, Warren. “Apologia.” Ramparts. April 1966.
31.  Stern, Sol. “The Ramparts I Watched.” City Journal | Manhattan Institute. Winter 2010. Accessed September 20, 2024. https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-ramparts-i-watched
32.  Edmond, Lez. “Harlem Diary.” Ramparts. October 1964.;Hinckle, Warren. “The March that Failed.” Ramparts. October 1964.
33.  “Interview / Senator Frank Church.” Ramparts. January 1965.
34. “Editorial: The Year of the Lemming?” Ramparts. April 1965.
35. Scheer, Robert. “The Winner’s War.” Ramparts. December 1965.
36. “Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics.” U.S. National Archives. Retrieved September 11, 2024. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics
37. Fall, Bernard. “A Vietnam Album: ‘This isn’t Munich. It’s Spain.’” Ramparts. December 1965.
38. “Vietnam War Statistics.” Vietnam Veterans of America, Charles S. Kettles Chapter 310. Accessed September 11, 2024. https://www.vva310.org/vietnam-war-statistics
39. Scheer, Robert. “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” Ramparts. January 1965.
40. Trautman, Jim. “Famed Doctor Tom Dooley Secretly Helped CIA.” Vietnam Magazine. October 2020. Reproduced by HistoryNet.com: https://www.historynet.com/tom-dooley-cia-agent-vietnam-doctor/
41. Hinckle, Warren; and Robert Scheer. “The ‘Vietnam Lobby.’” Ramparts. July 1965.
42. Duncan, Don. “The whole thing was a lie!” Ramparts. February 1966.
43.  Stern, Sol. “A talk with the Front.” Ramparts. November 1967.
44. Lindsay, James M. “TWE Remembers: General Westmoreland Says the “End Begins to Come Into View” in Vietnam.” Council on Foreign Relations. November 21, 2017. Accessed September 17, 2024. https://www.cfr.org/blog/twe-remembers-general-westmoreland-says-end-begins-come-view-vietnam
45. “Saigon (A.P) (U.PI.) etc., The Life & Times of the Vietnam Press Corps.” Ramparts. February 1967.
46. Landau, David. “The Diplomacy of Terror: Behind the Decision to Bomb the Dikes.” Ramparts. October 1972.
47. D’Amato, Anthony; Gould, Harvey . L.; and Woods, Larry D., “War Crimes and Vietnam: The “Nuremberg Defense” and the Military Service Resister” (1969). Faculty Working Papers. Paper 125. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/125 – OR – https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1124&context=facultyworkingpapers
48. “Billy Graham’s Vietnam.” Harvard University Press. February 22, 2018. Accessed March 3, 2025. https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2018/02/billy-grahams-vietnam-grant-wacker.html
49. Pepper, William F. “The Children of Vietnam.” Ramparts. January 1967.
50. King, Martin Luther. “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam.” Ramparts. May 1967.
51. Turner, William. “After J. Edgar, Who?” Ramparts. March 1965.
52. Cook, Fred J. “The FBI and Organized Crime.” Ramparts. May 1965.
53. Raab, Selwyn. Five Families: The rise, decline and resurgence of America’s most powerful mafia empires. Thomas Dunne Books | St. Martin’s Press. New York. 2005.
54. Turner, William W. “I was a burglar, wiretapper and spy for the FBI.” Ramparts. November 1966.
55. Weiner, Tim. Enemies: A history of the FBI. Random House: New York. 2012.
56. Holmes, Marian Smith. “Spies Who Spilled Atomic Bomb Secrets.” Smithsonian Magazine. April 19, 2009. Accessed September 12, 2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/spies-who-spilled-atomic-bomb-secrets-127922660/
57. Hersh, Seymour. “Uncovering the Nerve Gas Coverup.” Ramparts. June 1969.
58. Hersh, Seymour M. Reporter: A Memoir. Knopf. 1968. https://www.amazon.com/Reporter-Memoir-Seymour-M-Hersh/dp/0307263959
59. Chen, Adrian. “After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back.” Gawker via The Real News Network. December 15, 2013. Accessed February 28, 2025. https://therealnews.com/after-30-years-of-silence-the-original-nsa-whistleblower-looks-back
60. Ramparts. June 1965.
61. Landau, Saul. “Massah LBJ and His Nigrahs.” Ramparts. November 1965.
62. Cleaver, Eldridge. “Requiem for Nonviolence.” Ramparts. May 1968.
63. Cleaver, Eldridge; and Paul Jacobs. “Notes on a Native Son.” Ramparts. June 1966.
64. Cleaver, Eldridge. “Letters from Prison.” Ramparts. August 1966.
65. Pearson, Hugh. The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 1994. https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Panther-Newton-Price-America/dp/0201483416
66. Bloom, Joshua; and Waldo E. Martin Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press. 2013. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520293281/black-against-empire
67. Delli Carpini, Michael X. (2000). Black panther party: 1966-1982. In I. Ness & J. Ciment (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Third Parties in America (pp. 190-197). Armonke, NY: Sharpe Reference. Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania. Accessed September 16, 2024. https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/41942e56-ab0b-43c4-8d1a-f9b5d920d23a/content
68. “Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998).” National Archives | African American Heritage. Accessed September 16, 2024. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/eldridge-cleaver
69. Stern, Sol. “America’s Black Guerrillas.” Ramparts. September 1967.
70. Momodu, Samuel. “The First Black Power Conference (1967).” BlackPast.org. February 20, 2024. Accessed October 7, 2024. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-first-black-power-conference-1967/#:~:text=The%20First%20Black%20Power%20Conference%20occurred%20in%20Newark%2C,the%20worst%20civil%20disorder%20in%20New%20Jersey%20history.
71. Browne, Robert S. “The Case for Black Separatism.” Ramparts. December 1967.
72. Cleaver, Eldridge. “The Land Question.” Ramparts. May 1968.
73. Weismann, Steve. “Why the Population Bomb is a Rockefeller Baby.” Ramparts. May 1970.
74.  “Hukbalahap Rebellion.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed September 24, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Hukbalahap-Rebellion
75.  Ehrlich, Paul. “ECO-CATASTROPHE!” Ramparts. September 1969.
76. Mann, Charles C. “The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation.” Smithsonian Magazine. January 2018. Accessed September 20, 2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/
77. “World Population by Year.” Worldometer. Accessed September 20, 2024. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
78. McCarthy, Terence. “Feast or Famine: The Choices for Mankind.” Ramparts. September 1974.
79. Ridgeway, James. “The Cleaning of America (Don’t Hold Your Breath)” Ramparts. March 1971.
80. Ridgeway, James. “Rocky Mountain Coal Fever.” Ramparts. October 1971.
81. Marine, Gene. “Alternate Energy: Here Comes the Sun.” Ramparts. March 1974.
82. Barnes, Peter. “What the Country Needs Is…” Ramparts. May 1974.
83.  Marine, Gene. “Scorecard on the Environment.” Ramparts. December 1973.
84. Friends of the Earth. 2023 IRS Form 990. Accessed October 1, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237420660
85. Public Advocates Inc. 2023 IRS Form 990. Accessed October 2, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237103042; Natural Resources Defense Council Inc. 2023 IRS Form 990. Accessed October 2, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/132654926; Environmental Defense Fund Incorporated. 2023 IRS Form 990. Accessed October 2, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/116107128; Earthjustice. 2023 IRS Form 990. Accessed October 2, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/941730465
86. Ridgeway, James. “Para-Real Estate: The Handing Out of Resources.” Ramparts. May 1970.
87. “Arab Oil Embargo.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accessed September 25, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-oil-embargo
88. Parker, Richard. “The Energy Crisis is coming . . . in about 200 years.” Ramparts. March 1974.
89. Yücel, Mine; and Michael D. Plant. “GDP gain realized in shale boom’s first 10 years.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Accessed October 4, 2024. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2019/0820
90. Petroleum & Other Liquids: U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels). Energy Information Agency | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed October 4, 2024. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=A
91. Egan, Matt. “The United States is producing more oil than any country in history.” CNN. December 19, 2023. Accessed October 4, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-reserves-crude/index.html
92. “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Coefficients.” Energy Information Agency | U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed September 26, 2024. https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php
93. “Electric power sector CO2 emissions drop as generation mix shifts from coal to natural gas.” Energy Information Agency | U.S. Department of Energy. June 9, 2021. Accessed September 26, 2024. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296#
94. Ridgeway, James. “Gas Battle of Algiers.” Ramparts. March 1972.
95. Marine, Gene. “Alternative Energy: Here Comes the Sun.” Ramparts. March 1974.
96. Sorensen, Kirk. “Dr. John Gofman has died.” EnergyFromThorium.com. August 27, 2007. Accessed September 23, 2024. https://energyfromthorium.com/2007/08/27/dr-john-gofman-has-died/
97. Marine, Gene. “Moratorium: Taking the Initiative in California.” Ramparts. August 1974.
98. Zeman, Tom. “Nuclear Power: Lying Doesn’t Make It Safe.” Ramparts. August 1974.
99.  Zeman, Tom. “Solar Power Now.” Ramparts. April 1975.
100. Mitford, Jessica. “The Rest of Ronald Reagan.” Ramparts. November 1965.
101. Mallon, Thomas. “Red Sheep.” The New Yorker. October 8, 2006. Accessed September 12, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/16/red-sheep
102.  “Golly Gee, California is a Strange Place.” Ramparts. October 1966.
103. Carney, Francis. “How the West Was Lost.” Ramparts. November 1974.
104. Scheer, Robert. “A Political Portrait of Robert Kennedy.” Ramparts. February 1967.
105. Hochschild, Adam. “The Radical Philosophy of Régis Debray.” Ramparts. September 1967.
106. Debray, Régis. “Excerpts from Revolution dans la Revolution.” Ramparts. September 1967.
107. Joscelyne, Andrew. “Revolution in the Revolution.” Wired. January 1, 1995. Accessed September 20, 2024. https://www.wired.com/1995/01/debray/
108. Eckstein, Arthur M. Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground beat the FBI and lost the revolution. New Haven – London: Yale University Press. 2016.
109. Burrough, Bryan. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin Press. 2015.
110. Horowitz, David. “Fascism and Other Nightmares.” Ramparts. September 1974.
111. Kopkind, Andrew. “The Sixties and the Movement.” Ramparts. February 1973.
112. Stern, Sol. “I.F. Stone: The Journalist as Pamphleteer.” Ramparts. February 1968.
113. “I.F. Stone.” Britannica. Accessed October 7, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/I-F-Stone
114. Kopkind, Andrew. “The Importance of Being Izzy.” Ramparts. May 1974.
115. “The Gulag Archipelago.” Brittanica.com. Accessed February 27, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Gulag-Archipelago
116. Kaiser, Robert G. “Reagan, Solzhenitsyn to Dine.” Washington Post. April 7, 1982. Accessed February 27, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/04/08/reagan-solzhenitsyn-to-dine/c942bf55-79d9-4fde-a01a-485f644b06f5/
117. Kaiser, Robert G. “Solzhenitsyn Refuses Invitation To White House.” Washington Post. May 10, 1982. Accessed February 27, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/05/11/solzhenitsyn-refuses-invitation-to-white-house/64649bae-8a8f-4b6c-b44c-d454bbab65fd/
118. Webb, Lee. “A Welfare State for the Rich.” Ramparts. October 26, 1968.
119. Ridgeway, Jim. “The Democrats: A winning strategy?” Ramparts. September 1968.
120. Hinckle, Warren; and Marianne Hinckle. “A History of the Rise of the Unusual Movement for Women Power in the United States.” Ramparts. February 1968.
121. Dixon, Marlene. “The Rise of Women’s Liberation.” Ramparts. December 1969.
122. Salper, Roberta. “Women’s Studies.” Ramparts. December 1971.
123. McIntyre, Mark. “Disability Pay: THE CHECK AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.” Ramparts. April 1973.
124. Horowitz, David. “Southeast Asia: The Two Koreas.” Ramparts. March 1968.
125. Seth, Michael J. “North Korea’s 1990s Famine in Historical Perspective.” Association of Asian American Studies. Winter 2011. Accessed October 8, 2024. https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/north-koreas-1990s-famine-in-historical-perspective/
126. Horowitz, David. “Refuting Chomsky.” Salon. October 8, 2001. Accessed October 8, 2024. https://www.salon.com/2001/10/08/chomsky_2/
127.  “GDP per Capita.” Our World in Data. Accessed October 8, 2024. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=table
128. Sontag, Susan. “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Ramparts. April 1969.
129. Camarano, Chris. “A Letter from Camp Venceremos.” Ramparts. August 1970.
130. “Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism.” New York Times. February 27, 1982. Accessed February 26, 2025. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html
131.  Zeitlin, Maurice. “Inside Cuba: Workers and Revolution.” Ramparts. March 1970.
132.  Horowitz, David. “The Making of America’s China Policy.” Ramparts. October 1971.
133. Gittings, John. “Inside China: In the wake of the Cultural Revolution.” Ramparts. August 1971.
134.  Horowitz, David. “Asian Tragedy.” Ramparts. March 1972.
135. Horowitz, David. “The China Question and the American Left.” Ramparts. July 1972.
136.  Kolodney, David. “Et tu China?” Ramparts. May 1972.
137. Peck, Jim. “Why China’Turned West.” Ramparts. May 1972.